I was gearing up to take on one of the New Vegas Bounties 2 missions, expecting a moshpit of heavies. I never really used the Tesla Cannon, so I decided to load it up, considering it had an area effect.

... Or so I thought. I shot a group of cazadores to check out whatever changes were made to it and... no huge explosion shooting arcs off to other nearby cazadores. Just the one under the reticle got zapped.

So what happened? In FO3, it was like having Zeus's thunderbolt on your shoulder. Now it's just another directed-fire weapon, for which is merely comparable to the Gauss Rifle, and only so because of its uprate in the recent patch.

All the mesh and texture assets for the old Tesla cannon are still in the archives, so I thought I'd try to transfer the FO3 Tesla Cannon scripts over. Except... the first script I transferred doesn't compile. The crippled NV GECK apparently has its error reporting disabled, so a script with a compile error not only doesn't report that it has one, it doesn't even report which line has the syntax error. So I have no clue why the NVGECK is balking at it.

So, to any devs out there...

1: Why was the Tesla cannon nerfed from its FO3 incarnation? I can understand the ammo consumption (I thought 1 ECP per awesome arc explosion was absurd), but it lost its uniqueness.

2: How did you write scripts without compile error reports?

3: Can we have a GECK that reports errors? Error reports are rather helpful in finding out what is wrong with stuff.

Yeah, it happened in the latest patch. We already have a thread for it, though: "Tesla Cannon, God's Smiting Stick."

See here:
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1183675-tesla-cannon-gods-smiting-stick/

Sawyer himself has posted quite a few times explaining the reasoning behind the change.

Actually, judging from the FONVEdit report on WMX, it never was there. WMX itself has yet to be updated to reflect the stat changes to several weapons (my patch nonwithstanding), so the current 1.0.6 ESP of it still has the old Tesla stats. I looked in the GECK, and a key activator and script present in the FO3 version are missing in the FONV, replaced with a basic damage health enchantment.

Yep, let's use that.