i got it but what is so special about it?

Well, Besides looking sixy. Lucky is a unique version of the [censored] .357 revolver. It does more damage, Has a higher rate of fire and critical chance. And again, It's sixy.

even without a critical hit build it deals higher damage then the standard 357, iv used it to hunt radscorpians before and it tore through them like butter.

Critical damage, reloads 1 bullet at a time so can be fired quickly if you just need a couple of more shots, easy to repair and find ammo for, and has low strength/ skill requirements. It's a good all rounder.

...do we really have to explain this again and again to people? You've been around here as well so I'm kind of shocked you asked this. Lucky has such awesome qualities, it's capable of killing a Deathclaw on it's own, and 2-3 of them when done properly.

Lucky is a perfectly good sidearm. The main reason people like it is the 2.5x critical chance, which it shares with just one other non-energy pistol-- That Gun. And unlike That Gun, Lucky can be concealed in the Strip's casinos with 50+ strength.

Lucky's Colt Peacemaker-style "loading gate" reload animation is unique among pistols, and can be both a benefit and a curse. It takes much longer to execute a full reload than almost any other handgun. But you can chamber 1-2 more rounds more quickly in an emergency. You can also acquire it very easily very early in the game (it's usually the first unique gun I pick up.)

It also uses one of the game's most inexpensive and plentiful ammunition types (even in the very early parts)-- .357 Magnum. If you pick up Hand Loader, .357 JFP ammunition is easy to make and performs excellently, having several bonuses over regular ammunition and no drawbacks. Lucky loaded with .357 JFP is one of the most accurate handguns in the game.

And, like other revolvers, it's affected by the Cowboy perk, so it synergizes well if you were planning on using the Medicine Stick, Brush Gun, or Trail Carbine as your primary longarm.

It basically gives purpose to the sidearm category in that from a logical gameplay standpoint, why bother with a sidearm? In a game where you don't experience, for example, the discomfort you might feel from firing a .50 cal, nor would you suffer from issues where a guy wielding an axe might have an easier time shoving a long and large rifle out of the way and getting up so close you can't fire upon him, why bother with a sidearm or a pistol? And again when a rifle like the Medicine Stick almost unanimously outperforms something like a hunting revolver...why use the hunting revolver?

Lucky is different for a variety of reasons:

-Cheap and easy upkeep. Repairing it to full is literally going to cost ~100 caps

-Cheap and easy ammo supply. .357 is arguably the most frequent ammo type in the game (Dead Money and OWB both throw hundreds of this round type at you, and almost nothing else)

-Lightweight ammo and lightweight itself. Supplying Lucky is very easy and unlikely to ever create carry weight issues for a player. This means Lucky can conserve on more powerful rounds from your rifle in order to kill numerous easier enemies.

-Tying into the above point, on a crit Lucky can hit as hard as the Medicine Stick can hit in base damage. This means that if you truly need to conserve on rifle rounds, Lucky is capable of handling stronger foes aswell with minimal risk

-Highest crit rate of any (non Silenced .22) gun in the game. The right build can easily achieve 50% crit, meaning every second shot is as powerful as a Medicine Stick shot for a fraction of the cost and carry weight.

-All-around well rounded gun. Good accuracy, good damage, good crit rate, good ironsights, good everything. The one weakness is that as a Cowboy weapon, it doesn't mix well with low-Agility builds and obviously prioritized towards high luck ones aswell.

-Finding ammo or .357 magnums to supply Lucky as you're on the go is incredibly common and easy. Many enemies carry both, not to mention many locations house the rounds.

So basically, if you've ever played on hardcoe mode and a character of yours has had money problems or issues with carry weight? Lucky is the perfect fit to remedy those problems. Lucky will save you tons of money without stressing you out and making you feel like you're risking your life by taking on cazadors with a pistol instead of your rifle, not to mention it can increase the amount of enemies you can kill before needing a resupply by a good amount. You will not run out of ammo or run low on weapon condition for Lucky. Ever.

