Damage scaling how does it work?

[Big Boss]

Did a comparison.

At level 2, a pipe bolt pistol one taps scorched and ferals.
At level 50, the same pistol doesnt do ♥♥♥♥.

Shouldnt it be the opposite, the more powerful you get the more damage you do?

[IceMan PJN]

I just skimmed over this but...

Enemies scale up, too. At level 1 you run into level 1 enemies but at level 50 those same enemies are level 50.

Okay, so it should at least even out, right? Well, no. At level 1 you are basic. You don't have a pile of perks or legendary mods on your equipment, or probably any mods at all. By level 50 you're definitely into ideal perk cards and you're definitely heavily modding your equipment beyond just basic stock. This means you're relying on a good build and good, upgraded equipment to do what bone-stock equipment did at level 1. Everything scaled up with the expectation that you're doing these things.

Now, if at level 50 you were still against level 1 scorched, then yes you should be wiping out their whole family in one shot. But you aren't running into level 1 scorched at level 50.

[Big Boss]

Messaggio originale di IceMan PJN:

I just skimmed over this but...

Enemies scale up, too. At level 1 you run into level 1 enemies but at level 50 those same enemies are level 50.

Okay, so it should at least even out, right? Well, no. At level 1 you are basic. You don't have a pile of perks or legendary mods on your equipment, or probably any mods at all. By level 50 you're definitely into ideal perk cards and you're definitely heavily modding your equipment beyond just basic stock. This means you're relying on a good build and good, upgraded equipment to do what bone-stock equipment did at level 1. Everything scaled up with the expectation that you're doing these things.

Now, if at level 50 you were still against level 1 scorched, then yes you should be wiping out their whole family in one shot. But you aren't running into level 1 scorched at level 50.

So its the classic: You grow stronger but not really

[Chronocide]

Messaggio originale di Big Boss:

Did a comparison.

At level 2, a pipe bolt pistol one taps scorched and ferals.
At level 50, the same pistol doesnt do ♥♥♥♥.

Shouldnt it be the opposite, the more powerful you get the more damage you do?

Nah the damage doesn't scale exactly, so there's two things at work here, basically.

First, think of your noob character as piece of paper with writing on it. A 1st level character is 1/50th of that paper with writing on it. The game "fills in the blank" on that paper so you have a whole page of writing when doing stuff. As you level up, the auto answers that the game gives you are replaced by your choices. So, in effect, you aren't really leveling up, you are more replacing choices that the game made for you with choices that you make. Mind you, this is all hidden from the player view.

Second, your gear does not scale with you. You have to make/find new gear, every so often, in order to have current gear.

All this is up until level 50.

After 50, most of the character creation stagnates and your gear no longer needs to be higher level.

You will get more perk access, and there are "legendary" perk slots opened every 25 levels (so 50, 75, 100), but this doesn't affect your level so to speak, nor really affect anything else.

[Chronocide]

Messaggio originale di Big Boss:

So its the classic: You grow stronger but not really

No, more like you don't grow stronger at all because this isn't an RPG, not really. The level system is better thought of as a way to measure who plays a lot or for a long time. People under level 50 are brand new, under 100 are not totally new, and so forth

Level 1-50 can be considered "tutorial mode" for this game. They're afraid you'll leave if they don't give it to you slowly.

[virpyre]

In a nutshell Lower levels get a damage bonus vs. higher level enemies when an encounter is scaled to match a higher level player.

Against an enemy with 100 armor

• a weapon that deals 1000 damage every 10 seconds deals 1000 damage
  
• a weapon that deals 100 damage every second deals 50 (-50%)
  
• a weapon that deals 10 damage every 0.1 second deals 2.2 (-78%)

All three weapons seam like they would be equal, but that is not the case, the weapon that does the most alpha damage is significantly stronger. This poses a problem for any sort of rapid fire weapon, on release the minigun was the dps king, but had an alpha damage of 8, meaning it only achieved ~15% of it's theoretical dps. While stealth and instigating effects deal insane disproportionate damage, doubling your base damage almost triples your damage until you reach critical mass. (armor : damage =between 1:2 - 1:6)

---

How this relates to enemies is rather simple, because enemies balance is terrible almost all enemies use a very simple and easy to remember stat spread.

