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The sniper rifle should always do the same damage as the hunting rifle as long as they shoot the same cartridge. Period. The difference between the two is accuracy. Accuracy gives a range advantage over an enemy, and in the case of the sniper rifle, you can be so far away that even after you shoot they have no idea where you are. That is the entire concept and modus operandi of a sniper. The weapon does not need especially high damage or a high crit multiplier to function in its intended role, because you should be sneaking around and scoring sneak-attack-crits with it. The only time the sniper rifle feels underpowered is when you stop being a sniper, and try to engage alerted enemies at short range. Which is why I brought up shotguns and SMGs. These weapons are powerful at short range, but pointless at long range due to their poor acuracy. Each type of weapon has a different role in combat. There is no reason that a big, heavy, bulky, scoped rifle should be all preferable over a compact SMG when you're being rushed by enemies 10 meters away. The sniper rifle's old x5 critical multiplier allowed this style of play because even your big, heavy, bulky, scoped rifle hit like a freight train due to the crits on every shot.

tl;dr = sniper rifle is a perfect weapon for delivering sneak attack criticals. If you don't want to play as a sniper, don't use a sniper rifle.

As far as reducing the accuracy of the lever action rifles, I'm in favor. Which I have been ever since weeks ago when I pointed out that the problem with them wasn't their power, it was the fact that they could score hits at crazy ranges.

The Assault Carbine is more of a collector's item or an afterthought on Black Isles' part IMO. Anything with 5mm peashooter ammo isn't worth it, much like the miniguns. If I'm fighting under 100 yards, I go with my cowboy caliber irons, they have outrageous accuracy and knockdown power compared to non-sniper cartridges.

Assault Carbine is not total poo. I love that weapon.

It's not poo and it dosent do much damage cause it uses 5mm ammo

It is High Velocity (5 Powder required for crafting, compared to the 5.56's 4) 5mm, and being such a small round, has inherent armor-piercing chararacteristics, but this is not so in FNV, making a high-performance military-grade ammo type inferior to a submachine gun.

Except this is not a combat simulator.
Perhaps for realism sake they should have had different cartridges. But other than that the sniper rifle is supposed to be a tier above the hunting rifle and thus from a game balance perspective should do some more damage.

As for sneak-crits, it's absurd that an automatic critical isn't considered enough of an advantage.

It's more accurate, shoots faster, costs few AP in VATS, comes with a scope by default, and you can add a suppressor. The last one being a huge game-changer. The only thing that really gets worse is the cost of using it since the sniper rifle needs more maintenance (slightly offset by the fact that it will one-shot a deathclaw so you don't need to be firing many times). And I guess it weighs a little more?

it also feels underpowered when hitting somebody in the head from miles away, when not crouching. where is the logic in that?
you keep on referring to the short range abuse, and fail to see, that it is not only the short distance properties affected by these changes.
btw, 40AP per shot is nothing i'd consider 'few'

Where is the logic in eating meat making you stronger or in being able to fix guns with ducktape or the player being able to absorb enough bullets that their skin would look like the surface of Merucry, or in the fact that the player has an infinite number of magazines and never has to find, reload, or manage them? These are game realities. As is the fact that sneaking lets you make sneak attacks. I don't understand why pressing one button is such a hardship. 80% of the game makes no logical sense, which is common to games as a whole.



38 for sniper rifle versus 60 for hunting rifle = few.

Actually you all almost don't get the point with the weapon. Yes the munitions used with the weapon can be a slight effect on how it's not a great gun. But you have to think that an SMG shoots almost the same munitions and it's effective, and also the minigun shoots the 5mm bullets and that's an outstanding gun in the right hands.

The factor that brings the Assault Carbine down is because it shoots faster, which eliminates all of the weapons accuracy. That gun has no accuracy and you never have a sneak attack because every round in the 3-5 round burst misses the target besides for the last bullet because the recoil is the most stabilized after the burst is finished and the last 2 bullets leave the barrel.

Summary: It shoots smaller rounds which slightly makes it less powerful. It shoots faster, which makes you overrate it's uses. Yet, it has almost zero accuracy, which deems it a very poor gun especially since a sneak attack is almost out of the question.

Sniper rifle have 80hp, IIRC Hunting Rifle have 300, that's a big difference in repair.

Better accuracy is almost pointless in the 0.0X range.

