Heavy Handed

Heavy Handed (called Brutal in TORN) is a Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout Tactics, Lionheart, and TORN trait.

Fallout, Fallout 2, TORN
You get +4 points of melee damage, but your critical hits have a -30% modifier to the critical hit tables.

Fallout: New Vegas
Your melee and unarmed attacks do more damage, but less critical hit damage.

More specifically, your Melee and Unarmed damage is increased by 20%, but your Critical Hit damage is reduced by 60%, but only for those two weapon types. Since you inflict more damage consistently with Heavy Handed though, Critical Hits are less of an issue, unless the player relies on Sneak attack criticals as a major source of damage or if the character criticals often due to perks, Luck, and high weapon modifier (certain perk/weapon combinations give you a guaranteed chance to critically hit).

Assuming a Critical Hit chance of 7.5% (Base 5%, multiplied by a Machete's x1.5 Critical Hit Chance), a player will Critical Hit once out of 13 to 14 swings, on average. So, a machete's damage with and without Heavy Handed should work out to this:
 * Without Heavy Handed: 13 swings * 11 damage + 1 crit (+11 damage) = 154 damage
 * With Heavy Handed: 13 swings * 13.2 damage + 1 crit (+4.5 damage) = 175 damage
 * Weapons most useful with Heavy Handed:
 * Thermic lance: Only 10 critical hit damage.
 * Chainsaw: Only 8 critical hit damage.
 * Ripper: Only 5 critical hit damage.
 * Rebar club: Extremely low critical hit chance (maximum critical chance of 33%).
 * Nailboard: x0 critical hit multiplier.
 * Pool cue: x0 critical hit multiplier.
 * Rolling pin: x0 critical hit multiplier.
 * Cattle prod: Only 5 critical hit damage.
 * Two-Step Goodbye (GRA): Only 10 critical damage

Heavy Handed with Better Criticals

 * $$\text{Base crit} \times (1 - \text{Heavy handed} ) \times (1 + \text{Better crits} ) = \text{Crit damage}$$

Example: Using a cattle prod.
 * $$5 \times 40\% \times 150\%=3$$


 * See Also
 * Critical chance

Fallout Tactics
You get +4 points of melee damage, but your critical hits have a -20% modifier to the critical hit tables.

Lionheart
You do +2 points of damage in melee combat (hand-to-hand or non-ranged weapons). Your critical hits have a -30 modifier to critical chance. This trait cannot be selected with Finesse.

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