When I made a hitman, I carried both a 12.7 mm suppressed and a 10 mm suppressed.
With professional perk, the 12.7 mm killed BOS paladins with a single head shot, but the 10mm wouldn't.

Use the 10mm for general purpose sneak and shoot - lost of parts and ammo, and it counts for concealed carry.
12.7 mm counts as the big gun.

Useful Sneaky weapons:
- 12.7 mm suppressed
- 10mm suppressed
- sniper rifle suppressed
- dynamite (reverse pickpocket...instakill)
- riot shotgun -- first shot w/slug will drop anything, next 11 in the mag prove deadly when his buddies come around the corner.

Happy hunting!

Heh, yeah, my distance ability is decent to pretty good (even for VH) but I absolutely don't have quick reflexes & my closeup/moving-target gun-aim is pretty terrible in this game...and then I make it harder for myself in other ways on top of that. When I play w/companions I don't care about difficulty but when I go solo I'm a self-masochist I guess. Topside enemies usually not a big issue even w/bad reflexes but in caves it's a problem for me. Plus I'm rusty from goofing off with the multiple companion mod a lot for over a month. But I also made errors in her STAT/build (not much forethought...) that makes her weak so I should remake her, see if that helps at all. Or lower the difficulty for her. Or remove the XP mod to get Perks a lot faster or make the HUD strongly visible. har.

Anyway, she has Good Natured/Small Frame, Guns/Sneak/Speech tagged.

Black Widow, Comprehension, 1 lvl of IT that boosts Luck to 5. Was planning on The Professional when 70Sneak but not there yet.

10DT armor
Boone's Beret

Guns is around 50ish.

There is one on the ground in Bloodborne Cave

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Bloodborne_Cave

Tbh I think you should play with what you've been given.
All the things you think you did wrong make a decent back story imo.
The low stats especially sneak and guns makes the 12.7 more a hinderence at the moment stick with the 10mm and let the game flow.
I've found with pistols the fun is actually in the challange of not powering up a 9mm is a great weapon for most of the game if you look for ways to make it work on tougher critters.

I would normally completely agree, but I was hoping to be able to use the 12.7 in more of the game than just the Strip/Main Quest/Caesar/Dam etc. With my low-XP mod, speciality builds kinda need to be more efficient. But yeah, you have a point about usefullness of the 12.7 too early.

That said I haven't actually tried Bloodbourne cave w/her yet so I guess I'll try that today. Maybe I'm being overly paranoid and/or I'll get lucky or something. Plus occasionally I'm not as terrible as I think I am.

NO WAIT! The 12.7mm Pistol is in a chamber past the Legendary Nightstalker, you either grab it right off and fight all the Nightstalkers on the way out starting with the Legendary Nightstalker, or fight the Nightstalkers on the way to the gun.

Just tried it. I set guns and sneak @50, luck @5 and took a modded 10mm. Had to strip to my skivvies to get a 10DT. Veryhard, no hud. I was carrying too much ammo to do hardcoe so I simulated any healing by using foods.

1. Sneak + hollowpoints = easy. No problem at all. 2 mags for the whole place, but only because one of the pups got stuck in a rock and I couldn't hit it.
2. Run 'n gun + regular ammo = harder, but not bad. I got bit by one pretty good, enough to have to heal, but there was plenty of time for that. Took more ammo, more like 4 mags (I svck at run 'n gun.)

Moral of the story: since I never run n' gun, my gun skills can't be any better than yours. You'll make it just fine.

-Gunny out.

Were you able to bypass the Legendary Nightstalker or was he more of pushover than I remember? That's the one I was primarily worried about, since he's lvl 15 or something vs. my lvl6-7. Don't have the caves memorized and according to the wiki the pistol is in the 'last section of the cave.'

I got a sneak crit on him and pumped him full of lead after I killed the others. Plus you didn't tell me how many HP you had. I just altered down a lvl 30 PC of mine and forgot to nerf his HP.

Here's a good strategy:
Good luck.

-Gunny

I have 250HP. The purple gecko's can kill me in 2 hits more or less, btw.

...the only FT point I have near there at the moment is Raul's Shack, and in this game some deathclaws have spawned between it and the Boomer access tunnel near the cliff edge (they like to do that sometimes), and there are cazzies near the road. My 40-45ish sneak isn't quite good enough. Hahaha. Hm. Maybe if I wait they'll disappear.

This and don't forget the the advice I posted above.