This has been on my mind. Maybe it's the survival difficulty, but the weapon balance in this game feels pretty screwy to me.

I'm rather upset with my .44 revolver and my .50 sniper rifle, both are as modded as they can ever be, but they just kind of svck. The damage doesn't feel anywhere near good enough for the massive recoil and slow fire rate they have, giving them a pretty poor dps. my rifle is a legendary one with 30% armour penetration, but it's still not really worth using much. I shouldn't need to headshot a raider 4-6 times.

I'm not too keen on assault rifles either, it annoys me that the damage takes a huge nosedive if you use an automatic reciever, does that even make sense? The fire rate is just too slow if i don't have it automatic, i'm better off spamclicking my 10mm pistol, but the damage is about 40% less as automatic which is probably worse. Either way i'm using my assault rifle more for entertainment, and i can rarely kill anything above a ghoul before it runs out of ammo.

really as far as ballistic weapons go, i've yet to find anything that can match my 10mm pistol in terms of dps, and also massive availability of ammo. I don't like energy weapons much and prefer not using them (although the laser musket is hella OP)

what's your guys thoughts?

and also, how would you fix these underpowered weapons?

Shishkebob is undertuned and for reason doesn't leave a fire DoT.

The worst offender for me is the .45 Submachine Gun. Good god, that thing doesn't fit any niche in the game that i can think of.

The Assault Rifle is weird but is a decent semi-auto rifle for general use later on in the game.

the .44 is fairly useful in VATS but next to worthless in real time due to its slow firing rate and inability to drop enemies in that one hit you get before they close.

So far only thing I really notice is the shiskebab, since its bugged, not being affected by the big leagues perk, so it unavoidably lag behind regular melee weapons.

The minigun is an embarrassment. It may as well be shooting lots of BB's. In fact the mini is useless as is. You have to stand out in the open while sending hundreds of rounds downrange to dispatch your target and the spin up time means it is less convenient to take cover, shoot, take cover etc...

I find explosives like grenades and mini-nuke to be underpowered for what they are. They both seem to have to land right on the target or no damage is done.

Slightly underwhelmed with the sniper rifle. I love sniping, I love silenced weapons.. It's weird to me that the laser rifle has become more powerful in this iteration of Fallout. Laser rifles used to be a pretty low level weapon. Pretty much only good until you find the plasma rifle.

Overseer's guardian is way to weak, like come on bethesda 210dmg is too little it should be doing like double to even catch my eye.

The Plasma Rifle seems to be lacking. Very... umph-less.

the plasma handgun

Not really weak, but the fat man's blast radius should be more accurate...I mean it's a mini nuke after all..
Without spoiling I'll just say I was at a certain end battle in a certain location against a certain group of individuals..brought the Big Boy to the party, and am launching them all over, however, I noticed a couple going off below some enemies, and not hurting them..just because they were a couple steps above?..pssh a couple mini nukes shoulda wiped out the whole area..

Any modified weapon chambered in .50.

The .50 cartridge needs to be buffed by perhaps a multiplier of 1.35 (so if a .50 sniper did 100 damage then it does 135 after the buff).

Shishkebab svcks ass too.

I second this. Moded pipe rifle have same if not better stats and use more common ammo. On the other hand .45 is used by battle rifle which is much better when modded with automatic receiver. SMG feels out of the place and I see no point using it.

Other weapons seems to be more or less fine. There are more and less effective among them but that's fine by me.

No, they were not with exception of Fallout NV. And Fallout NV had by far worst implementation of weapons in any Fallout game.

Laser rifle was always superior to hunting/sniper rifle and that's logically how it should be. It's freaking laser, isn't it?

Its not necessarily stronger. It is dependant upon the armor of the enemy

Ah the Shishkebab is broken, that explains it. Well that then obviously.

Gauss rifle

I've found most rifles to be inferior to their pistol counterpart. The damage difference is too small when you account for vats app cost and severe hip accuracy.

Nah, the battle rifle works best as a semi auto...well, battle rifle. Higher damage, and fast enough for most purposes.

Well i was comparing automatic category since that's what SMG primarily is. Whenever you prefer to keep your battle rifle in semi or full auto is matter of play stile. Automatic versions are always superior in damage output to their semi auto counterparts (in Fallout 4) purely stat wise. Their real effectivity is depending on how you use them and for what.

At the close to mid range, only thing inferior about them i see is their ammo consumption.

I'm not happy with the Shotguns,

The range suffers about the same as all other games and doesn't seem to account that the gun doesn't really function quite like people want to imagine that it does. What I mean is that shotguns in most games have a pathetic effective range compared to real life. You can and people do go hunting with shotguns and if these guns worked like they do in video games well pst no way you'd get close enough to your game animal. Its sad that in game firing at something across a street with a long barrel shotgun I may as well be missing but in real life that would have been a kill shot from 5 times that distance.

The thing is that its all done in the name of game mechanics but in this case given that there most certainly are better choices and options of weapons available to fill the niche of close combat weapon well why make the shotty so useless? People freaking shoot skeet out of the air but in game oh no you cant be effective at anything past 10 feet.

Seems to me that people want to think oh but its handy when you have points in Riffleman to switch from Combat Riffle to shotgun...Actually its not its better to just use the Riffle the whole time rather than change to shotgun. The only case in which its better to use the shotgun is in narrow short corridors found in buildings but even then I'm carrying around 2 guns weighing in around 40 pounds just to satisfy that when just using the Riffle for all purpose is just generally always better.

The hunting rifle turned .50cal sniper is disappointing. I miss my antimaterial rifle

I used to think the same about automatics, until I gave them a proper shot. Right now I've only at lvl 28 with 3 perks in commando, but my hardened automatic combat rifle spits out 100dmg per shot. That's not shabby with the fire rate it has. (While I know legendary isn't relevant for discussing weapon balance, the fact that it's Overseer's Guardian *does* help a bit!) I was concerned about ammo, but took two perks in scrounging, and have >1000 ammo for all of my weapons. I'm really digging the automatic weapons. The impact of being shot a lot on enemies is substantial, you get access to handguns, rifles and shotguns, it's easy to cripple, etc. It has a lot going for it.

There are two weapons I think needs tweaking. The .45 submachine gun is totally misdesigned. It should be somewhere between the pipegun and the combat rifle in damage, but much more accurate than the combat rifle. In many circumstances I will not use my combat rifle because of the recoil, and that's fine, but the only other real alternative is laser. The SMG could fit nicely there. I also think Plasma is underwhelming. Compared to laser it really doesn't add anything, and costs a whole lot more to use. I think it could use a damage buff to be the last weapon before gatling laser. Even with a buff it would still do less dmg than my combat rifle.

melee weapons just seem weak in general to me.

Then you obviously dont know your fallout 4 facts.

Shot for shot, automatic weapons are inferior to their semi auto counterparts.

maybe it is the ammo? I mean shotty's have everything from Birdshot up to slugs and even less than lethal! .38, .44, .45 .. all have hollow point and FMJ rounds. Could that be our missing modifier as the Laser weapons shoot energy!