Fallout VII - Vault-Tec calling

[Triaxx]

They're similar because the Fallout Wanders Edition team went on to Project Nevada when NV came out. Guns are vastly stronger in FWE, and DR is useless in comparison until you get up to 20 or so. All that, plus the annoyance of being crippled is what inspired Nikola's super power. It leaves you down a bit of AP, but compared to immortality, it's a small price to pay.

Personally, I'd grab the first thing that looked at all armored, but that's just me. I tend to play the kind of characters that don't take nonsense like people trying to kill them.

Yeah, that's not supposed to happen. That scene with Burke and Lucas is supposed to happen inside the bar, with Burke agreeing to come with Lucas and then shooting him in the back. I suspect you found Burke on his way back to his home, and that's what screwed things up.

Though you can convince him to get up and walk away if you flirt with him. He gives you a key to his house and depending on what's installed, there might be some good things in there for you.

What are you recording with? It left an FPS counter in the top left, presuming that wasn't intentional.

The one thing I hate about FWE/Fallout 3 is how inflated prices are, and how little everything is worth. If you need anything, go out and kill raiders for it. You'll never be able to afford most of it, and you can find better by killing random idiots anyway.

[Balmas]

I record using OBS. The FPS counter is actually part of the Steam UI. I generally keep it up in the top left corner because it's small enough not to be immediately noticed and provides a nice metric for just how intensive it is to record in a given area.

I know, right? You go from being able to buy out a store with a few laser rifles in vanilla to basically being poor the entire time with FWE installed. I could handle having less valuable weapons and more valuable weapons, but having both is just a step too far for me. That's also why I got Repair up to 100 in the second episode; it allows you to repair things much better, and that's indirectly one of the best sources of caps until you can invest in Barter.

[Triaxx]

Oh man, I forgot all about repairing in Fallout 3. Or possibly blocked it out. Almost always the second skill I maxed after Small Guns.

[DigoDragon]

Oh man, I forgot all about repairing in Fallout 3. Or possibly blocked it out. Almost always the second skill I maxed after Small Guns.

In all my FO3 plays, I went Sneak and Repair first. Guns didn't figure in until third, but generally get abandoned as soon as energy weapons were commonplace.

[Triaxx]

I either play with guns then big guns or go energy exclusive. Regular brand F3 has enough energy ammo to make it work. TTW was much less well populated with energy ammo than I expected and so I didn't have such an easy time.

[LibraryOgre]

Lockpicking and Science were my first ones... I HATE having to leave things unpicked or unchecked.

[DigoDragon]

Lockpicking and Science were my first ones... I HATE having to leave things unpicked or unchecked.

The Wasteland Survival Guide was the first series of quests I always did. Not too many locks and computers early on, and picking up the early exp gets me on track to spread into Science and Lockpicking. Worst case, wander around and kill raiders for exp. Eden only knows FO3 is full of them everywhere.

[BladeofObliviom]

Lockpick 50 is an extremely high priority for me. Science 50 a bit less so. Hard and Very Hard terminals are fairly rare, though hard and very hard locks pop up fairly often (though at least 3/4 of all very hard locks have keys to find). From there, usually Repair/Speech and a weapons skill. In F3 I also tend to put some early points into explosives just to get the bomb quest out of the way. (I always disarm it, even when playing evil. Destroying Megaton is so, so dumb.)

In New Vegas, Lockpick/Science 50 are still good but the higher ranks come up significantly less often (still max both, just later). Repair tends to get pumped earlyish, if only because Jury Rigging is a must-have.


EDIT: Unless I'm playing with mods, then I tend to pump Sneak early in both. My preferred mod setup tends toward extremely high lethality, and being unseen is an extremely effective way to not die.

[Triaxx]

Jury-rigging always felt like a wasted perk in New Vegas. There were so many copies of generic weapons, and merchants with 100 repair and nothing else to buy, that you could keep just about anything in top form. I think Flak is F3's only 100 repair guy. But NV also had weapon repair kits as a vanilla thing.

