is close combat now not a little bit OP?Near all better Fighter/Mercs have very good Melee stats and strength and can wear Hulk Armour.I Capture today the Scorpion King he is much better then the Monk and he can use Hulk Armour .Thats crazy no one can beat him as he one hit near all and dont get near never hit and if he take a hit his Armour absorb all.I ask in the past to make the NPC a little bit better but now many are much to good and the Scorpion is broken OP much more as you can give them even more HP with the clinic tools.Im playing on Grim Dark Dying World and i have absolute 0 problems or a Challenge any more and im only half trough the game
Melee is definitely stronger than ranged at this point with the possible exception of if you're willing to buy cyber cannon ammo, but I believe the supply is not unlimited for that and cost would be a huge concern. Ammo pack does not work on those.
There's a few issues I think surrounding what works in combat. First, ranged does not have anything like strength that allows damage to scale with stats. A follower with a Herculean frame can be trained to more than 180 strength (I'm not sure what the cap is for them yet but I've trained Cassius from less than 130 to more than 180 already in my current game.)
Related to the above, strength directly contributes to health on a 1 for 2 basis so someone with a herculean frame has a higher max possible health than for instance someone with a normal frame. So as you train strength on a melee fighter both their damage and their health goes up. As you train whatever you want on a ranged fighter their damage is unaffected no matter how high you train their stats.
Then there's the damage perks. Warrior works with everything and can be trained so that's not a problem either way. Brawler is melee only. Critical Strike is ranged only but it's not consistent like Brawler so it's not reliable. I might do significantly more damage per hit if I get lucky or I might do zero extra damage if I don't. Malevolent further tips the scales in favor of slaves since mercs can't get it and it can't be trained.
There are some mercs and slaves who are guaranteed to have brawler and there's at least 1 slave guaranteed Malevolent (Rebecca), but to my knowledge there are zero NPCs guaranteed to have both brawler and malevolent, neither of which can be trained. So your best damage output is going to come from a save scummed slave with a herculean frame where you guarantee they start with both brawler and malevolent.
Lastly there's the issue of power strike. There is no ranged equivalent to power strike guaranteeing significantly more damage per hit as long as your skill is high enough to never miss. So a highly trained melee fighter will consistently do over 100 damage per hit without a crit and more than 150 with a crit while someone using a plasma will do at most maybe 125 with a crit and closer to 60-80 without one.
Easy to adjust it there.
