I am not sure that "realism" and "balancing" in the same sentence like that makes any sense. Realism seems to me to be rather unbalancing.

But I will note that the .44 has considerably rarer ammo than the .50 cal. And, also that the ap cost for the both of them is significantly higher than the AP cost for the .308 and for the 10mm. So to deal with ammo conservation issues you typically wind up carrying several weapons which eats into your weight allowance. And to get most of the best perks for pistols you'll probably want to be investing in stats other than strength...

But I guess you could argue that nothing makes sense???

No. Now what you gone do about it DUDE?

No, those are NOT versions you are gone be using most of the time. Both mods and perks are available only at certain level and perks (including those for mods) moreover cost skill points which you may not have (for example because you want to use them for another perks). For that reason, plain comparison makes no sense.

You can make pistol in 12 gauge too. But it still won't be pistol round. .50 is heavy machine gun round.

Here's the thing. The reality is that in RL the .44 Special and the .44 Magnum (anybody remember "Dirty Harry"? ) comprise nearly all .44 caliber handguns. I'm unsure how it works out, but the diameter of the .44 slug is .429 or thereabouts and the .50 cal is actually about .560. The .44 Special and Magnum has a specially designed longer-than-normal shell casing to fire a high-velocity projectile using 180 to 200 grains of powder. the .50 uses what is essentially a scaled-up 30.06 cartridge.

The .50 caliber bullet weighs nearly 3 X what the .44 weighs, but is only marginally bigger in diameter, and in fact, the difference is only marginally visible with the human eye. The additional weight of the .50 is in the length of the slug. One might think that the additional weight would mean more damage, but that is kind of illusory.

The heavier slug has more "punching power" meaning it will penetrate deeper in a given material, but if you are talking light armor and human bodies, the additional weight is meaningless from a damage standpoint. With a .50 you can shoot a deer and also kill the deer standing behind it. The .50 caliber will penetrate and engine block where the .44 won't, and in that sense does more damage, but I doubt we're really generally talking about killing a Kenworth here.

The other difference is in range. The range of the .50 rifle vs the .44 really wasn't brought up here, but this is as good a time as any. What's the range on the .44? Something like 80 I think but better in the modded Bull version? The rifle on the other hand will (with a long barrel) have a range in the upper 200s, I believe. From that standpoint, the .50 will kill things that the .44 can't even hit...

Currently in RL (in case anyone's interested), the long range confirmed kill record is some 8000+ yards with a .338...

So a comparison between two fully upgraded weapons, in a game where you shoot a bunch of stuff, to determine which one is better for you makes no sense. Do you seriously believe that?

This is funny. I sell all .45, .44 and 5mm these days. I don't bring pistols to a real fight, my combat rifle is a .308 and I don't like the huge pray and spray machines.

Sacrilege! How can you sell .44 rounds? They're so rare I keep running out

He is not merely determining which one is better. He is instead complaining that fully modded and fully perked .44 does more nominal damage then fully moded hunting rifle (which .50 cal sniper rifle is).

There is no reason why it shouldn't.

What are they good for? I went to help out a settlement under attack yesterday. About 10 Super Mutants, several legendary, several masters, damn there was only a couple of normal ones.

A good fight, My new X-01 set, pretty well tricked out, now helped a lot. A pistol would have been a joke there.

He kinda is determining which one is better, and then saying it shouldn't be better according to real world logic(yes I know this is a game but rules apply)/balance. I don't know if he's right or wrong, but the comparison is still valid.

Perks double damage for weapon type, heavy weapons, rifles, pistols and automatic. You can eiter include it or not.

Mods is variable for different weapons so it makes sense to use the highest damage mod, unless if has serious downsides like reducing range a lot.


And yes pistols are serious OP, game balance had it been realistic damage they would be junk. They are popular real life because they are light and easy to carry but nobody uses them as main weapon in an war.

There is not much point in arguing about the realism of different guns in a game system that abstracts all their effects down to a single "damage" number. The reality of firearms damage is energy and how that energy is delivered to a target. A .44 Magnum is more powerful than a 9mm in the real world, but the reality is that the .44 is generally "too much gun" to shoot a person with and will go right through - taking a large portion of its energy with it. The .44 Mag and similar are useful for shooting hardened targets like wild boar, bear or moose, or for armored people. Honestly, I would (and do!) choose 9mm for defense against people any day for a myriad of reasons - not the least of which is that it will do more damage to a person (on average) than a .44 Magnum.

Rifles are another bag of worms of wounding dynamics that I won't get into here, as this is not a firearms forum. Just suffice to say that the problems the .44 Mag has with shooting people are magnified even more by the .50 BMG (which we can assume is what the game means by .50 Cal, based on the pictures). The .50 is an anti-material round, not an anti-personnel round. It is meant for killing vehicles! If you shot somebody with it, they're going to die because it starts with SO MUCH energy in the first place, but it very definitely wastes most of that energy. The rifles that use it are made for huge, huge ranges so that they can lose a lot of their energy with distance and still be lethal a mile away.

So the long and short of it is that the real difference among these different rounds MUST consider penetration as a crucial aspect of wounding. But since the game doesn't do that, all we're left with is how they function IN GAME. The reason that the .44 is so strong compared to the .50 is that it creates a viable option for players who have high Gunslinger ratings. I think this is what arras is talking about when he mentions the perks - not Gun Nut perks, but Gunslinger/Rifleman perks.

I would agree to some extent if the .44 wasn't just flat out superior in this game, fires faster, has more damage, costs less AP to fire in VATS. It's not just a viable alternative, it's better hands down. I think that's the OPs problem, and I presume he thinks it would be more balanced if it had lower damage than the .50 cal does.