If you can pass the check, you never need more than 90 science, since Lesko's lab coat is stupid easy to get, and it's a +10 to SCIENCE!

Naturally, the worst part is the lack of maintenance.

[Rynjin]

Jury Rigging is almost a necessitybin NV in my experience. It makes it so I don't have to chain murder NCR Veteran Rangers and carry around a dozen sets of their armor, as an example. I can instead just carry a bunch of sunglasses (weightless) and random medium armors I can snatch off corpses as needed.

[factotum]

In all my FO3 plays, I went Sneak and Repair first. Guns didn't figure in until third, but generally get abandoned as soon as energy weapons were commonplace.

I hardly ever bother with energy weapons in Fallout games--yes, they do a bit more damage, but it sticks in my craw to waste the skill investment I already put into regular guns, and you don't usually find good energy weapons until late game (apart from in FO4, of course). I'd rather snipe someone's head off from 100 yards with a regular gun than have to get up close and personal to finish them with an energy weapon.

[Balmas]

Spoiler: Episode 2: Ghoulish Traps

Show

Oh man, I forgot all about repairing in Fallout 3. Or possibly blocked it out. Almost always the second skill I maxed after Small Guns.

The difference in repair between Fallout 3 and New Vegas shouldn't be as huge as it is, I don't think, but somehow it is. The fact that in Fallout 3 you can barely repair above your skill level, combined with how you lose efficacy with the very first shot, means that you're constantly feeding garbage guns to your useful guns. That's if there was actually weapons that could be used to repair your things, since if there werent' you needed to find at least one vendor who could have 100 repair.

New Vegas's 75% condition is good enough was a lovely little change that both made 100 Repair less immediately pressing. Such a small thing, but so meaningful in how you use and advance the skill.

In all my FO3 plays, I went Sneak and Repair first. Guns didn't figure in until third, but generally get abandoned as soon as energy weapons were commonplace.

I usually go Sneak, Repair, and Small guns as my initial tags, and then only start putting points into Energy Weapons once I advance the main quest enough to introduce the Enclave.

I either play with guns then big guns or go energy exclusive. Regular brand F3 has enough energy ammo to make it work. TTW was much less well populated with energy ammo than I expected and so I didn't have such an easy time.

Eh, I think that FWE really has kind of a perfect storm of things going on that make Energy Weapons awesome but impractical.

The good, first, is that energy weapons are genuinely better than small guns if all you're looking at is fire-rate and damage. For example, a plasma rifle has almost the same damage as a sniper rifle, while also having a deeper clip, firing 50% faster, and requiring less AP in VATS. The tri-beam laser rifle or the Metal Blaster have equivalent damage to practically all other shotguns, while having double their firerate and a smaller spread.

The problem comes when you thing about trying to keep these things supplied and repaired. As I said before, FWE is really dumb about its barter calculations; it jacks up the price of ammo, drops the price of weapons to 20% of what they'd normally be, and then brutally penalizes you for not having 100 barter with prices that could be 300% higher than the cost of the item. The end effect is that you have less money available for spending, and this is greatly exacerbated by how energy weapon ammo is both super-common in vendors and super expensive. Don't be surprised at paying something like fifteen caps per micro-fusion cell in the early game.

And then you have the fact that in FWE, energy weapons generally have less health than their small guns counterparts, and are very rare until you can start regularly looting Enclave patrols. Oh, did I mention that since the default respawn rate in FWE has been lowered, you'll be seeing far fewer Enclave Troopers in game? Oh, and since you want high DPS over high damage-per-shot, you'll want mostly machine guns, and the only Energy weapon that kind of fills that role is the Gatling Laser.

EDIT: Unless I'm playing with mods, then I tend to pump Sneak early in both. My preferred mod setup tends toward extremely high lethality, and being unseen is an extremely effective way to not die.

I should note that when I'm playing Fallout 3, I actually try to stay away from both VATS and sneaking. It's extremely effective, especially in FWE's more lethal world, but it just saps some of the fun out of the world. I mean, yes, I could press an insta-win button and watch my character target a character from a mile away and blow their head into gory chunks before the enemy even knows they're there. It'd be a hundred times more effective than running and gunning. But it's just more fun to take the world as it comes than to be able to declare yourself the winner of the fight before it begins.

