Fallout 4

If you're not sneaking, the stun on sledge is more beneficial, you know that V.

Agree with his thought though since it directly reflects part of why I'm not doing a second run yet, melee weapon variety is definitely wanting some independent love for crazy fun. I was kind of surprised with how prevalent they made pipe weapons you didn't see something goofy like gun blades. Power swing to stab then pull trigger or something.

If you are bored and on PC, you can play as Liberty Prime ;p Gets kind of buggy if you walk around downtown Boston, although you feel like Godzilla

To do it, go to console and type player.placeatme 115b50. This spawns Liberty Prime (don't worry, he doesn't attack you, even if you are KOS with BoS...however, he will attack anything KOS to Brotherhood of Steel, including the Institute. I summoned him inside the Institute center once for lulz). Then in console type player.tc, then while still in console use mouse cursor to select liberty prime and type tc. Leave console again. You may have to press V a couple times to get the proper camera view (can't go 1st person). Liberty Prime will auto attack if you face an enemy and you can initiate attacks by pressing the attack button.

Sulrn_sl said:

If you're not sneaking

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Error, does not compute.

Super Sledge might be situationally better prior to having all the melee perks, but not after. Even then I think you'd need a VATS Enhanced one to make it worthwhile. Once you have all the melee perks you can one-shot anything with the instigating machete for much lower AP cost than similar damage weapons.

We're not talking melee run through - at least I'm not. We're talking about having a melee for when you get swarmed or close distance on someone when that rifle isn't exactly graceful at CQB. So the shotgun or sledge comes out (ie no melee perks at all).

Oh, I'm pretty sure Cinge was talking about a melee run, and I definitely was.

For non-melee build I'd still never carry a 20 weight sledge around. It does like a third of the damage that my combat rifle does and costs almost twice the AP, and the combat rifle (non-sniper) works fine at point blank range. Not to mention the explosive combat shotgun I have, but don't use much because it's so ridiculously overpowered.

I found some pretty op powerfists but Cait wouldn't use them in power armor so theyre banked.

Yeah, unarmed weapons can't be used in power armor at all, which for companions means they will never fight unarmed in power armor because they pull out their default gun instead.

Cait doesn't seem to have any advantages in melee/unarmed from what I've seen anyway, despite her story. Is her str any higher than the other human companions?

Do people really think the combat is good? Honest question, as I've usually enjoyed Fallout combat pretty far down the list of enjoyable things in the franchise. I've never been much into first person shooters, though, so all the people saying the combat is improved because it's better in that regard may be right and it's just not my thing. I always thought the best part of Fallout combat was VATS so it wasn't just pew-pew-pew spam but at least a bit more turn-based tactic styling.

Terrible difficulty scaling and general balance issues in combat has always been a hallmark of Fallout combat as it always feels you're either woefully outgunned or one-shotting everything. Or, when a battle starts getting strategic you suddenly get gibbed by a grenade that instantly goes off the second it's near you leaving little/no time to react (which seems worse in FA4 but maybe I'm just not seeing them as quick because I've been streaming to my Shield portable with a tiny screen). Being one-shot hasn't ever impressed me much as a style of 'difficulty' in a single-player game where you die and reload right before the battle most of the time anyhow. Always enjoyed fights that were amusing more than difficult in the sense I'd have to re-load 5 times until I get lucky and don't get insta-gibbed by big-bada-booms.

Maybe I'm gay but I never played Fallout for the combat. Usually the story, humor, characters, open-world and actually getting to make decisions that matter, which 10 hours in all seem a bit average at best so far in FA4.

Yeah I loved the combat up until everything gets trivial. Kinda hoping for ironman mods in time for my next playthrough.

I was talking to a friend about it and I mentioned how I hated vats in fo3 but now I think they could refine it further and put vats into their next TES game as "battle sight" or whatever and that would salvage TES's shitty melee in one fell swoop.

