Its should get tweek . I just spent 400 rounds to kill legendary gunner from 2 m away ?! Yet if i use 10mm auto pistol with explosive ammo i need far far less! Mini gun should be far more superior , dont you agree?

Depends on your perks.

5mm ammo is smaller than .22 caliber, so it's pretty understandable that it's a weak gun...considering a .50 cal rifle can take several shots to drop an enemy in the game.

i like minigun against a swarm of ghoul, it is so satisfying. but yea it feel quite weak in most case

Hmm...you might be right...there is a perk for haevy guns more dmg! ...[censored]... thats it! ...niceee maybe Bethesda did not screw all features in game

Yup. I'm sure if I picked up a minigun it'd be awful compared to my rifle and pistol, because I took those perks. The perks really do make a big difference, almost the same as leveling up the different weapon skills in the prior games.

get the perks, throwing that much lead down range gets pretty powerful. Plus you have to burst fire it or else you wont hit anything.

Exactly!

I have noticed if I use VATS for minigun attacks that weapon kills Very Quickly...due to the burst fire, and not having to "pre-spin" the gun.

I am not sure how exactly armour works in F4 but I ques problem is that minigun does small damage per bullet. That might make it ineffective against opponents with lot of armour. Damage of individual bullets just does not get through. It's best against opponents with high health but low armour.

Even with perks, the minigun is considerably weaker than the other heavy weapons. It's probably the least cost effective, as 5mm ammo is expensive and the minigun requires a lot of it to kill. The missile launcher and the gatling laser give far more bang for your buck.

OP wasn't comparing it to other heavy weapons. He was comparing it to other classes of weapons. Of course the minigun is one of the least powerful heavy weapons. That's no surprise.

Miniguns are also automatic weapons I believe, so getting Commando should also provide a boost...

I just checked new Wiki entry for Damage Resistance and it's as I have suspected. Weapons with low individual bullet damage perform poorly against heavily armored targets. Most automatic weapons suffers from this effect. This can be offset to some degree by using armour piercing automatic receivers.

Did you upgrade to the Tri-Barrel yet? That is lower ROF but more damage.... I've not tried my tribarrel yet. The minigun definitely does feels weaker than it was in Fallout 3 (minus the perks of course).

The one thing that has impressed me over Fallout 3 is the missile launcher. In 3 that was so weak I never used it much... but in 4 it kicks ass. One thing in 3 where it was weak was splash damage.... this time they got it right (or at least a lot better).

The vanilla minigun is kind of weak, but it's still decent against super mutants since you can stunlock them with a constant stream of hot lead. The minigun gets awesome when it has a legendary damage mod on it. Fifty explosive damage per bullet is very good when you are using a rifle, but it is hokerrs when you are using a rapid firing minigun. Still, my OTP is the gatling laser.

there was also the bug in 3 and New Vegas where the missiles (and rockets) would do zero damage to enemies

This makes sense, realistically. I feel they balanced things pretty well damage-wise and how armor affects things. The problem, however, comes from ammo scarcity. It's fine that automatic weapons do less per shot and take more bullets to kill. The problem is that the game doesn't really compensate for that increased expenditure of ammo. So, automatic weapon end up feeling weaker.

The scarcity of ammo is where the Tri-Barrel shines... It also makes sense to fully unlock the scrounger perk.

Big guns seem to be balanced as secondary and/or endgame weapons. They are expensive to operate, because they use a lot of, or expensive, ammo, and because their high weight takes up carrying capacity that could be used for loot instead. They need, IMHO, more perks than any other weapon type before they become useful/effective. And, they just feel impractical in "normal" combat against small targets.

They are incredible fun to use against large enemies, though. The minigun is great against the tougher Supermutants, for example. The missile launcher is my favourite way of dealing with Deathclaws and Mirelurk Queens. The Gatling laser makes short work out of Sentrybots and Assaultrons. And nothing beats using a Fat Man to clear whole groups of enemies. (Except for artillery fire, maybe.)

That's because armour worked differently in F3. It subtracted fixed percentage from incoming damage so it did not matter how much damage individual bullet does. Only thing that mattered was damage per second which minigun had huge.

In F4, higher ratio between armour value and damage of individual bullet, less damage is applied.

For example if target have armour value of 10, which is your common bandit in leather or raider armour, minigun will do only 50% of damage. Against opponents with lot of armour like robots, minigun will do only 10-30% of damage.

Sine minigun can't have armour piercing mod, use it either against large crowds of enemies with low armour or individual targets with low armour and high health. Anything well armoured and you are wasting ammo.

Yeah if you have watched the real thing firing and know some stuff about it, the game's minigun feels rather weak and unrealistic.

The damage each bullet deals feels weak, its fire rate slower, its range shorter, its accuracy is also worse...

But hey, if they were making it realistic it would be way overpowered for gameplay, it would be like cheating.

Except if the whole combat system was designed in another way.

I'm also a Serious Sam fan, and these games all feature the minigun, which is my favorite gun at these games, because they do it justice, alas Serious Sam are games where its ordinary to face 30, 50, even 100 enemies at screen at once, which is how and why the minigun at these games feels natural and can be seem realistic without being OP.

I was thinking about making a mod that makes that particular gun feel more like the real thing, but for that I will wait until they release this game's Creaton Kit.

I know it use 7.62x51mm cartridge. That's quit powerful one comparable to 0.308 inch and much, much more potent then theoretical 5mm one.