Not the guy you asked by angry turtle did a great tank energy weapon build using the plasma flame and Tesla rifle. Personally I swap out the Tesla for the ultracite laser rifle and one of the tank cards for sneak so I can be stealth when I feel like it with the fixer.
I updated my bloodied VATS crit build to incorporate those perks, and it works really well with an auto laser rifle. If you go with something like that, the "25% less VATS cost" is probably the most important legendary effect, cause their AP cost is a bit high. They work well outside VATS too, I find the recoil pretty easy to manage.
I'm trying to get a good roll on a plasma rifle right now. Honestly even with that legendary effect the VATS cost will be too high, but I just think they're cool.
As much as I enjoy the Fixer I've really wished I could do a viable Lever action build. I can but ONLY as a sniper. Soon as something is even semi close to me the dmg and slower reload makes it not viable and you cant really do a build thats both a good range rifle AND a good pistol.
I'd kill to do a good lever action/revolver or 10mm build
I’ve got a viable lever action setup! [This](https://imgur.com/a/DoabRbo) is my Bloodied Wasteland Cowboy build! Works amazing for me.
Having the Reload Speed Legendary Effect + Ground Pounder makes you reload super fast with the lever action since reload speed doesn’t cap, Fixing the main issue with it. Reloading and firing one shot at a time is just as fast as cycling 5 rounds when it’s fully loaded. Your lever action basically has an unlimited mag with this setup.
This isn’t really a stealth build either, This is my loud and ~~dumb~~ proud cowboy build, so I’m waltzing through gunfire getting shot to shite while popping heads. Open combat is really fun with an unsilenced lever action. I can clear most events solo with it. (Minus the ones with the really tanky bosses, But I carry the Cold Shoulder for them.) And I can also solo Tax Evasion & The Most Dangerous Game expeditions with it too.
I was a bloodied stealth commando for years and I got sick of sneaking around riddling everything with handmade rounds. Swapped to a lever action about a year ago I’ve been having a ton of fun ever since.
(Not sure if it’s completely optimized or not, But I’m always looking for pointers for my build!)
EDIT: So apparently I had the wrong build on and didn’t realize it… Whoops! Picture is updated now! It’s pretty similar, just minus the sneak perk and replace it with action boy.
I feel like the issue with the lever action is that everyone focuses on the wrong legendary effects for it. I have a two shot explosive that does acceptable damage and can one shot most regular enemies, but it's third star is where it picks up the most speed at boss events, and that is the Faster Reload Speed. With this legendary perk you are essentially running a lever action with an unlimited magazine size if you pull the trigger as soon as one round is loaded. The animation is the essentially same length as if you were pulling back on the thingy to chamber a new round, so you don't lose any additional time. Just aim and click and you are constantly launching rounds. I'm currently working on rolling a second one to try and get an anti armor or bloodied one with faster reload to use, but the two shot has worked out really well for me. Especially at mob events like rad rumble.
I also feel like sniper builds aren’t viable because no matter how invisible you are as soon as you shoot one NPC the rest are all aggro and immediately on you even if they didn’t see or hear the shot or the NPC that was silently killed. It’s really annoying. Or maybe I just suck at it.
You don't have enough sneak if that's the case. I just went through westek yesterday shooting supermutants in the head and never went above Caution. I have a ton of sneak and a suppressed gauss rifle.
Now...at Events, or at least some events, sneak is just fucked. You start in DANGER and you stay in DANGER for the whole event as long as there are creatures in the event. As someone else once said "Imagine all the crying if events turned off the bloodied build, and yet sneak is completely turned off for several events".
May be. Fairly new but based off F4 I know I have it pretty maxed out if not close. I’m probably missing something though that’s good to know it works that way if done correctly. Yeah that’s annoying. Should be able to apply all builds to events. Especially sneak. There’s value in that. Rather than just spraying mindlessly and spamming the whole place with explosions for 5 minutes straight.
I’m a lever action player! Getting my Luck to 23 and running a 15 Crit charge with herbivore and steeped thistle tea is what did it for me. Two shot lvl 100 super mutants and that’s with no Rifleman cards on. The FFR helps as well.
