I don't really understand why Explosives turned out so awful in New Vegas. The Fat Man deals about as much damage as a plasma grenade, missiles weigh 3 lbs per unit and deal garbage damage against DT because of the lack of critical/sneak critical damage, and the only real high-damage placed/thrown are either prohibitively rare or ludicrously expensive. The unique explosives weapons in particular are awful. Trying to play a demolitions character in New Vegas is incredibly frustrating.

I sort of agree, i have melee/explosives, and 40mm and 25mm (dont know if it's mm but still) grenades are too damn rare, can't find em anywhere. If i do, they are those damn expensive ones (26 caps one, for the machinegun).

26 caps is too expensive? when you should easily be rolling in caps and the prices of repairs and weapons were deliberately jacked up because essentially that's all you need to spend your money on?

haven't really played with a high explosives skill yet, but surely you could check into micks n ralphs and gun runners and completely clean them out of explosive things?

keep hold of a spiked knuckle or power fist to deal with lesser enemies, you barely need any skill to deal decent damage with them.

It's 26 caps per unit; 25mm grenades are the ammunition for the grenade machinegun. For reference each clip is 30 grenades.

It's not necessarily about just having explosives on hand. It's that the common ones - particularly 40mm and 25mm grenades - are pretty much awful. When you look at it from a weight/cost standpoint, explosives are hilariously bad compared to the other weapon types. This is partly because all forms of explosives are ineligible for critical damage and sneak critical damage.

For example, take the high end of the scale. Deathclaws. Anything that fires 40mm or 25mm does pretty awful damage versus them and is a huge waste of ammo. You need explosives that deal large up-front damage like Bottlecap Mines, Plasma Mines/Grenades, C-4. Even a Fat Man takes 2 mini-nukes per Deathclaw on normal difficulty assuming 3/3 demolitions expert and a fully repaired Fat Man. That is absurd.

Hit up the Boomers, do their quests, prosper. I've found well in excess of 100's of 40mm grenades (admitedly, I've found far less 25mm) and the Boomers have enough of a stockpile to last anyone the entire game, especially as merchants resupply every 72 hours. On a side note, Explosives was never intended to be a main-combat skill but rather a back-up skill. It is great for crowd control and massive destruction, but should be too expensive to let the player run around using the Grenade machine gun like it was just a variation on the 9mm SMG.

I know, even though I have not invested in explosives, dynamite svcks and so does the grenade launchers

This has nothing to do with not finding enough explosives. Especially 40mm or 25mm. My point is that in terms of raw effectiveness they are dreadful. My demolitions character has had no problem keeping stock of things to detonate. In fact were I inclined I absolutely could use the grenade machinegun exclusively, that is not the problem. It's that their raw power is simply awful as the player grows in level. Having another character that is Guns specialized in 1h weapons (pistol, revolver, SMG) I can tell you flat out that explosives are nowhere near as destructive as revolvers. That should not be the case.

Explosives are not good against armour (in real life) so that seems to be fine. You need special explosive -shaped charge to deal with armour. Which could be great idea for adding shaped charge explosives in to the game. They would need to have none, or very limited area effect but direct hit should bypass heaviest armours. Obviously this would be impractical with thrown grenades and mines. On the other hand 40mm shaped charge grenades should be deathclaw killer.

It's not fine at all if "AP explosives" aren't in the game. In real life bullets don't do more damage to someone's head if they're looking the other direction. I mean, in real life how much damage would a small nuclear bomb do to "armor"?

Either way, it's really not the issue. The issue is really that the explosives that are fairly effective in those situations (bottlecap mines, C-4, plasma explosives to a lesser extent) are simply too expensive/rare. C-4 costs 1,000+ caps per unit. A player that goes high explosives simply needs better access to those particular types of explosives. A perk like Hand Loader/Vigilant Recycler that allowed an Explosives character to make these types (or in the case of existing crafts, just easier) would mostly fix this issue.

Would be nice to be able to take c4 and scrap metal and construct claymores or even ball bearing laden semtex blocks to do more armor piercing damage. Even just letting you use gun powder, scrap metal, and maybe an empty nuka cola bottle to create a fragmenting pipe bomb of sorts. The game is still new though and I have little doubt they'll add a lot of new schematics in upcoming dlcs to address nerfed abilities.

Just to add my little pet pevee to explosives skill, where the hell is my molotov cocktail?

This should have been a craftable explosive.

I'm bummed to hear explosives feel nerfed, I was planning on doing an explosive character next.

Grr my current character had planned to use explosives vs armor in an energy weapon explosives build.... nerts! Least im only level 4 on it so its not a huge waste of time.

