Why is Psycho so good?

B

bji

First time out of the vault
From what I understand, the psycho drug gives your character:

+50% damage resistance
+3 agility
-3 intelligence

And yet, when I take it, I become almost completely indestructible.

I've only taken it once in Fallout 2, and once in Fallout 1, both at points where I was having particular difficulty with a fight. I can't remember the Fallout 1 details too much, but I know that just taking psycho enabled my character to kill a bunch of super mutants that were otherwise beyond his capabilities.

In Fallout 2 (which I am still playing), my unarmed-only character encountered the guns outside the military base and they were shredding me. So I took 1 psycho, and was at that point about to walk up to each gun and kick it to death, sustaining innumerable volleys of machine gun fire.

It's as if just taking psycho made my character unable to be damaged by any attacks. +50% damage resistance doesn't seem like it would account for this, because it would just reduce by 50% the damage that I would take, not eliminate it completely.

Also it seemed like my criticals became much more frequent and devastating, although my base agility was 10 already so I expect the +3 agility wouldn't have any effect at all.

So why are the effects of psycho so much stronger than what it seems like they should be?
 
The effects of addiction to Psycho are pretty bad, it subtracts three from your Agility and a quarter of your damage resistance during withdrawal.
Beyond that, not much, as far as I could remember Psycho wasn't exactly easy to find in the original Fallout.
 
This happens because the +50 DR from Psycho is added to what you already have from armor and ammo modifiers (not halving what you get after the other calculations), burst weapon damage is calculated on a per-bullet basis, and integer arithmetic always rounds down.

Those minigun turrets do 10-14 damage, and fire 40 shots of 5mm JHP (dmg mod 2, DR +35). Suppose you have metal armor (DT 4, DR 30). The ammo dmg mod brings the damage up to 20-28, DT takes it down to 16-24, and DR (total 65) reduces it to 5-8. Still bad at point-blank. Psycho increases your DR to the maximum of 90%, and the damage per bullet goes down to 1-2. Not so threatening anymore; even if every bullet hits, on average you'll only need 4 stims to get back to full health.
 
Kanhef said:
Psycho increases your DR to the maximum of 90%, and the damage per bullet goes down to 1-2. Not so threatening anymore; even if every bullet hits, on average you'll only need 4 stims to get back to full health.
Click to expand...

So if I read correctly, with psycho the damage should be 1-2 per bullet, with 40 bullets being fired by the turret. If they all hit, that would be 40 - 80 damage. If only half hit on average, that would be 20 - 40 damage.

However, I definitely see all attacks from the turret either doing 0 damage, or doing some ungodly amount of damage (due to a critical which bypassed my armor and did extra critical damage), in the range of 120 - 180.

Why are 95% of attacks on me reduced to 0 damage? By your reasoning, 95% of attacks should be reduced to something in the range of 20 - 40, not 0.

Like I said, it's as if psycho makes me completely immune to non-critical attacks. I just don't understand it.

The text definitely reads 'the turret hits you for no damage' after every attack, not 'the turret missed'. So I think it's hitting, it's just that the 90% damage modifier is somehow reducing the damage to 0. Is it because each attack is doing 1-2 HP of damage, and the 90% reduction reduces that to 0.1 -0.2, which is then rounded down to 0, for every bullet?

If that's the case, then high damage modifiers are MUCH more effective against burst weapons that have lots of bullets that each do little damage, than it would be against single large shells. Which basically makes sense given that psycho clearly doesn't eliminate all damage done by any weapon (otherwise it would be far too powerful), it just does so for some enemies that use burst weapons.
 
There does seem to be something that reduces it to less than what the 'official' formula predicts. Hard to tell what without having the actual code. I was assuming 65% DR = 35% of the damage left, so calculated dmg * 35 / 100 ; it might be doing something different.

Have you been boxing? That can increase your DT by 15, making you nearly immune to small arms.
 
Kanhef said:
Have you been boxing? That can increase your DT by 15, making you nearly immune to small arms.
Click to expand...

I boxed the three challengers in New Reno, and won (fairly easily) - is this what you meant? Or is there somewhere else to practice boxing and increase DT?

Also, I used the punching bags in the army base ...
 
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