For those who have an overall sense of these weapon classes, how do they compare in damage, accuracy and other characteristics? And which are better in early, mid and late game?

This is going to be fairly lengthy and I'll just try and break this down into Pros and Cons for both :

Energy Weapon Pros :

Generally more accurate
Lightweight
Low strength requirements
Only three types (plus variants) of ammunition, all of which are interchangeable with Science skills. Not counting Flamer Fuel.
All ammunition has degrees of armor penetration
Recharger Pistol and it's unique variant in GRA allows you to have a quality sidearm with no ammunition requirement later on in the game.

Energy Weapon Cons :
Not a whole lot of variety so get used to looking at the same three weapons for a long time
Struggle when the "tier up" period occurs, this is when you start to see different breeds of magnums and carbines but the same three laser / plasma weapons
No stealth options
Governing stat of Perception isn't as valuable as having a high Agility depending on your character build

Previously Energy Weapons held onto crit builds as their time to shine. Most featured low base damage with a generous critical chance and high critical multiplier. Unfortunately most Guns now boast the same.

Laser is highly accurate and a high rate of fire but has low damage. Plasma hits like a neon green battering ram but is slow moving so you can find yourself missing outside of V.A.T.S a lot if you don't compensate. Generally I find most people who dabble in Energy Weapons prefer to go one route or the other, I'm a Lasers man myself. With the mods that come with the basic game and GRA I can make a lot happen with the Pistol, RCW, Rifle, and Tri-Beam.

Energy Weapons boasts some ridiculously high damage heavy hitters that are a royal pain to maintain in the form of Gauss Rifles and the Holorifle as well, these compete (on paper) with the heaviest hitting rifle but the cost of maintenance is a bit tedious.

Guns Pros :
Almost everyone is using one. Even if yours breaks you'll find something to repair it with or pick a new one off of Corpse-Mart
EVERYONE except the Van Graffs sells Guns ammunition
Numerous concealment options for Holdout weapons
Numerous silencer and scope attachments to let you switch between fully automatic machine gunner to stealth assassin with ease
Guns specific perks such as Grunt and Cowboy do a hell of a lot more for a hell of a lot more weapons than Laser Commander and Plasma Spaz do.

Guns Cons :
A lot of the big boys have hefty strength requirements, but this can be meted out with the Weapon Handling perk
Reload times depending on the weapon you're using, especially true for most revolvers and some clip / box fed chuggers.
Have to use specialty ammunition depending on the type of enemy you're fighting - meted out by Hand Loader for some weapons and the fact that Hollow Points overpower high DT depending on the gun you're firing them out of, RE: Brush Gun

I probably missed some, but there ya go.

They're comparable in the early game and mid game. Late game I have to say as much as I love Lasers, I've never had it quite so easy as using a Brush Gun or an Anti-Materiel Rifle.

Bridges just gave a fantastic breakdown ...but he left out a couple things.

Like the plasma caster and the Gatling laser. Both can be picked up relatively early ( and cheap, or even free ) if you know where to look .

But most important IMO is the meltdown perk. A well built EW sniper with meltdown and the YCS-186 is the most devastating character in the Mojave Wasteland.

I once killed 5 deathclaws with a single shot.

The important thing to remember is that once you choose meltdown you can no longer use EW's at close range.
But that's what shishkebabs and hunting shotguns are for anyway.

The Captain is correct.

Meltdown is a perk where whenever you get a critical kill of an enemy with an energy weapon, they explode into an energy nova which deals massive damage to anyone around. Awesome when you're fighting packs of tough enemies like Deathclaws or zerging enemies like Gecko packs or hit squads. The downside worth being mentioned is that if a hostage or a friendly soldier is nearby, you'd also be dealing damage to them as well and they'll get quite irate. You can never turn it off, so you have to be sure it's something you'd want active at all times.

Not sure why I routinely forget the Gatling Laser and Plasma Caster but the good Cap'n is correct again. Good damage output, rapid fire, energy heavy weapons with lower strength requirements but comparable damage to their lead spewing counterparts. Given the high retrieval rate of drained ECP cells and efficient recycling of them, you can essentially have an infinite ammo gatling gun that spews lasery death.

TBH with the DLC's and the appropriate perks the top-end energy weapons outclass guns pretty badly. There really is no guns equivalent to the LAER/advanced LAER or GRA tribeam with laser commander and optimized ammo.

One thing that was left out of the anolysis is that Energy weapons include the Incinerator class, which gives you Explosives-like area damage capability.

Also, even with Meltdown, you CAN use EW at short range. You just use a Flamer.

With the Gun Runners' Arsenal, EW are a very good starting option, as you can purchase 100% condition GRA Laser pistol and mods, as well as bulk ammo.

The greatest thing going for guns, however, is silencers. And availability, especially in the DLCs. An EW-exclusive character in Dead Money would be forced to depend on that ridiculous Holorifle.

Oh and Guns kill clean. None of those ash piles littering the landscape.

