Legendary damage bonuses will trigger on every bullet. Explosive bleed fire whatever you want a shotgun or an automatic or an automatic shotgun.

I have a non-explosive minigun. It add 15fire damage you can obtain from a quest

The damage is quite decent and it is very good go against a swarm of unarmores enemy like feral ghoul packs.

Maybe I can try to capture a video to show you guys the joy of big gun tonight. I guess I can do one dungeon in glowing sea for both big gun and normal gun and you will see the different

In short it is very fun and do lot of damage. But it can be expensive for maintaining the ammo supply for long term

Eh, of course semi-auto deals more damage per bullet and with the way all games vs AI works, it's more effective. But both type of weapons are fun to use and can do the job just fine if perked up. I've always used semi-auto/rifles in FO3/NV but this time I'm having fun with automatics. Take perks in auto + sprinter(resist when sprinting) and just blaze through everything.

It's an unfair question to begin with seeing as the .45 machine gun is one of the worst weapons in the game. I noticed it the first time I used it

Minigun svcks too unless you have the explosives legendary attachment that tripples its damage or more.

All automatic weapons generally fail compared to their semi-autovariant unless you have specific per bullet modifying legendary attachments.

There are perks to make auto guns better, but so are there perks to make snipers better. My combat rifle does more damage per shot than a rocket launcher at like 179, with a fire rate of 90 or so.

The minigun does 8 damage a shot, and I think like 150 fire rate.

Gatling does 14 auto, but 66 at the slower auto mode.

Auto guns are generally less accurate and only good if you like to spray and pray instead of aiming. I do prefer automatics myself, though its more from a fun standpoint rather than a statistical one. Like how raiders do suppressing fire, but I never take cover since they're not gonna hit me until I'm in danger mode.

Automatic weapons tend to have lower damage per bullet. Although difference is not that big when compared to non auto of the same caliber. It's just that more powerful calibers does not tend to have auto mods (which is reasonable). Automatic weapons still do more damage per second when compared to non auto weapons of the same caliber.

Problem with auto weapons is that weapons with low damage value of single shot are ineffective against armored targets. Armour value of 10 will reduce damage done by mini gun by 50% for example. And that's light armour. Try minigun on combat robot and you will do something like 10 or 20% of damage.

My recommendation is, if you want to use automatic weapons a lot, always install armour piercing mod on them. Of course, there is no such mod for minigun.

Reason why energy weapons do much better on auto is that they have higher per shot damage and therefore are more effective against armored targets. Same is valid for battle rifle or legendary weapons with additional effects.

If you are using minigun against armored then you are doing it wrong. You should use missle launcher instead. It will one shot a BoS power armor paladin

Minigun is excellent against big swarm of enemy. Try to imagine you need to go against 20+ feral ghoul at the same time and there are few legendary mix of with bloated glowing one (there are few spots in glowing sea have that. At least I encountered 3 places)

Semi auto is just too slow for the job

Outside of .38, I don't have enough of any ammo type to consider spraying full-auto and missing half my shots. A .38 semi-auto Pipe Rifle is my FO4 Varmint Rifle and my workhorse gun simply because of the abundance of ammo, but if I went full-auto I reckon even that supply would dwindle quickly. In Fallout I have always preferred fewer, harder shots to more, lighter ones.

However, since Settlers don't use up ammo, I give them the full-auto guns - they can spray walls of lead all day and it doesn't cost me a single cap. My dream is every Guard sporting a Minigun, every Farmer with a .44 - lots of little hits with a few big hits thrown in. I give Provisioners Laser weapons so i can pick them out easily during a fight.

lol - but I digress... agree with OP that full-auto is not the way to go. I think of it as a red herring to burn through our ammo and create a need to grind for more (open-ended game, thus Beth will need to insert drivers and incentives to get us to play similar content over and over - not having a go at them, that's just standard sandbox game doctrine - comes up more in MMO's, but any open-ended game will have elements of it). Same with the difficulty levels - enemies don't get more better or smarter, they just take a hell of a lot more bullets to kill.

Exactly. Minigun is also excellent against single targets with high health and low armour.

Yes. Bleeds, poison, and explosive effects work better on full-auto weapons (bleeds doubly so). At higher levels, stagger will be a blessing when you're out in the wastes, something that's achievable at rank 5 of commando.

