Does anyone else feel that energy weapons aren't nearly as good as they used to be? Laser weapons especially are almost useless now, even the most basic of armor reflects them just fine. And I feel like plasma worked really well for me early on when I found the Q-35, but then it just stopped being....well, accurate. It always misses targets now, constantly. Even at point blank. The shots just seem to phase through enemies 50% of the time or more. Some of the other new energy weapons are alright, but still, I feel like regular guns are way better.

Yep, with all the supposed balancing they did, they sure messed some things up.

Yeah, this game needs some attention.

*cough* Fat man does less damage than C-4. *cough* It's balanced around melee and guns. You'll do more damage with a sneak attack using a ballistic fist or AMR than you will by lobbing a mini-nuke. That makes sense.

Energy weapons weren't nerfed. They are just used differently. Now, they are useful against lightly armored humans, small to medium sized animals, or robots and power armored enemies (with the Pulse Gun).

YES! I miss being able to gooify my enemies with one or two plasma torroids... >:( The only energy weapons worth a crap are Pew, Pew, the AER 14 Prototype Laser Rifle, the Gatling Laser, the Tribeam Laser, the Multiplas, and the Gauss Rifle.

See, right there, they are nerfed; Guns on the other hand, is good against all type of enemy.

Although they are nerfed, they are by no mean unplayable; but you got to be sure you have a high crit rate to maximize their performance.

In other words, you need to compensate their nerfiness with minmaxing.

Gauss gun is the highest dam regular gun in the game. With Max Charge shots it can do 210 damage per shot. The other two most powerful weapons are the unique Gauss and the Alien Blaster, both energy as well. Downside to the Gauss being that it still has the VATS bug from FO3.

Lasers aren't the best, true. The laser rifle is (according to the lead developer) the most accurate weapon in the game, despite its low damage and having the only upgrade in the game that makes a weapon even more situational. Laser RCW works wonders against light armored foes, though not their heavier buddies.

Plasma is decent enough. Just don't get so upset about laser not being very good.

But you can't really use Gauss as a battle rifle, unlike sniper rifle (and its unique Gobi CSR).

Plasma Caster have a heart breaking req of Str 8; Multiplas is hard to repair until you have Jury Rigging.

Use overcharged ammunition. Bring Raul along to compensate for the additional wear-and-tear and/or craft your own Weapon Repair Kits - preferably both.

Also keep in mind there are a host of other advantages energy weapons have over guns that aren't strictly damage-related.

Like?
Cell conversion and recycling isn't that much better then Hand Loading; it would be worst if high tier bullet casing isn't that hard to come by.

Decent enough?

The plasma rifle is so badly outclassed by the cowboy repeater, both supposedly being of the same tier since their skill requesites are both 25.

Cowboy Repeater fires soooo fast thanks to the inhumanly fast lever action (seriously... how could that have been missed? I can fix it so easily), The cowboy repeater can also load Handloaded rounds, which are essentially like Overcharged shots, but don't tear the gun up and also have a modest DT-piercing effect and are more accurate. It also uses only 1 cap's worth of ammo per shot (standard .357 is 1 cap per round) while the plasma rifle eats up 6 caps worth (MFC = 3c, x2 per shot). It uses 10 less AP per VATS shot than the plasma rifle, and also weighs 3 weight units less than the plasma rifle. The Cowboy Repeater also gets a 1.25x crit chance multiplier, making the 2x that the Plasma gets less meaningful.

The heavy plasma guns (Defender, Caster) may be good stuff, but the regular ones svck. They're so totally outclassed by Guns in the equivalent tiers, just like lasers.

Plasma Spaz? Wooo, now I can fire my svcky plasma rifle 3 times instead of 2 in VATS... while I could already fire the Cowboy Repeater 4 times. Still can't fire my Multiplas more than 2.

Meltdown? That makes crit kills highly dangerous to you, not just your foe, thanks to excessively large AoE and damage of the effect. You end up hoping you don't crit kill them.

Vigilant Recycler? Despite my heavy-handedness with the Super Mutants on Black Mountain with my Multiplas rifle, I have not noticed any significant increase in the amount of MF cells recovered, certainly not enough to feed hungry plasma rifles.

*DELETE, doublepost*

I haven't had much of a problem with energy weapons. Sneak crit with an upgraded laser rifle 1 shots most things, and with the insane amount of crits I get I bring things down pretty fast. They have a bonus of looking cool and turning people to ash and goo.

