I just got done lots of changes to my guide. You can find it here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/443421/fallout.new.vegas.weapon.faq.txt

It's also available on gamefaqs (although the latest and greatest isn't up there yet... use the above link for that):
http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/959559-fallout-new-vegas/faqs

Enjoy!

Great guide! Thanks a lot.

Haha just saw this on Gamefaqs.

Nice. That is mindblowing that the Sniper Rifle multiplies your critrate by 5....why did they think that was a good idea? I almost didn't believe you until I tested it out...sure enough critting on almost everything while shooting from the hip :/ Now I seriously regret only ending at 8 luck, costing me 10% crit instead of the 2% I thought!

Yeah, it's kind of broken. It probably should have just been 2.5x or 3x.

Because of this fact, it ends up doing a lot more damage than what the Pip-Boy says. Generally, the pip-boy isn't all that reliable. The tables at the end of the guide are more accurate. Go by those.

There is only one roll when it comes to the Multiplas crits. Either the whole thing is a crit or it isn't. If you're using it in VATS, then only 1 projectile is actually shot(the graphic is misleading), and thus crits apply only once. If you're shooting outside of VATS and you succeed in your crit check, then all 3 projectiles will crit.

Another thing to note: Full auto weapons shoot 3x in VATS. The 12.7mm SMG has an AP cost of 20 and does 36x3 damage. Thats 5.4 damage per AP... the highest in the game. Not overly useful against high DT targets, but the enemies you listed in the VATS section of your guide - Cazadors, Stalkers, Mantis - all have 0 DT. 12.7mm ammo also comes in the Hollow Point variety.

Why use 12.7mm when 5mm is perfectly fine and cheaper?

I agree, I found the Assault Carbine to be very effective against Cazadores in practice.

Contreras sells, literally, thousands of them at his shop. It also weighs less than half as much as a 5mm. So the question is, why NOT use the 12.7mm?

Are you sure? I think I remember reading this in a few places on the wiki and on gamefaqs forums. If they're wrong, I'll definitely fix the guide (I guess I just have to remove the *'s and the notes). Could you get back to me on this please? Thanks.



That's interesting the full auto weapons. Even though I listed those 3 enemies, I didn't mean to imply that you only want to use VATS against only those enemies. In fact, 2 of 3 are so easy to kill that you don't need This Machine or something better at all . VATS is certainly useful against everything, especially if your weapon is geared to performing well in VATS, like Brush Gun, This Machine, Multiplas Rifle, etc. are. Generally, if you have a Brush Gun with SWC ammo, you want to be in VATS all the time if you can. This is how I approached my anolysis in the guide.

Because Assault Carbine is more durable and have a greater effective range?

Yes, i'm positive. Crit is only checked once, and if the check passes, then every projectile on a weapon scores its critical hit. The Multiplas will never scores its 420 critical damage in VATS because its technically only registering 1 projectile. Because of this, the Multiplas is a much better weapon outside of VATS.



At 12x3 damage per 20 AP, even if you emptied an entire bar of AP, you won't kill a regular Cazador on normal difficulty. Are you even paying attention to the context of this thread?

Errr.....why the hell are we talking in terms of VATS?

Best VATS gun: Bush FULL STOP

I'd like to add that multiplas does surprisingly devastating sneak attack criticals capable of oneshotting everything in the game.

When doing a sneak attack critical against DT 0 enemies with max charge ammo with better criticals multiplas does:

(35 + 105 x 1.5) x 3 x 1.75 x 2 = 2021.25 damage with a bodyshot and 4042.5 damage with a headshot.


YCS/186 in comparison does:

(140 + 70 x 1.5) x 1.75 x 2 = 857.5 damage with a bodyshot and 1715 damage with a headshot.


Both weapons are overkill 95% of the time but the one situation where multiplas rifles ridiculously powerful sneak attacks came in handy for me was when I was fighting against the legendary deathclaw. On very hard with max charge sneak attack headshot YCS/186 left the legendary deathclaw at 1 bar of health left while multiplas turned the thing into a pile of goo with a single shot in the back. Not very practical application but still a nice thing to know.