Actually, VATS is kind of a problem in Fallout 3, I think. It grants you an absurd amount of damage resistance (90 or 95%, I forget which), while also granting you an additional 15% critical chance. It boosts both defense and damage. It bolsters the terrible shooting mechanics of vanilla Fallout 3. It has the best perk support to make it better. Because of all these factors, you have no reason not to use VATS at every opportunity and every reason to spam that button. And it just gets repetitive and boring, unfortunately.

Jury-rigging always felt like a wasted perk in New Vegas. There were so many copies of generic weapons, and merchants with 100 repair and nothing else to buy, that you could keep just about anything in top form. I think Flak is F3's only 100 repair guy. But NV also had weapon repair kits as a vanilla thing.

Really? For me, Jury Rigging is one of those perks that all of my characters have. It's not because you can't keep vanilla items repaired easily enough, but because it lets you completely break the economy of New Vegas. Buy up a varmint rifle, have someone repair it to full condition, and then use the varmint rifle to repair a sniper rifle or anti-material rifle for massive profit. Ditto with 9mm repairing things like Ranger Sequoias, or legion/NCR armor being used to fix combat armor.

Admittedly, my mod setup makes Repair even more stupidly powerful. More Scrap Metal CRAFTing makes it so that every barrel, abandoned motorcycle, shopping cart, baby carriage, typewriter, broken computer, etcetera, can be turned into scrap metal, and from there into FWE's version of weapon repair kits. At 100 repair, you can get enough scrap metal from a shopping cart to make 12 repair parts, so you quickly have more repair than you know what to do with.

[Triaxx]

The other thing is the fact that repair skill only affects how much the weapon repairs, rather than the total you're allowed. So if you stack up enough Varmint Rifles, you can eventually have one maxxed out even if you have only 15 repair skill.

Umm... you're using TTW and FWE interchangeably there and I am confused. Either way, until I went to RobCo I never had enough energy ammo. The other problem is Project Nevada adding additional weapons to the distribution mix, so even Enclave couldn't reliably be counted on for energy weapon ammo.

I always treat VATS as the emergency switch. Sometimes despite my best efforts, enemies get very, very close and leave me no room to react. So I hit VATS and let it do the fighting. Very useful vs. tiny melee enemies like Molerats and the nastier varieties of dogs.

Please, I have CASE and CIAO. I get one scrap, I can duplicate it infinitely. CASE lets me break scrap into 1000 lead and a few other things. CIAO lets me craft Scrap from 200 lead. I'm certain you can see where this goes. Walking out of Goodsprings with the sum total of Chet and Frankie's inventories, means the fact that I can't run is offset by the firepower necessary to kill a large portion of the wasteland from where I'm standing. You have no Economy, only scrap metal.

[DigoDragon]

New Vegas's 75% condition is good enough was a lovely little change that both made 100 Repair less immediately pressing. Such a small thing, but so meaningful in how you use and advance the skill.

The other thing is the fact that repair skill only affects how much the weapon repairs, rather than the total you're allowed. So if you stack up enough Varmint Rifles, you can eventually have one maxxed out even if you have only 15 repair skill.

Indeed! The difference is like Night and Bowling Balls. I found that I didn't need to constantly keep a load of spare guns to fix mine. In fact, I could just keep a few pieces of scrap metal and scrap electronics (later refining it to spare parts with EDE) which weigh much less and then after that I could build weapon cleaning and repair kits. NV kind of made repairing a trivial issue, but I am fine with that.

The problem comes when you thing about trying to keep these things supplied and repaired. As I said before, FWE is really dumb about its barter calculations; it jacks up the price of ammo, drops the price of weapons to 20% of what they'd normally be, and then brutally penalizes you for not having 100 barter with prices that could be 300% higher than the cost of the item. The end effect is that you have less money available for spending, and this is greatly exacerbated by how energy weapon ammo is both super-common in vendors and super expensive. Don't be surprised at paying something like fifteen caps per micro-fusion cell in the early game.

