Heavy Handed

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

You swing harder, not better. Your attacks are very brutal, but lack finesse. You rarely cause a good critical hit, but you always do more melee damage.

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 same 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 critical)

Assuming a Critical Hit chance of 7.5% (Base 5%, multiplied by a Machete's +1.5% 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

Better Criticals can offset the penalty of this Trait, but will still leave you with a -10% penalty to your Melee/Unarmed Critical Hits but as opposed to a +50% dmg bonus still resulting in a -60% difference. (Its benefit is still fully-applied to Guns, Explosives and Energy Weapons, however)

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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