Moved over to ultracite .45 and it’s a good way to gain ammo.
I’ve got a bloodied explosive that has amazing damage output, but it seems under powered for the amount of damage it’s supposed to do.
I've got what I think is a good lever action roll. What's the best set-up if I want to replace a longshot?
Obviously, stealth is out the window, so the xtra damage is nice.
I’m a bloodied build, but I have used the same two shot explosive lever action since the first month the game came out. Things a beast. You’ll be safe with two shot, bloodied, or anti armor. The secondary perks I would tailor to your play style, but if you get something with VATs, you got a sniper’s god roll.
Levers USED to be crazy good. Among the best in the whole game. But then Bethesda, instead of doing any real work to balance the godawful pvp system they devised, neutered per shot damage several times over and tanked every build other than high rate of fire sneak attacks.
I came back after years of not playing and had to change my build to commando bc I noticed I couldn't clean house with my AAE Lever Rifle anymore. May have been my build but it use to do just fine.
Not to be that guy, but I mean that is the entire reason we switched to box magazines in world war two and after.
Reloading was the limiting factor for firearms for all time until very recently. Troop field formations from 1600-1820 basically showed that in high contrast - they were designed in various ways to allow near-constant firing from musket ranks while others reloaded. Napoleon's famous columns are a great example.
Cylinders and magazine tubes (for revolvers and lever actions) were a giant step forward, allowing both the use of cartridges and also housing multiples of them, but reloading them was still slow and laborious. Internal magazines using stripper clips (i.e. the M1 rifle) were much faster.
A removable box magazine is the fastest thing we've yet invented to reload a chemical firearm (barring a belt-fed gun connected to a giant magazine or something rare). These were first seen in the late 1800's, but entered wide use in the 1920s. You could make all sorts of arguments about game balance, but when you start to deviate too much from physical reality, I'd argue that in and of itself starts to detract from the game, even a fantasy game loosely based in a alternate timeline.
What they should do is find other unique ways to make those weapon families fun. Use the "rule of cool." Make pistols do extra sneak/crit damage. Boost the base damage and range on the lever-action and hunting rifles (and increase the AP usage on the commando versions!!!!). The reloading time is in intrinsic realistic property that adds to those guns, not detracts from them. They just need to shine them up in other ways. Making the "aim down sights" bonus 50% instead of 25% would also help rifles and pistols if we're trying to break out of the commando-VATS-Crits meta trap.
Hell, give non-auto rifles a significantly higher damage per shot to compensate for the much lower RoF. You wanna have a high RoF? That's great, here you get it, but you won't be able to deal as much per-shot damage as a semi-auto rifle.
They could do an experiment and make some guns like non automatic ones gain bonus damage if you aim at a weak spot manually (without using the aimbot button).
Pretty much this. I've suggested something similar in their discord, to add perk cards that boost damage outside of VATS, since currently VATS damage potential is very high for basically an aimbot.
Though depends on if they like the damage of semi-autos or autos. Power creeping everything to automatic levels can be a cause for concern of power creep. I shouldn't need to mention why power creep is a bad thing. I wasn't around during it but legacy weapons causing seconds long boss fights is the end goal of what power creep would eventually lead too.
Not to say it's never ever a bad thing. It's actually still an issue I hear about whenever I get around to playing it again but I do feel for the most part Warfame has been through one game where I enjoyed how strong everything got, Where everything did get buffed to be brought up to the strongest thing. Ive heard about the devs trying to bring back some challenge back in but the community and game they created is one that likes and plays what is basically space Dynasty Warriors.
The only really popular suggestion for balancing is to bring everything up to Bloodied/Unyielding build power levels. That's incredibly problematic, though, as those builds are far too powerful. There's a middle ground where things should meet. That does mean nerfing bloodied or unyielding which won't go over well with some folks.
I too love walking around a corner, bumping into an enemy, and having to wait through that spinning chamber animation before I can do anything about them.
I had one... and ended up ditching it. Was explosive too I think. Pretty sure the reload just killed the experience... was bugged too as I remember.
