I think it's balanced fairly well as of patch 8. You'll notice enemies make shove attempts against characters far less often now, and some of the weight issues involved with shoving seem to be better. Meaning there aren't as many NPC successes as there used to be.
A lot of the videos showing enormous shove distances are based on old patches. It's still farther than some die hard by-the-book fans would prefer, but I like it where it's at.
The only thing I would change about shove is not letting it work to wake up sleeping targets. Other than that, I think it works fine. It's a wonderful addition to the game.
And as someone with well over a thousand hours in this game, I can say it's not an overpowered "go to" tactic, despite the occasional arbitrary claim otherwise.
Yes it's a wonderfull addition.
But no it's not balanced. And it will never be until they don't at least turn it as a full action, make it harder to succeed/easier to resist (hard to go deeper into details considering that the calculations are hidden) and remove the pushing arrows.
Being able to (be) OS so easily in a game that mostly revolve arround luck is absolutely a bad idea. You may have been lucky in your patch 8 playthrough. I haven't.
As someone with over a thousand hours in this game, I can say it is an overpowered "go to" tactic. When I'm mostly sure I'll loose a combat I'm just shoving to win and not loose my time to do it again. Being able to solo the entire game so easily just show how broken it still is (even if it's harder since patch 5).
