The hunting rifle is my favorite weapon for sniping. Call me old fashioned, but I like bolt action rifles as that was what I used growing up. However the damage output is sorely lacking compared to the assault rifle and combat rifle. With my current perks, an un-modded hunting rifle does 89 damage with the standard receiver using .308 ammo. The combat rifle max damage mod is the .308 receiver, yet it does 137 with the same exact caliber. So the same caliber on a different rifle results in a nearly 50 point difference in damage? By logic, and reality, the hunting rifle should do similar damage with the same caliber. Then consider if you upgrade the hunting rifle to the .50 cal receiver, the damage only goes to 154. That's a pretty paltry increase over the .308 combat rifle. The assault rifle clocks in at 125 with the advanced receiver. In what world does the .50 cal barely trump a 5.56 round? Does anyone at Bethesda compare actual rounds? The .50 cal is double the size of a .308, and close to three times the size of a 5.56 round. The .50 cal should be the highest ballistic damage available in the game, aside from the unrealistic Gauss, and not by a minimal amount. It should be a noticeable gap. Please consider giving the hunting rifle a damage buff in both the base mod and the .50 cal mod.

yeah damage is to low...i think they tried to balance out perks etc... you can bump it up quite with rifleman, ninja and sandman

There is also a mod that increases damage by i think 30% on nexus

Unless you are on console like I am.

Actually there is a mod that calculates real life weapon damage taking into account weight and speed of the projectile: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/6523/?tab=1&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Ffallout4%2Fajax%2Fmoddescription%2F%3Fid%3D6523%26preview%3D&pUp=1

I haven't installed it cause I think it will unbalance my game, some weapons in the game become too overkill if you actually give them real life damage. And the weapons mods are calculated to reflect real life values too.

What is "ballistic damage"? You mean non energy one?

Size of the cartridge is not proportional to damage (I assume you mean damage to living organisms).

As for your .308 comparison between hunting and combat rifle, you are comparing top "damage increasing" modification on combat rifle with middle rank "damage increasing" modification on hunting rifle. Of course combat rifle does more damage, that's logical -inside illogical logic of magical ability of receiver modification being able to increase damage of the same cartridge. You can as well ask how .308 with "standard" receiver does more damage then same .308 on "advanced" receiver (what ever it is).

Of course, you can understand modification of "receiver" as a very loose game abstraction. Closest thing in practice would be to modify ammo itself. For example by overloading it, using heavier bullet or modifying the tip (hollow point). Fact that you can have "armor piercing" receiver suggest that that's exactly what Fallout 4 receiver modifications stand for.

In that case you are comparing performance of mildly modified .308 on a hunting rifle with heavily modified .308 on a combat rifle. Combat rifle then should outperform hunting rifle. In other words, combat rifle have better receiver modification of .308 then hunting rifle.

It's very unrealistic mod too. Kinetic energy (weight multiplied by speed) does not directly correlate with damage. There are other aspects which contribute, most prominently attributes of bullet itself: it's shape and tendency to change shape on impact like deformation, shattering, tumbling. Properties of target also play big role.

The assault rifle is insanely OP even more so then the combat rifle. Which I was not expecting. when they where both fully moded.

I am with you OP. A bolt action is meant to make that one shot, I think they see it the way it is as balance. When in reality if they would have had a skill system they could have had mechanics such as barrel sway. where even at 100% small arms. you still had some sway. could steady your shot and. Fire, Fire, Fire. Gotem.

But... Yea...

Pains me people do not know the real power behind a bolt action and or a long rifle,

Browning .308 all day baby!

I agree with you OP.

Ballistic damage in FO4 is any weapon that does not do energy or radiation damage. In other words anything that fires an actual projectile. I thought this was common knowledge.

Have you ever compared a .50 cal bullet, to anything else, with or w/o the cartridge? Both the casing and the bullet itself are as I described. The size difference between them is pretty impressive. And in terms of stopping power, you aren't going to exceed a .50 cal under 75-100 yards.

Yes, I understand the difference in the "level" of the modding. But it's just illogical that a base mod on one weapon would be the max mod on another one and that they weren't similar in damage. And if they were, then in theory the max mod on the higher caliber round should dwarf the other weapon when maxed. A bolt action .50 cal should be able to one shot everything in the game. It should out damage every other ballistic weapon by a wide margin. The price you pay for that power is the slow reload times and limited clip sizes. A hunting rifle has 1/4-1/8 the clip size of the combat rifle/assault rifle. The assault rifle can have an 80 round clip while the hunting rifle has 10. 80x125 vs. 154x10. You do the math. That's not very balanced. The entire point of the sniper is to be able to kill with one head shot. And sadly, in FO4, that isn't the case on the .50 cal without specific legendary mods.

