Planning on an automatic weapon build using the combat rifle (like the way it looks over the assault rifle) and I'm wondering which would be better: the extra armor penetration of a Piercing legendary, or the extra raw damage of a Mighty one.

And before you mention them, yes, I know explosive, wounding and two-shot are stronger. But they feel far too powerful/unrealistic for me to enjoy using them (I've tried)

Mighty will always do more damage. Piercing will not give any advantage vs unarmored foes (eg ghouls).


That said, vs high DR foes, Piercing will actually have higher net DPS.


If you're looking to gimp yourself, Violent has the same damage boost as Mighty, but brings massive recoil for a touch of realism.

whats the mighty legendary do?

+25% damage.

From my automatic weaponry playthrough experience, its like that:

[Two-Shot] > [Mighty] > [Burning] > [Piercing] > everything else.

Piercing would be great if you're going against BoS for ex, burning would give you that extra when you're going to engage big legen ones such as queens, mighty for big huntings, such as deathclaws, scorps, etc .

But two shot ones are damn insanely OP and best all round deal, to me.

Get a 100 rounds mag and you'll never feel that "realoding weakness".

Everything ammo other than .45 to be sold in order to fund the fact you'll burn through 5000 ammo's in a bunch of hours, expecially on your way to the south.

Doesn't two-shot have impossible recoil on automatic weapons though?

While this is technically correct, I prefer the Piercing. The simple fact is that if the enemy doesn't have any armor, you probably don't NEED any bonuses to wipe the floor with him. But when somebody's armor is high, 30 points makes a big difference in whether you can damage him or not.

If you're not interested in 2-shot weapons, out of the two you posted, I'd go with the mighty..+25% damage for everyone seems better that piercing thru only certain enemies..idk..

I can say that I used the Overseers Gaurdian (a 2-shot combat rifle) as an automatic for a while, and didn't think the recoil was too terrible, but then again I play a lot of FPS games like CoD and Battlefield, so I may be a bit biased..

Does it? i hadn't really felt it that much impossible, yeah, the machinegun swings a bit upwards on his own, but prolly playing on a STR/AGI build with maxed commando's perks made me feel it a bit less?

Could fire around half mag before having to correct aim again, as far as i remember.

I will reload that character to check it in a moment

Might not be so bad if you play on PC with a mouse. But on a PS4, using a controller, having to drag down the anolog sticks to compensate for recoil can be pretty hard.

Oh, i didn't considered that aspect at all, i am sorry.

On console would be harder to counter the recoil probabily, yup.

Tho i have no idea to be honest how the recoil would look alike, i mean, i tried, crouched trying to put half a mag into a door and well, it was quite stable for around 30-ish bullets, then yeah, i realised it was swinging upwards a bit.

But i don't really know how that "a bit" is being counted towards the kind of perks i used towards the build and how much of it was coming -hindered- from the weapon itself.

Eventually you get the chance to try it out might be worth it, otherwise i'd just stick with mighty as good second, unless you've already in mind to do a certain playthrough focusing on highly armored enemies (such as BoS members ) .

edit: if you're looking for a combat shotgun/carbine might be slighty different than the machinegun , and gonna have smaller magazines as well (putting you into the "omg i need to reload NOW" feeling that i hated on auto 10mm tbh).

I don't even know why mighty is in the game...

It should only be violent. Mighty is redundant and less realistic and nowhere near as balanced.

Mighty is always better than Piercing. DR works on a ratio of the attack damage versus the armor rating, so higher values give diminishing returns - this means that the effective damage increase from Piercing will cap out at around 15%.

It's nice to know that instead of balancing the legendaries, beth just whipped random [censored] out of its ass and left the game in a state where every legendary except for perhaps 3 or 4 svck absolute balls.

Commando gives innate AP for automatics anyway doesn't it?

No, but Rifleman does for non-automatic rifles. Most automatic weapons can be modded to take Armor-piercing receivers, though, which similarly ignore 30%. If that stacks with Piercing for 60%, I think it may trump Mighty in some contexts... I'd have to do the math though. Quoting from the wiki:

"The Penetrating mod's effectiveness, due to the exponential curve of armor based damage reduction, does not vary with the target's armor after a certain threshold. When the target's armor rating is less than 15% of the weapon's damage, which is very little, the damage is applied in full (meaning 99%) and the Penetrating effect wasted. If the armor rating is between 15% and 21.4%, a Penetrating weapon will still do full (99%) damage while a standard variant will already experience damage reduction, making the Penetrating weapon increasingly better by comparison (0% to 13.9% more damage). Past this point, which is still very low for semi-automatic weapons, having the Penetrating mod means a static 13.9% increase in effective damage."

This. Piercing is terrible. The damage I gained from a 100 damage penetrating laser rifle vs enemies with 150 (and 45) energy resistance compared to a 90 damage Institute rifle without any legendary effect was insignificant. Little enough to not even notice the effect, and chalk it up to the 10 damage difference. If you want to pierce armor just have a higher damage weapon (mighty helps, or use the gauss rifle).

i just read somewhere that they way fo4 handles damage (1 100 shot damage will do more dam than 2x50 shot damage due to armor reduction) that more damage always trumps everything else...

instigating is probably one of the best effects as it does 200% damage and kills most foes (especially if sneaking or with critical)

2shot does not do double damage per se - the second shot is fired unmodified and base...for a fully modded weapon its something like 160% damage i think

what is best also depends a bit on the weapon... i have a wounding assault rifle and everyhing just melts away, and i have an instigating plasma sniper rifle with the crit mod - i 1 shot behemoths so (survival)....

Piercing works out to a 14% damage bonus on enemies with more that 50% of your weapon's damage bonus, and is always inferior to mighty.

On weapons with high damage scaling bonuses work best

Two shot* > Mighty > violent > piercing

for low damage weapons with a high rate of fire fixed bonus damage work best

Bleeding > explosive* > freezing > energized = plasma infused > poison > burning

notes

Two shots adds the weapon's base damage, then deals half the listed damage with each shot, meaning a weapon with highly upgraded damage does not benefit as much as a weapon with no damage upgrades, while weapon's whose damage is reduced by upgrades benefits even more. A full upgraded 2 shot gauss rifle gets less than a 50% damage bonus, while a fat man with the mirv upgrade receives a 200% bonus

explosives deal more damage on heavy weapons like the minigun, because the heavy gunner perk and explosives expert both apply, and increase the damage of the explosive to 60 damage per shot, the other effects only receive one damage bonus, meaning bleeding only reaches 50

Burning and poison don't stack with themselves (bleeding does), meaning unless you are only shooting each enemy once every 5 seconds you are wasting the bonus damage with every shot, and poison is better than burning because poison resistance is far more rare than energy resistance.

freezing is better than energy and plasma damage because it freezes on critical hits in addition to the normal damage bonus.

I tested an automatic two-shot combat rifle vs a normal automatic combat rifle, both fully modded. The normal one was more accurate both hip-fired and aimed. Yes it does fire an extra bullet, but it's pointless if it doesn't hit anything.

May as well use an automatic shotgun, which is also more accurate than an automatic two-shot combat rifle.

Actually, I'm curious, does anyone know the Weighted DR ignoring amount for the arm misc mods? Added with a Piercing Deathclaw Gauntlet, what would that net?