I've always been a Guns man in New Vegas, though I still have very fond memories of Vengeance and A321's Plasma Rifle from Fallout 3. After looking at Bridges very detailed breakdown I noticed something. The cons for EWs are pretty serious, but the cons for Guns can all be worked around. As he mentioned Weapon Handling is incredibly useful for heavier weapons, reload times aren't a huge problem for single-loaded Guns since they can fire at any time during reloading and I've never thought of ammo as a problem outside of hardcoe mode and even in it EW ammo is generally heavier. These are my thoughts anyway.

Note: No EW I've come across can match the CZ57 Avenger when taking down hordes of enemies. The battle of Hoover Dam was a complete joke with this gun, it almost felt like cheating.

alien blaster is one of the most powerful weapon in the game. it requires wild wasteland at the beginning of the game. also pew pew is almost as good as AB. AB has limited ammo between 100 and 250 which should be near enough to take down the all strongest nasties like death claws. if you got both of them, you got power!

I would say from a personal Preference I prefer Guns over Energy Weapons.

GUNS FTW

If your new to New Vegas or the Fallout World, I'd stick to guns. Cheap, somewhat-easy-to-find ammo and the large amounts of varieties and mods for the guns.

Energy weapons are a lot more common in FO3 than New Vegas. Most Energy cost a pretty cap to buy the gun and enough ammo.

Gatling laser. Accurate with a high rate of fire meaning a lot of crits, coupled with MC ammo that can make up for a lot of the lower DAM.

I have always run guns or unarmed on my couriers as there seems to be more diversity (not to mention the ratio of guns to energy weapons early on). The pre DLC perks seem to lean more towards guns but I haven't seen later perks. For me it'll always be shotgun to the face or sniper rifles.. My friend runs energy and seems to have a much slower campaign..

Combination of both. If your gun is svcking at the moment, switch to the energy weapon and problem solved... The prototype laser rifle in new vegas is my favorite energy weapon with the meltdown perk.

Guns are so much more effective I think. My energy level stays at 8 my whole play though

I like turning my enemies into ash.

Guns are great.

But... Turning enemies into ash.

Let's see what a maxed out crit build can do with a fully modded GRA tri-beam.

(10 luck + built to destroy + finesse + ulysses's duster + 1st recon beret) x 1.5 crit multiplier + laser commander + light touch + set lasers for fun = (10+3+5+5+5)*1.5 + 10+5+4 = 61% critical chance

Base damage: 25x3 = 75
Crit damage: 33 (with better criticals) x 1.83 crits per shot (on average, not strictly correct but it converges to this in the limit as the number of shots fired goes to infinity) = 60.39
Total damage before perk and ammo multipliers: 135.39

Total damage: 135.39 x 1.15 (laser commander) x 1.3 (optimized MFC) = 202.41 damage per shot.

Total dps: 202.41x2.73 = 552.58 dps

Like I said, energy weapons are nasty in the right hands.

Guns have the advantage that they're good right out of the box. You can do great with just 100 in guns and nothing else. But energy weapons have a much higher top end damage potential, outside of things like automatic weapons w JHP ammo against unarmored targets.

I'd really like to take the time and try an energy weapons char but i think i'm gonna wait for Unlimited edition

I prefer guns. Last time I ran an EW character I found them very powerful but had headaches when it came to maintaining them.

A fully modded Laser Rifle is, aesthetically, my favourite weapon in the game. Unfortunately I had trouble killing high DT targets. Max Charge cells require so many caps to fire and make weapon maintinence an even bigger issue.

I found the Gatling Laser underwhelming, and at the rate it chewed through cells I couldn't imagine how much it would cost to use max charge.

Plasma weapons have the problem of slow moving protectiles.

Overally I found them to be extremely powerful but unreliable, and reliability is the first thing I look for in a weapon. I don't like having to make constant trips back to merchants to buy ammo, get my weapon repaired, convert ammo or carry around a bunch of dupes with which to repair it in the field.

With a Brush Gun, Trail Carbine or even a trusty old Service Rifle, there's none of that. It might not be spectacularly lethal, but it gets the job done every time.

I'm interested in making a EW character but concerned about ash piles and goo piles causing glitches, is this really much of a problem?

I've left enough piles of ash in the Capital Wasteland and Mojave Wasteland to stand in for every cremation ever documented in human history and I've never had them glitch out on me. Sometimes if an enemy dies of destabilization while falling backwards they can fall off of ledges and be a bit harder to find for the precious loot they'd have, since a pile of graying cinders are hard to pick out amongst the background compared to a multi-colored armored corpse.

What about when enemies respawn and the piles are treated as the same thing as the respawned character?

I'll admit that it does have a higher crit chance then the CZ57, but it has less HP, it has slightly higher spread, it has a lower DAM and DPS and the highest amount of DT it can ignore is 10, which is the lowest amount for the CZ57.

Of course they are. They're the easiest and laziest weapon class to work with and most effective right out of the box.

The other four are...well....

Lets just say you won't breeze through the game so easily with them without proper specialization.

Yeah, but when you do...

Play an fully kitted out unarmed specialist and the game starts to look like Fist of the North Star.

"You are already dead. ".



Huh? Fully modded the gatling laser has exactly the same DAM and DPS as the Avenger, the biggest differences being that the gatling laser has twice the magazine size and the fact that the gatling laser can pump the damage even higher with laser commander and optimized/MC ammo. The built in AP for avenger is really nice though, but overall the two weapons are very comparable.