The problem is simple.. sawyer realy knows his stuff with guns.. but when it came to energy weapons he somehow managed to call up the power of mega derp and realy realy blew it.

He got everything wrong.

In energy weapons your not dealing with bullets your dealing with cells and packs... each holding alot of charges. But somehow they made it such that each shot was a cell or pack all its own... Baicaly like loading an m 16 with a dozen clips and firing clips out of it.... DERP!

So they got the weight of the ammo off by a massive amount AND they got the ammo availablity off too... yes chet would only have a few small cells but thats alot of shots for a laser pistol...

Anyway its supposed to be tweaked and fiddled in the patch that will come out sometime soonishish.

I'm not saying it isn't. Energy Weapons need help. I agree with you. I was just suggesting something that helped me when I played an EW character.

Saving in the shop and quitting the game completely fixes that for me. With every merchant.

If I would be really sarcastic I would say "What a brilliant plan!"...

Naw. He blew it with the bombs. the just pewed the energy weapons

It's a plan that worked, which is more than you have to offer. My character now has more ammo than I could possibly use, and I haven't had to "farm" in some time. Good luck to you.

Point was that I know perfectly well that I could take them easily with sneak crits, but I do not do that because those should not need that in the first place. If you need sneak crit for Fiend, you know that your weapon really and utterly svcks.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

True, it works for me to, it's just so annoying to turn off your game then re-turn it on.

They're energy weapons... The ammo should be rare, but the damage should more than make up for it. I heard one of the devs was a gun fanatic, so they 'balanced' energy weapons. They should've gone back to the original fallouts energy weapons. High damage, moderate weight, and expensive.

Not made them the worst weapons in the game. You're going to die if you're hit with a 5,000 degree bolt of plasma. Anywhere. From the shock. I'd rather take a bullet than a plasma bolt...

Edit: Added stuff.

No need to be an [censored]. With that perk (thats name eludes me now) that causes a giant explosion when ever you hit something with an energy weapon even when you kill the smallest creatures, energy weapons are pretty over powered then. A few shots takes out like 10 low level enemies at once.

Energy Weapons are rare mostly due to Canon. Energy weapons were very new in the years before the great war. So few in types and numbers. They are harder to maintain so after 200 plus years many would have broken.

Ammo being hard to find I would agree with if Energy Weapons were as powerful as they should be, lasers are concentrated light, I've seen lasers used to carve things into metal, the lasers in FO are hundreds of times more powerful than that, they should be able to burn through people in two or three hits at the most with 100 Energy Skill

I remember in FO3 having too many EC packs and MF cells to ever use, and even the lasers were acceptably powerful enough, the thing is, laser and plasma weapons in FONV do as much damage as they did in FO3, it's just now everything has DT instead of DR, with DT you need something more powerful to be able to hurt your enemies, a laser rifle can still do the job, barely, with some mods and high Energy Skill, but it's not enough.

One thing I'm really annoyed about is how pathetically weak the Laser RCW is, anything with armour just laughs it off, just because it's automatic doesn't mean it has to do pathetic damage, the Laser RCW is just 6 Laser Rifles built into one weapon (It's explained somewhere and on the Wiki) which means it's damage should be similar to the LMG, though I still love how they've modelled it after the Thompson.

1: It's a late-game perk.

2: It's so OP'd that it's a danger to you and your companions and any allies/neutrals in the area as well, since you all get caught up in the blast too.

THIS THIS THIS

Wrong comparison. The Laser RCW is a laser submachinegun, and it compares quite favorably to the 10mm submachinegun. The RCW does slightly less damage (base 15 versus base 19), but it's one of the most accurate automatic weapons in the game (spread 0.08 versus 4.0), uses cheap common ammo (ECP's only cost 1 cap, like 10mm ammo, and are regularly found in stores by the hundreds), has a larger magazine, is more durable, weighs less (both the weapon and its ammo)....

Yep. Laser RCW is one of the exceptions to the "Crap E-Weaps" problem.

Its big brother, the Laser Gatling, on the other hand, is completely useless on account of having no ability to overcome even a modicum of DT. Useful against Cazadores, and that's about it. Anything else is a waste, either from being low-level creep or possessing said modicum of DT, and even against Cazadores there are still ways less ammo-costly than the LaserGat.

If its RoF was just half what it is and its damage doubled, it'd still be suficciently BeamSpammy, AND would actually have damage that's of consequence.

Nice. Now, what do you do with high level enemies once you get the level 16 Meltdown perk to deal with the low level ones you've been fighting for the last 16 levels? :blink:

I've got http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Laser_Commander, and my view of your claim that Energy Weapons are "pretty powerful" remains the same: :rofl:

My Energy Weapons character, like two other characters of mine, is on hiatus waiting for that patch that's allegedly coming RSN ("Real Soon Now") to magically turn the game into what I thought, mistakenly, that I was buying back in October. :rolleyes:

This is true. Energy weapons are well known to be underpowered in New Vegas, and the rarity of their ammunition is only one cause of this, and honestly, a cause I would consider acceptable, had it not been for the fact that they fail to make up for the difficulty of finding ammunition by being much more deadly.

