IIRC 1MF=1.5SEC,thus 1 Laser Rifle shot = 1.5 Laser Pistol shot.
Plasma Rifle is actually more efficient than Pistol as the later consume 2SEC per shot, while Rifle still use one MF.

If, Laser rifle is bump up against Cowboy Rifle, while Plasma is on par with trail, with Recharger against Varmint and available near very vendor like the later, EW user would have a much smoother transition to high tier.

Uhm yeah, that's a negative. Unless it's a special type of ammo or modification there is no justification for needing to use more than 1 round per shot. Especially for energy weapons considering the nature of light energy. A laser beam can be split multiple times without loosing much force, in reality. Ever had a laser pointer? Ever had a laser pointer and a prism? Point that bad boy at the prism and see what happens, you get a mini light show. Multiple beams from that same singular source,and they're all consistently stable. As for plasma, I've never owned any plasma riffles or any sort of plasma device, luckily for all the banks in my area. Which is irrelevant because a gun is meant to use 1 round per shot. Period. Point me to a gun that needs multiple rounds of ammo to fire one shot, that isn't modified. I don't think one exist. But I would love to be proven wrong. Maybe then I'll be able to understand why a sniper riffle requires 5 rounds of ammo for 1 shot.

The difference is that in a firearm, you have some powder packed behind a bullet. The powder explodes, and pushes the bullet out the barrel. There's no easy way to change any part of the equation because there is a very specific way everything has to fit together, within extremely fine tolerances. An energy weapon takes in energy and uses that energy to drive a gas tube or a plasma generation chamber or who knows what else. We haven't got real plasma rifles to say for sure how they would work. The point is that the part of the weapon that creates and/or launches the projectile is independent of the weapon's source of energy. Think of a flashlight. You can run it off a car battery, a lantern battery, a couple of AAs, whatever, it doesn't matter as long as you wired it correctly. Different energy weapons just consume different amounts of charge per shot depending how powerful and how efficient they are.

Where this falls down in-game is that the energy weapons are miserably inefficient. An SEC is the equivalent of 2 ECPs, which means weapons using SECs for ammo should logically do about 28 damage per cell to the Laser RCW's 14 damage per ECP. A weapon that consumes 2 SECs per shot should do about 56 damage per shot. Etc. And an MFC is the equivalent of 3 ECPs, so those weapons should be doing 42 damage per 1 MFC consumed. The unique plasma rifle is the only one that even comes close to this (32 dmg per MFC = 75% efficiency). A plasma rifle that consumes 2 MFCs per shot should be doing about 84 (!) damage...but instead gives us a rather feeble 30 damage (15 dmg per MFC = 35% efficiency).

EW seems like an albatross around the neck of someone who chooses or wanted to use them. Practically speaking, even players who wanted to use EW will find little reason to do so early on and will likely find better combat success with Guns, albiet with no skill. Something seems very wrong about that...

Why have EW a skill at all if the skill will not have much practical use for the first half/ three quarters through the game?

Makes no sense at all. In fact, the combat skills make no sense at all. I feel that it would actually be better to not tag any combat skills and just focus on skills that require skill checks such as lockpicking.

There are PC mods currently that add -50% DT for all energy weapon ammo. I've been playing with it and I still had to bump up energy weapons DAM by a few points each for them to feel competitive.

Seems to me that laser should be: silent, accurate, fast firing but do less damage than guns

Plasma weapons should be: loud, less accurate than guns (especially at long range), slower projectile but do considerably more damage

Only uniques/shotgun/tesla type weapons should use more than 1 ammo at a time.

Both should automatically bypass at least 50% DT. It's only natural that energy weapons would have evolved to combat more advanced forms of armor. Maybe give certain armor an additional energy resist value (ie. tesla) This balances out the fact that AP ammo for guns currently have no real downsides (-5% damage instead of 50% damage in Fallout 2, and they cost about the same as regular energy weapon ammo.)

DPS at each tier should be competitive between guns and EW (which they aren't, by a long shot.)

I understand that, and agree to an extent. When energy is concerned I look at it like this. Let's take solar energy (lasers) for example, since as far as our intents and purposes are concerned the suns energy is limitless. I could make 2 different solar arrays. One very high tech with the best part's available designed to be super efficient. Then I could make another one, with scrap parts and not worry too much about it's design or efficiency. They both use the same energy source, yet one clearly pumps out more power than the other.

