It's useful if you have ammo for it and until you got gatling laser,

In my run as a pure heavy, I never have any enough ammo for it even with scrounger perk, NO NPC sell 5mm ammo earlier game.

Early game Flamer more useful, because it have more damage perhit and use less ammo to kill enemy.

And if you got gatling laser, it's time to finished using minigun.

Minigun only useful for killing that one deathclaw in concord.

And, thats a legendary that requires a fair bit of luck to find. And is unbalanced to boot.

The Gatling laser can be upgraded with charging barrels to have over 3x the damage, not to mention having its energy receiver upgraded to add even more damage, and a reflex sight/beam focused added, you can end up with a Gatling laser with a moderate firing rate that does almost 100 damage per shot with no heavy gunner perks. That's far better than anything the Minigun can do

Minigun can't have a silencer thus it deals a lot less sneak dmg (no sandman bonus) and reveals you faster which mean no sneak dmg. Lower base dmg also means you gain less from multiplying your dmg

You get criticals by using your gun in vats. 100x25%=25, 32x25%=8, 25>8.

Minigun is heavy. Heavy means vats attacks cost more. Expensive vats attacks mean less vats attacks. Less attacks mean slower criticals. Less criticals mean less dps. Fourleaf cover, gun-fu, consentrated fire etc. all wants lots of vats attacks. Minigun can't provide lots of vats attacks.

Minigun can't benefit from broken vats?

Minigun has heavy weapons and nothing else. Heavy weapons is in a perk tree that doesn't give benefits for shooting.

Minigun can't snipe means minigun does less. Doing less is not a benefit.

600 dmg without drugs or criticals. Maxed out gunslinger+best weapon mod=about 100 base dmg. You can get 6x sneak dmg multiplier with sandman and deacons perk. There is also a rare drug that adds extra sneak dmg (you do like 9x sneak dmg) for even more dmg. I'm also not 100% sure how criticals work with sneak.

My issue is not with the minigun or gun dmg in general. It's with the whole game. It is just broken to the core and the only way to fix it is nuke it from the orbit.

Just give all your miniguns to your settlers to guard the town.

Minigun is 100% useless. One. Hundred. Percent.

Unless, of course, a friggin super mutant master or primus is using one. Then I get cut in half in seconds. Funny, that. But not funny haha.

I feel that the minigun is good only versus lightly armored targets and fast moving targets, like bugs. Other than those 2 target categories you are going to waste a lot of 5mm ammo very, very quickly.

I found some usefulness in the staggering minigun, which renders an enemy unable to attack. A great, quick way for dealing with enemies with high HP; you just stand there and shoot. But then again, you need a lot of rounds to kill enemies with high HP. I needed 300-400 to kill a mirelurk queen. Took me a while to get all that 5mm ammo and used it all in a few seconds. I had the tri-barrel mod that dealt the highest damage too. The mod also gave me the best recoil, which is much needed for wielding the minigun for a prolonged period of time. A high-HP enemy like mirelurk queen is usually big and bulky so it is hard to miss, but you still need great recoil to steady the minigun.

Combat rifle moded to be full auto are far superior to a mini gun. They can be used to hit at longer range, they can have alot of the recoil moded out, they can be given armor piercing, they do alot more damage and are alot lighter. I liked using the mini gun in FO3 and NV so I tried to find something good about it but I just can't. They svck. Maybe if I ever find a legendary one the will change but my new oversearse guardian is doing over 120 damage and I don't even have the last rank in commando yet so I doubt I will bother with a mini gun at this point.

In a game where Damage means more than DPS, Miniguns and automatics overall are just not worth it in the end. Compared to Borderlands, automatics actually have a better chance in the latter because of the ability to slag enemies, which then boosts the damage up incredibly high towards them, allowing automatics to have more stability at higher levels. In FO4? Ye-no. "Just get a legendary" isn't really a fix at all, since every other weapon style can do just fine without one.

You're right of course; everything everyone else said in this thread was right. But in certain occasions, a staggering minigun may be useful. Against the mirelurk queen it may be the most useful. Missiles and mini-nukes would do fine too, but I wanted to use my surplus 5mm ammo. The mirelurk queen keeps spewing mirelurk babies and poison, so I feel the quickest kill may be the best. Also, I was in the southeast part of the map, which is a wide open area with not too many places for cover. It just seemed to me that shooting the MQ up close with the staggering minigun for just 20-30 seconds without any retaliation would be the best and quickest way.

