The armor problem

[PhamTrinli]

Something's not adding up...

I have 46 armor on one of my characters and yet he is getting owned by enemies with guns that only have ~25 armor pen.

Isn't armor supposed to reduce incoming damage by a percentage if the attacker's armor penetration value isn't at least as high as your armor value? He is getting hit for full damage with regular non-crit shots from enemies.

Is this a bug?

*Edit*
I forgot to add that these are not energy or elemental weapons, they are regular ballistic weapons

[Commander Gorda]

Maybe they use energy weapons, or fire, frost etc.

[NixBoxDone]

If this is like any other primarily single player tactical rpg, the enemies get buffs as the game progresses so you can't just mod yourself essentially invincible.
There's also the possibility of the enemy units having been specced majorly into armor pen and running modded weapons of course, though that's a tough sell to get from 25 armor pen to whatever you need to get 100 % damage vs. 46 armor.
Your unit wasn't armor broken from abilities or precision shots, I assume?

Regardless I think the long and short of this is that the enemies aren't designed to have access to the same tools and abilities you do, they're designed to give you a tough fight at the stage of the game where you're meant to encounter them.
If that means giving them a ton of penetration because, at that stage in the game, the devs expect you to have access to plentiful deployables, smoke grenades, consumable healing items and long range options, then that's what they will probably do.

[PhamTrinli]

Originally posted by NixBoxDone:

If this is like any other primarily single player tactical rpg, the enemies get buffs as the game progresses so you can't just mod yourself essentially invincible.
There's also the possibility of the enemy units having been specced majorly into armor pen and running modded weapons of course, though that's a tough sell to get from 25 armor pen to whatever you need to get 100 % damage vs. 46 armor.
Your unit wasn't armor broken from abilities or precision shots, I assume?

Nope. No negative status effects of any kind at the time, actually.

[NixBoxDone]

Originally posted by PhamTrinli:

Originally posted by NixBoxDone:

If this is like any other primarily single player tactical rpg, the enemies get buffs as the game progresses so you can't just mod yourself essentially invincible.
There's also the possibility of the enemy units having been specced majorly into armor pen and running modded weapons of course, though that's a tough sell to get from 25 armor pen to whatever you need to get 100 % damage vs. 46 armor.
Your unit wasn't armor broken from abilities or precision shots, I assume?

Nope. No negative status effects of any kind at the time, actually.

Yeah, then they probably got souped up by the devs to make life tough on ya. :D

[Jotun]

They probably hit you with a critical hit.

[PhamTrinli]

Originally posted by Jotun:

They probably hit you with a critical hit.

Guess ya missed the part where I said they were regular non-crit hits

[Dat Zorro]

Yep, looks like this game went the cheap way of providing challenge, namely simply buffing the enemies instead of giving them better guns and armour. Wasteland 2 did this much better.

[Pandada-sensei]

Playing on Supreme Jerk, the fact that 1 rifle shot does 150 damage out of 300 health (maxed Strength) and 1 spray of heavy does 370+, I can safely say the challenge is unfair and someone didn't even test the game properly.

Doesn't matter if I have 30 armor either with 300 health, they just seem to do a random amount of damage that just one-shots regardless.

[Toshiro_Aki]

i have a guy with 84 armor, if he takes a shot from a LMG payaso in the Yuma area it take 70% of his HP. the guys carrying a Bren, its armor pen is 12... so i see where OP is coming from.

[Karl Ohnefurcht]

If your weapon's penetration is equal to or greater than your enemy's Armor, your weapon will deal full damage. If your weapon's Penetration is less than the target's Armor, you'll do a proportionate amount of damage, but no more than 80%. Examples:

Penetration 15 vs. Armor 10 = 100% damage.
Penetration 5 vs. Armor 10 = 50% Damage.
Penetration 9 vs. Armor 10 = 80% Damage.

So you get about 50% with 46 ar vs 25 Penetration
I got the information above from https://wasteland3.wiki.fextralife.com/Combat

[Bloodwest]

The shots which take you down are probably crits, they appear red. So besides high armor and hp you also need crit resistance to tanks ballistic shots. Also, difficulty modifiers may do they part if you set higher than normal.

[PhamTrinli]

Originally posted by Bloodwest:

The shots which take you down are probably crits, they appear red. So besides high armor and hp you also need crit resistance to tanks ballistic shots. Also, difficulty modifiers may do they part if you set higher than normal.

Once again, they were regular non-crit hits. I know what a crit looks like. These were not crits.

[Pandada-sensei]

Trying to justify "crits" to explain the unfair difficulty despite not having played Supreme Jerk.

And I am insanely positive that the ones preaching about crits doesn't even know how crit resistance even works.

And you know all of the comments responded to thus far aren't even playing it on Supreme Jerk or any semblence of difficulty like a vast majority of the youtube videos having ♥♥♥♥ recommendations on builds.

[PhamTrinli]

Originally posted by NixBoxDone:

Originally posted by PhamTrinli:

Nope. No negative status effects of any kind at the time, actually.

Yeah, then they probably got souped up by the devs to make life tough on ya. :D

I don't mind difficulty. What I don't like is unpredictable difficulty that doesn't make any sense and seems to go against the game's established rules and formulas. That makes it so preparation/player skill (and even character skill to a lesser degree) mean absolutely nothing. If difficulty is random and unpredictable then it's not a tactical or strategic game anymore - it's just a slot machine.

Wasteland 3 is not supposed to be a slot machine type game. It is clear from playing through most of the game that it is meant to be tactical in nature and that player choices - both before and during battles - are supposed to be able to reliably affect the outcome of encounters.

Most of the game, the armor pen to armor rules have seemed fine. Enemies do reduced damage to my highest armor guys and normal damage to my characters who don't have as much armor.

Then I get to this point in the game where every enemy (while being several levels below me btw) seem to ignore armor altogether without having a legitimate reason for doing so (high pen weapons or energy or elemental weapons or scoring critical hits) so that now combat makes less sense than it did before and the "difficulty" is just due to random breaking of established rules and norms through the first 95% of the game.

This is either a bug or very poor game design decisions by the dev's.

[[WPC] Doc_Holliday]

I imagine enemies get bonus penetration like you can, from barrels, your background, and luck. Ultimately I feel armor is useless, it should be a bit more complex and provide some resistance to bullets that have a higher penetration.