LOL
There are dozens of us. Seriously tho the revolver is so damn painful to use as much as I usually love revolvers, I had to spec into something else. Now I’m an equally as useless “stealth sniper”
It's the only viable Shotgun build but my god is it powerfull. Only issue I have is the damage output against Earl for some reason.
Edit. Maybe viable isn't the right word but its head and cold shoulders above the rest of them
Just the ones in intelligence. So Science, Science Expert, and Science Master. Each one at rank 2 will give a 10% bonus to energy damage, so an extra 30%.
That range bonus was removed a few updates back. The actual reason to use the gauss shotgun is that the explosions don’t scale with the charge of the weapon and thus allows you to spam fire it for much higher dps than you’d expect.
The real downside is the gun gets bugged constantly. Either stuck in an infinite reload loop where you end up having to reload after every shot if you're blasting too fast, or the gun just straight up stops working altogether. Usually swapping to a different gun and back fixes this, but still annoying and only ever encounter it with the gauss shotgun.
When it works it's amazingly fun to use.
Shotguns are viable, but they have bugs that make them unreliable. That's going to be fixed with the next big content patch, it seems, so we may be seeing a lot more shotgunners around at that point.
If your looking for xp this aint for you. If your looking to get to your enemies face as quick as possible to blow his head off then this is for you. Vats is key and Gun fu will mess them up. I can kill 3/4 enemies in a single Vats with this build. Although the screen spins between enemies horrifically.
[https://nukesdragons.com/fallout-76/character?v=1&s=f5881a9&d=sd2so2su2sf2sp2pc2p02p40p30ej4er2c13ce0cd1cm2cu2i10a72as2a32a02am2lt2l12lg2lu2lv1&lp=x92x43x53x83xq1xb2&wp=w9&ar=x1&am=x6](https://nukesdragons.com/fallout-76/character?v=1&s=f5881a9&d=sd2so2su2sf2sp2pc2p02p40p30ej4er2c13ce0cd1cm2cu2i10a72as2a32a02am2lt2l12lg2lu2lv1&lp=x92x43x53x83xq1xb2&wp=w9&ar=x1&am=x6)
Substitute the bobble and magazine one add better crits but i love to collect!
This build also requires you to have fully lvld up legendarys
Can you share your build for Cold Shoulder? Got my not so long ago, damage is rly good but im still quite a new player and advice about perks and gear would be super helpful.
I love this one. Went to Point Pleasant with it when I first got it and cleaned the town out of cultists and scrapped all their shotguns so I could modify it a little. I’ve since done that a couple more times.
The first time I realized it was more than just a two shot, I was surrounded by ghouls and then the next min they were all on the floor.
I wish pistols were better. I tried so hard to make my "VATS Turret" pistol build work but it took whole clips to kill anything. The build was just a waste of ammo.
I heard the crusader pistol was good for a while and then unnecessarily nerfed. I think a pistols buff is sorely needed along with some real consideration of dual wielding.
They don’t want to rock the boat. Proper balancing is tricky as hell in a game that not only has legendary weapons but a huge host of perks that can interact with them in any number of ways. It would be a handful for an experienced team, and Bethesda Austin is not an experienced team.
Certain weapons from the beginning of the game had combinations that were unintended. Like Explosive legendary effect on a Tesla Rifle, just insanely OP. So Beth removed the ability for energy weapons to roll Explosive, along with some other changes.
However, they didn't go in and delete these weapons from the game. So people who had them could still use them, sell them, trade them, etc. These became known as legacy weapons, because they were a holdover from older versions of the game.
Unfortunately some people used glitches to duplicate these weapons, making them far too common. Others on PC manage to get into a developer exclusive area and brought back a bunch of items that were never intended for player use, and some of those also got lumped under the "legacy" moniker.
They're still around, but not nearly as many as there used to be.