You're right about everything except killing faster. You kill faster with automatic weapons. They're great mid range weapons, they're great outside of VATS and you only need 3 agility to make them good because their range allows you to easily sneak. Not to mention they're useful anytime except extreme long range.

A playthrough with automatic weapons probably allows you to die less often than other weapons specialization. Heck, a VATS-less build means you can put 1 luck, 2 agility, 3 perception which leaves you tons of points to distribute elsewhere. As for the ammo part, just get 1 automatic weapon per type of ammunition and use the correct weapon versus the monsters you're fighting.

except there is so little ammunition at first, and the armor opponents take damage so well, that you end up with more resources loss, and have to use other weapons more often. Also, auto weapons have less of an impact, which means enemies can keep on shooting you, which means you actually take MORE damage overall unless you are really good at pulling a Neo and dodging bullets/

Let me put it this way, i have as many points in the rifle perks, as i do the Auto-perks, i kill faster, cleaner, and with less resources with a shot gun or pistol, or combat/laser rifle then i do with any auto-weapon.

I went to a mirelurk queen, and pumped tons of auto ammo into it, and it took a decent amount of time. I went up to another mirelurk queen of the same level, and killed it in only a couple hits with my Plasma shotgun.

Gameplay and story segregation time!

There is absolutely no reason for an automatic receiver to significantly effect the ability of a bullet to kill. Auto-.45s should do just as much "damage" per bullet as a semi-auto.

That of course would make anyone using semi-autos quite crazy (except from a ammo conserving standpoint), so of course they don't do it.

Automatic guns are less accurate only if you, the shooter, are inaccurate. The game does nowhere close to being a firearms sim, but that said, IRL roughly matches game mechanics - short, controlled bursts.

Outside of games most civilians have never fired full automatics, SMGs, SAWs, etc portrayed in games. But in the military or games, short bursts with tight control will allow hitting most rounds. Especially at the rediculously close ranges combat occurs in FO vs IRL urban assault or open terrain.

Comparing semi-auto Damage vs auto DPS is a fallacy - you either have to compare dmg v dmg, or dps v dps.

For dmg, it's a no brainer to say given the easy numbers shown, a single round of FO4 SA does more dmg than single round auto.

But if you assume ressonable shot grouping, with reasonable percentage of hits, many of the auto versions will out dps the SA version (same gun v same gun except receiver mod).

What many in this thread are arguing is weaker damage output is confusing theoretical dmg output with poor aim. That is not derogatory, i am simply saying if you are not able to accurately hit with enough rounds to achieve greater dps with the auto version vs SA, that is not an inherent gimp condition of the gun, simply lack of aim.

If the auto versions did such rediculously low dmg per round that all the aim in the world with 100% shots hit amd tight enough grouping so on all same body part desired, then ok - that would be fair poi pnt to say auto version is inherently gimped.

But take a stopwatch, doesnt need to be super accurate or complex - just time how many rounds are expended on full auto blazing against a wall for 10.0 seconds. Do the same with SA version of same gun. When aim is ignored, there isnt a single gun other than those that have no exact counterpart where the auto version doesnt out dps the SA
e.g. No SA version of minigun go test) or the exception of the 10mm which has an odd category for auto v SA dmg

So it would be fair to say - auto is too hard to aim, my dps is lower because i miss more. But some people aren't saying that - they are blaming the gun, but not their gun control.

Ever since i picked up a legendary semi-auto that deals 25% more limb damage,and modified to hold 80 in the mag with red dot,i haven't touched an auto.Well actually,i haven't touched any other weapon either.It's just beastly,fires fast,accurate from the hip and at long range and never have amo problems.

Modified a few sub machine guns and an auto rifle,pathetic in comparison.

If the have a good legendary effect, they can in fact be better than most semi-autos. But there's really no justifying how terrible they are.

In F:NV, they were in fact very powerful. A 10mm SMG hit like a truck with that thing's fire rate.

I think they missed the mark on what should be doing the most damage at what cost.

Semi-automatic weapons should be cost-effective, on the down-side of killing things slower but with less ammo spent

Automatic weapons should be cost-prohibitive, but on the upside of killing things faster with more ammo spent.

Right now they have both negatives on automatic weapons, and both positives on the semi-automatic weapons.

Yes, if you have a legendary with an huge bonus to each hit automatic weapon is nice at closer ranges or groups of enemies.