The truth is almost all weapons int he game are underpowered as opposed to RL counterparts. Consider, how many times do you have to shoot a raider in the head vs how many times you would have to shoot someone in RL in the head to make them want to stop fighting?

With all the "bullet sponges" running around, one has to wonder why bother carrying anything less than a mini-nuke? By the way, I think Special Forces would disagree about the usefulness of pistols... didn't they just switch from 9mm to something a little bigger? Then too, there is the thought "Is Fallout 4 really a war?" or just a series of encounters?

The problem is that Fallout damage have nothing to do with reality. In reality you don't have hit points, and weapons does not have damage. Those are very inaccurate abstractions.

In real world amount of damage bluet does is not determined merely by size of the bullet and it's speed and weight. You can shoot someone with .50 cal and he can survive if you bullet went strait through tissue without hitting any essential organ. On the other hand you can hit the same person with .38 any he will die instantly because bullet have stooped inside his heart.

In real world what is important is what organ bullet hit and what damage it done to it. You don't die of "bullet damage", you die of vital organ failure. The other kind of lethal "damage" bullet does is "shock" or "trauma". You can get hit by bullet in to non vital organ but your body can experience shock trauma which can kill you. And the last type of lethal "damage" in real world is bleeding. You can receive non lethal wound in to your finger nail but you may bleed to death as a result.

For those reasons comparing real world weapon performance with computer game which use "hit points" makes very little sense. There is no way you can objectively use real world properties of weapon and it's cartridge to calculate "damage" in hit point system. It's all about arbitrary numbers, nothing else.

I don't use heavy guns. Well once in a while for fun, but I have nothing in heavy guns.

My 5.56 Assault Rifle, my .308 Combat Rifle and my Combat Shotgun do most of the work.

I just felt like bringing up another property, base damage, which is 48 for the .44 and 37 for the hunting rifle, which causes a significant difference against armored targets, because armor's effectiveness is scaled to weapon base damage, meaning that the hunting rifle always suffers greater damage loss to armored enemies than the .44

The .44 is rather more powerful than the .50, but I feal what they really need to do to fix this imbalance is make a better new high caliber rifle.

@arras

You can determine the relative damage of real life rounds by how much of the human body would be considered a fatal area to be shot in real life.

A .38 needs to hit very specific areas at very specific angles to be lethal, and most of those are still only when medical attention is absent

If you get hit by a .50 you will probably die, if it hits your center of mass you are probably dead, if it hits an extremity you probably lose that extremity, and a lot of blood loss in any case.

So a .50 would be more likely fatal with one shot, so in a hitpoint system it makes sense that it does a lot more damage so as to be lethal in a few shots.

In game the .50 rifle does less damage, and is more easily reduced by armor than the .44 pistol, which is rather contrary to the vehicle killing power a real life .50 rifle has

Comparing game balance and real world performance is illogical by definition. Balance goes against realism. Real world is all about dis-balance.

.44 pistol does more damage then .50 cal sniper rifle because .44 pistol have much shorter range. That's game balance. There are other factors which contribute to game balance, which OP forgot to mention too, like availability (rarity) of gun itself and it's ammo. Availability of mods and perks and their cost.

That's why I said OP makes no sense. It's out of context.

I just can't use PA without heavy guns, it seems wrong. I'll probably make a third character at some point to fiddle with more conventional weapons.

Dude, this is so wrong that I just can't let it pass. The most lethal round in the USA - by numbers of actual deaths per year - is the .22LR. The most effective round for killing people in terms of deaths per shooting (again, real statistical numbers here) is the .357 Magnum followed closely by the .40 Win which was created specifically to approximate the performance of the .357 Mag in a semi-auto. These bullets (we're talking about bullets, really, not guns) are specifically designed to kill people best. That is they deliver all their damage in the 12 inches or so that people's body inhabit rather than go through.

Armies use long guns because the tactics of war require them, not because long guns are more lethal. Hell, the .223 was designed specifically to be less lethal than its predecessor .308 on the theory that a wounded soldier was more of a detriment to a fighting force than a dead one.

Balance does not always go against realism, what are you talking about? A mini-nuke doing more damage than a grenade is both balanced and realistic. They don't always go hand in hand, but they don't always disagree either.

Guys, his comparison of fully perked out related skills doesn't matter, just half the number for the base (modded ones). Why is it so hard to understand ?




Because it's not fun to constantly having to gimp my characters because of the wierd balance. A more fun "game mechanic" is to have access to a varied arsenal that has different advantages and disadvantages. I'm not even talking about how they perform in real life.

Right now, laser weapons are just so much better than balistic weopons and the .44 calibler is also wierdly balanced.

I think it would have worked better if it had much less accuracy at long distance.

The reason that we are reduced to using real life comparisons has to do with the OPs questioning of why a .44 would do more damage than a .50. If it's all just game based, then there is no reason whatsoever to think that a .50 would do more damage than a .22 because it all exists only in the minds of the developers, and the players in the game. Damage is whatever the devs say it is. It only seems logical to think of a .50 as doing more damage after the real life counterpart is brought in. I suppose what is being questioned is basically the dev's grasp on weaponry and relative damage, and it has little to do with the actual caliber or whatever of the weapon itself...

I don't think we know for sure yet, but I suspect that in this context, "base damage" means base modded damage before perks like Rifleman. I do not think it means original unmodded damage of the basic weapon.

I don't really know much about guns, but aren't those statistics skewed by the availability of the guns using those specific cartridges?

This, and from what he's saying (and he does have a point) that the .44 magnum is plain better in every single way than the .50 cal rifle, bar range which isn't really that important most of the time, so by making the .50cal deal more damage it would kinda balance things out.