Or how about fire (plasma...), let's say I dip a match in gasoline and keep one regular. I light the regular match. It does it's thing as usual. Then i light the gas dipped match, it damn near blows up... if it doesn't actually blow up. They both use the same source for energy, the first match just had an additional catalyst. But it didn't need an additional match (ammo) to get there. Energy can be amplified and converted all sorts of ways from the same singular source. When energy is concerned it's about the the process in which it does what it does and the quality of it's "source" The ammo should reflect that. You don't need more to get a bigger bang with energy, you may just need a different process of extracting said energy.

deleted post.

Nice job explaining that for anyone that didn't understand. Let me just add something to it.

The logic that more ammo = more damage is inconsistent. If this was the case, then all guns that use the same ammo MUST do the same damage. But yet we see weapons that use the same ammo, do not have the same DAM, such as a regular weapon compared to a unique version. I can throw a rock and hit you in the head and it could really hurt. My grandmother could also throw a rock at your head, though I doubt it would hurt as much. Even though we use the same ammo (a rock) we are using the ammo with varying vectors, which changes it's potential to hurt as much as it could.

Also, just to comment on Energy Weapons again, most people here say they aren't very good. While you are entitled to your opinion, I respectfully disagree. It is true that a few of the Energy Weapons are clearly less effective than their Gun counter parts stat-wise, but their actual applications vary greatly. Lots of people have been throwing out comparison numbers for things like weight, DAM etc, but actually using the weapon in game provides a different perspective.

I have nearly hit 30 with my current EW character and I have never run into the problem of not being able to kill something. Deathclaws, NCR Rangers, BOS, all of the Legion Camp. I truly do wonder if anyone has gotten past 15 with an EW based character. EWs seem more than adequate at getting you through the game, which is really all they must do. Even if every Gun weapons could kill every character in one shot, and energy weapons were still in their same state, they would be fine. Unless you cannot complete the game due to their lack of killing power, they are doing all they need. I have never personally seen an instance when Energy Weapons could not handle the task at hand, and until that happens, they are fine in my eyes.

Well, it is widely acknowledged that there are a few decent EW weapons out there (gauss, plasma caster, etc), so a player dedicated to the skill can make it through the game without too much issues. And it's true that balance ultimately isn't that important in a single player game. However, boosting EW weapons across the board will also make certain enemies more of a threat, which is nice.

Oh I wouldn't suggest that every weapon needs to be 100% efficient at translating potential energy from its ammo into destructive power on target. At the least, laser and plasma weapons should behave differently (lasers are more efficient, plasma weapons are less efficient but more powerful).

But when you have weapon A, which does X damage and costs Y ammunition, and you have weapon B which does 2X damage and costs 6Y ammunition without any other benefit, something somewhere is badly out of whack.

I should pick up the GECK and tinker with this...

The OP does make some good points, well rounded conclusion too and i'm inclined to agree.

fortunately with my character i've gone for energy weapons/melee, so if nasty stuff gets too close (as seems likely) i can wack them with a rebar club which i have at the mo, combined with knockdown effect it's pretty sweet against rad scorps so far.
go over like a sack of potatoes, then i just whale on them.
I use the energy weapons as a kind of punctuation point in my rage.

Well not that it matters much for subject of debate but "ammo" usually consist of projectile and propellant. Rock in your example is projectile. Propellant is your hand. While projectile is the same, "propellant" is different so "ammo" is not really the same.

As for energy weapons, as name suggest there is no projectile and propellant, not classic "ammo". Damage is done by energy of some form or another without using projectile to carry that energy to target.

While damage is influenced by effectiveness of design of gun and projectile itself to some extend, in general larger the projectile and more propellant means more damage. In case of energy weapons its more energy = more damage. Its not that inconsistent as you suggest.

Eh? Two people throwing the same rock (ammo) with different strengths all of a sudden equates to two different rocks? That doesn't make sense. So because one person is stronger than the other, their rock has somehow become a different rock? It's still the same rock, the force applied to the rock was just different. But that doesn't change the rock. The "ammo" has not changed, the weapon has. The rock is still the same rock. And the grandmother could throw 5 rocks of equal size and may still not reach the force of him throwing the single rock.

More ammo does not necessarily equal more damage. Damage is reliant on the weapon.

Logically speaking, if a person made a gun which required 5 rounds of conventional ammunition to fire; it would be more productive to simply create a new type of ammo specifically for said gun. Make a bigger round, put more catalyst in the round so the weapon can use it more efficiently. Just doesn't make sense to use multiple rounds of ammo to fire one shot. That's a rather inefficient design.

ok i see where you are going with this, but using your logic if you put in three times more energy and the only difference is 30% increase in damage where did the rest of the energy go? To compensate the projectile has to either be faster or release energy in non-damaging form. So what a massive radio wave or UV burst or every time you fire? If so much energy was lost kos of the weapons inefficiencies it would melt in your hands after one clip.

you CAN beat the game with energy weapons! You can also kill deathclaws with the Lucky revolver. The issue here is that regular guns are more reliable, available, versatile, cheaper and lighter. Guns are just so much better.

