I don't know, I use a Laser RCW once in a blue moon, and my Energy Skill, in all of my playthroughs, has never been higher than 28, and I did some pretty good damage with it.

Lol. That had to have been pretty messy. I hope you had enough toilet paper.

How exactly are the plasma caster and multiplas rifle extremely rare? You can get both at lvl 1, both are extremely easy and simple to aquire.

Stealing them from Van Graff is easy, buying them on the other hand or finding them is a little more difficult.

I got frustrated with an EW build I had and dropped it... is Maximum Charge ammo too resource intensive to use? Says it ups damage by 75%...

Well, it kinda proves that Energy Weapons are a worse skill than Guns. Because a skill that requires more work must yield more reward. Otherwise it's pointless, unless maybe it's for pure roleplaying value

I've tried to make a pure-EW character on my first run. I constantly ran out of ammunition, EW were costly and I ended up having Guns at the same level, if not higher, than EW. If I hadn't try to raise EW, I would have been much more effective with Guns.

In previous games Energy Weapons used to be expensive, harder to repare, not available early, munition was scarce but they dealt much more damage. Now the disadvantages are all still here but the damage was nerfed down. For EW to be effective, they must not simply be on par with guns. They must be superior to guns, because that's the whole point of EW.

5 regular shots make 2 shots of max charge. Plus you have to have vigilant recycler.

No they aren't all bad. But most of them are pretty bad leaving you with low variety compared to guns.

Gladly the few that ARE good are very good and easy to get. (Silver rush)

I agree with everything except harder to repair. They weren't really any harder to repair in FO3 and the first 2 fallouts didn't have weapon repair. But yeah you have to wonder why the brotherhood is so worried about people having energy weapons when energy weapons aren't as good as normal guns.

The thing is Obsidian is clearly pushing EW earlier on so people don't have to have guns to start off.

If any of you bother to go back to my post on page 2 you will see why some people struggle with EW, especially in 1st run.

i LOVE energy weapons.........i cant stress that enough. i love the sound, the flash, the globs of goo when i vaporize them. having played my first 2 playthroughs with EWs i can definitely tell you that guns are far better. my current character is better with guns at lower skill levels than with energy weapons. in my ideal world energy weapons would be able to bypass some of the DT, have higher crit chance and do at LEAST as much damage as a gun. the downside of them would be having to repair them more often, some weapons use more ammo (which they do in the current game) and be harder to find and obviously you cant do multiple sneak attacks since they light you up like a christmas tree.

as for when energy weapons should be viable, frankly they should be viable at any point in the game. i never understood the reasoning behind building a character that is handicapped for 90% of the game just so you more powerful for the last 10% of the game. its not like im having any problems taking out deathclaws with my anti-material rifle with incendiary ammo.

Max charge ammo doesnt require vigilant recycler to make it just needs enough science skill.

Unlike hand load the guns version of this perk vigilant recycler only slightly mincreases overall recycling of ammo it does nothing more.

I really think you would have to try out Energy Weapons yourself to make the call, I personally love all of the combat forms equally and all have their strengths and weaknesses...

With that said it is also important to know how to build your Character to your combat style. If you want to specialize in Energy Weapons then you will need to build your character to specialize in critical hits, this has been known since FO1...

But anyways, I would say to the generic character build then yes Guns would be the better choice, but have a Crit. Happy build then EW would be the way to go.

On my non-combat focused character EW do more than guns. This is mainly due to my character having the overcharged ammo available at level1. The trade-off for me was that energy weapons tend to be harder to headshot at long distances. I guess I could do more damage with a .357 pistol, but the ammo is more scarce for it and aiming is actually a bit harder. I think they are all pretty even and people forget that 10mm smg does [censored] for damage unless you have it fully modded or are standing RIGHT ON TOP of the enemy. At low levels I highly doubt you will have it fully modded since those modes were not readily available until mid-level for my characters. I stumbled on a multi-pass and unique plasma rifle early on...I was using guns at the time, but I wish I could have used them because I only had a hunting rifle for pew-pewing. That Gun does low damage... just because it crits more does not make it awesome when the damage it does is not better than any other normal weapons available. As far as a first run through the game without knowing where anything is they are about equal because of the exploring I did. No, I did not wander far off the beaten path to get the good energy weapons...they were found in easy to access locations in low areas.

I'm doing an energy weapons/melee character. and it works out okay so far. but i think i'll struggle with deathclaws a bit.
(don't get why plasma pistol is weak? even with overcharged rounds)

Gubs tend to do more damage per shot, and energy weapons seem to shoot faster. But with damage threshold and no AP energy rounds, guns has a hude advantage.

As i said in a previous thread, with my Energy Weapons character Veronica was doing all the killing, ED-E and me were the comical sidekicks. Sure the light show was pretty, but even with Max Charge ammo in the Q-35, enemies just didn't give a [censored] :shakehead:

Gauss Rifle was as powerful as ever, but with it's ammo consumption it can't be used against every enemy.

Maybe there's bug? The VATS damage prediction shows large amount of damage to be done, but the shots consistently fail to do nearly that much.

Check my posts at the bottom of last 2 pages.

There is just close to none mid tier gun for EW, nor is there any "battle rifle" (which save you ammo) at higher tiers.

It's funny how Unarmed is three times as good as EW.
Sure I have to get a lot of damage when facing a deathclaw but with the right build it's just too easy.
And I never really had any problems with finding a good weapon either really.
Seriously, the time when Unarmed is better than Energy Weapons then something has clearly gone wrong. (imo)

Personal taste for me.

I hate energy weapons. I think they look absolutely ridiculous. Damage output doesn't matter. I just hate them because of the way they look.

That's why - in my world, mind you - they svck.

Energy weapons are horribly underpowered. In my power armor I do not have to fear them at all. Nice lightshow, but effects are close to zero. Only energy weapons I use are gauss / YCS. Lasers and plasma just do not cut it when you need to kill something with even a bit of armor rating. Only other good energy weapon is pulse gun and it is very situational because it works only against power armors and robots. Other problem is that ammo for them is much more rare than for normal guns.

10mm SMG beats energy weapons in inside and cave locations by 100-0 in most cases. For deathclaws you need bigger guns though. Outside it is sniper rifle / Gobi all the way (or Ratslayer for smaller targets). Of course deathclaws just love YCS...

How are folks having problems finding ammo? Have none of you encountered fiends yet? They drop, Laser Rifles, Laser RCWs, Plasma Rifles. Like Fallout 3, any laser rifle guy for some reason drops 40+ micro rounds. I am sitting on 1200 ECW rounds, and 1500 micro rounds, and that wasn't even remotely difficult to acquire.

It is true, Guns and Melee/unarmed is better. Trouble is a lot of folks in this thread aren't even Energy Weapon users giving advice, which is horrible. Energy Weapons, while not the king of combat anymore, is still easy as hell to use.

Some of us, like me, don't like to farm items.
I only buy MFC from the occasional traveler and Van Graffs.
Farming makes the game a lot more easier.

Of course we have. Problem is thought that when you find Fiends for the first time by playing normally, you most likely already have normals guns at 100 which makes energy weapons kinda pointless. Add in fact that they are underpowered and there is a problem.