Hunting Rifle just got a screw up AP; but if you compare .308 weapons to lever-actions, they are horrible.

Suppressor is also meaningless if you are actually "sniping".

Really, the only use for my sniper rifle is character with high Gun skill but low Melee/Unarmed skill.

we keep on going in circles here.
as i've said a thousand times, my character build has been made obsolete with these changes, as i simply could have used my special points, my perks and traits on something better, when the game suddenly forces me to rely on those sneak attack bonuses everyone gets. i'm no longer able to land a chain of critical hits on groups of critters, i'm taking on from the distances, which was incredibly satisfying for me. i have the character build for it, but not a corresponding gun anymore.
the gobi rifle, my favorite weapon, has become a completely pointless gun, outclassed by even a scoped trail carbine. that just svcks, simple as that.
who's using a gobi rifle now? you? for sure not. if a rebalancing ends up in that no one is using a certain gun anymore, it has been done wrong. nobody argued against dumbing down sniper rifles, but what has been done, was a full scale crippling, making not only a certain weapon useless, but whole character builds, too.
i'm out, as i have nothing more to say,

I agree, Gobi is obsolete once you have a modded Hunting Rifle or Sniper Rifle.

If Gobi have a clip of 10 and extra 100hp (which I tried) it would be semi-competitive against other .308.

The suppressor is HUGE when sniping. It lets you go from one Sneak Attack against a group of baddies, to sneak attacks against everyone of the baddies. They will just stand around and let you slaughter them once you get the suppressor on the sniper.

The lever rifles are crazy overpowered all around. Heavy damage, insanely impossible lever action animations, pinpoint accuracy. And also, the .45-70 Gov't round became obsolete IRL for a reason: it can't compare to modern rifle rounds. Why is it second only to the .50 MG in all-around stopping power?

As for those lamenting over the sniper rifle's changes... If you want to slug it out at close range with a .308-chambered weapon, use the automatic rifle from Dead Money (or wait until February 22 for those on platforms who fell victim to Microsoft's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish moves). The sniper rifle is for SNIPING.

I think Hunting Rifle beat Automatic Rifle square on with round efficiency.

And why would you use Guns with Dead Money? Holorifle beats all!

No, if you actually snipe far enough, the noise makes no difference...in fact, if the kill impulse is high enough, silent weapon would still alert them.

The suppressor is only good for robbing friendly/neutrals.

Not really, Using the Ratslayer I was able to snipe 4 fiends without alerting them at medium range, that other wise would have come running with a non-silenced weapon. They took 2 rounds each too.

To topic at hand:

I haven't used it much but I did a few times using surplus and HP ammo it cut right throw low armor targets at mid close ranges just fine. AP works good vs. mid/heavies too. (Creature wise, I haven't shot at anything like PA or combat armor with it yet.)

This isn't true in real life. Not only does barrel length contribute significantly to muzzle velocity, but the combination of bullet design/weight and barrel twist can affect flight characteristics and terminal ballistics. I.e. the same cartridge loaded with the same primers, powder, and bullets firing from two different rifles can have significantly different muzzle velocities, accuracy and terminal ballistics given a certain range.

As for F:NV, I gave the Hunting Rifle a slightly higher DAM than the Sniper Rifle/Gobi because its RoF is so much worse. When you move from tier to tier within the same weapon "concept", I think it's good to keep one statistic of the "worse" weapon superior to the better weapon. It means the weapon isn't instantly outmoded; there's still a reason to keep it around if you value that particular aspect.

I've already looked at the lever-actions and their RoF and AP costs were too low across the board. As I wrote earlier (?), much of the initial upscaling of the looping reload guns (.357 Magnum Revolver, Cowboy Repeater, Trail Carbine, Brush Gun, Lever-Action Shotgun, Hunting Shotgun) was because players here (Obsidian) disliked the long looping reload so much that other advantages of the guns were seen as not worth the hassle.

MadCat221, .45-70 Gov't is not an obsolete round in modern loadings. You certainly can't use it at long range due to the heavy, wide bullets most cartridges use, but at modest hunting ranges it will drop anything in North America including grizzlies and polar bears. .308 Winchester is designed for flat trajectory and tends to overpenetrate and have poor expansion at close range. It's pretty difficult (I won't say impossible) to model all aspects of gun/cartridge/bullet performance for a game (especially an RPG, where the character's stats come into play), but the .45-70 Gov't was selected as the top-end lever-action/revolver round because in modern loadings, at close range, it is an extremely effective round.

