Is damage penetration really all that useful?

[Hentai-chan]

I am doing testing runs for a mod I'm making. Trying to give armor penetration to maces without getting the perk. I noticed that it has no effect at all? I'm not sure. I have been testing for a few days with bandit chiefs and I have this mod that redoes the armor rating formulas . I explicitly increased the values to the max to see if it would make any difference. But I don't see a difference still. I didn't test it by giving myself the perk manually yet. But I wanted to ask if it is really all that useful? Does the armor rating mod do something that misleads me into thinking it's useless? Or am I testing against the wrong targets? I have only been using Bandit Chiefs so far.

[27X]

You're missing the point of the mod and armor in general. Armor in TESV is literal DR. AP removes that DR by the amount stated in perk + the damage value of the weapon + the amount of damage blobs the weapon produces, which is why two handed daggers are batshit broken, even on legendary. The mod adds a more linear scaling value to dr amounts, thus making armor more important earlier on, the mod does nothing to weapon damage other than adjust the effectiveness curve which is still a curve, as the very handy pictures point out.

 

Also also if you installed this mod in the middle of a playthrough, it won't work.

 

Also also also you can literally set the amount of DR and amount of dr removal in the mod itself, so there is no "correct" answer as an absolute.

[nilead]

Well, depends on your setup, really. If everyone runs semi naked with 20-30% physical damage mitigation - AP are kind of meh.

If you modded your game so that half of NPCs sit at armor cap, and modded said cap to be 95% mitigation, well , yeah, you do want AP.

 Most of my builds end up making it pretty damn valuable, but it can be rendered obsolete in 10 seconds with SkyTweak.