For example let's say you go to Old World Blues and of course you're pretty limited in how much ammo you can bring with you while OWB is highly demanding on ammo with it's bullet-sponge enemies. Again as an example, let's use Lucky and the Medicine Stick. Lucky's ammo weighs only 53% of the weight of the Medicine Stick's. You can rationalize that the Medicine Stick is absolutely neccesary for the high DT enemies like Roboscorpions, but not for the rather numerous nightstalkers, lobotomites and misc enemies like robodogs and spore carriers. If you were to try and use the Medicine Stick to fight all of these, you'd run out of ammo much quicker. If however you brought Lucky and a good amount of .357, you could save that ammo for the roboscorpions. Let's say both Lucky and the Medicine Stick can oneshot spore carriers/nightstalkers/etc and there's 500 spore carriers/nightstalkers/etc and 100 roboscorpions. Using the Medicine stick for all of them would consume 500 rounds from the spore carriers alone, and then let's say 5 rounds for each roboscorpion. You'd need 1000 rounds for the Medicine Stick and 65 units of carry weight for ammo alone, which totals about 4000 in caps for all of that (not counting hand loader ammo costs), NOT including the cost of repairing the Medicine Stick, which can amount to several thousand (5k+, but of course this is situational and could be made way cheaper. If you can't make it cheaper though, gg). If however you bring Lucky instead and use it for the spore carriers, you could save yourself the money and weight OR provide some breathing room for the Medicine Stick so that you don't freak out and worry about ammo supplies every time you miss a shot. Using Lucky would reduce the carry weight total to 50 units and the overall cost to 3000. Realistically, you won't even need to buy ammo for Lucky and will save 2000 caps rather than 1000, as the game simply throws .357 rounds at you on multiple occassions. On top of this, repairing Lucky is literally a hundred or so caps; it's not worth mentioning the cost to the point where using a weapon repair kit on it feels like a waste of money.

That all may not sound like much, and again sidearms aren't for every character. A character swimming in cash for example won't neccesarily need a sidearm, nor will a character with 350 carry weight. However, realize that's 15 pounds of more loot per trip and 1000 caps (or 2000+) saved per trip; that adds up. This is also why sidearms like the Hunting Revolver are such crap, because they have identical carry weight and cost to the Medicine Stick....except it's more. Why? Because it deals less damage, so more shots and caps are required. So what's the point...? Lucky knows it's job and knows it's just there to conserve on costs and does so wonderously in a way that can simply be felt even though it's such a passive and behind-the-scenes benefit, and it's also nice that when you DO take it out vs. an armor foe, it performs much, MUCH nicer than expected on crit builds.

And what cannot be explained easily with just math and numbers is that it's basically the ultimate rainy day gun. IF something should happen to your main rifle, this is the gun you want as backup. If you run out of ammo for your main gun or find yourself in a situation where you can't repair it or you're going on a trip where carry weight is an issue (DLCs), this is the remedy. Yes, bringing down that deathclaw with your rifle is of course ideal and much less stressful. But if and when you're in a situation where that for whatever reason isn't possible, this is the gun you want to fall back on. It's outrageously reliable, and not only that it's reliable in such a way that using it actually profits and benefits you. I know people have heard the story before, but this is the gun that, had I not had it with me, my DID Courier would've died in OWB simply because I'd run out of ammo. This was the gun that was the last weapon left I could afford to feed and repair and the one I became forced to rely on versus every enemy type. It was the only one left by the time I reached the Giant Roboscorpion, as even repairing Pushy was just becoming too expensive to do, not to mention Pushy was not really ideal for taking on Brush Gun lobotomites. Even with the constant Brush gun lobotomites, I wasn't receiving enough .45-70 rounds to feed my own Brush gun consistently. I had to rely on it, but it came through. The .357 ammo was so frequent and so lightweight that even the roboscorpions went down, because every second hit was essentially a brush gun hit.

