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So I've had a suspicion for a while now, and we've all heard the complaints about combat in One Wasteland and how ludicrously durable enemies are now.
I'm not here to complain about my personal experiences.
I'm here to prove just why the game is fundamentally broken as of yesterday, and I have math(doesn't everyone love math) to prove it.
As of yesterday, levelled enemies(which is to say, almost all of them, anyone who has done any modding in other Beth games knows what I'm talking about) derive most of their relevant stats from curve tables(armour, health, damage).
It took a little bit of digging, but I found the curve tables. I'll throw up the data from the Scorched curve table right here.
So, we now know how much health scorched have at basically any level.
I also went and took a look at the curve table for the hunting rifle(weapons, afaik, have had curve tables since the beginning, but since they're only available in certain levels this isn't really important).
Those observant among you may have noticed something.
A level 50 hunting rifle, with no mods gains 75% more damage over a level 1 hunting rifle.
Over that same level difference, a level 50 scorched gains over 720% more health.
Now, maybe that's not fair, after all, nobody is running around with a stock hunting rifle and no perks.
So let's recalculate.
A stock level 50 hunting rifle with all the rifleman perks does 112 damage(70x1.6). Add in a refined .50 cal receiver and this number jumps to 135.
So a level 1 hunting rifle with no mods and no perks does damage equivalent to 114% of the health of a level 1 scorched.
A level 50 hunting rifle, on the other hand, does only 46% of the health of a level 50 scorched in damage, and that's with all the relevant perks and bells and whistles.
None of this math accounts for armour. Armour scales with level too, reducing potential damage significantly on high level enemies.
In short, enemy health is vastly outpacing the ability of the player to deal damage as they level up.
This also explains why so many players around the level of 20-30 are complaining about the game being ridiculously hard: If you go back and look at the curve table for scorched health, you'll notice that right around 20-30 is where health starts going f*cking nuts. Between level 14 and 23, enemy health triples.
So in all this, is there any good news?
Well, yes, actually. This should be relatively straightforward for Bethesda to fix: As far as I can tell, the health of every NPC in the game is dictated by about 30 or 40 curve tables. Changing these values is something that could be done literally in an hour of work, and carry exactly zero risk of bugs.
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