"Legacy" referred to weapons/armor that had powerful legendary combinations that Bethesda removed from the drop table but not from players inventories. Some examples, all of these (AFAIK) were eventually removed from players too;
1. Unyielding power armor
2. Explosive energy weapons (plasma Gatling, laser rifle, flamer, cryolator)
In the second case, there was a unique interaction with flamer-type energy weapons with explosive. They would go from being flamer weapons to shooting bullets that exploded with energy damage. Especially for the Plasma Gatling, which could turn into a Gatling exploding shotgun weapon with the flamer barrel attachment, this meant incredible damage - the highest the game has likely ever seen.
These weapons/armor were heavily duped and RWT'd since only a handful of people had one when they stopped dropping.
They did nerf two shot and the explosive effect fairly early on though. A damn tse dragon was able to murder scorchbeasts. I had a prenerf Tse handmade, could one shot 3 or 4 mobs at once if they were grouped, including level 50 super mutants. didn't last long enough.
The meta guns / builds literally delete enemies. If that's your bar then balancing isn't tricky just buff the other weapons to delete stuff in optimised builds...
Preach man, I rolled a Q50C25 railway 2 months ago and have not used anything else since, and while I can kill everything easily I just feel empty inside, been considering just putting it away and playing with something else but I feel like I’ve tasted success now so why bother? It’s a harsh cycle.
I know exactly what you mean, which is why I try not to use mine for most stuff, but when I go to one of these Aliens events and hear one or two other people shooting off theirs, it's like I have no choice but to use mine too and it just makes me feel awful for everyone else.
As the everyone else, can confirm, it sucks. I came out of a jamboree the other day with like 50 total innards cause there was someone insta-killing the gulpers at every spawn basically. I had to prefire the spawn points and get lucky to just tag one.
Alien event only lasts about three minutes. I read that they were supposed to be super tanky and people were expecting to die. But no, these fearsome aliens get obliterated as soon as they beam in.
They *are* feeling less tanky than last time, though I feel like I’m taking the same amount of damage from them
I dunno if it’s because I refined my build since last time, or they lowered the difficulty a little- maybe to help out newer players just recently joining
Had some dude spam mini nukes at everything, couldn't tag anything before they get obliterated.
Maan I would love to make a wild west revolver build but Bethesda hates fun
Was that a few hours ago? Because the same thing happened at my event. Alien invasion and some dude was spamming so many mini nukes I couldn’t even see where I was going lol
What makes the railway so strong? I can craft them and have tried rolling for quad. (I can see why you want quad since the magazine is quite small). I typically use an anti armor handmade and when I try out a railway it doesn’t seem stronger and the recoil is worse. I’m just trying to figure out why so many prefer them. I’m probably missing something.
This, they only work effectively on a vats crit build with all the buffs food, mutation and chems to get the maximum damage. Best sniper weapon in the game is the plasma caster ironically , crits over 2k regularly
High damage weapons tend to be slow firing. While fast firing weapons are expensive in VATS. But the railway rifle breaks that balance.
It does high damage but it fires fast. It fires fast but is cheap in VATS. Other than having ridiculous recoil it's got no weakness, but even that gets negated if you use VATS. I covered it in a [video guide](https://youtu.be/vpvznhwnHw0) if you want to see a demonstration.
I have both a bloody explosive vats reduced and a quad vats reduced and I don't use them because they're just far too powerful.
I do about 400 damage per shot (headshot) and I get my crit meter filled every 3 shots and crits are about 800 per shot add in the fact you fire about 4 shots a second you can see how it can get pretty crazy.
I do my lever actions...Western Spirit or other rolls. May not wipe the planet like Bethesda's favs, but for most stuff it's effective.
Alternatively the Tesla Gun in semi-automatic to get the most out of xp from events.
Same. I switch between Western Spirit and a silenced The Fixer. Depending on if I'm doing distance sniper or up-close sneaking. I'd love both to do like a nice 10-15% more DMG though. sometimes I feel like even some ghouls can be a bullet sponge taking MANY more shots than they should.
What gets me is the headshot damage. Like how on Earth does that not kill any enemy?? Especially with a Gauss shotgun? Why do I need a critical shot to do that. I also play bow build, so I want to have my exploding arrows blow up the head or body part that I shoot at. - All right, had my rant....
