These are tiered weapons so it will likely be 5 to 7 "godly" weapons at Tier 5, and the rest will be "slightly better than the other weapons of the same tier" going down each class and tier. As for balance, it remains to be seen, but Obsidian has done fairly well thus far in nerfing/buffing unbalanced weapons, and if you find one that's too OP for your taste, there's no gimping like self-gimping. The easiest thing to do in an open world game like FONV is to not use whatever object/perk/skill etc. that you believe to be OP.
I gotta disagree with that, while it was nice that they tried to make shotguns and energy weapons less OP than they were in FO3, they went overboard so much that they became next to useless. This is especially true if you want to try and use over/max charge energy ammo, energy weapons shouldn't consume the same crazy amounts of ammunition that they do with normal ammo when you are using over/max charge ammo, it's not really a good trade off to do 150% damage at the cost of 250% of the ammo.
Sorry, but I really don't want all unique variants of weapons. I don't want a slightly different looking and slightly differently named weapon with a bit more damage and/or a few bonuses. I want new weapons that look entirely different than everything else.
Remember how unique weapons were in fallout 3? It all looked the same. The miss launcher looked exactly the same as the missle launcher. I'd rather have completely new weapons, not copies of weapons that are simply renamed.
Agreed, uniques are usually disappointing because they look pretty much the same and most don't do anything "unique," they are just a mildly better version of the normal weapon. I want uniques that actually change how the weapon works, like adding new effects to it. Even though its a bad example since it svcks, the MIRV was nice in that it changed how the weapon worked, but it was such a horrible waste of ammo and overkill that its pretty much useless. Speaking of the MIRV, I've always wanted to see a nonnuclear version of it, something that carpets an area with normal grenades.