so the character im currently playing on is going to use heavy hand to hand combat. I started upgrading the unarmed skill, but looking back on it, unarmed only has 4 weapons (via the fallout wiki) whereas melee weapons have 19. almost 5x as many. unarmed weapons also cant be used in power armor, and while i dont like to use power armor that often (feels a tad bit cheap), i still might use it to slug a deathclaw with a baseball bat.

via perks, both gain a chance to disarm and cripple. the biggest comparison is that unarmed, at rank 5, gain the ability to paralyze while melee can hit multiple targets and smash skulls (assume this is a killmove below a certain health percentage that has a percent chance to proc). Melee STILL sounds like its superior. so.. yeah can someone help me see the reason to use unarmed? maybe the boxing gloves can knock opponents out (like new vegas. KOing the deathclaw mom and whapping her until she died was the best)

so, my question is, what are the pros and cons to each style of weapon?

There is no reason to go unarmed other than RP purposes. It's absolutely gutted compared to past games.

It also only does 4x stealth damage, unlike melee's 10x, with 3/3 Ninja. Also Melee's stun modification > Paralyzing Palm.

Unarmed weapons apparently also cannot be used with powered armor. Supposedly they have cool moves though

Melee in 3rd person has better animations than in 1st person. It's too bad there are no more kill cams, but in 3rd person there are still kill moves