That would be a tough fight for more than 2 bugs - using VATS and a Laser rifle at medium range, I could hit 4 Cazadors in wing to drop them to ground ( which renders them pretty much harmless) in 1 set of initial action points. You'd have to be really fast AND accurate to do that outside of VATS !!

In fact, I don't think you could do it outside of VATS

I always kill Cazadors outside of vats, because vats wont [censored] let me shoot them in the head. Like the game really will not let me select the damn bugs heads.

You don;t want to shoot them in the head at first - wing shot to drop to ground, shoot next one, etc til ALL are on ground, only then go back and finish off. BUT - I could have taken head shots in VATS, but it takes too many hits to kill them, even in head. Better to drop them , then clean up afterwards

You know piercing strike should have been for energy weapons, unarmed and melee weapons get really high damage they don't need to ignore 15 points of DT.

But if piercing strike was an energy weapons perk, I think that would help balance things out nicely.

If I'm in sneak mode I can 1shot them if I hit them in the head. I just can't do it in vats. Why waste extra ammo when I can free aim.

Cazador's weak point isn't their head you know... its their wings.

Here's an idea... Bethesda should do fallout from now on because somehow Obsidian just isn't capable of making a good fallout game, i'm sorry, they made this game Fallout: New Vegas: Where punching people is more effective than shooting plasma at them!!!

Absurd, really.

Anyways, here's my bit of advice, why not make all ammo cost the exact same, like say, the ammo for lvl 25 skill required guns cost exactly the same, same for all lvl 50, lvl 75, lvl 100, etc... that would be TRUE balancing, and while were' at it, have every gun and it's counterpart do the same damage/spread/RoF etc... that way all we need to choose is what weapon we want to use, and there, we won't have any setbacks, like for instance,

A Laser rifle doing the same about of DMG as say, a service rifle or Cowboy Repeater or something, and having a laser RCW doing the same amount as a 10mm SMG. If I shoot you with a laser, like as described in The Pitt DLC for one of the trainyard workers, the person who was hit had has arm litterally chopped off with one shot... can a gun EVER do that? No, so energy weapons should do more damage anyways, but i'm willing to compromise, and say, "Hey, you know what, make all guns do the same damage at their respective skill level, and i'm happy". It won't be the RIGHT solution, but hey, i'd rather have something done right in this game as far as weapons go.

It's funny because i'm using the laser pistol not because I want to, but because I want to store up my ammo stores for 5.54 ammo for the All American and some 12 Gauge shells for my Riot Shotgun (i'm building an Energy Weapons/Guns character, I tried making an Energy weapons/explosives character and LOL they got the short end of the stick too).


It's sad that only Melee, Unarmed, and Guns are true primary weapons classes, while explosives and energy weapons are subpar, this is what the melee and unarmed users in fallout 3 must have gone through, but hell, I remember using that super sledge and darn, I didn't NEED anything else, or the Deathclaw Gauntlet, and in that game, you could IMPROVE the DAM on unarmed and melee uniques, and craft unique schematic weapons. I basically carried the Shishkebab, Super Sledge, and DCGuantlet and sold everything else, the DCG and Shish you could get within 30 minutes of venturing into the Capital wasteland so really, I DON'T feel bad for melee/unarmed...... They had it pretty damn good in reality.



The gatling laser would be viable if it had the mass ammo availability that the Minigun has, and the same DAM, i mean, really? Give a minigun 700 AP rounds for ONE GUNS MERCHANT while I can only get 120 REGULAR electron charge packs IF i'm lucky? So that's 120 rounds that doesn't even equal 1 full mag for my Gat, and 1200 rounds for the minigun, both of which cost 1 cap per round?


It's almost like Obsidian saw energy weapons bullying Small guns in fallout 3 and was thinking.... hey, let's punish the bully by taking everything that makes him tough away.... strange anology I know, but I think it's effective for explaining what happened.


I think the Tesla Beaton would be a viable option as well, just make the ECP's MUCH more abundant, or, for the few vendors that sell them, have them sell them for like 0.5 caps per round, and have mass amounts available. Then you can have that REDICULOUS 45 ecp per shot cost.