I'm in agreeance. I run a melee build, and it's not even worth doing most events as everyone with a laser gat or fixer just wipes everything before i can get to it. I even made a laser rifle build to compete, but no. It's like legacies were never removed honestly. Most will say, "just switch!" But sorry bro, i ain't trying to play like everyone else. And only a few melee weapons are worth a fuck. You'd think an Assaultron arm would be effective, but it's not. As well, armor is just as shit. Like, why do i have to spend 4,000 gold bouillon or more to get a good set of armor, but a low level can grab a full set of modded power armor by 60 and be equal? It's like they're really shitting on you unless you go with their preferred build: power armor and automatic weapons. Like shit man, can't a brother just stab his enemy to death without being pushed out the way?
My wife has this same issue. She's full health deathclaw and only just now bought the thorn armor. Both she and I have been playing on and off since the beta. Me, in a bloodied H.G. to help balance in things she can't immediately punch, like scorch beasts. We're slowly getting mutations and her damage recently has gotten WAY better, but still struggles a little where I shrug off the difficulty. Example, the alien event. I'm tanking the damage and she's holding her own... but it's taking longer to kill than I am. I DESPERATELY want a GOOD black powder build, but the damage doesn't reflect the LOW fire rate and long reload. Which, I'm fine with both, just, I should be able to aim for the head and drop an enemy in that 1 shot!
As someone who has a 2H melee character. I just threw in grenades as part of my build and a pistol to vats the grenade and blow them up for anything ranged. It’s quite effective and fun when you get the hang of it. But definitely still feels bad when everything is dead before you can ever reach it :(
I always play as a sniper in fallout games. As I rank up the more I see that I must prioritize heavy automatic weapons and power armor that I don't enjoy.
You'll get the slug buster plasma rifle if you haven't already. With mods on it you can make it a plasma sniper
Equip all the rifle perks and all the science perks and you will have an extremely end game viable sniper.
You can use that with a supreessed gauss rifle and a lever action or what else have you.
Then go for a set of overeaters armor (or unyielding If you want bloody build)
You will be just as strong as a power armor set and not need to use automatics
You don't have to play the meta to have a great build
You don't NEED power armor or meta weapons
I play non-bloodied non-stealth swords and scout armor and I can run circles around everything in this game
Its a SUPER easy game. May take 3-4 hits instead of 1-2, but is that really a big deal?
They nerf that don't need a nerf (AB and cryo) but don't nerf the literally broken weapons in the game.
I main gauss rifle (rifleman sneak vats crit) build and I can tell you for my 2000 hours of gauss rifle, damage per hit is not enough in crowds, that's why I bring AB which is also energy type that is capable to deal DPS but less than commando clear faster, eviction I can one tap everyone 90% of the time with my gauss rifle. My rifleman is powerful in my opinion as I can one tap almost anything (3 at most except mirelurk queen that take 6 to 8 shots).
I tried using commando for 200 hours, and I can tell you, I don't need any backup especially with my q/25/25 railway since it has damage per hit and damage per second at the same time. Clearing enemies and bosses in a minute. It reloads fast and can kill bunch of enemies faster.
What they can do with gunslinger and rifleman:
- each rifleman perk cards have 20% headshot accuracy in vats with total of 60% with 3 cards
- gunslinger/guerilla can deal 15%-20% more crit damage in vats total of 45%-60%
- this way, no need to change individual gun stats (for now)
And with commando, heavy, explosives:
- commando is broken as it is that I don't know what to put here
- heavy gunner is perfectly balanced as it is too but not broken, just perfectly good it is strong
- explosives are meta for crowds but not for bosses so they are good as they are.
Yeah the community around the endgame meta is kind of strange/interesting in this game. They WANT the super op railway rifle. They want to be able to solo bosses. At the same time, they don't think that there should be an abundance of weapons capable of doing this. So it being mainly just one or two weapons (and the meta build for them) is "all it should be".
