Very hard difficulty experience

[EvilPie]

Okay i would like to talk a little about my experience playing the game on very hard difficulty (im currently lvl 27 on my most recent run, and i also finished honest hearths while earning every achievement on very hard mode) i decided to drop the difficulty level of the game to hard more for 2 reasons 1.the game is still too easy on normal mode 2.on very hard mode i find myself doing too much preparations all the time by goin around farming caps hoarding industrial amounts of ammunition because all the enemies are terribly tough and it takes a lot of bullets to kill them (wich depletes my thousands of rounds in very little gameplay), so i just wanted to share my point of view and ask if anyone has any opinion or tough about this (i´m not complaining that the game is to hard on "very hard" more i´m just saying that all the run around for supplies makes the game less enjoyable )

[talgaby]

Very hard makes enemies bullet sponges, so you need to know how to deal tons of damage quickly if you do not take the sneaky/diplomatic approach. Usually unarmed or a sneak crit build works well. After all, the game only relies on a damage multiplier, and does not throw in enemy types with purposefully gigantic health and armour values like some badly designed ones do. *coughFallout3cough*

[Lord Tyrian]

Very Hard difficulty pretty much forces you to make use of the most effective strategies, and to focus on a specific character build that you know will work. Maybe it's a good idea to avoid combat scenarios early game, do a lot of quests that don't involve a lot of fighting, to level up your character, also turn in snowglobes and break the banks of the casino's on the Strip. You want to be prepared before you tackle some of the tougher sections of the game. Also buy stimpaks from any merchant who has them. All in all, since difficulty level has no effect on any of the non-combat aspects of the game, you can take advantage of this. Do the easy stuff, get money and XP from it, make use of it to take care of the harder stuff.

About the harder stuff, namely combat... Ideally you want to be in an advantageous position during any fight. Seek the high ground, bonus points if it requires jumping to reach it; the player is the only entity in the game that's able to jump, IIRC. Try to get sneak attack criticals, and use weapons & perks which maximize crit damage to make the most out of them. This also means you'll have to use less bullets to kill enemies, saving you a lot of ammunition. Invest in a Sniper Rifle (or you can even find a few just lying around, such as on a bed in the 1st Recon tent at Camp McCarran... Doesn't even need to be stolen, strangely enough). Also, find the Suppressor modification for it. If you need .308 rounds, Contreras at Camp McCarran tends to have a huge amount. That'll get you off to a good start.

I'd avoid the Ratslayer; due to a bug, it's not a proper silenced weapon, so you're better off using a Sniper Rifle w/ a suppressor mod attached, which does work properly. So the Ratslayer, while not a bad weapon per se, shouldn't be relied on for stealth.

Remember, if you can't handle a fight, sneak past it, or simply run. Fight only on your terms.

There are other strategies beyond merely a stealthy build, however. I remember seeing a Youtube video of a guy explaining a build that's very effective on Very Hard mode. It was basically a VATS centered build (picking up the perk Math Wrath, and other similar perks), with the main weapons of choice being Maria (Benny's 9mm, very useful against targets with little to no DT, gets insane amounts of VATS rounds) and the Gobi Campaign Scout Rifle (unique Sniper Rifle, and a surprisingly good weapon for VATS strategies). It also emphasized having a high crit rate. So in a nutshell, a high crit build using weapons that get plenty of rounds in VATS. It also allows you to reliably cripple limbs. For instance, crippling a Deathclaw's legs or a Cazador's wings makes those encounters a lot easier.

Sadly, I can no longer find the video. Back then I created a character centered around the proposed build, played on Very Hard, and it worked quite well. Didn't complete the entire game, though. But I did clear Quarry Junction and similar areas.

Anyway, good luck, and happy hunting

[red255]

yeah. Very hard mode is basically a damage slider
so you could take drugs which increase damage, psycho/Slasher/Med-X.
and would basically change Very hard mode with drugs = Normal Mode without drugs.
such is the nature of damage sliders.
also any semblance of difficulty leaves as you accquire bigger guns and armor.

So I would have suggested some sort of difficulty mod, over the default damage slider the game provides which just makes bullet sponges instead of nuanced challenge.

[Teerapon]

Very hard difficulty is tedius and make enemies bullet sponge for no reason even though it challenging, but the Hard difficilty is enjoyable for me because it's not too easy and too tedius but still required some strat and management.

I would recommend the mod called "Jsawyermod" designed by Josh sawyer the Lead Disigner and Director of the game himself if you want to stick to vanilla feel. it basically a director's cut since it tweak and fix a lot of things. Normal or Hard difficulties and Hardcore mod are recommended.