You take an enemies' level and multiply by 2.5-3, that is their armor, and you will never be far off on any common enemy except scorched, who fall outside normal range of everything else.

Using my napkin math you would expect for level ~40 enemies to have 100-120 armor

• mole miner - level 40 - 100 armor
  
• super mutant - level 42 - 100 armor
  
• sheepsquatch - level 50 - 150 armor
  
• ghoul - level 42 - 85 armor (low)
  
• scorched - level 40 - 60 armor (exception)
  
• wendigo - level 42 - 150 armor
  
• deathclaw - level 41 - 150 armor
  
• mothman - level 45 - 250 armor (exception)
  
• grafton monster - level 40 - 300 armor (exception)
  
• Scorched queen - level 95 - 300 armor (though, because hidden dr, 1500 effective)

Cryptids are the only semi common enemies who are almost universally above curve, also, there are a number of notable enemies who don't scale, in general enemies who don't appear below level 25 have almost no scaling whatsoever meaning their armor is as tough at level 30 as it is on level 50 variants.

There are only a select handful of common enemies who are not armored to insanity degrees, mirelurk kings who instead have a factor of 6 times more health than anything that isn't a boss at the same level.

This means to make decent work of enemies you want to aim for a weapon with damage over 100 by level 30, and want to be aiming for 200+ in general, if you can break that barrier then you can deal with most enemies, but any weapon that can't reach that point needs a lot of help from armor piercing to bring down the almost universally high armor values across the board of enemies.

[insert food here]

I have weapons that i use in and out of vats, sure in vats does more damage but they still work just fine out of vats.

This sounds like a build or weapon level issue as i know first hand weapons like the fixer works just fine without using vats.

[virpyre]

The Fixer has a hidden, non-removable mod which provides several additional bonuses:

• A stealth bonus equal to three pieces of Shadowed armor.
  
  
• Increases movement speed by 20% while sneaking.
  
  
• Increases all damage by 20%.
  
  
• Dynamic naming override to "The Fixer" (regardless of attached modifications or Legendary effects)

[bad weather yes]

Bro just go back to city skylines 💀

[Lesmir]

Messaggio originale di Big Boss:

Messaggio originale di BizarreMan:

Are you using a level 1 pipe bolt pistol vs a level 50 scorched? That could be a problem.

More precisely though, as one gains levels, it is expected that you will also be gaining your power by slotting perks to increase your damage. That is where the scaling gets fuzzy.

The rough part is between 25-45 as the mobs scale up to their higher levels and if you don’t scale up with them, you will get hammered.

I use a fixer at level 60 and it does zero damage. And no Im never going to use vats.

skill issue

have you try to '' git gud '' ?

[Big Boss]

Messaggio originale di bad weather yes:

Bro just go back to city skylines 💀

Haven't played that game in literal years.

Maybe you should ask the devs to make a better game.

Its advertised as an Online fallout game. But it doesnt have the basic Online features that involves an online RPG. Such as shared instancing, only the leader in a team will progress when you do interior quests. WEIRD RIGHT?

Which means its a singleplayer game where you can see other players and team up with them granted the others dont need to progress in any meaningful way in interiors aka you get boosted by high level players who finished the game.

My fixer is equipped with the 3 perk cards that increase damage for non-automatic rifles such as commando, expert and master commando, tank killer, i have bloody mess, covert operative. No Im not going to use VATS because I actually enjoy PLAYING games rather than relying on some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mechanic that is literally aimbot (weird how its in an online game, imagine adding it to a game that had originally: PVP) and building the whole game around VATS. Most of us on PC (see online shooters, very popular on PC) prefer to actually use our mice to aim. Imagine if they added glued on autoaim to CS2, literally nobody would play it anymore besides perhaps console gamers. Because they love that ♥♥♥♥.

