Basically, most explosives in this game are horribly nerfed. I have a pure demolitions based character, and quite frankly it is harder to kill tough enemies like Deathclaws on Normal than it is for my shotgun-only character to kill them on Very Hard. Worse though, is that to do so with explosives is far, far more expensive for no benefit except AoE on weak enemies (which still costs you tons more caps than just gunning them down or beating them to death in melee). I have no idea what the logic is behind the profound nerfing of raw damage behind stuff like the missile launcher and fat man, and the lower more "common" projectile explosives like the grenade launcher are crippled by the fact that they are incapable of critical hits (which not only do double damage or more but ignore a large portion of DT, which is why sneak criticals are so deadly against Deathclaws).
Late game demolitions involves hauling around 100+ lbs of explosives ammunition that costs thousands upon thousands of caps (C-4 and plasma mines/grenades in particular are INCREDIBLY expensive) for results that are less damaging than any other weapon skill in the game. Complete waste of time.
