Protection Against Criticals?

Makatak

Makatak

First time out of the vault
One of the things I can't stand about Fallout is the potential magnitude of damage from critical hits. I can be wearing the best armor in the game and whopping some mutant/enclave behind, but then BAM, I get one nasty critical hit for 100+ points of damage and its all over. One time, the bottom left portion of the screen read that I got 43,980 points of critical hit damage. Does Endurance or Character levels decrease the chances of that happening?

At least D&D based RPGs give you helmets...
 
I’m the complete opposite, if I can do massive damage with a critical, then so should the enemy. Some of the Enclave critters have small gun and big gun skills in the 140 range, so you have to expect a certain level of critical hits.
 
I agree with .Pixote. since during the late stages of the game the armor-piercing criticals are the only way any kind of enemies can actually kill you, so removing them would remove the last part of challenge from the battles you fight wearing power armor.
 
I don't care if its more realistic. I don't like having to save before every single battle. Criticals should do 2x, maybe 3x damage. Not 10x damage!!!! That goes for the player as well. Huge criticals are very disruptive. It doesn't add to the challenge effectively at all. It just makes the game largely based around luck.
 
so you'd prefer 'rather nastie boo-boo' instead of 'critical'.

I'd think the name of the damage effect would imply that it is critical to something... Being that its related to your health, well I think that a critical effect should be just that: critical. Not just; mildly upsetting.
 
He has a point tho. There is a difference between geting hit hard and insta deaths wich criticals very often are. Random instant death does not add realy to the chalenge imo. However I never liked that put a helmet on and yer immune approach either.

Anyway, its an old system and there is no reason to bitch about it since it wont change. Take it as it is.
 
I agree with the others here. Its called fate/life/chanc, whatever.

Shit happens and in combat one could say it comes in the form of a critical. Reloading is not something complain worthy in a game where you are supposed to save alot. Well, unless you were like me who went to the glow, got mortal radiation doses and then saved.

Critical could mean an enemy got a lucky face shot. It could mean you ran into a sniper with a Barret 50 sniper rifle. It could also mean you stopped to pickup some interesting item as the same equipped sniper decided to pull teh trigger. Luck works in strange and funny ways.
 
As frustrating as the criticals might be, I actually prefer them. If the enemies didn't have an ability to critically hit you, you'd get pretty bored in a while. This keeps the battles more exciting. Fallout 3 lacked this ability and pays the consequenses.
 
I would rather my enemies have tactics which rivaled my own, rather than blindly charging and hoping for the best in every situation. I'd rather my challenges be aware of my reputation or perceived power "level." "Oh man, HOLY SHIT, Its Blackguard The Destroyer McKillsALot!!!! We are so screwed if we fight him, maybe we should just run back out into the waste and not even bother him"

I would rather saving be a privilege than a right. Saving before you do everything including take a piss (while it is so optimal a play strategy that I cannot bring myself to not do it) detracts from the challenge of the game. I think way points (where you get free saves upon completing certain objectives or reaching certain points) and then having say... an item that granted a player choice save (You use a "Beacon of Destiny" and may now save your game), would be a much better way of doing things.


If my enemies have the ability to do massive crits, then so should I and vice versa. I am a firm believer in game balance. But with that said I do not see why massive crits should exist, when all you have to do is make weapons actually lethal in the first place. Make getting good armor (or whatever substitute unarmored/unarmed defenses as perks/feats) a PRIORITY. It always bugged the hell out of me whenever I saw "You have been hit in the left leg and take 798 damage" (That happens only like 1 out of 2500 successful hits, but the fact that it does at all is nonsense) ESPECIALLY when the attack in the first place did not have any chance of damaging. If your M1Abrams Tank gets hit with a rock, then No Matter how many times you throw the rock, no matter how "critical the location or strike" you will NOT damage the tank.

That is fake difficulty. Just allow enemies to ambush you, let everybody have real weapons, make defenses actually worth a damn, and put a premium on saves. No need for game interrupting critical hits.

GWT
 
I'm not aware of 'abrams armour'

Advanced Power Armor MK-II

18 hp / 60%
20 hp / 70%
19 hp / 90%
18 hp / 60%
16 hp / 70%

50 lbs

AC 35 (armour class)

the HP stats define the minimum damage that must be done before the user takes any damage,

the damage done is altered by the % reduction.

thus, in advanced PA km2 no, you wouldn't feel a rock being thrown at you, and I can agree that in this situation that the idea a 'super-crit' can essentially bypass all that is a little silly, but as far as I'm aware a rock cannot obtain a ridiculous crit.

