Last night, I got a Brotherhood of Steel mission from Rhyss to clean out some super mutants at Big John’s Salvage. I’ve been to this location several times and am well aware that it’s populated by higher-level mutants as well as yao guai, so I don’t scoff at it the way I do when I go to the Super Duper Mart or some raider place. Even so, I’ve always been able to clean it out without issue. I might encounter a few brutes, enforcers, maybe a couple of masters, and the odd overlord or primus.
This time, it was full of warlords. If you don’t know, warlords are level 68 enemies with perception of 12 and at least 1535 hitpoints. Some are really well-armed. I’m so used to one-shotting most enemies with my sneak perks that you can well imagine my surprise when my uber sniper rifle hardly made a dent in my first two targets. Also, it took almost no time for the whole crowd to find me and go into full-blown danger mode, which meant that my sneak damage advantage was gone.
There must have been eight of these guys, and even my explosive-ammo machine gun was scarcely hurting them. The only thing that saved me was X-01 power armor (which I was wearing completely by accident) and running. I hoped that I could gain enough distance to go back into sneak mode, but they were not going to let that happen. They broke into little teams and kept me exposed the entire time. My power armor was getting mangled and I was popping stimpacks like mad to stay alive and ward off crippling.
I finally reasoned that the only thing I could do was find the inevitable suicider and put him down first. Then, hoping that I could avoid being pummeled with grenades and missiles, I decided to just wade into them and use my Fusil Terribles shotgun, which helped quite a lot, as this weapon has a high chance to cripple enemies. Apparently, the mutants respected my berserker panic strategy and backed off slightly. I think a couple were distracted by yao guai as well. Anyway, I was able to advance and cripple most of them. I probably could have escaped, but Rhyss would have been mad at me, so I kept advancing on them and unloading the shotgun, even though they were still firing their miniguns and whatnot at me.
At last, limping and clad in tattered armor, I killed the last mutants and dogs. Somewhere in there I killed a legendary, but all I wanted to do was fast-travel out of there.
The lesson I took away was that I need moar powah. Happily, I’ve been working on the Luck perks, which should give me a good supply of criticals, but I think I’m also going to get the chem addiction immunity perk. This kind of encounter calls for money, lawyers, and drugs.
I promise to read this more thoroughly in just a little bit. I just wanted to interject that I died in FO4 for the first time in like a month last night when I just happened incidentally to rediscover “Heartbreak Bay” or whatever the heck it’s called near Red Rocket in the Northwest and found it populated with Super Mutant Masters and Enforcers. Like, 3 dozen of them. It was ridiculous how quickly and how thoroughly I got surrounded. I remember there being like 3 guys there before.
This is one of those situations where world scaling is a double edged sword. You don’t feel especially powerful at higher levels when the world just keeps leveling up with you.
Last night on a whim I started just wandering around scouting near my Red Rocket base, like I said. For quite a while I was really enjoying myself one shotting low level Raiders with my pistol. I did eventually get taken out (a second time, first was huge Super Mutants I stumbled across) by a Legendary Raider near the drained quarry (never made it to the bottom, or if I did I’ve forgotten) solely because I forgot to pop a stimpack. I was wearing my newly begun Synth armor project and forgot that I’m not invincible… D-:
Also it goes without saying but I love the illustrative photo of your travails.
Yeah, I just met quite a bunch of muties around those satellite dishes south of Finch Farm, and there were some tough ones among them (I had cleared that place at least twice already). I’m about level 40-45.
On a not very related note, at a certain military location, there’s a decommissioned sentry bot. Nearby, you can find a holotape that allows you to activate the bot and send him to one of four military locations to patrol for ne’er-do-wells. I tried it out on the Olivia satellite station, but I suppose he travels pretty slowly because he wasn’t there when I arrived. But I have great hopes that he’ll eventually get to a destination and let me watch him blow things up.
spoiler below:
He’s located at the Robotics Disposal Ground. Go to Vault 111 and follow the river or lake or whatever east and a tad north until you see the symbol for a junkyard in your PipBoy.
BTW: There’s a command to deactivate him, but I couldn’t get it to work. This may be by design. You can also give him a self-destruct command. The holotape goes in your Misc inventory, so you can use the PipBoy to send him to one of the four places.