I think we'll look back in a few years and remark how vats went from a stupid compromise with fallout's traditionalist turn-based combat to something that became a signature Bethesda RPG thing.

khorum_sl said:

Is her str any higher than the other human companions?

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No, but it wouldn't matter in your case anyway. Power armor sets base ST to 11.

khorum_sl said:

I found some pretty op powerfists but Cait wouldn't use them in power armor so theyre banked.

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I made a melee specific power armor suit (hot pink for the fear factor). I did the unarmed dmg + melee upgrades for both arms, the overdrive leg servos (faster sprint) and the AP sprint reduction mods, the stealth boy torso upgrade, and the thermal/predator vision upgrade for the helmet. Pretty fun and the suit does a fuckton of punch damage. With a crit I could 1 shot a BoS knight in T-60 armor ;p

One scribe ran up to me and tried to hit me with the stock of his rifle, then he shot at me point blank. My character just stands there, perfectly still in VATS, then I punch him once and he flies back 10 feet in a spray of blood lol

Best melee weapon in the game is a Shredding Minigun with Bleeding. You spin it up and just run into people. It does stupidly high amounts of damage. No bullets needed. It does damage with every rotation of the barrel.

Vorph_sl said:

Oh, I'm pretty sure Cinge was talking about a melee run, and I definitely was.

For non-melee build I'd still never carry a 20 weight sledge around. It does like a third of the damage that my combat rifle does and costs almost twice the AP, and the combat rifle (non-sniper) works fine at point blank range. Not to mention the explosive combat shotgun I have, but don't use much because it's so ridiculously overpowered.

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Yeah I'm a melee build. I've been using a sledge for a while now, haven't found any better. I am level 28 I think, so don't have all the perks and such still. I use sneak/vats a ton.

Cinge_sl said:

Melee is kinda fun but it's a bit depressing. Guns have all these cool looks and pretty unique(cryolator, alien gun, plasma gun etc) and melee are weapons with a blade attached or some barbed wire. The only cool relatively cool one I've seen is the flamethrower sword thing(haven't found it myself yet) but it's pretty crappy. Once you get a super sledge you mod it and pretty much done. I was hoping for some more unique/cool melee weapons. All these crazy energy weapons and I can't get some kind of lazer sword, or magnetic field power fist .

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I actually felt the opposite for the first 90% of my sneaky sniper playthrough since I constantly found awesome looking melee weapons. Just the past 2-3 levels I've finally started randoming into decent guns now.

Best "melee" weapon exploit for the early to mid levels, sure. Not sure if there's ever a point where furious would pull ahead of wounding, it's not like furious doubles damage with each hit or anything extreme like that, and the bleed stacks infinitely. Either way, you're looking at grinding on a high level mob for like 15+ seconds while hoping nothing else is around to kill you.

...or you can just one-shot it and all its friends with a series of VATS sneak attacks with a normal weapon.

Yes, more or less. I have 14 PE and torso shots are 95% from pretty damn far away, and almost anything that actually has a torso will die to my .50 sniper or .308 combat rifle (both are Two Shot mods, since I have had zero luck at getting a single instigating legendary, let alone one on a weapon I can actually use). I just finally did the USS Constitution stuff last night, and killed like 10 scavengers in two rounds of VATS shooting from the deck to the street far below, using my .308 (185 AP = 7 shots queued). All torso shots except for crits on the legendary ones. Completely trivial of course, but it was still fun watching it happen.

Plus you have to take into account the crit perks. I almost always have 4 banked, with a 35% chance per kill to fill the bar, a 14% chance per shot to bank 1 (possibly 2), and 9 LK filling the bar pretty damn fast on its own. Accuracy is really never an issue.

Tuco_sl said:

Did you ever get to a point where VATS was generally accurate at mid-range? I have perception at 10 and still at midrange headshots are at like 50-70%. This is with MacReady's perk.

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Keep in mind weapon accuracy on the weapon itself varies a bit - higher Accuracy figure = better VATS numbers.