Also, I think what obsidian failed at doing when they were "balancing...*cough*biased towards guns*cough" was not putting enough locations on the map, hell, 1/3 isn't even USED, they could have put more industrial sites like the repconn center where you can get more energy weapons ammo at, fallout 3 had every inch of the map used, not one square was left out and here, it's like they just duct taped and glued it together if you look past redrock, there's NOTHING there, same on the eastern colorado... they could have put so much more locations in there, all having some energy weapon ammo, or hell, another town devoted specifically to energy weapons and if you were an energy weapons character you could pass a "skill check" and get a discount or something.

I honestly think that more time was needed for this game, it's like, looking at it now, it has so much potential, but it looks like they forgot to finish 1/2 the stuff, but maybe i'm just spoiled on bethesda's expert developing technique, I mean, almost every building in FO3 was unique in some way.


Maybe for the next DLC add in a crapload of energy weapons mods, which AGAIN surprise surpise, they get next to nothing... look at how many weapons on guns get mods... almost 3 for every weapon, surely at least 1 at minimum....


look at how many there are for EW's...yeah, I bet someone at obsidian was tired of getting fragged by the Enclave soldiers and their plasma rifles lol.


whatever, it's not like anyone at Obsidian will even listen to these rants we have anyways so better get used to just going guns or unarmed Lol so much for "giving the player more choices for character customization" yeah, tell that to the explosives chars that never get critical hits too!

Their "weak point" is irrelevant if I can still shoot them in the head and kill them. It should be fairly obvious any flying creatures weak point should be the wings. Again, why waste ammo shooting the wings when I can blow their brains out in 1 shot. If that alerts more I then switch to my lovely incinerator which basically cripples their entire body. So either way, they don't get to fly.

But you can only do that to 1, then the rest are on to you and they move fast

....but how do you get filthy rich like I am?


Selling plasma rifles, of course!

Do you have a bath-tub filled with RCW's and Plasma Rifles that you swim in? I do. :hubbahubba:

I read this forum multiple times a day every day and have been for the past year and a half.

First, let me get this out of the way: I do not believe that it should be a design goal to make one skill better than another. While it's impossible to perfectly balance all skills, I don't think that Unarmed should be designed with the goal of being inferior to Guns, or that Energy Weapons should be designed with the goal of being inferior to Explosives. I believe the goal should be to make the weapon skills (specifically, in this case) distinct but comparable in overall utility. This means that I think Energy Weapons should not be inherently better than Guns and I don't think that someone who focuses in Unarmed should drop dead in every open fight because it would be realistic to do so.

The goal with Energy Weapons was ultimately to make them "outside the boundaries" of Guns. By that I mean that Laser Weapons would tend to be more accurate, faster firing, and lower DAM (usually, not not always) with higher DPS than its equivalent gun. Conversely, Plasma Weapons would tend to be slower firing and higher DAM. There are some cases where this isn't true, the most notable example being the Cowboy Repeater and Plasma Rifle, both of which are considered "tier 2" weapons for their classes. When balancing some of the Guns toward the end of the project, I did bump the Cowboy Repeater up relative to other Guns but did not bump up the Plasma Rifle, which is an oversight that I regret. The Plasma Rifle does have a much faster reload rate than the Cowboy Repeater, but it should also do a higher base damage. Ultimately I do think that I did tune some of the Energy Weapons too far out of "spec" compared to Guns, mostly at the low and mid-range. I did not intend to make Energy Weapons "bad" and I apologize if that is the perceived result.

Lol never expected a head honcho to respond but might as well ask is it even possible to update the weapons and secondly can we expect a fix or is that a hell no not a chance in hell kinda situation?

Rebalancing is not something that is done with patches for a singleplayer only game. I've never seen such happen, at least.