The next patch is supposed to fix energy weapons, fortunately, mainly by adding damage threshold reduction to them. I'd say it comes too late, energy weapons should have been worthy competition for guns by default, but at least it shows the developers know there's a problem, and are trying to fix it, now I just hope the patch also actually fixes some of the bugs in the game, and especially the new ones introduced in the last patch as well, and doesn't add new bugs. Of course, modders already beat Obsidian to it, but maybe once the next patch is released, we won't need energy weapon rebalancing mods... maybe, we shall see.



No, I'd still say they're underpowered, Meltdown only makes enemies explode when they die, and that's not going to be easy if your weapons are barely doing any damage because they're too weak to pierce the damage resistence of your enemy and there's no way to make them better at piercing armor because energy weapons lack anything with the same effect as armor piercing rounds. Besides, guns don't need you to choose a specific perk to be useful, so it's still bad game design that energy weapons do.

Also, try using meltdown when you're within the blast radius of the explosion, it might not seem so good then.



Which is why I'd say the damage threshold reduction for energy weapons should have been in the game by default.

Actually, I'd say that energy weapons should largely ignore damage threshold, and instead armor should have a separate stat to determine how effective it is at absorbing damage from energy weapons, because energy weapons don't cause damage by the same means as conventional firearms, and something that will protect you from bullets might not stop lasers. I can easily buy that power armor would be good at guarding against energy weapons fire because it's a high-tech, futuristic armor, and one might assume that when it was designed, energy weapons would be taken into account, and therefore it would be designed to protect the wearer against them. But I have a hard time believing that armor made out of tanned cow hide is going to protect you from a laser powerful enough to serve as a lethal weapon, for that matter, I have a hard time believing that the exoskeleton of a giant scorpion or lizard can block laser beams. But that's probably too major of a change to do in a patch, it would be nice if Bethesda or Obsidian, whoever develops the next Fallout game, would consider it for future games, though.



That'st quite reasonable, but the fact that they don't make up for their rarity by being half-way decent is less so. If energy weapons were actually as weak as they are in New Vegas, I doubt people before the war would have bothered, since the Rule of Cool is not really much justification to invest in developing new weapons. And being cool is about the only edge energy weapons have in the unmodded game, until the next patch is released.

If anything Energy Weapons should become much more rare (no Fiends and random mobs running around with them) and to balance their rarity be much more powerful, even more powerful than the coming update will buff them. They should be the cream of the crop but with limited availability to both the weapons and ammo, making their uniqueness and appeal that much greater. Nothing breaks the allure of a Plasma Rifle like having a cannon-fodder mob wearing crap armor running at you with fully stocked with them.

The issue is they were nerfed due to becoming just another level-list weapon. The shouldn't have gone down that road to begin with and it'd solve the issue of their weakness.

This took the fun out of it for me. Your 2nd (or 3rd, 4th, etc) time through, you know that one place where all the really good energy weapons are. And you can steal them with ease by simply carrying them into the bathroom in the back and taking them all. Takes all the fun out of discovering them in the wasteland.

The rcw is not as durable as you might think... go ahead fire both weapons and watch the durablity meter. Also remember the 10 mil gets the benfit of hand load ammo that doesnt break the weapon faster.
and turns the bugger into a mighty cazador whacking machine.

Oh and the ammo weighs the same .03 lb it just seems lighter when compared to the depleted unobtainium used in the small cells and the dark star alloy used in fusion power cells..


And the rcw is the only energy weapon with a sane gun weight. All the rest seem to be made from fruitcake.

Hello, two words: "Science Fiction". Two more: "Retro Future".

The game isn't about realism, it's about a brand of futurism that was commonplace in 1950's fiction which assumed that pocket-sized atomic batteries, advanced robotics and anti-gravity was just around the corner. It's also why there are giant insects, impossible hybrids and creatures from black lagoons in the game as well.

Suggested sci-fi viewing: Forbidden Planet, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Them!, Rocket Ship X-M...

In case you hadn't noticed, this game attempts to give its stories a sensible background. 'Science fiction' does not necessarily mean 'divorced from reality', nor is it a 'get out of jail free' card when it comes to explaining decisions made in a story. The fact is that energy weapons in this game (and Fallout 3) are no better than their conventional equivalents and it is perfectly reasonable to ask why anyone would go to the effort of creating weapons that offer no advantages over their predecessors.

It was the same way in Fallout 3, if I remember correctly. Only it wasn't weighted there and not nearly as rare so it wasn't as much of a problem.
I think it's more how Bethesda/the engine handles ammo.


Except that it's a perk you get at level 16 with 90 EW-skill (Meaning a late game perk), it damages everything around the target (allies, bystanders) and does nothing for EW-weapons general lackluster capability of dealing with DT.
Also Perks are not supposed to be a fix to a weapons lackluster performance.