Very good. Thanks!

Yeah, the multiplas has the highest crit protential. You see this in section 3.02 - Average DPS Chart. However, it's not 105 x 3, because 105 is the value of all 3 projectiles already factored in. So Multiplas would crit for 459.38 damage per shot and the YCS/186 would crit for 428.75 per shot.

Still, it's potentially even less if SomethingToPonder is right and only 1 projectile is used. In that case, YCS/186 would be way better than Multiplas Rifle's crit damage.

Even if Multiplas crits for 30 more damage, the weapon's range and very high spread make it impractical to use, so the YCS/186 or Gobi is still better is almost all use cases.

Here's a table where you can see the top crit weapons and how they compare to each other with different ammo. You'll see that multiplas, if all 3 projectiles can crit at the same time, are not miles ahead of the ycs/186

   .---------------------.------------.--------.----------.---------.---------.   | WEAPON              | AMMO       | CRT %  | BASE DMG | CRT DMG | AVG DPS |   |---------------------|------------|--------|----------|---------|---------|   | Gobi                | .308 JSP   | 100.0% |    90.00 |  225.00 |  397.77 |   | Sniper Rifle+       | .308 JSP   | 100.0% |    93.00 |  232.50 |  372.00 |   | Gobi                | .308       | 100.0% |    60.00 |  150.00 |  265.18 |   | Sniper Rifle+       | .308       | 100.0% |    62.00 |  155.00 |  248.00 |   | YCS/186             | MF MC      |  40.0% |   245.00 |  428.75 |  215.62 |   | Multiplas Rifle     | MF MC      |  20.0% |   183.75 |  459.38 |  203.04 |   | YCS/186             | MF OC      |  40.0% |   175.00 |  306.25 |  154.02 |   | Multiplas Rifle     | MF OC      |  20.0% |   131.25 |  328.13 |  145.03 |   | YCS/186             | MF         |  40.0% |   140.00 |  245.00 |  123.21 |   | Multiplas Rifle     | MF         |  20.0% |   105.00 |  262.50 |  116.03 |   | Anti-Materiel Rifle | .50 Match  |  20.0% |   126.50 |  264.50 |   69.00 |   | Anti-Materiel Rifle | .50        |  20.0% |   110.00 |  230.00 |   60.00 |   '---------------------'------------'--------'----------'---------'---------'

I dont quite understand what do you mean by 105 x 3 but let me clarify a bit:

Multiplas normally fires 3 projectiles each doing 35 damage.

Outside vats each projectiles critical hits are calculated seperately meaning all 3 can get critical hit and they will with sneak attack.

Critical hit bonus damage is 105 per crit and it gets boosted to 157.5 with better criticals meaning that each projectile that does a critical hit does 35 + 157.5 = 192.5 damage.

Because the gun fires three of these projectiles, we can combine them to 192.5 x 3 = 577.5 damage now or we could just keep on counting individual projectiles damage and multiply the damage by number of projectiles = 3 in the end if we wanted to, doesnt matter either way.

If we werent doing a sneak attack or using max charge ammo 577.5 would be the final damage to 0 DT opponents body if you had gotten lucky and had all 3 of the fired projectiles do a critical hit.

Now because we are assuming that you did use max charge ammo the damage gets multiplied by 1.75 which comes to 1010.625 damage and that you did a sneak attack which doubles the damage further to 2021.25 when hitting the opponents body. Headshot would further double this damage to 4042.5.


As far as I know this is how the damage is calculated. The reason the damage gets so high because the critical damage bonus gets added multiple times with weapons that shoot multiple projectiles at the same time like shotguns. The reason why shotguns dont do huge sneak attacks anymore like they did in fallout 3 is because their critical hit damage bonuses were cut to around 1/3rd of what they were back then. This combined with the DT system means that they dont deal as much damage as before. In Fallout 3 each pellet could get around 27-40 crit damage bonus before perks but in New Vegas they only get around 10.