However, weapons such as lasers, mini-guns, plasma rockets and flamers CAN cause massive crit's (along with burst fire from most burst capable weapons)

In the situation where the attacker opens fire with a mini-gun and its 100 rounds per second (imagine 100 bullets.. then imagine them heading toward you VERY fast ... ) and those bullets for some unforeseen reason find the gap at the knee, or groin or neck (power armour unlike tanks has to have greater mobility) your sure as hell gonna notice those 100 or so bullets making their way through that weak point and then ripping up whatever was behind the armour plating.

So, rick Vs, tank this is not, we are mostly talking highly destructive weapons Vs a VERY old suit of mobile armour

Overall I still stand by the idea of massive crit's, and if you don't want to risk being blown apart by them, don't engage enemies with weapons likely to do so. perhaps try 'sneaking' instead of balls to the wall gun-play?

don't like saving, you don't HAVE to hit F5 every 5 mins.. play an ironman game (i.e only save when your about to exit the game / sleep) and when the character dies, he's dead. That's how life in the wastes should be!

small post-post edit
regarding your comments about AI tactics, dont forget, the original FO games are quite aged now. Only now in modern (and often only in 'mil-sim' games) do we see combat aware AI models. And in some defence in Fallout Tactics, I cant recall the amount of times I was facing opponents that refused to budge from behind sandbags or in a trench, forcing me to use alternative assault tactics (as I knew running toward them I'd suffer serious damage OR shock horror... a super crit!) I'll agree that FO 1/2 had limited AI, but lets face it, FO3 the enemy actually insist on running toward you, in the open, firing until either you or they are dead (usually them) so it hardly a part of 'terrible old game AI programming'

If you want games with enhanced AI, I'm sorry to say you'll have to look further than FO 1/2, but there are games out there that do have this as a feature.
 
Criticals shouldn't be insta-kills in a game where there's no player skill involved. They should have a threshold that makes them survivable (uhm...is that a word...?) even if it means grinding to the point of having 999 Hp. Otherwise you might as well make a random event where the main character slips on a banana peel and breaks his neck.
 
The simple fact is "Super Criticals" exist. These criticals are capable of bypassing DT & DR entirely. A Rock is capable of damaging someone in Power Armor. A minigun no matter how many times you fire it at a tank will not swiss cheese the tank. You might very well get lucky and damage the tank, but you are not going to flat destroy the tank in 3-5 seconds worth of bursting.

"Super Criticals" do not need to exist, and they should not exist. There are numerable work arounds that (while perhaps older Fallouts could not properly implement all of them) modern Fallout, and those games like it, has No Excuse for avoiding.

As stanislao points out; this is essentially random. The other players pointed out that this is the only source of challenge late in the game. This is a problem. The difficulty is Fake. Make weapons more effective; make armors more situationally effective; and make preparation actually matter. Giving the player to spend all their action points "Aiming" (not unlike the overwatch mode from Tactics) to increase their next attacks chance to hit, coupled with Perks that relate to bypassing armor and ambush benefits would be all Fallout would need to be able to avoid needing fake difficulty.

If my weapons did "real" damage, then a 2x damage -25% DR critical would seem like a whole hell of a lot of damage, no need for random shots to be Uber powerful.

GWT
 
I wanted to chime in on this topic and bring forth another interesting point.

Due to how Fallout and Fallout 2 are designed, without Super-Critical hits, there is -no- end game difficulty whatsoever. This is because the player character essentially has infinite HP and HP is more of an indication of the damage the character must take to be killed instantly. Due to the fact you can open your inventory 1 time during a combat situation and heal all your HP back to full with an infinitely obtainable item, the player character must have the chance to take a single hit to kill him/her else there is no danger in combat, and thus no challenge. Due to the design of the game, this is not fake difficulty, it is actually a design flaw.

Consider Diablo 1&2; they have the exact same design flaw. Blizzard has seen it this time around and is implementing a new system.

If these Super-Criticals were to be fixed, you'd have to overhaul the entire game system. You would need to make it so that fewer stimpacks could be used during combat and make it so that it was much more likely for the PC to be injured at normal levels during combat. That would cause the player to have to concentrate on trying to avoid damage if at all possible and use their healing items much more wisely.

How I would do it is remove the super-crits (leave the 2x - 3x damage, armor bypassing ones), reduce all Damage Thresholds on armor by 20%, leave the Damage resistance percentages alone, however, and make it so Stimpacks consumed reduce the player's Damage resistance to all damage by 15% for regular Stims and 30% for Super Stims down to a maximum negative resistance of 100% (meaning the player can take as much as double damage from a normal attack). You could explain that the super-regen powers a stimpack gives also makes the body more temporarily fragile as it uses up bodily resources to stitch up wounds. Effect would only last 10 minutes (in-game) so the player could rest it off very quickly between fights.

This would make damage 'mean more' overall, still allow the player to heal as much as they want, but would make the player skirt closer to being 'one-shotted' if they are in a prolonged fight where they have taken more damage.
 
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