Mighty, Penetrating, Explosive, or Crippling?

I have a Crippling Advanced 10mm Pistol and an explosive one. Oh God was watching the Swan and Legendary Alpha Deathclaw hobble hilarious!

I want to find a Mighty or explosive .44 though.

On a side note My Explosive Advanced 10mm has an 86 damage stat while all of my other Advanced 10mm pistols have 71.

I've also got a poisoners Mini-gun, Mighty Fatman, Penetrating Rocket Launcher, and Wounding .50 sniper rifle.

In most situations a two-shot legendary is fantastic. For guns with extreme firerate I'm leaning towards explosive rather than crippling.

Two shot is by far the best for single shot weapons, with the exception of shotguns. for automatic weapons it's a bit trickier, if the affix is adding more damage than the shot itself, it's better with burn&bleed etc, if not, 2 shot as well. Shotguns effects (like bleed, explosive etc) is per pellet, not per shot. It is unclear to me how many pellets you have, but from testing with a 2 shot combat shotgun with max mods compared to a 25 bleed combat shotgun with same mods, the bleed is way better. It might even be that the 2 shot only adds one more pellet, as it is not 2x the damage of the basic version.

Instigating is not too bad either on very high damage weapons like hunting rifle and gauss gun if you want to use them for sniping.

It is hard to evaluate utility stats like the criple, but those are very good if you feel that you don't need more damage ofc. To each their own. On lower difficulties they might even be preferred. personally I have been sticking with damage though, since I modded so that I do almost 2x the damage of survival, but enemies does 2.5x vanilla survival, so damage trumps any alternative stats from my testing.

Edit: after some testing it appears that poison doesn't stack for multiple hits, so that is not very good, on shotguns in particular since you only get one instance of it despite the many pellets. Might be same with fire, but explosive and bleed should stack for sure.

I have a two shot combat rifle that destroys everything. I stopped using it a while back because it made enemies too squishy.

I found a missle launcher with bleed damage strangely so am going to try it out soon.

Shouldn't penetrating be the most powerful though because it ignores enemies damage resistances?

The version I have only ignores 30%. It's a very nice laser rifle, but I prefer my two-shot combat rifle.

The ranged weapon ones are so much better

Is that the only one in the game with that perk? The overseers.

"Two shot" for rifles, "exploding" for automatics. And I love "penetrating" for energy based weapons.

I want a two shot and explosive version of weapon

Not really, the armor system in this game is logaritmic value/point, so removing 30% of the armor should increase the damage by a fair bit less than 30% if I understood it correctly. Either way, even if you did straight up 30% more damage, 2 shot is 100% extra damage so it is better regardless.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't explosive have the same outcome as crippling anyways? I felt like I read somewhere that when an explosive round hits an enemy, it damages their limbs too, crippling them.

Two shot can basically give any weapon a ridiculous amount of damage. Bumped a .308 combat rifle to 150 damage, and I haven't even gotten the last rank of Rifleman yet.

Besides that, I'm quite fond of the double damage on full health enemies. Only good on certain weapons though.

I havent experimented with this yet but how does two shot work with lasers and plasma weapons modded to fire multiple blasts? the laser/plasma shotgun mods that is. does it add one extra beam or double the beams?

Adds an extra beam , but the spread is horrendous, not to mention the recoil. I don't think the double damage applies unless you hit them with both beams, rendering the double damage useless.

Two-shot Assault Rifle with all Rifleman and Gun Nut perks. I now own the wasteland.

The .308 rifle with double damage at full health is another good one.

That's almost as hilarious a combo as a freezing flamethrower. What's worse than getting hit with a rocket? A rocket that makes you bleed more after it's turned you inside out.

Had to put the exploding assault rifle away. Too dangerous, killed the minutemens dog and messed up codsworth more times than I can count as well as putting chips in my own armor.

Got a wounding rocket launcher too. +25 damage on top of 193 isn't special but i didn't have big guns leveled. Some people said explosives perk help rockets but i'm not so sure.

Possibly dumb question. Does the demolition expert perk increase the explosive damage on "explosive" legendary weapons?

Also, can you get the explosive legendary buff on a rocket launcher for double buffed lulz?