[i_m_bored2death]

Originally posted by Teerapon:

Very hard difficulty is tedius and make enemies bullet sponge for no reason even though it challenging, but the Hard difficilty is enjoyable for me because it's not too easy and too tedius but still required some strat and management.

I would recommend the mod called "Jsawyermod" designed by Josh sawyer the Lead Disigner and Director of the game himself if you want to stick to vanilla feel. it basically a director's cut since it tweak and fix a lot of things. Normal or Hard difficulties and Hardcore mod are recommended.

I am a bit late to the party, but let me explain. The problem is how difficulty works. This system is a legacy system that goes all the way back to morrowind. Very hard difficulty doubles the damage enemies do while cutting your damage in half. This was ok for morrowind and it was ok for fallout 3 however it is not ok for fallout NV for one simple reason. DT (damage threshold). Now let me explain say you shoot your gun for 100 damage. In very hard you will do 50 damage instead on a an enemy body part with 0 DT. Now lets say he has 25 DT. In normal you do 75 damage, in very hard you do 25, which is 3 times lower. Now this is just a guess (i don't actually know how the formula works) but i believe the very high difficulty damage reduction happens before DT, which is why every enemy with a bit of armor seems so bullet spongey. In fact i am almost sure of it. since armor seems to stack very well for enemy but not for you. In fact at the damn, enemies wear special armor that gives another 20% DR (damage reduction), which applies before DT. I still one shot them with headshots but if i shoot at the body, where the DT is higher, i can empty my magazine and seems like i am doing no damage. Now if it was just the DR lowering my damage into obscurity the difference between body shot and headshot should not be so pronounced, it's only 50% reductions in damage so if DT applied before difficulty damage reduction, my headshot would not be THAT powerful. But since helmet only has 2 or 3 DT depending on what they are wearing, even after DR adn dificulty damage reduction i still have enough to one shot them with head shots(i think i was using holorifle with reduced spread drugs when i noticed this) The same applies to your armor. If you feel armor is useless. that's probably the reason. Say you have 25 DT on your armor and enemy does 50 damage. On normal that is 25 damage after DT on very hard it is 75 damage after DT, so 3 times the damage instead of 2 times the damage. This is just a guess but my own experience tells me it is true, since no matter how armored i get i still seem to take tons of damage from high damage weapons or attacks, disproportionately so, while faster shooting low dmg weapons do seem more affected by DT. Bethesda really need to do something about how they increase difficulty since it's just a matter or % boosts which does not work well with anything except other % boots effects. Add in any flat values in your game and the difficulty slider gives back inconsistent results. Guess it's lucky they only do % increase on everything ^^'. There is no way to fix this, even with the geck however i took the compromise route 150% damage take on VH 75% damage dealt and put down xp to 75% on VH (gonna do my first test play with these setting and see if that is not enough, i will bump it down to 50%) since that is the only modifiable value based on difficulty left unused in the game engine under fDiffMultXP (fDiffMultXPVE/E/N/H/VH) and would require some creative modding otherwise. And i like the DT system in general better than the DR system in FO3, i just wish they would have fixed the difficulty slider to spit out consistent results. Obsidian did not have much time to work on the game, so my guess is they didn't check DT balance across multiple difficulties. They just left the difficulty setting from FO3 since they built the game on top of the existing FO3 game. In fact you still have the DR stat on armor and will even show up ingame if you add DR to an armor piece, even though no armor piece uses it outside special armor for hoover damn last battle and maybe a few other unobtainable pieces or armor. Other than DT there is no reason why FONV enemies would feel more bullet spongey than FO3 enemies on higher difficulty. The difficulty setting are exactly the same and the general NPC balance is comparable. This is also probably why armor piercing bullets feel so much stronger than anything else at very hard difficulty and why hollow point feel so useless. But don't judge obsidian too harshly. When bethesda released their DLC's for FO3 they added flat damage that bypassed DR and on higher difficulty they would take one shot at me and do 75% of my health in damage in full power armor set. Lousy swampers. It's just a lousy and lazy way to increase difficulty

[Death Approaches]

you're missing the point of Very Hard...

when you're lvl 1 or 2, chems are extremely useful, but after a few levels, how often do you use anything besides stimpaks, radaway/rad-x, and the auto-tourniquet cause cazzies suck?

or VATS for that matter? Survival + Very Hard are for roleplaying; chems aren't for when you remember them, they become a necessity for big fights, and the difference between plinking away on a seemingly indestructible tank, or dropping them in a few rounds.

if you don't enjoy cooking / consuming foods with perks, crafting / consuming chems, etc. and consider all that just micromanagement that gets in the way of your killin fun? then lowering the difficulty was the right idea! cause VH w/o buffing up = grueling tedium.

[June]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.