Agree with the OP, the mini gun badly needs a caliber upgrade in the next DLC!

It's the coolest looking gun ingame, come on Bethesda do it some justice please!! :'(

I don't care if you make it super rare (infact that would make it cooler), just make it super powerful as well - esp. considering the weight of the damn thing!

65 base dmg .50 cal Mini Gun for 1st DLC and I will buy all DLCs for this game!

Sure, you are not referring to the Assault Carbine?

Yeah, I don't think he was referring to that, considering, you know, that the unique Minigun had great damage and enough ammo capacity and DT negation to destroy a pack of deathclaws in a heartbeat?

The minigun was so much worse than the carbine it wasn't even funny.

Also Deathclaws weren't that hard in NV, there was almost no DC variants that were much stronger than regfular DCs like in this game, were regular DC is pretty much the weakest of all.

Except it reduces fire rate to 45 so you have basically modded you Gatling in to very inaccurate laser rifle which fires fusion cores. Gatling Laser even without charging barrels of course is better weapon then Minigun, Minigun is after all sort of early to mid game heavy weapon while Gatling should be late game (yes I know you can obtain it at the beginning if you know where to look, as you can any other weapon). But that does not mean Minigun svcks.

Which heavy weapon in game can have silencer?

You get exactly the same damage because because bonus is applied per shot, which means that with high fire rate, more shots gets sneak bonus and thus your entire DPS multiplies. As long as you stay hidden.

But then again, if you are using Minigun for silent kills, you are doing it wrong.

I don't use VATS at all, so I can't really argue with you. But I ques the same is valid for every heavy weapon ...cons they all are heavy after all.

Heavy Guner perk increase damage just like any other weapon perks do. That counts as benefit for shooting to me. Only few weapons in game benefit from more then 1 weapon specific perk. I recall only rocket launcher.

As for silenced weapons, Do you really complain that Minigun should have silencer mod?

I will repeat myself, but if you use Minigun for sniping, you are doing it wrong.

You get the same sneak attack bonus as for any other weapon. All perks apply to Minigun equally. You continue to focus on single shot damage and disregard fire rate.

I am not sure criticals work other then it VATS at all. So far I did not see any conclusive evidence that they exist outside the VATS.

That different weapons serve different purposes and that you can't snipe with Minigun as effectively as with sniper rifle or that Minigun is not as effective in silent killing as silenced pistol is not broken mechanic.

God the whole sniping with a mini-gun argument is silly. Of all the reasons to think the gun is utterly useless that would be the top choice. Its a heavy weapon, its supposed to be loud and unstealthy.

The problem is, it hits like a rad-roach, and weighs like a truck. You have to burn through obscene amounts of ammo, when you could have killed something far *faster* and *cheaply* with a 10mm gun. I honestly cant think of a single instance, where I say, "dang, I wish I had my minigun!".

The explosive mini gun with heavy gunner perk maxed is just ridiculous

The right legendary on any weapon can be ridiculous. Thats more of a game balance issue. Imagine, if there were no legendary weapons. Would the minigun be viable?

Was considering taking big guns and ammo scrounger perks to use a mini-gun as my main weapon so I took one out for a spin and yeah what a let down. Blew through about 2.5k ammo just on 3 small little encounters(in my 50's). Raiders and Super Mutants just pointed and laughed at me. Even if you maxed out big guns and got the damage up to 20 that would still be insanely weak.

I havent taken any weapon skills yet so I will just go back to working on other things. It also killed my stealth game hehe.

Yeah, the minigun is way underpowered. In New Vegas, what made the minigun so good was the fact that 5mm had an inherent armor-piercing ability, which is not present here. As a result, we have an extremely low damage weapon that should kick out high DPS, but the DPS ends up getting neutered by the target's armor most of the time.


Potential fixes could include increasing base damage, an armor-piercing receiver, and the ability to upgrade to .308 or 5.56 ammo.

Buddy i have all the heavy weapon perks and the mighty minigun i found is still garbage

seriously all miniguns are garbage except for this mystical magical explosive one i keep hearing about and as i have a 10 in luck and can only find shoddy legendary armor and a few light mele weapons I will probably never friggan see it

i mean seriously this is gaf

problem is that my idea of proper use of a minigun isnt mass slaughter of ferrals or roaches

If you say so buddy... Meanwhile I'll rather stick to real numbers.