Hello everyone, first time poster here.

I have been playing Fallout new vegas a lot and have finally got my hands on one of my favourite Fallout 3 weapons, the Gatling laser!

Unfortunately I've tried it on a number of different enemies and have found that compared to Fallout 3's GL it is surprisingly underpowered. With New Vegas' Damage threshold system on armor, a fully repaired GL with 100 points in energy weapons and the +3 damage mod firing max-charged shots is hopeless against any heavily armored targets like Deathclaws, Super Mutants and BoS Paladins as their high DT almost completely neutralizes the damage. I've literally shot all 240 ammo at a single Paladin and inflicted only minor damage.

Obsidian also seem to have boosted the fire rate of the Gatling laser by 10 shots per second, increasing the DPS but also increasing the ammo consumption. Those 10 extra shots per second don't help one jot against armor and make it good only for killing a few unarmored enemies before all your ammo is exhausted.

I don't have the better criticals or laser commander perks yet, but I suspect that laser commander wouldn't makes much of a difference since +10% damage translates into only 1 or 2 extra points. I'm not sure if better criticals would make much difference since I don't understand the crit damage calculations and I can't tell how frequently the gatling laser currently crits.

Any suggestions? Am I using it wrong? Would those perks help?

Thanks.

I had 4 or 5 Deathclaws charge me at once, and only the Gatling Laser let me survive - but I did use up over half my total ammo!!! May be a little weaker than FO3 (where it was my fav also), but the real weakness is going to be lack of ammo in FONV ( I had over 10,000 ammo in FO3)

Hi mrmike_49,

That's interesting. At the moment it seems like I can barely dent a deathclaw (I'm playing on hard, not sure if that affects their armor) with the Gatling laser. Did you have the laser commander or better criticals perk at the time?

Thanks,

Its not the only underpowered energy weapon in Fallout new vegas.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Gatling_Laser_%28Fallout:_New_Vegas%29

Crit damage doesn't have a calculation, it's real easy, each weapon has a different critical damage bonus, when you crit you add that to the regular damage.

Different weapons have higher or lower chances of critting though.

A gatling laser normally does 7 damage per hit, a crit does 7 more.

The gatling laser is really the most defined laser weapon in terms of that it embraces the notion that lasers are fast, accurate and low damage but high dps. It's exactly the kind of weapon you want to use against humans and unarmored foes.

And the opposite of what you want to use against armored foes.

Thanks, Vocha. Interesting, I thought there was more complex maths going on than just that.

I can appreciate that the Gatling laser makes sense thematically, but since there are very few lightly armored foes at this point in the game (particularly ones who are dangerous enough to warrant the Gatling Laser's 500+ DPS), it's hard to see much practical use for it.

I suppose it could be effective against Jackals as they can be well armed and tend to be quite lightly armored, but since they have quite low health they can be killed just as well by any other half-decent weapon.

Thanks..

Hi imp slayer79,

I'd agree that all the laser weapons suffer somewhat from low Damage ouput. I can appreciate that their high accuracy, high speed and low damage are what distinguishes them from plasma weapons, but since New Vegas has this damage threshold system, pure damage output regardless of DPS is now much more important than it was in Fallout 3. Now you can't wear armored enemies down with lots of weak shots like you could in Fallout 3.

Some of the plasma weapons are crazy powerful, though - The multiplas with max charged ammo fires three simultaneous 60+ damage shots, and it can be nicked from the Silver Rush as whenever you want.

I do have the Perk to increase Crit Chance, I'm not sure that there aren't 2 perks that affect Crits???

Playing on Normal, am level 30, 100 EW

Laser commander and better critical's says hi. The Gatling Laser may not be the best weapon in the game, but vs large groups of enemies (even armored) the only weapon i can think of thats more deadly is the fat man.

The Fatman does like 86 damage. When it did around 800-1200 damage in FO3 depending on your big gun skill.

Solution: Don't use anything but the Gauss Rifle (Preferably the unique one) and Laser RCW with mod.
Any other weapon is complete crap when compared to these two.
Use RCW for all enemies without high DT and Gauss Rifle from far far away for enemies with high DT.

But yeah I never found it on my 60 hours first character.
Sad to hear this weapon is complete crap as well.
Sad that almost no Energy Weapons are actually good. (Yes, this will be the new thing I'll whine about until the next game is released or until they fix the skill with a patch or a new form of ammo which has armor piercing damage.)

At first I didnt realy like laser weapons.. but then I started running a new energy explosives build with trigger discipline and ...

They do rather well at a distance. I think you will find a gatling laser is more effective at range then a minigun.

Hi,

I'm going to take back some of what I said.

I've been using the Gatling laser more and now have both perks, and it's definitely got its uses. While wandering the wastes I can annihilate entire groups of enemies, excluding Giant Rads, Deathclaws, etc, in seconds and by carefully tap-tap-tapping the trigger rather than just hosing shots everywhere I'm able to hold onto my ammo a little longer.

I think what threw me is that you have to use the weapon differently that you did in Fallout 3. One cannot simply go around spraying ammo at everything anymore.

I agree that the laser RCW is very good when used correctly, and it seems a little odd that it is more effective against Deathclaws and their like than the Gatling laser, but nm.

I still think many of the plasma weapons are enormously potent, particularly the multiplas, plasma caster and the unique plasma rifle (i forget its name).

Does anyone know how to calculate chance of critical hits with the 2 perks for Crit Chance and Laser Commander?? PER 8, INT 8, AG 6, STR 8

Cause when I fought those 5 Deathclaws, I sprayed ~ 1,000 rounds - so a 10% crit chance would have meant 100 critical hits, which should be more than enough to take out a half dozen Deathclaws even with their high DT and low Gat Laser (non crit) damage

Point that same Gatling Laser at a Cazador swarm, or a stampede of Fire Geckos. The results should be allot different.