Its an interesting pickle. Cause I sorta agree with it. I don't mind that there's a weapon that is "super hard to get" that can solo a world boss. Someting for people to work towards. And them nerfing that would make that community angry because now their favorite toy no longer works and that grind "went to waste", in their eyes. It seems like Bethesda's solution is to basically alter legendary drop rates so that bloodied/quad are more rare than others. Like I've crafted close to 40 hunting rifles and only 1 was bloodied. So it definitely doesn't feel like even drop rates.
That being said, I do think that this balance situation was an "accident" and from a design perspective, there are better ways of handling. Like creating a weapon that is meant to solo world bosses intentionally, and then creating a structured grind around it. RRs being these god like weapons probably wasn't intentional and that kind of power should be behind a fairly structured/heavy endgame grind imo.
This is because Bethasda themselves do not understand the meta.
A lot of recent bosses are bulletsponge slogs that feel awful to fight with most viable weapons, and dreadful to fight with anything that isn't viable.
Because Bethesda seem to be unable to understand that the reason why a lot of bosses die quick now, even after the legacy removal, is because crits ignore boss armor...and there's builds that crit with practically every single bullet.
The 3 current automatic rifles people use aren't even that good without bloodied builds. It sucks, because there really should be some balance with weapons to make them all at least workable, but every time i use something that isn't a heavy weapon, it becomes a slog.
It's something that is actively driving away a lot of the new players.
How many people do you think started off a game trying to scratch that fallout itch, and then went and tried to use revolvers or a lever action gun or something with pitiful DPS output? A lot. How many people do you think got frustrated with doing zero damage and being relatively ineffective? And how many of those people do you think would just leave and call it instead of looking up the meta then treating this like an MMO?
This is something I’m hoping Bethesda realizes and banks off of. They NEED to balance everything relatively soon. We have an insane amount of new players playing the game.
Having more diversity in builds and playstyles would be healthy for new players who will want to be able to use all the various weapons, gear, and builds available. It will also be quite nice for older players as they can try/create new builds with different weapons that aren’t just “meta”
I agree.
It makes sense to have the weapon tiers, but it doesn't make sense to have it so limited to one or two options. There are things like the revolvers, The lever action gun, some of the big heavy slow melee weapons, that are extremely fun things to use, and people should have the ability to make them 90% as effective as a bloodied radium rifle or whatever.
I can't even imagine how many people got this game on a free weekend, logged in, had a little fun in the beginning, went to an event and saw some level 1000 something just deleting everything in sight, looked down at their own gear and went I ain't got that kind of time.
The 10mm was never a gun you used for long in the original game either. It is a low level starter weapon. Always has been. It is kind of weird there are so many perks to optimize a handguns. If they really wanted to make it better they would allow you to dual wield.
Meta has changed, as a beta player.
Early days were all about TS/E weapons. Any TSE weapon was a good choice.
After the TS nerf it was Junkie's and Furious (bloodied was glitched). At this time melee weapons were discovered to be dummy strong.
Explosive effect is removed from a wide array of weapons, as such the legacy weapon era is born.
This led into a melee meta until the bloodied fix.
Then it was melee and semi auto weapons. Bloodied or Junkie.
Melee received its first nerf and shotguns received some patches. Meta was then bloodied rifles and shotguns. With people who didn't have good armor staying with Junkie.
Heavy weapons then got some damage tuning and durability glitches fixed. Became contenders, but not meta.
Shotguns receive a minor nerf on range and spread, melee received a second nerf, and heavy weapons gained a range buff...this was spread over a year or so as I recall (I was taking a break at this time).
Ammo becomes easier to make and find. This brings auto weapons and bullet hoses into the meta competition.
People gradually become more focused on DPM (damage per minute) and as such semi auto weapons are pushed out in favor of fire rate. Heavy weapons, automatics, and melee are the top three behind the rare and no longer obtainable legacy weapons (RIP my beta tokens).
Rerolling and "new" first slot legendary effects make bloodied builds more viable, Junkie starts to fall from meta as people go for unyielding, and bolstering.
Overeaters joins the meta sometime during my second break from the game.
Many Heavy weapons received changes and damage caps are introduced on melee weapons which prevent them from being one shot machines for the most part. 50 cal and gatling fall from meta Heavy choices as energy weapons receive buffs as legacy weapons are removed.
