A Fallout 4 player stumbled upon three legendary Deathclaws at once and survived only thanks to power armor and a river

Power armor in Fallout 4 gets sold to players as a walking tank, the kind of gear that makes regular combat armor feel like a pile of rags. That reputation holds up right until three legendary deathclaws start passing that tank between each other like a dog toy.

A clip of exactly this beatdown showed up on Reddit: a level 135 player on Very Hard difficulty took a careless shot at a regular deathclaw, and two more legendary ones came crawling out of the bushes right after, including a hybrid variant with nightstalker chameleon camouflage.

Monsters like that don't spawn in the base game – the player is running the "27 Legendary Bosses and Hard Legendary Giant Creatures that Respawn" mod, which scatters 27 level 600 bosses across the Commonwealth and buffs behemoths on top of that. By the player own admission, most of these things two-shot him without the armor.

The real pain here isn't even the damage, it's the grab animation. Deathclaws in Fallout 4 constantly snatch their target and slam it into the ground, stripping away player control entirely, and with three of them attacking at once, the player basically turns into a ball getting batted around a circle.

That grab mechanic is exactly why melee fights against deathclaws get so much hate – countering between grabs is nearly impossible, and the Harvester from Far Harbor only helps because it swings fast enough to stagger them first.

What saved the run was an old, thoroughly unsportsmanlike trick: water. Deathclaws won't go into deep water, so the fight turned into a river shootout, ducking underwater and picking them off one at a time. Someone in the comments caught onto the tactic right away and called it a wise strategy, while another user offered up the classic line from the monsters perspective:

Come outside, we won't jump you

Plenty of tips for avoiding this mess piled up in the comments – VATS for the damage and slow-motion, a hit of Jet or Psycho Jet for a speed boost, or an enraging pipe pistol that turns the toughest enemy against its own allies.

People also brought up power armor survivability mods, from TAPAS (Totally Awesome Power Armor System), which makes armor nearly immune to small arms fire, to "Durable and Realistic Power Armor," the one the original poster is actually running. Someone pointed out that last detail directly: the armor didn't take a single scratch through the entire fight, which sounds suspiciously like the exact broken balance the player claimed not to be using.

The T-60 held up through everything in the end. Whoever's sitting inside it, though, clearly needs to stop shooting first and asking questions later.