You misunderstood. The rock is the projectile while the person throwing it is the propellant. So if two different people are throwing the same projectile in his definition it becomes different ammo (propellant +projectile). Hmm can either of you incorporate the value of the barrel length into your argument? lol

...lol you guys are getting way to technical over a video game... how about you just go play some fallout?

Either way, the rock is still the same rock. It's still the same ammo. One person just makes better use of it. But it's still the same rock. Two people throwing the same rock doesn't equal different ammo. If anything it equals the difference between a fully repaired weapon, a worn down one. But the ammo is still the same.

I would, but the flashlights ran out of batteries.

Seriously speaking, ammo consumption and the lack of armor penetration are the main problems here. Armor penetration problem can be partially alleviated with OC and MC ammo, but it only makes the ammo consumption problem worse. Make a high science skill recipe for turning fission batteries and other assorted, infintely obtainable junk into energy weapon ammo like, once again, in FWE.

Not sure why people think it's logical that the scale of ammo used and damage done would be some linear function. Makes more sense to me that it's more of an exponential curve.

Either way, I can't say I really agree with the topic much. My energy weapons playthrough definitely wasn't harder than my guns playthrough, and both of them were very hard/hardcoe. Maybe folks aren't making the overcharge/max charge ammo or something. The Q-35 in particular is probably one of the strongest weapons I've seen that uses very basic ammo.

My EW guy had -40% AP costs for plasma weapons (Fast Shot, Math Wrath, Plasma Spaz) and 135 base AP. Enter VATS, annihilate things with critical hits all day. If you go out of your way to stack crit (like if I'd removed Kamikaze for Built to Destroy and had 10 LCK) it's even easier.

If anything it felt less complicated to manage than my guns playthrough. You're not even worried about the type of ammo you're picking up because you don't have to mess with a bunch of stupid little items at the workbench, it's just a straight conversion. I wasn't even compelled to take Jury Rigging on that playthrough, the only weapon that wasn't easily repairable was the unique Gauss and crafted weapon repair kits were more than enough to keep that weapon above the CND threshold the entire game (aka well beyond level 30 time wise).

As a suggestion, what about this brief attempt at a rebalance, using the potential power of the ammunition as the starting point:

Electron Charge Packs (ECP), used by lighter laser weapons. Damage is the baseline at 14 per ECP.
Laser pistol => Laser ECW => Laser Gatling. They all do the same damage, the laser pistol is cheaper, lighter and flawlessly accurate, but the ECW retains its extreme rate of fire, and the Gatling Laser directly replaces the ECW if you're strong enough to carry the thing.

Small Energy Cell (SEC), used by heavier laser weapons. Damage is standardized at 24 per ECP (85% efficiency)
Laser rifle. Does 24 damage per shot, high rate of fire, flawlessly accurate, consumes 1 ECP to fire and has a bonus of 5 to beat enemy's DT.
Tri-beam laser rifle. Does 24*3 damage per shot, moderate rate of fire, flawlessly accurate, consumes 3 ECPs to fire. Gains a bonus of 15 to beat enemy's DT because the beam wavelength is tuned to a destructive harmonic.

Microfusion Cells (MFC), used by plasma weapons. Damage is standardized at 32 (75% efficiency)
Plasma pistol. Does 16 normal damage and 8*2 fire damage. High rate of fire, moderate accuracy. Consumes 1 MFC to fire.
Plasma rifle. Does 32 normal damage and 16*2 fire damage. Moderate rate of fire, high accuracy. Consumes 2 MFCs to fire.

The gauss rifle is fine where it is. It's not efficient but it's outrageously powerful and ends most opponents with one shot, so hey.

Obviously there's a lot more energy weapons than this, but how does this sound as a place to start. Bear in mind that the Cowboy Repeater and the Trail Carbine, the Guns "go to all-around workhorses", are rated at 35 and 45 damage respectively. For the Tri-Beam laser rifle and its armor piercing effect, consider the Service Rifle which is rated for 20 damage and can fire armor piercing 5.56mm rounds.

its uh... Laser "RCW" btw.

Yes yes, acronym soup everywhere. Your thoughts on the proposal are...

Instead of making energy weapons equivalent to regular guns, they should have made energy weapons more powerful but rarer and more expensive than guns like they did in FO1, 2, and Tactics.

A Laser Pistol should not be as weak as a 9mm Pistol. It's a much more sophisticated piece of equipment and it uses energy cells that should be a lot harder to make than bullets.

I use Energy Weapons no matter what.

agree