As someone who manually burst-fires auto guns in shooters unless they A) have infinite ammo (hello, "Limitless Potential", you overpowered SOB of a blaster) or are being used against a massive swarm of enemies I really, really hate (hello to you too, ferals and mirelurks, you can all burn in a special plasmathrower pistol-shaped hell), I concur. Burst DPS on single target (semi-auto) versus sustained DPS on multiple targets (full-auto) just isn't directly comparable.

If you have the trigger discipline to get a string of headshots with a 50-cal sniper in the same time it would take to mow down ten ferals with a perk-buffed minigun, more power to you, but that's skill compensating for a gun's inherent qualities. The minigun is designed to mow down hordes of squishy little enemies, and the 50-cal is designed to crack open a hard target in the tiny soft bits, like, say, a mirelurk queen's face. If you're using a load of individually weaker bullets against armor, which in this game is generally designed to soak quantity over quality, you're gonna have a bad time - but those same bullets will tear through unprotected flesh.

That said, some auto guns are legitimately awful, like the SMG. Now THAT needs a buff - although it's partly because the SMG has far fewer upgrade tiers than many other weapons, and the assault rifle is in a similar position. In this case it's down to the mods; the semi-autos have a whole extra tier (maybe two in some cases?) of murder to upgrade to. Which is a legit oversight and should really be updated in free DLC of some sort. And ammo economy is a real concern, especially with the lower-tier guns.

Damn, though, do energy automatics roll faces to a ridiculous degree. Modded right, they have almost no recoil and absurd damage. Plasma repeaters will eat ammo like a companion armed with a minigun, but everything in front of you will be green goo in seconds, and ADS can just melt heads all day. All gods help the Commonwealth if you find a legendary Never Ending plasma rifle, too - but before that point, Limitless Potential or a certain quest reward will do nearly as well.

Now if only the alien blaster came in auto. And/or legendary variants. Alien ship DLC take two when?

Really? The Fallout New Vegas I remember was automatics becoming outclassed because they couldn't penetrate the DT of higher level enemies without AP ammo (and some calibres didn't even have an AP variant).

It was usually more useful to use the non-automatics due to higher damage per shot.

They do have that Dakka dakka dakka appeal though.

Here is my video of doing pest control in glowing sea in survival mode. (no story spoiler)

https://youtu.be/0dh6kojTPE8(Big Gun)

https://youtu.be/2N4omu7a2_g(Rifle)

You can clearly see that big gun do things so much faster (in a way it is close to OP). of course... it will hurt my wallets quite a lot if i do this all the time. but who doesn't like being a unstoppable war machine and yes i am not perfect shooter so when using rifle i missed quite a few shots

p.s. this is my first time do video upload to youtube. somehow it the quality dropped from HD to 320 after upload and i have no idea why

hm... it seem there is now HD version available on the thing. i guess youtube need some time to process the video

Most auto weapons aren't as bad as people might think. If you use Jet with one you may notice how inaccurate they can be at even mid range. Minigun is just as effective as some of my best weapons at close range. You've got to factor in how often your shots miss on weapons with high rates of fire.

I do agree though that considering how much more ammo is wasted with full auto, they should have slightly higher DMG.

Combat rifle with red dot is my strongest weapon, trumps the combat shotgun even because semi auto it has a higher fire rate but i can keep all shots on target.

Rofl, if you seriously think automatic weapons aren't beast, you haven't bought the "Spray n' Pray" from Cricket, insane fire rate SMG with exploding bullets. Even on the highest difficulty this gun will be good the entire game. You just need to actually invest in purchasing ammo for it, it's only 45 caliber which is easy to find.

Just like single shot weapons, Automatic weapons depend on having special properties to really excel. Exploding ammo and bleeding (The bleed stacks every shot, ignoring all DT) are examples of extremely overpowered versions of automatic weapons. Kneecapper is great on automatic weapons as well, turns Death Claws and Behemoths into a joke.

I use this automatic weapons all the time on the hardest difficulty and they outclass my single shot weapons easily, I don't even have a single point in Commando. I've invested in Explosives and Melee weapons. (My Fatman and Missile Launcher can get the job done too, but a little too powerful at times lol)

Only noobs would seriously think automatic weapons aren't amazing because they can't afford the ammo for them.