Also most comments in here are aggressive GIT GUD LUL U LOSER! WHY DONT YOU PLAY WITH VATS U LOSER LUL?

Which explains why Fallout 76's community was miniscule prior to the fallout shows boost. And high level players in the game act like theyre some kind of overlords.

Some high IQ comments though from the likes of virpyre

[Kriminaal]

At level 1, you have nothing, scorched have nothing

At level 100, you have a build, scorched have bonuses.

I have literally made an auto-pipe rifle build post-100 and been able to double tap scorched. In fact, it almost was comparable to a Handmade in performance (almost). Once you have a build in place and have the right mods/equipment, a lot of normal weapons start to become comparable, besides of course, the meta weapons which outperform the class below due to certain factors (like the fixer's innate abilities).

And yes, with that pipe rifle build, I was shooting from the hip (it was automatic) and it was pretty crazy how steady it was and viable versus level 100 Super Mutants (I did it for some Daily or Weekly quest that had kill things with a pipe weapon). So yea sure, VATS is meta and far superior but if you like the from-the-hip playstyle, I'm with ya, it feels cooler.

Then again, I know Gun-Fu.

[Dracul]

Annoyingly the Awareness card isnt available till 27 so I couldn't do any from scratch testing with it.

First I made a new character (lvl2) starter pistol does 15dmg, against the weak feral ghouls outside the vault it did 15 damage for body shots.

Then I made a lvl20 (didnt even know you could do that) starter pistol for that one was 20dmg, the same ghouls took 11dmg for body shots.

Then I jumped onto a lvl89 gunslinger with a modded 10mm that does 53dmg a shot, to these ghouls (which were scaled to lvl50) it was doing 35dmg body, with Tank Killer (36% armor piercing) and piercing mag (50% armor piercing) awareness shows them having 25 physical 25 energy resist, 66 physical 66 energy resist with out either of those. A ordinary lvl 45 10mm was doing 22dmg body shots.

To put that in perspective of a higher mob a lvl75 super mutant primus has 141physical and 93 energy resist with out anti armor stuff (54p and 36e with causing it to take 34dmg a torso shot).

-----

Basically they put the kids gloves on and once they come off they are like, why arn't you using vats, a heavy gun and or an explosive weapon? or a chainsaw/autoaxe I suppose.

[Mooman]

All this time and no one actually answered the question... a few got close, but it once again shows players don't know the game they play. Not entirely their fault though as it isn't known without digging.

I'm not going to answer it. Instead I'll be vague. One Wasteland scaling is a lie. Mobs don't scale smoothly but in fixed steps. Also look up the resistance equation as that tells another part of the story.

Damage is everything because Bethesda don't have a clue about how to design a reasonable combat system. Sure, they've tried/trying to do things and have employed the help of 3rd parties (The Multiplayer Group) but somehow still fail to deliver a reasonable system... This company sure is pathetic...

[jockstraps8899]

I'm sorry to say but VATS is essential to me. It is really good against annoying enemies like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ticks and mole rats.

[rdkehoe]

VATS has been in every Fallout game since they were FPS style....3, New Vegas, 4 and now 76. Do you have to use it? No. Do you have to like it? No. Can you intentionally gimp yourself because you think a core mechanic of the Fallout games is stupid? Yes.
There are also builds that don't need to use it at all. Telling other people how to play the game they paid for, however, is just silly.
There are a tonne of cookie cutter WoW MMO's out there if that's what you prefer, and there are lots of repetitive Call of Doody games if you just want an FPS.

There is a power creep in this game but it has way more to do with your perks, legendary perks, mutations, and so forth than levelling up. Also, use level 50 weapons at level 50+, not level 2 weapons. You can craft a better version of most weapons every 5-10 levels.

Also comparing this game to Counter Strike and the like is invalid. This is a pretty casual PvE game, those are competitive PvP games.