How exactly does damage resistance on armor work

[Echo]

Hi. guys. Thanks for taking the time reading this.
What i am consused about is does it matter where i am hit?
If i take on a helmet, will the protection only help when getting headshots or will a left leg armor peice also help reduce the damage taken by a bullet to the head?
The reason i am confused is because i see a total armor number in the lower left cornor of my pip-boy.

[Tavman (4)]

It's a complicated process with lots of formulas. The wiki can explain this better than I can.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Damage_Resistance

[Morty Jhones]

If you hit your target the works dammage as folowes.
1. damage roll.
2. the shots dammage is then modifieyed by the location modifire (Head, limb, torso) which . . veries from weapon to weapon
3 askes is the target aware of the shot.
3a if yes, go to 4
3b if no. applly sneack attack mod
4 work out resistance.
4a Autofire weapons.
the game addds alll your armour together and uses that as your armour when struck by automatic fire and untargeted attacks
4b Single shot weapons.
Against single shot hits (rifles and Melleee hits) and targeted attacks the game uses the armour of the location hit.
5 armour is deducted from damage.

[Doombringer]

Previous poster is incorrect.
There is no damage roll, damage is fixed.
Armor is not hit location based, Fallout 4 just sums up all the armor from every piece you are wearing into an overall value.
3 Types of armor: DamageResist, EnergyResist, and RadiationResist.

Armor in fallout 4 is complicated. Usually it will use this formula:
DamageReduction = 1-0.5*(AttackDamage / DamageResist)^0.3653

The following cases do not use the formula:
0 Armor = 0% DamageReduction
Armor <15% AttackDamage = 1% Damage Reduction
Armor >550x Attack Damage = 95% Damage Reduction
Energy Weapons do no damage vs 1mil+ energyresist. (the ballistic part of plasma still works though)

Note you will never hit the upper limits by legitimate means...

Hit locations multiply damage after Armor is taken into account depending on creature type.
(Mirelurk shell takes way less damage, most targets take much more damage when headshot, deathclaws take more damage from belly shots, etc.)
Explosive damage ignores hit location modifiers.

[Echo]

Thanks mate. It was very helpful. :)

[The Inept European]

So for example when fighting Slag in Out of the Fire, where he is wearing raider power armour without a helmet, there is no point targeting his unprotected head? Or no more point than if he was wearing a PA helmet?

And no point aiming any auto weapon at any specific body part?

[Doombringer]

There are BodyPartsData (can be looked up in creation kit) for each enemy type.
Certain locations get damage modifiers; headshots usually do 2x damage.
(On Protectrons/Assaultron they only do 1/3 damage, Deathclaws take 2x from belly shots instead, etc.)

Not having a helmet just means his overall damageresist is a bit lower, doesn't make him take extra damage (beyond the normal 2x for headshots) from head hits.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Doombringer:

Armor >= 1000000 = 100% Damage Reduction

I can't be sure about earlier, since I recall using it myself on a character who subsequently seemed to take no damage, but this currently appears to be incorrect.

I found this to be the case when checking it a couple of weeks ago, and confirmed it with another test today.

[red255]

Originally posted by Echo:

Hi. guys. Thanks for taking the time reading this.
What i am consused about is does it matter where i am hit?

if you are wearing power armor it matters. If you aren't wearing power armor I haven't noticed much of a difference. beyond total value, but then I generally wear ballistic weave underlays on my body and hat. so I got decent armor on total coverage.

[The Inept European]

A quick summary of the detailed wiki article:

If armour strength matches the weapon damage it will block half the incoming damage, all else being equal.

Greater armour strength (beyond the weapon damage level) has small, diminishing extra benefit vs weapons of lower damage. Or to put it another way - the excess resistance needs to be huge to make a significant difference.

The main benefit of higher armour strength is to be able to resist against weapons with higher damage levels, much more than it is to "shut down" damage from lower damage level weapons.

HTH

[ghpstage]

^^^
That wiki article is interesting from the other side too, that of a player attacking enemy DR.
It tells us about energy damage on rifles not benefitting from DR penetration from rifleman, a well known goof that usually gets the blame for the impact of a much, much bigger goof that is also pointed out in that article but only glossed, and theres yet another big goof with energy crits.

The critical hit page contains another energy DAM goof again....
Bethesda obviously hate lasers!

[Doombringer]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

Originally posted by Doombringer:

Armor >= 1000000 = 100% Damage Reduction

I can't be sure about earlier, since I recall using it myself on a character who subsequently seemed to take no damage, but this currently appears to be incorrect.

I found this to be the case when checking it a couple of weeks ago, and confirmed it with another test today.

hmm, I just tested it and ghoul did take damage... 5% damage
Dunno why it didn't take damage when I tested this 1.5 years ago, will edit to correct.
Now I need to find other threads where I posted this to fix :(

Thanks for pointing it out.


EDIT: It does stop all damage from energy weapons at 1000000 energyresist, but not ballistic weapons at 1000000 damageresist, I tested this limit with an energy weapons.
(That is how I got the no damage result 1.5years ago, and it still works that way today.)
At 1mil+ energy resist = 0 energy damage taken, but 999999 still takes 5%.

As previous poster pointed out, energy weapons are calculated a bit differently that ballistic ones, so I guess this shouldn't be a surprise.
I just assumed ballistic would work the same at 1mil+, and that was a bad assumption...

[ghpstage]

Interesting,
Which bit of info did that 1,000,000 number come from exactly?

Without knowing that I can only speculate, but is it possible that the laser 'million' point may need to be modified in line the the differences in equations? As in 1,000,000 * damage multipliers?

Might be worth testing 50 million to see if that works to see if you can rule out the possibility that 100% reduction is impossible, and then looking to see what if any damage multipliers the enemy might have in place. I wouldn't be surprised if its something stupid, such as the difficulty damage multiplier ending up getting used where they shouldn't be...

[Doombringer]

Difficulty damage multiplier happens after armor, it has no effect on how well armor works.

I set a ghoul's energyresist to various values, shot it, recorded how much damage it took.
(using getav health, I had given it silly high hitpoints before starting)
Did this literally thousands of times.

Ballistic damage still does 5% damage at 50mil damageresist.

Damage Reduction goes from 95% at 999999 to 100% at 1mil, but only for energy damage.
(It's from a conditional statement in the armor formula, but we don't get source code for how armor works though. Had to test inputs/outputs in game to figure it out. 100% damage reduction for energy damage happens at the same point (1mil) regardless of damage/shot or anything else.)
It is 95% damage reduction from ~17500 to 999999 energyresist with a 1crank laser musket (32 damage), no perks.
The formula caps out at 95%, absolutely no change over a huge range, but then suddenly jumps to 100% at 1mil.

Energy damage is treated differently than ballistic damage (see crits & perk damage mods vs armor, wiki has decent info on this), dunno why, but it is.

[The Inept European]

Right, I'm selling my lasers then.
Never used them much anyway. :-)