Thinking of a hardcoe playthrough, and got to thinking about the recharger weapons

That would be a good survialist weapon, no ammo to lug around, though the damage is meh at best (they make good kill the minor bugs/mobs weapons though)

But the added weight, lower damage, etc... makes them very very bad weapons to use as anything but bug zappers and that's a shame. I could see an advanced prototype being out there as a unique and maybe matching the laser rifle stat wise (preferably with scope!) with a little heavier weight.

Now got to looking at the ammo weights for energy weapons, ouch! Even though I can understand they are high density batteries, that still hurts... for the weight of a hundred rounds and a laser rifle you'd have a higher powered rifle with more ammo.

Makes me wonder if I should instead go with just guns on the hardcoe route, maybe keep the recharger pistol as backup.

The advantage of energy ammunition is that you have four ammunition types across the set of all energy weapons - this reduces the chance of never having ammunition for your weapon of choice, especially since energy ammunition can be freely converted from one form to another (With the exception of flamer fuel). The other advantage is that more advanced versions of energy ammunition are just stronger - Standard is always better than bulk, Overcharge is always better than standard, Optimized is always better than overcharge, and max charge is always better than optimized. The only reason you'd use lesser ammunition is to slow weapon degradation.

The disadvantage of energy ammunition is that it is really heavy, but is that such a large price to pay for ammunition you can use with virtually any energy weapon?

Bullets, on the other hand, are suitable only for a handful of guns. The play between hollow point and armor-piercing and other types renders certain rounds useless against certain opponents. Of course that doesn't matter so much if you elect to specialize in a nice general weapon (Like the assault carbine), but you do need to constantly have on-hand different types of bullets for different opponents whereas energy weapons allow just using one cell type.