Hrm, well what you're saying directly contradicts with what SomethingToPonder said. Who's right?

I used to think that critical hits for each projectile were calculated separately too. That is actually how I had the guide before. Then SomethingToPonder said that it's all at the same time. Who is right?

Actually, are you sure it's 105 damage? I don't think so.

According to the wiki, Multiplas Rifle does 31.7 per projectile for a total of 95.1 damage with regular ammo.

If the projectiles are calculated seperately, then a critical hit with that projectile will be:

31.7 * 1.5 (better criticals) + 31.7 = 79.25 damage.

If all 3 plasma rounds crit, that's only 237.75.

I don't know where this 105 damage is coming from.

Im getting it from GECK. Heres comparison against Tri-beam. Compare their critical damages.

http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/6497/nvweapons.jpg

The listed base damage is split between the projectiles while the critical damage isnt. It might have been an oversight for multiplas to have so high crit damage bonus since all shotguns and tribeam have crit damage bonuses in the 7-15 range while multiplasmas is listed at 105.

Also if the three projectiles did 237.75 damage when all of them crit, that would not be enough to oneshot legendary deathclaw on very hard which I did multiple times when testing weapons. Legendary deathclaw has 850 hp and I think it had either 15 or 30 DT. Even if it had DT 0 you would need to do 1700 damage to kill it in a single shot on very hard because damage is cut in half.

If multiplas did 237.75 damage on a full crit, it would do 237.75 x 1.75 = 416.0625 damage with max charge ammo, 416.0625 x 2 = 832.125 damage with a sneak attack to the body. I killed the legendary deathclaw multiple times with sneak attacks to the body but 832.125 is less than half the required damage even if we calculate using DT 0. Even sneak attack crit to the head wouldnt be enough to kill it with one shot using these numbers.

At the time I was comparing its sneak attacks to YCS/186 and they were consistantly less than half of multiplasmas crits. For example sneak attack crit with YCS/186 to the body took just under 50% of the deathclaws hp in a single hit while multiplas killed it every time. Only after getting lord death rank 3 was I able to do just over 50% damage to the body with a single attack and kill it with a headshot when using YCS while multiplas didnt need to even bother about the headshots and killed it consistently on a single bodyshot alone.

Let me clarify: There is only 1 critical hit check when you pull the trigger. So there is no "if all 3 can crit at the same time", because if the critical hit check succeeds, then all 3 will crit.

I love your guide but if I may point out that the riot shotgun is very very effective at deathclaws if you use beanbag ammo. It is actually my weapon of choice after they charge and get close enough.

Hrm... so let me get this straight... the reason Multiplas Rifle is doing more damage is not really because my math is wrong, but it's because the game is fouled up in some way that causes the multiplas rifle to be bugged to do way more damage than it's supposed to? Did I get that right?

Although if the Legendary Deathclaw has 850 HP, wouldn't my calculations be enough? With Max Charge ammo, a critical hit with Multiplas Rifle does 459.38 damage, not 416.0625 like you are saying (I've already calculated this). If you factor in the 30 DT, Multiplas Rifle does 429.38 damage, correct?

If you take a shot to the head, which does 75% more damage, it would do 751.415 damage. That's almost 850.

Now, if it's a sneak attack, doesn't that damage get multiplied by 2? So that's 1502.83 damage. That sounds like enough to kill a legendary deathclaw to me.

Where I am going wrong? I am no expert, so if I'm wrong, I'd appreciate letting me know

Okay I looked in the geck, and it does not say that it's 105 damage per projectile. It says 105 for all projectiles. This is actually the number I'm using, so I'm going to declare my calculations "correct" until shown that it's not.

Base damage on Multiplas: 105 damage
Critical damage on Multiplas: 105 damage
Projectiles: 3

Base damage is divided by number of projectiles.
Critical damage is multiplied by number of projectiles.

Before modifiers, Multiplas does (35 - DT)*3 damage. It does (35+105 - DT)*3 on a crit. With MC ammo, it does (35+105 - DT)*3*1.75 on a crit.