You use the armor piercing mods as a reference, but they don't exist for the hunting rifle. And in fact they are only used on the automatic receivers, which would obviously defeat the purpose of being a sniper...

We had this discussion before on another threat and I posted results of firing tests of .50 on ballistic gelatin. It shows that .50 does not do more damage then .308 (size of cavity), it just penetrates deeper. I am not going to repeat those arguments because mods does not look keen of disusing real weapons here. Bottom line as I said is, bigger size does not mean more damage. Construction of the bullet matters too, as does target. .50 is constructed in a way which minimizes damage (to maximize penetration). It was primarily developed against mechanic targets (as a round for anti aircraft gun) not against live targets.

And what makes you think that .308 mod on combat rifle is base mod? Where does game implies anything like that?

I am not sure what makes you think it should one shot everything in game but .50 mod on hunting rifle does outperform other ballistic weapons in game (with exception of gauss rifle and possibly .44 pistol -not sure about that one, would need to check data).

And what makes you think it should be balanced to begin with? I see no reason. Should pipe rifle be somehow on par with gatling laser? Why? There clearly are weapons in game which are performing better and ones which are performing worst, as they should be. Of course depending on situation.

That such receivers exist clearly point on the fact, that what in game stands for "receiver modification" is abstraction which includes bullet modifications in real life equivalent. Therefore you are not comparing equal .308 bullets, but ones modified to different level. It's then logical that they have different performance.

As for actual implementation of "armor piercing" concept in game, that's different topic which I am not going to discuss. I will just point to to the fact, that rifleman perk gives you up to 30% armor penetration ability, equivalent to armor piercing receiver. Perk for automatic weapons lacks that ability. Also automatic receivers typically do less damage then their semi-auto equivalents.

Umm, the hunting rifle base mod is .308. Not sure how you came to the conclusion that I was talking about the combat rifle there.

But it doesn't vastly outperform other ballistic weapons, even though it should(excluding the Gauss of course). There's a huge difference between slightly outperforming, which in this case is what the hunting rifle does, and having a noticeable performance gap, which it doesn't, but should.

Because all play-styles should have a reasonable viability. People want to play as snipers, and people want to use the hunting rifle as their primary weapon of choice. However with the limitations of clip size, reload speed, and aim speed, it is heavily penalized vs. PA melee builds and guns blazing play styles

I'm not sure why you feel the need to criticize the purpose of this post. If it's not affecting your game play, then why do you care if the people it does concern voice their opinions about it? I don't think it's too much to ask for a damage buff to a weapon that's not performing to it's true potential.

Changing caliber also require changing barrel, magazine and feeding too but only seen this on two barrel shotguns who has an shotgun+ rifle barrel option (nice for deer hunting in forests)

The various mods includes bullet type

No system is not realistic, nor does it try to be.

However its somewhat balanced. You can get your hand on an hunting rifle pretty early, an combat rifle with .308 is far harder.

I agree. Used hunting rifle the other day modded to a .50. Was very surprised and unimpressed.

This Mod is pretty good:

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/333/?

Hunting Rifle makes much more Fun with that and other Weapons too.

Because you have compared second top most receiver mod on hunting rifle with top most receiver mod on combat rifle. Non of them is basic one. So what basic mod are you talking about?

Uh, no it should not. Only argument you have posted so far in favor of such thing is size of cartridge. Which is simply wrong. Actual tests does not confirm that .50 vastly outperforms .308 as far as damage to living tissue is considered.

First of all hunting rifle is not only sniper weapon in game. Second of all I play as a sniper using hunting rifle all the time. It's perfectly playable.

I newer said anything about purpose of this post.

Since you request change to game play which affects me, I have right to disagree. Hunting rifle is performing all right.

Agree.

I use a fully modded hunting rifle, .50 caliber, etc, etc, and have no problem taking down most enemies with one shot. (fully perked out in rifleman as well.) The 10 round magazine limitation doesn't bother me, as I can snipe from a pretty good distance, and most enemies can't even find me before they find themselves dead.......

Now, up close and personal, the hunting rifle svcks. But, that is as it should be. It is NOT a 'close quarters' weapon. Combat Shotgun, on the other hand.... is AWESOME in close-in fighting.

Better damage and a better firing sound the one in fallout 4 sounds to dinky the same problem in 3 and nv.

The hunting rifle definitely should be buffed to do more up-front damage. When compared to the potential damage and firing rate of the other rifles, the bolt-action gets left way behind, and that doesn't make much sense. While it should have the lowest DPS of the non-pipe rifles, it should have by far the highest per-bullet damage, and it barely exceeds the combat rifle's damage when modded to comparable levels.

I'm referring to game balance, not real guns. In video games, bolt-action rifles do the most damage but fire slowly. In Fallout, they do the same damage and fire slowly, which is silly.