This I agree, a lot.

And thank you for write up a counter argument about forums.

Obviously this thread is derail back to sniper rifle....but I would say it is closely related.

Josh, I personally think the larger clip, cheap repair and durability would make up for other possible disadvantage Hunting Rifle have against other .308 weapon.

As for Assault Carbine, I think simply add it to Viper/Jackals' equipment list to increase availability would change people's opinion about it.

I'm kind of surprised this hasn't been voiced more, because it's certainly a factor for me. Against big groups of e.g. fire geckos I've found I can get into big trouble while stuck in the reloading sequence. I actually prefer the assault carbine in that sort of situation (where DT isn't an issue) because you can spray everything into oblivion before it gets close, even if you do end up using lots of (cheap) ammo.

Whatever, it's a fantastic game so cheers for making it.



I think this is a good point. It's relatively hard to get hold of, so you do kind of expect it to be better than it is.

As a budding gun nut I think the best approach to the lever guns is to slow down the rate of fire, AP cost and increase the spread. It is a powerful round, but I think making it a more mid range round is best.

Now, I would LOVE to see certain ammo types have a base armor penetration and bonus to damage. I know it makes the game more complicated, but I think it is worth it. A slow moving round like the .45-70 would butcher a lightly armored toon, but would be much less effective against power armor vs high veliocity round. Also, as a resident explosives lover please boost those weapons! I can do it via mods, but it is not the same.

BTW, I think FNV was a good game for Obsidian, especially since this was one of your first sandbox type games. Even Beth has made a dudes (Oblivion) and they started the whole genre. It was refreshing to see your approach to a good story. Just need to make the game more difficult. Players like difficult games. Crap, I still remember dying a ton in Fallout 2, would love that difficulty in FNV. Or the next game.

Just my two cents.

I don't know how anyone can be swamped by geckos. Even in caves you generally have long hallways to kill them easily in one clip of a cowboy rifle as they dribble at you. Outside it is obviously much easier.

Making the assault carbine more easily available on it's own wouldn't solve every problem either because in those situations it is outclassed by submachine guns. You would have to lower it's tier literally to being found in Goodsprings. You then also introduce the issue that there is no two handed rapid fire weapon until the LMG.

This is why the problems of the assault carbine struck me so. It doesn't fit anywhere. It is pretty much bad at everything. The only place it currently make sense is a tutorial gun. And then you have the dissonance problem of why a modern assault rifle can't outdo a submachine gun made in the time of Bonnie and clyde.

Like I said in the original topic the game suffers from having one flat defense statistic DT. To have DPS and high damage per round weapons coexist together you need things that are more resistant to one over the other. Big tough mutant animals should best be fought with those lumps of lead throwing cowboy guns but should be abosrbed by bipedal military enemies. Armor should have stayed as absorption and DT represent the sheer toughness of mutant critters IMO.

Make it have more punch then a SMG....since it's using rifle rounds instead of pistol ones. I guess you could also tighten up it's spread a little so you can land multiple hits from close middle range. That way it's the clear level up from a SMG on the way to the "top" LMG in the auto guns category.

No, they should have implemented the system fully instead. In the originals you have modifiers on guns and there ammo. from everything from +/- to hit, damage, and penetration. Also would have been much better to have the DT and DR system with multiple damage types back. That way you can model "tough" animals with higher DR and lower DT.

It *doesn't* use a rifle round. 5mm has "low power PDW cartridge" written all over it. If you consider it to be the same as the real-world 5mm Remington Rimfire Magnum, it delivers comparable energy to ye olde 9x19mm, being a much smaller bullet at much higher speed which translates to penetration at the cost of cutting a smaller wound channel. It is a low powered round optimized for low recoil and good armor penetration (this also explains why the "Minigun" doesn't knock you over when you fire it). 5mm is in the same general area as the tiny rounds used by the H&K MP7 and FN P90. Part of the problem is that, unlike in the real world, video game characters don't fear getting shot or feel pain like living things do. In the real world if you fire your PDW popgun at somebody and hit them half a dozen times with its pathetic little bullets, they are probably going to leave you alone because they are now seriously injured and will die without medial attention. Video game characters have no self preservation or pain which somewhat devalues these things.