I have explosives at 65 and no explosives perks taken.
I mainly use guns, sniper type rifles with sneak. Shotguns and fullauto weapons on closecombat.
How ever I have found that explosives can be usefull if they are planned tactically, as support.

There have been many occasions where I saved my companions life from Cazador swarm with 2 frag grenades.
Deathclaws I always kill by planting some mines / c-4 to their predicted path to me and then get to higher ground and start sniping. If they see me or start looking they walk/run to my explosives that if not kills them, cripples them and buys me more time. I play on hard / hardcoe and only armor I use is my bountyhunters duster with 6 DT so if a deathclaw gets on my skin I die!
I never engage my companions to hard fights anymore since I lost Boone on my OMGWTF fight with cazadors. I just tell them to wait till I clear the path.

I haven't run to any deathclaws in close quarters yet, can't wait to see how I can pull that off

But anyway, Explosives are great for support but lousy main weapon. They also make a nice assasinaion tool Live dynamite on targets backpocket usually rips him a new ahole
Also some c-4 planted while in stealhboys protective invisibility field can blow up multiple baddies or make them crippled and almost immobile

I tried to do powerarmor wearing minigun shooting badass who just walks and mows down all kinda toon but that failed.

playing with C4's are kinda fun... it only kind of svcks that no npc reacts to somebody throwing a C4 in their face.

Nothing says drat drat DRAT!!!! Like tossing a stick of tnt at some baddies and then having an entire fleamarket full of junk fly around the room and beat the ever bleeping bleep outa me... I was dang near spatulaed to death...

aye explosives are really a support weapon used against weaker groups of enemies they can save alot of hassle.

For instance i snuck up on a group of 6 legionaries sleeping, i use grenade rifle, after about 5 shots all dead.
most satisfying.
again with the grenade rifle, i save up the ammo for the later game when legionaries are plentiful, pump their camp full of explosive. most satisfying.

Eh deathclaws are ridiculously tough anyways, unless you use a "special" named weapon or a .50 sniper rifle or lots of C4, mines you got no hope of stopping them.


Now if i was gonna make a complaint about enemies i would say there's a distinct lack of robots roaming around. even then your average rifle is usually enough to take them out.

I almost think something is broken between explosives and deathclaws. My "named" rocket launcher says it deals 127 damage (which IMO still svcks given how much this crap weighs per shot) and with living anatomy on my other character I know normal ones have 30 DT and 500 health. That means I should be dealing 97 damage or so per missile, but on Normal 5 missiles doesn't even really come close to killing one.

I played a character who tagged explosives and guns. I was stockpiling TNT from the powder puff gangers and when I went to use it in Vats against a large-ish group of "raiders," I was shocked at what happened: V.A.T.S. only used bullet time on me and my target. The other raiders ran full speed and started slashing at me with their knives. I wanted to "blow them up" as a group. What a let down.

Also, it appears to me that your explosives skill is a multiplier of it's damage. With that character I had 40 or so explosives skill and my pip boy told me that my TNT had a high damage output. I would like to see the raw data. I would like to use explosives in a support role. To me it looks like something I should ignore until later levels and just experiment with.

Fatman NV = 80damage + harder to find Mini nukes
Fatman FO3 = 800-1200damage + easier to find Mini nukes

I don't know if its just because my explosive skill is low is this game or not but they are pretty weak.

Yes, this also svcks something fierce. Especially since VATS no longer offers you protection like it did in FO3.

Have to agree that the explosive weapons seem a bit underpowered to be honest and I was expecting some kind of OMGWT*BBQ style gameplay with them since you have to wait a bit to even play with them. Dynamite and Long Fuse Dynamite is fine imho and shouldn't have that mentioned moment, but the Fat Man launcher definitely should. Was quite surprised to see how little damage the Fatman did when micro-nukes *mini nukes* are so hard to come by. Same goes for the grenade launcher and grenade machine gun even with the rare versions of these weapons it was a bit underwhelming.

Yes, the start of the game feels fine for explosives. Well, other than the whole "everyone else moving faster than you and your target in VATS" issue which makes utilizing AoE hard, but the power of it seems right.

Later on it just feels like they forgot explosives could not crit and nerfed the hell out of the high end projectiles.

Did you find a rare grenade launcher? I know there is a rare grenade rifle but I have only found a standard grenade launcher.

The 40mm grenades aren't that rare. The venders always have them. The biggest problem is that they don't do enough damage.

Pretty much, yeah.

Obsidian was too heavy handed in their overhaul of weapons types, weapon skills and VATS. They could have still built the game to their liking without changing/nerfing so much of what we were used to in FO3 (which this game is ostensibly parallel to).