Ha, wow, my rant met with an unexpected degree of attention

Mr. Sawyer, with respect, your "high DPS with low damage" concept doesn't work as well as it might have in Fallout 3 because of the way the new thresholding works. You *need* high damage to punch through the armor of more serious enemies; or armor-piercing ammunition, which is the only thing that saves the 5.56mm and 5mm weapons from becoming obsolete at higher levels. There's basically only two energy weapons that can deliver the kind of one-shot stopping power that common Guns like the hunting rifle and sniper rifle can. Yes you can switch to using high-energy ammo which lets them punch through a lot more armor, but then the cost of using the weapon goes up by an order of magnitude between the ammo and the repairs. You could argue that energy weapons are great at mowing down squishy targets, but between the SMGs and the shotguns, so are Guns.

If you want to let energy weapons to be powerful a different way than guns by letting them break the rules, my thought is that all laser weapons need to be automatic (maximize DPS; and most of the good Guns are not automatic) and plasma weapons should do a significant amount of fire damage on top of their basic physical damage. Fire damage ignores armor making plasma weapons at least marginally effective against anything, and it makes logical sense given that if somebody throws a million-degree blob of plasma at you it's not the *impact* that hurts...it's your flesh melting and burning.

Some other features, like just having a solar panel that we can carry around or set up to charge energy cells, or a way to turn the relatively common Fission Battery into ammunition, might help with the ammo situation.

had to ask.200 dge mini nukes will stay then hahaha

It's JE again!

I just have to reply thank you for making EW more available early game.

Although I think the lack of Trail carbine or .44 revolver equivalent make EW took most of the heat.....

Personally, I rather see Laser and Plasma go one tier up and lock Recharger weapon as tier 1 (if that's where Varmint Rifle belong).

I have seen forums like this already and they're like a broken Ipod
Let me suggest.
I think lasers should be super accurate, higher crits and randomly bypass DT. Plasma weapons should be stronger, (more on brute force than crit), have the ability to wreck armor ( damage the armor until it's broken,decreasing DT and DR). I think that we can all agree to make the EW and ammo rare. I also suggest we balance the ammo consumption.

Actually, Laser already do what you suggested....
Damaging enemies' armour is more harmful to yourself in the post apocalypse

EW ammo is rare enough as for now.....

Energy weapons NEED to be more powerful than regular guns! It doesn't make any sense otherwise.

Laser pistol should not be competing with a 9mm, the fact that it does is unbelievably sad. I always thought it was a nice trade off in previous fallouts when I made an energy weapons char. I suffer in the beginning and rule in the end, now my energy char. just suffers.

Anyone find the perfect balance on EW ammo adjustment yet? I made it ignore 10DT but I think it still needs a small adjustment, but any more DT removal seems to be too much.

Look at it like this people. You just had the project director drop in (pretty [censored] awesome btw, would not have expected that) and admitted that there are some "issues" with energy weapons. At the very least that's a ray of hope that they will patch things somewhat...maybe. But nobody can say the devs don't read the forums, nor can they say they don't listen to the community. So lets recall the so called "ranting" and rename it constructive criticism. Where it's proper at least, some [censored] IS just plain ranting.

First off, I like to thank you for taking your time to respond let alone responding to something that deals with criticism, when you didn't have to and give a response. My question to you would be why do energy weapons need to be so dependent on critical damage, as the only way to bypass armor of the tougher enemies of this game, rather than have some form of ammo to assist in bypassing armor? Second question is why do they have such high ammo consumption compared to guns, but yet only offer similar levels of performance?

When I mean randomly bypass armor I did not mean critical hits what I am saying is normal shots bypassing DT. I think that the energy skill should reduce the amt of ammunition used but let us not make it 1 shot for all but make it sound reasonable.

These are the main issues indeed. Make plasma weapons have innate armor piercing, and make only uniques consume more than one energy ammo per shot would be my solutions. Maybe alter Laser Commander and Plasma Spaz perks to give additional armor piercing?

Well i'm a PC user, so i'll just see how that works.

I think that a fair deal would be 1 energy cell for laser pistols and 2 cells for laser rifles. Plasma on the other hand should consume 2 for the pistol and 3 for the rifle. O agree with you on the uniques. It would make more sense for the stronger weapons to consume more.