You'd think an electrified sword would do significantly more damage than a baseball bat or a plank with a nail in it?

Apparently not.

Anything with the hilariously OP two-shot mod kicks ass. The .50 is still weak, two shots can occur for other cartridge sizes as well.

After 200+ hours, here's my input on it.

Unarmed/Melee - Don't really use it, but it gets silly with chems and blitz.

Single shot/Autos - Sniping/FPS. I love both. I would say short of heavy guns a fully auto Overseers Guardian is the strongest gun I've played around with.

Heavy weapons - Minigun and Junk Jet are a disappointment. The missile/broadside/Fatman get silly when paired with the explosives perk as well. Big Boy was ~1800 iirc, and I still could drop more points in bloody mess and lone wanderer.

Pistols - Vats monsters. Chain critical headshots for days


As for what is actually *bad*?

.45 SMG - Never a time I would actually consider it.


Pipe weapons have a place early game, and the .50 bolt action is surprisingly good for a long while. You can suppress the pipe revolver too. I have a 2-shot 308 revolver that is stronger than the deliverer

.50 sniper is horrendously underwhelming. auto weapons in general lack punch. I need to find a legendary two shot .44 or 10mm, that would be sweet.

Sorry - I misunderstood.

Still, though, my statement stands.

It's all good, mistakes are made.

I find that sometimes I keep double quoting people... I don't know why or how...

The minigun is a joke. It shoots a spread of bullets in a shotgun like pattern with a big empty spot in the middle. If you do hit your target, the 5mm round does almost no damage. Real miniguns shoot what is basically a solid stream of bullets, not a cone shaped pattern.

The shotguns svck too. They shoot more like a slug than actual shot pellets, with very little to no spread to the pattern. The effective range is also terrible.

The missile launcher needs a damage boost too. No unarmored human should survive a rocket to the face.

Hehe, I got both of them.

Two shot advanced .44 and two shot advanced 10mm. The .44 kicks some serious ass and the 10mm is great, but not as good.

Missile launcher is fine due to the fact that it is affected by two perks.

My missile launcher is already dealing near 400 damaged per shot and I'm at full heavy gunner but only one star in demo expert.

A fully packed launcher with heavy gunner and demo expert will do more damage than a vanilla fat man.

Fat man, explosion needs to be 100 times bigger

This is a result of levelled enemies. Like most bethesda games, you'll frequently see stronger enemy spawns as you level up, but a lot of them are just renamed or retextured things. A raider or a super mutant or a feral ghoul is a static enemy, it doesn't change, so you get stronger relative to them as time goes on. But once you're high enough, some (not all) of those spawns are replaced by Super Mutant Brute, or Withered Ghoul, or Raider psycho, and these variants have VASTLY more health and damage than their lower level counterparts.

this system doesn't really make sense, but it's supposed to provide continued challenge as you get stronger. I really want to see a mod to fix it

Actually in FO 1 and 2 laser rifles svcked. Absolutely zero reason to use one over a Sniper rifle. Now, the Turbo Plasma Rifle in FO 1 was god like, as was the Yuma Flats Pulse rifle in FO 2. Those 2 guns were the only reason to ever use Energy Weapons, and even then it wasn't needed, especially in FO 2 with Gauss rifles galore and plentiful ammo by end game.

What is rather under powered to me is the Gatling Laser. For big guns, that rocked, but it seems lacking in FO 4. It just isn't very convenient to put perk points into Big Guns early game, what with the massive amount of ammo you need, and I don't think you can get a Gatling laser until BoS appear.

I feel like automatics were made underpowered to compensate for how powerful some of the legendary effects are with them, but it still doesn't really balance the OP legenary effects and makes them underpowered without legendary effects.

Melee weapons are pretty underpowered with low strength. That makes sense, but guns don't need any special stat to be good. I feel like some weapons shouldn't be affected by strength when it comes to damage. Weapons like the combat knife and the ripper shouldn't depend much on strength for lightly armored opponents and when sneak attacking. Maybe strength should affect swing rate for the super sledge since the rocket is what makes it do most of its damage, but the player still has to recover for the next swing. A cattleprod or Taser weapon could be one that doesn't depend on strength at all.

Oh, I agree with the .50 being weak. My point was more that it should be balanced with the 2 shot thing in mind as well.

Guns with that seems to have more kick/recoil, but whether that is enough balancing I don't know.

Offcourse there is still the question of what constitutes overpowered in singleplayer.

I would suggest that the game is 'balanced' on normal difficulty...if you play higher, enemies become damage soaks.

The .50 is too weak, should be 40-50% stronger than the .308. As its now its weaker than good lasers. yes they might increase weight and recoil to balance.

.45 is a bit strong for an assault rifle but weak for an machine pistol.

Would prefer if automatic fire instead gave an huge spread and lots of recoil compared with semi automatic. Let command reduce this instead of increase damage.

yes this would make automatic weapon OP at close range. Remember early in Fallout 3 found that using pistols in VAT then enemies came around an corner worked wonders.

Your finger can not beat rate of fire set by game engine.

Armour effect do exist but difference in damage of individual shots between autos and semi autos of the same caliber is small, just 25% so auto weapons still deliver more punch over time. And then you can put armor piercing receiver on auto guns. I don't know how it exactly work but I assume it either negates the difference or makes auto guns superior in penetration.

Sniper rifle 14-34 damage at 5 action points cost

Laser rifle 25-50 damage at cost of 6 action points

Yeah, I'm aware of the leveled enemies, but it still doesn't explain why there's such a vast difference between two enemies 30' apart when I'm the same level and everything.

As I understand it, not all enemies level with you. some will always stay the same regardless of your level. So the higher level you get, the bigger variety in enemy levels you will see.

True, but it still makes my sigh when I one-shot a Super Mutant and then have to land 3 head shots on a Raider immediately after =)

Mini Gun 100&, only does 8 base damage and can reach a max of 16 with all heavy weapon perks... it's ridiculously weak, esp. for such a heavy weapon. Really ought to do 23 base damage and 46 dmg with all heavy weapon perks, then it would be balanced.

This is not really true.

its about 50% you probably have ranks in commando and not rifleman so it seems like less. I have the reverse, so auto looks like its doing a third of the damage. But its really about half if you take perks out of it.

You can get semi-auto fire rates around half of auto fire rates if you can click the button fast, and you deal comperable damage against a very large non-armored target. but armored targets favor the semi-auto, and smaller targets do as well (due to lower overall recoil), and the semi-auto chews up less ammo, which is pretty relevant for some ammo types.

And with some rifles, like a combat rifle chambered to 308, since the rechamber is the same slot as the auto, the damage difference is larger than 50% for going to auto (though the fire rate on the non-auto is also less).

In general the 'Balance' of automatic weapons is off, because in an ideal environment, they only manage to be even with semi-auto weapons, and any non-ideal environment they fall behind. Certain legendary mods (explosive, I'm looking at you spray and pray) can make up the difference, but its still not a good balance point.

I think there's a glitch with the Shishkebob. Especially if you have one with radiation damage on it. I got one with radiation damage and barely burns anything while the first one I've gotten literally burns everything I hit.

Also, I feel sniper rifles don't do as much damage as they should at times.

Pipe weapons, never use them because all the non-pipe weapons do a lot more damage.