Riamus
Hunter
There was a discussion about it a few pages back. It's entirely RNG, so it often feels really bad. Even though it happens mostly in that last few seconds, the reality is that you have an X% chance to succeed and if you fail, it'll fail at a random point. It's known that it's a failure when you click, even if it does a countdown. The timer just makes it worse because it makes you think everything is going well in the beginning, where it rarely tells you it was a failure (the higher time values), but when it's at the bottom of the timer, it has a very short time to tell you if it failed, so it just keeps doing it quickly.
I don't have the actual percentages in front of me, but let's say that without lockpicking perks, you have a 20% of success. With enough tests, you'll average a cost of 4 lock picks each time (4 lost, 1 to open it). But because it's RNG, you might fail 20+ times in a row or succeed 20+ times in a row. The odds are of course greater to fail many times in a row because you only have a 20% to not fail. Even with the perks, RNG is still RNG and you can fail many times in a row, even if you have a 99% chance to succeed even if that's going to be extremely rare. And the perks don't get your chances up that high.
So yeah, it makes it feel really bad and makes it feel like the perk doesn't help, even though it does.
If you want to look back to the discussion, there were some ideas for making it not feel so bad. Unless something happens to make it better, the best advice I can give is to get your pick or auger ranked up and modded and use that to open them instead of lockpicks. It's much easier. Or, if you use shotguns, breaching slugs work well, and if you're into explosives (even if not perked into them), you can use timed charges. Those at least have no random chance behind them, but aren't going to help much in the early game.