See, why can't I have just one or the other change? I didn't get into FWE. It goes too extreme in the other direction with the economy. I'd be fine with just selling prices being low, because loot is plentiful.

I should note that when I'm playing Fallout 3, I actually try to stay away from both VATS and sneaking. It's extremely effective, especially in FWE's more lethal world, but it just saps some of the fun out of the world. I mean, yes, I could press an insta-win button and watch my character target a character from a mile away and blow their head into gory chunks before the enemy even knows they're there. It'd be a hundred times more effective than running and gunning. But it's just more fun to take the world as it comes than to be able to declare yourself the winner of the fight before it begins.

I'll half-disagree here. VATS is indeed very powerful, as it raises your damage resistance and damage while in the mode, but I never get tired of it. Doesn't sap the fun for me. Possibly my secret is that when I hit VATS, I try to keep it to just one shot and I aim for non-head parts. I also don't take my time aiming. I click on a part as soon as the percentages come up and then go. Keep it moving. Cripple a leg or weapon arm, but not always an instant kill. Well, until I get the bloody Mess perk, then it's pretty much like shooting garbage bags full of Campbell's vegetable soup.

But yeah, I think a good middle ground is using VATS with just 1 shot at a time instead of spamming it and emptying your AP.

[LibraryOgre]

One thing that has annoyed me greatly about FO3 and its successors is the indestructibility of doors. I am carrying axes, auto axes, dynamite, and small nuclear weapons... but I can't open a wooden door with a glass window, because I don't have enough points in lockpicking.

[factotum]

but I can't open a wooden door with a glass window, because I don't have enough points in lockpicking.

It gets especially ridiculous when the door itself is already half-broken, as some are...you can literally see through the hole into the room you want to get into, but you still can't open the door without the proper key!

[BladeofObliviom]

In some cases, you could reasonably reach through with your convenient human arm and just unlock it without any need for a lockpick. But nope, door's locked. Gotta have lockpick.

The Capital Wasteland, 'tis a silly place.


EDIT: Though if we're applying logic to barriers in the later Fallout games, there sure are a lot of barricaded/boarded up/otherwise impassable doors. Bet there's some good loot in there, if nobody's managed to crack them open yet...

[Triaxx]

Fallout 4, delightfully, has a mod for that. Splinterz, which basically allows you to kick doors open.

Repairing in NV is trivial, but gun condition isn't, which I like. To whit: While it's only early on that I have issues with guns jamming, it happens even late game to enemies.

Balmas, when mousing over perks can you go a bit slower? It makes it hard to pause and read the video if I'm having to go frame by frame. Also, what perk mod are you using?

[Mando Knight]

Repairing in NV is trivial, but gun condition isn't, which I like. To whit: While it's only early on that I have issues with guns jamming, it happens even late game to enemies.

That, and condition is Gun HP, which means the game has a way to let you shoot weapons out of peoples' hands. FO4, in spite of its overall better gunplay, lost that function when it ditched weapon conditions.

[Balmas]

EDIT: Though if we're applying logic to barriers in the later Fallout games, there sure are a lot of barricaded/boarded up/otherwise impassable doors. Bet there's some good loot in there, if nobody's managed to crack them open yet...

"Fawkes, my arms aren't quite long enough to reach. Could you stick yer arm in there and flip the lock?"

"...I'm sorry, my friend. I feel that this is your story, and it is your destiny to do this alone."

"...Fawkes, you're fired."

Balmas, when mousing over perks can you go a bit slower? It makes it hard to pause and read the video if I'm having to go frame by frame. Also, what perk mod are you using?

Whoops, sorry about that. When I level up, I generally have a good idea of what I might want to take, so I kinda skip down to where it is. I've already recorded most of episode 3, but I can be slower when I next level up.

The Perk mod is the Ultimate Perk Pack. Specifically, I'm using the plugins for Pack 1, Pack 2, quest perks, beverage perks, and experience-based perks. FWE also adds a number of perks, mostly related to the new features added by the mod.