It's sort of difficult to explain a way just in writing and without raw experience. Like....what makes it good is partly just that it's so adapted and suited to the game. If the DLCs didn't exist for example and carry weight were basically not an issue (carry weight is honestly rarely an issue in the base game unless a character has low strength, as you can actively avoid areas with fights that are taxing on carry weight logistics or just return home if you truly run dry), then Lucky wouldn't be so special. Lucky is special because the DLCs exist, Lucky is special because 2 out of 4 DLCs chose .357 magnum as the round that would appear frequently and in ample supply, and Lucky is special because it functions in such a way that it can provide identical performance to a rifle half of the time for half the cost. (literally there, not being figurative. The ammo weight and cost are about half, but Lucky on a luck build can crit half the time)

Guess you could say Lucky is lucky that it's so special, because a lot of what defines it is just how specifically suited it is for the trials of the Mojave, and if Dead Money and OWB gave ample 9mm rounds, we might be talking about Maria instead. Or if DLC didn't exist so cut-off from everything so that carry weight and ammo supply were a factor, then we would solely be discussing what the best rifle is and wouldn't touch sidearms at all.

As a side note, Maria and That Gun also deserve mention as good sidearms. Maria's main setback compared to Lucky is simply that 9mm is not stressed as much and given out for free or found randomly as much, though it is even cheaper and more lightweight. Lucky can be supplied for ages off DLC alone, but Maria will need ammo bought. Likewise it's damage can't be amped up as much (no (viable) hand loader rounds) and it will of course suffer more vs. high DT opponents. That Gun is again an issue of simply not being supplied 5.56mm as directly, not to mention it's own repair cost isn't nearly as nice as Lucky's (over 1k and possibly just below 2k iirc). Still, it's a very viable alternative for low agility characters.

ALSID functions more like a substitute for an SMG rather than a sidearm as it's ammo weight is actually really significant (identical to .45-70 Gov't) and thus defeats any purpose of trying to be a sidearm. It does however provide a sort of alternative to an SMG in that between it's crit and better-aimed singular shots, you can opt to use it to aim precise headshots (works well with VATS) rather than spraying dozens of rounds of ammo from an SMG, thus dealing more damage per bullet and conserving on ammo better than a proper SMG, though an SMG is hardly a gun type you worry about conserving ammo for, making this more preference-based. Trying to compare ALSID to the above three would be more like apples-to-oranges and it'd be better compared to, for example, the 12.7mm SMG. (similar ammo weight, similar damage, but different combat styles, ammo usage and has bits of preference involved)

Damn, man. You don't need to write a dissertation every time this topic comes up. I'd like to say "TL;DR," but unfortunately, I read the whole thing.

Lucky is free, and Medicine Stick costs 20,000 caps or so.

Yet another reason to bring back the gold from Dead Money...

You forgot to add that it's sixy.

hey dude, i lost that info. files get deleted by accident. i haven't got it maxed out yet. so it is disappointing as deathclaw killer. i am trying out gun pistles. and i recall some here giving it thumbs up.

i normally don't mess with it because of the lock skill to get it. do you have a link to your praise of it. i tried search for lucky. too many to wade through.

If you're trying to find a pistol to kill Deathclaws with, I think you're misunderstanding the point of pistols. If you want to main one, then yes, go grab a hunting revolver. But again as I said, that's rather odd and pointless to do as the Medicine Stick is superior in almost every way, so you're nerfing yourself by doing so. Don't bring a pistol to fight deathclaws unless you absolutely have to.

And that's why Lucky gets praise: because it's one of the few guns that you could expect to be readily available to use at all times with full ammo and full condition that you can fall back on when your other weapons fail. Primarily though, the idea is to utilize Lucky vs. the no-DT enemies so that you can have more carry weight free up or conserve on ammo for your rifle to use against the high DT enemies. In desperate times it's good enough to manage to pull through vs. high DT ones, which is remarkable, but trying to main it and use it round the clock vs. high DT ones is just asking for trouble and asking for your luck to run out.

The thing with Lucky is that it is a great weapon for critical builds. I find that for guns, a pure damage build is good, especially with all cowboy weapons.

longknife, doing a roll playing thing. a theme thing. using the sidekick cletch. more than one 2leged but each is limited to a pistol. quantity over quality. forgot that lucky's strength is its critical hits. going to ad finese. that should help a bit.

usually when i use guns, i have low luck but i am killing with shotguns and the light machine gun. but lucky needs luck.