Difficulty settings

[Lahoo Eckbert]

I started the game on hard difficulty, but the enemies feel a little too spongy. It takes like 7-8 headshots with a sniper to kill a super mutant, double or triple that to kill a legendary enemy. No weapon I have, with the possible exceptions of fatman and alien blaster, give me any kind of gunpower satisfaction on stronger enemies. Sure I can one or two shot raiders or weaker enemies with a sneak headshot but at this point in the game those enemies are getting more rare(20 hours in). I'm considering normal or even easy mode. Do those settings effect anything besides damage given and received, like xp gained, loot quality, etc?

[Death Approaches]

nah it's just a metric for people who find the lower difficulties less of a challenge, who never die, never even get close to dying...

this game uses a combination of perks, both base power/damage, critical hits, and sneak attacks... then the VATS system, then throw in armor resistances, and by god, we've got a game! (ie. if you're shooting guys in leather armor with an energy weapon, maybe switch a ballistic weapon. )

the challenge of just being a pew pew pew bullet-sprayer is probably the issue - if you don't plan on playing tactically, it can get, as you say, a bit spongey... while some of it is probably learning curve, I frequently one-shot people tougher than me on Very Hard, using a weapon with improved crit chance and damage, and using various chems.

If you don't use chems, don't specialize in one weapon perk type til you're higher level, don't modify weapons to be what you want, etc. and just run around and see red markers and throw some ammo downrange with the best weapon you've found so far, yeah, lowering the difficulty to Normal is probably going to be more fun and have more "flow" to it.

Fallout 4 is many games in one, you can play however you want to, but try not to get obsessed on the difficulty setting thing, play whatever's the most fun for you!

[Goblin King Jareth]

Yeah I'm on very hard and running out of ammo a lot, but I knew what I was getting into in Bethesda games on that score.

The inverse situation is if you lower the difficulty soon even average and boring builds become completely overpowered by level 20 and you're one shotting everything too fast before you've even seen half the content.

I'd rather do the hard scrabble thing and slowly advance the character to what feels right "earning it RPG wise" over so many pages of levels and perks, advance the settlement building and so forth. It feels more in line of how it should be to me in a wasteland where you are supposed to be scrounging for any remnants of civilization. If I am giving up "realism" of sniper kills due to sponge factor that's easier for me to justify what with all the massive armor and mutations in this world, and it's still possible to get back to that level with enough special builds and weaponry I believe.

Right now my robot is carrying most of my damage, and that's ok since it's quite a Tony Stark move while I try to amass perks for science, blacksmith, armorer, gun nut to get the Power Armor and automatic lasers/gamma/plasma really working properly. His first armors looked like crap too and I'm on the T-51. I think there might have been an old issue where he even used sledgehammers.

[Lahoo Eckbert]

Yeah I'm guessing with damage investments, sneak damage + crit mods you can do lots of damage, but I'm lvl 21 and I could only invest in basic stats, gun nut, science, lockpicking etc and I need a good 20 levels more to be able to invest in everything I'd like to invest in.

I wish the difficulty mostly determined how much damage you received. I'd be fine with receiving more damage as long as I could deal just as much.
In medieval type games where it is mostly melee combat, spongy enemies aren't that big a deal but in a modern shooter type game when people start face taking sniper rifles it breaks the immersion a little bit. You'd expect your good aiming skills to be rewarded.
So far it didn't bother me as much but I was also hoping that I'd find weapons that'd allow me to make short work of enemies. So far the strongest weapon I have is the alien blaster which I randomly stumbled upon and has limited ammo.

edit : I didn't invest in VATS much(I think I just have one level in showing weakness) because I remember it being a little cumbersome and pointless. Unless I'm point blank the % chance of hit is extremely low. I can just aim and shoot instead.

[valium]

This is an RPG over an FPS, there are going to be bullet spongy enemies regardless of difficulty. The idea is that they will be more dangerous because they dont die instantly, giving them opportunities to actually attack back.