That, and condition is Gun HP, which means the game has a way to let you shoot weapons out of peoples' hands. FO4, in spite of its overall better gunplay, lost that function when it ditched weapon conditions.

D'you know, I hadn't even noticed that? I find my self aiming at weapons so rarely in F3 and New Vegas that it didn't even occur to me to try aiming for anything but limbs and heads.

[Mando Knight]

D'you know, I hadn't even noticed that? I find my self aiming at weapons so rarely in F3 and New Vegas that it didn't even occur to me to try aiming for anything but limbs and heads.

It's often mostly an incidental thing, such as when you dip into using full-auto weapons or if there's an enemy who's trivialized by disarming him (though notably not Elijah, who has a "companion weapon" version of the Gauss Rifle and thus can't be disarmed in any way).

It'd be a little more useful in certain parts of FO4, where there actually are enemies armed with things like Fat Men and can't always be reliably OHKO'd before they spot you (there's a couple Power Armored Raiders that wield one). Sniping away their heavy weapon would mean that you wouldn't have to worry about either missing the kill or an alerted nearby enemy immediately picking it up and locking onto you.

[Triaxx]

Awesome, thanks. :D

I really need to see if I can remember how to Fallout Tactics, because I really need to show that game off. Why? It was back in the days when if an enemy had a two handed weapon, and you broke their arm, they could no longer use it, stupidly including enemies who wielded with a one handed animation.

[BladeofObliviom]

Honestly my favorite use of VATS to shoot a weapon out of someone's hands is if you manage to catch one holding a Grenade. Hit that and it will explode right in their face.

[Triaxx]

It doesn't even have to be in hand, just equipped. I've blown up enough Powder Gangers by accident, and Super Mutants on purpose that I really miss it in F4.

[DigoDragon]

One thing that has annoyed me greatly about FO3 and its successors is the indestructibility of doors. I am carrying axes, auto axes, dynamite, and small nuclear weapons... but I can't open a wooden door with a glass window, because I don't have enough points in lockpicking.

Yeah, I agree. I have bottles of Wonder glue and a bunch of explosives all the time on me (landmines and grenades). Why can't I blow a lock open? I think there was a mod for FO3 that tried to do that, but I remember it being buggy.

That, and condition is Gun HP, which means the game has a way to let you shoot weapons out of peoples' hands. FO4, in spite of its overall better gunplay, lost that function when it ditched weapon conditions.

Yeah, shooting weapons out of people's hands was a fun trick to use. Enemies could do it back to you, which wasn't often, but meant keeping a back up gun just in case.

"Fawkes, my arms aren't quite long enough to reach. Could you stick yer arm in there and flip the lock?"

"...I'm sorry, my friend. I feel that this is your story, and it is your destiny to do this alone."

"...Fawkes, you're fired."

LOL, FO3 logic in a nutshell. :>

[LibraryOgre]

Honestly my favorite use of VATS to shoot a weapon out of someone's hands is if you manage to catch one holding a Grenade. Hit that and it will explode right in their face.

Heck, they have a grenade in hand, I view it as necessary to shoot it out of their hand. I'll try for that even when there are better shots, simply because the RoI is so fantastic.

[Rynjin]

I'm pretty sure you can snipe grenades already IN FLIGHT in New Vegas, which is cool.

[Triaxx]

It doesn't seem to work for me in NV, it's always a 0% chance, but it's fantastically fun in Fallout 3. It's possible to do in F4, but you've got to be stupidly fast.

[factotum]

Shooting the mini-nuke a Super Mutant suicider is holding is still possible in FO4, though, and it's really fun if he happens to be in the middle of a group of his mates at the time.

[Rynjin]

It doesn't seem to work for me in NV, it's always a 0% chance, but it's fantastically fun in Fallout 3. It's possible to do in F4, but you've got to be stupidly fast.

Is it? I downloaded a mod that replaces VATS with bullet time and tried sniping grenades in 4 but it never worked. At least for my own grenades.