Most of the problems with energy weapons are user errors that happens when the wrong weapon is used against a target. Not all mind to be fair. One does need to "all-or-nothing" specialize into energy weapons to get anywhere with them.

Max Charge (MC) rounds actually do more damage than AP rounds for weapons with similar stats.

Yeah max charge rounds are vital. A max charged stealth Gauss Rifle shot is truly a thing to behold.

From what I've experienced, a lot of the energy weapons aren't good against foes with high DT. I recommend trying the Gauss Rifle, Laser RCW, and Plasmacaster. Those weapons are great against enemies with high DT.

I'm running through with a Energy Weapons build now. All energy weapons are rubbish against any sort of armour. Even with 100 in EW and the various energy weapons I usually get the red solid shield appearing which signifies that the current weapon has a muchly reduce effect against the current target. I found the Tri-Beam laser (with focusing mod), Q-35 Plasma Rifle and the Laser RCW to be the most effective weapons so far.

Are you using MC rounds for your weapons? A energy weapon with 20 base DAM will do 35 DAM with an MC round, which should be more than enough to surpass the armor of almost anything.

Yeah, they always do more damage. But unless you're shooting at an unarmoured target, not as much of it get's through compared to AP rounds. AP rounds negate 15 points of damage threshold. Against some enemies, such as deathclaws, those 15 points are the only thing getting through.

I don't even see the point in using energy weapons in this game. I mean sure, you can switch them about and have a different one for each situation. But with regular guns all you need to do is put AP rounds in them and they become an allrounder weapon. You can run around with a Varmint Rifle for the entire game, and as long as you're using AP rounds you'll be able to kill everything. You can't do that with a Laser Pistol and Max Charge rounds.

I'm not sure how far you've got, but I found that the best early/mid game anti-armor weapon I could find was a regular laser gun, upgraded with everything except the (possibly bugged) beam splitter that reduces individual beam damage too much and in my case actually reduced overall damage instead of adding 30% more.

Once I got the unique green laser rifle I started using it instead as it had higher DAM, but a regular laser rifle with a scope and the +3 dam mod and overcharged/maxcharged ammo can be a surprisingly powerful sniping weapon. True, you're not going to be killing deathclaws with the basic energy weapons but you'll have trouble taking them out with many basic guns as well.

Now I'm sporting a Gatling Laser and a Gauss Gun, pretty much everything is my [censored].

DT just subtracts the DAM from the DT, so a weapon doing 20 damage will do 10 against an enemy with 10DT. What I mean is that AP rounds do less damage even including the enemies reduced DT. Here's a copy paste of a breakdown of the damage I've done before.

Ok, going over some numbers, let's have a Rifle and a Laser do 25 damage each. Against an enemy with 10 DT, they do 15 damage base, correct?

With the AP rounds, it goes like this
10DT: 25 - (25x.05) - (10-15) = 28.75 (Or if we just take DT to be 0 instead of -5, 23.75)
15:DT 25 - (25x.05) - (15-15) = 23.75
20:Dt: 25 - (25x.05) - (20-15) = 18.75

With Max Charge (MC) rounds, the Laser looks like this.
10: 25 + (25x.75) - 10 = 33.75
15: 25 + (25x.75) - 15 = 28.75
20: 25 + (25x.75) - 20= 23.75

The Laser gun actually does MORE damage than a regular gun with AP rounds does. If people are complaining about the Laser guns being weak, I can't help but wonder if they are even using the MC rounds.

Looking over a full list of weapons, I can see what some people are complaining about in a way. There are many more high damage guns for Guns than Energy, but the fact is that the guns still do roughly the same damage as their counterparts in each category, and Energy weapons with MC rounds scale much better than regular guns do (i.e., as they go up in damage, a Laser with MC rounds will keep doing more and more and more damage than a gun with AP rounds. In the example I used there is a 5 damage gap, but with 30 DAM weapons the gap becomes 9, etc.)

I actually used Max Charge.
Helped a little, but not enough.
Weapons still svcked.
And it's not fun buying a crapload of microfusion cells from a lot of different vendors, then converting them to Max Charge which has it's own rate. (I dunno what that is, 3 MFC to 1 OC?)
Then using weapons that require like 3/4/6 MFC for each shot.
Money runs out, vendors runs out, weapon CND runs out.
EW =/= fun. /imo

Take the perk that allows you to gain more depleted energy cells from your shots, and just buy depleted energy cells from vendors for cheap. You automatically collect depleted cells, but the perk that allows you to collect pretty much double the amount makes it so you should hardly ever run out of ammo, and even if you do end up running out it should save you thousands of caps over the course of the game.

If you have 300 MC rounds and 500 regular rounds, only use the MC rounds against heavy enemies. Are you running into a lot of heavy enemies lately? Convert the regular rounds to MC rounds. Running into weaker enemies? Convert some MC rounds back to regular rounds. The regular rounds pretty much take care of themselves in terms of recycle ability. 500Reg rounds turn into like 250 depleted rounds, which turn into more Reg rounds, etc, etc.

If you just buy depleted rounds you can make your own ammo for so much cheaper than buying it from vendors. Even better is that you can buy the bulk energy rounds and use them instead of normal rounds on enemies with low DT. These will also turn into depleted cells, which can be turned back into regular rounds or MC rounds, and you essentially get double the ammo for 1/3 the cost.

Honestly, energy weapons users should have a much easier time making their ammo than guns users, since bullets require powder, casings, and primers and whatnot, and the most they can recover from fired shells is casings. Energy users automatically collect everything they need to make more ammo just by using their weapons.