The only thing I never get with them is the epic slo-mo kills, like the time I took a viper gang guys head off with a shotty slug from really far away and his flew backwards in slo-mo like in a movie.

I noticed that they were weaker. Probably becuase of the new DT, or i was just using them on the wrong enemies

It's the DT system that really makes this hard for energy weapons, particularly the laser ones. It also doesn't help that there are so few EW mods and several of the ones that are there are bugged to hell.

That said, I played the game through to lvl30 using energy weapons and the main problem I've had is finding ammo rather than killing people. Max charged ammo is great but has a 2.5-to-1 conversion loss and with things like the gauss rifle using five of them per shot it means I'm consuming 12.5 microfusion cells per shot.

I'd actually say that by this point in the game with the crit boosting perks I have and things like meltdown/laser commander i'm probably more effective in fights than my gun using friend at a similar level.
I use the gatling laser for soft targets, the gauss rifle for anything armored, the pulse gun against robots and I ballistic fist anything that gets too close for comfort.

The lack of armor penetrating ammo is supposed to be overcome by the increased likelihood of criticals, doesn't actually work that well.

Works okay, but you can still score nice crits with guns with AP ammo and it just works better.

Guns have the advantage of more ammo, range, and powerful sneak attacks. In order to compensate for these things that energy weapons don't have, they should give Energy Weapons exclusive advantages.

Recommended advantages for Energy Weapons
High armor piercing stats
I always thought it makes sense for lasers to have passive amor piercing stats. I mean, it's a fricking laser. It is supposed to tear through all kinds of armor. So even the lowliest laser pistol should have moderate armor piercing stats, more than guns.

Obsidian is on the right track by introducing normal, armor piercing and hollow point bullets. Rightfully, a normal bullet shouldn't dent a robot, and you need armor piercing bullets to do the job. But armor piercing bullets should only be meant for humans wearing armor, and still shouldn't hurt robots that easily.

Higher armor for robots
Robots should have higher DT than human armor, and should have more resistance against sneak attacks. This gives Energy Weapons an advantage, who can penetrate robot DT effortlessly. Guns would then be average against robots.

More robots
There should be more dangerous robots like Sentry Bots in Fallout. I didn't find a lot of them. I guess rightfully there should be more humans than robots in Fallout, but there needs a decent amount of robots to make them a threat, and to make gun users sweat a bit.

High crippling rate
Laser should have high armor piercing properties, so using the same principle, laser should also cripple limbs more easily than guns.

So guns should be more effective against humanoids and creatures, but average or even poor against robots.
Energy weapons should be more effective against heavily armored humanoids or robots, because if you use energy weapons, you never worry about your enemies' DT. You cut through an armored human and robot equally.

I think with these simple balancing changes (without even tweaking the damage), Energy Weapons would be more appealing.

I dont know exactly what sawyer was thinking with plsma weapons but I know for sure I want him to stop thinking it.

Get the plasma rifle that fires 3 shots (don't remember what its called) with max charge rounds and you will see that energy weapons sure as hell wasn't nerfed. Also plasma caster, the new gauss rifle and the Laser RFW are sick, the problem for me is only ammo. My character went and broke the bank on every casino and then went to Hoover dam and purchased ammunition for like 50k caps (have a mod that makes npcs reset their inventory every time you speak to them). So now i can't really complain about ammo =D. I recommend having unarmed skill as well though, since when enemies get close you sure as hell don't wanna blow them up on yourself.

Energy weapons generally don't have a big strength requirement (some do, I know).
Energy weapons are generally very accurate, even the fully auto ones (most guns have a pretty noticable "minimum spread").
It's easy to convert energy weapon ammunition into precisely the ammo you need for the particular energy weapon you are using, with a high enough Science skill.
Energy weapons doesn't require you to take a perk to make your ammo more damaging - just a high enough Science skill.

Yeah energy weapons are definitely cheaper to maintain (perk wise) so you can get some other nice perks as well. I have a unarmed/energy weapons build. And i have every good unarmed perk except paralyzing palm as well as every good energy weapons perk except laser commander as i only use plasma weapons more or less.

QFT. I had to remove that perk with the console, it was simply too dangerous for me and my companions.

Let me just butt my head in to say "Yes I think they're nerfed".
Good, now I'm out of here.
(We've had this discussion in three looooong threads already. They're nerfed, Obsidian [censored] them up, all I wonder is what the hell were they thinking? Energy Weapons were never meant to be a weapon class to be used along-side with guns like they're equal or something.)