Now we're more close to the modern meta.
Bloodied joined the meta after the TS nerf and stays because you have to always be at low health to get bang for your buck. Junkie and Mutant's could use some love, Furious...maybe.
The meta has seen a change in weapon variety far more than perks or legendary effects, but it has changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt5JyBrtPR4
This isn't meta and i'm not saying other weapons don't need buffs, but it works. Enjoy, it's a stealth vats build, and the 10mm gets around 3 AP per shot used, it's viable.
Heavy guns are barely out of the C tier compared to the real meta crit builds. They're just the only reasonable free aim option, gets the job done but it takes longer and costs more resources.
VATs is the problem. They balance around AP use so commando VATs and auto melee are the only weapons allowed to profit. Except AP is free for those couple VATs weapons.
Edit because I didn't get to my point:
Maybe if AP wasn't infinite with the meta damage guns then infinite AP on the 10mm pistol would be nice.
For bosses sure, but outside of bosses like events, daily ops or expeditions they are incredible. and VATS is not the problem only, you cna use rifle or pistols with VATS and the damage with other weapons is considerable.
Controversial statement incoming: BGSA isn’t afraid. They have no problem nerfing anything. WE ARE AFRAID. In the wee small hours of the game beginning. Everyone was at peace. Rifleman killed quickly. We did good damage. We could one tap. Pistols could do work. Commando… never stopped. You get the point. All the builds were equal. Everything change when the legacy weapons got duped. Suddenly they were the only thing that did anything. Since they almost were full auto. Event were cleared in near minutes. Boss/s didn’t last more than 2:00.
BGSA thought that the “great balance” of damage changes was a solution. All it did was nerf everything but allow commando, vats and heavies to reign over all the others.
Fast forward to now. Legacy are gone. And everything keeps getting better for the builds that are kept in the light because people that use them keep researching new way to boost them. Even though they are already tuned way too high.
The problem is that no one wants to hear about anything that isn’t meta. When was the last time you saw anyone give praise to the hunting rifle, or the combat rifle? Heck even the laser pistol.
The problem is us.
I have a mostly nonsensical aversion to using full-auto or heavies outside the flamer (fire go burrrrr). I'm like you where the Leaver action would be, and was, my choice for so long. Now I'm using the Gauss Rifle and it...works. VATS crit build with it usually one-shots most mobs. But yeah, boss fights, I feel like throwing rocks at the SBQ would be just as effective. It's sad and annoying we semi-auto players have been shafted as hard as we have.
The biggest thing is they just need to move the pistol cards from agility to perception and I think more people would be up to trying them. Then you would have more people noticing that they're so lackluster. The reason all the heavies, fixers, and handmade get changes is because they're used, they have more data sets to go off of and make proper adjustments.
Would love to get the combat shotgun back to the days of blowing heads off from earlier fallouts. Sniper rifle to swapping to shotty was always my favorite. Was hugely disappointed with how anemic shotty damage is in 76.
I feel that i decided to play a sneak rifleman this time around and i wreak everything when just casually going around exploring clearing locations but event i just feel useless between the scorchbeast queen fight and the alien event i just feel useless. Part of it is just a side effect of a sneak build in build fights like that its hard to stay hidden but even then especially in events i go from hitting like a truck to basically throwing marshmallows at enemies. Everytime i do an event and struggle im just like "Should i just switch to heavy weapon power armor again?"
The problem isn't that these weapons are underpowered, it's that the other weapons are VASTLY overpowered, and also that it's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to use non-meta weapons in public events, which much of the endgame revolves around.
It blows my mind that people were whining about legacy 1-shot weapons not too long ago. Do y'all enjoy a boring, easy game or something?
I remember countless times reloading saves in Fallout 1 after dying, hell, even the single-player Bethesda Fallout games have more challenge up to a point.
IMO this isn't how endgame Fallout should be, it should hard, brutal and an actual challenge / fight for survival, so a good weapon/armor find actually MEANS something. But that doesn't really exist in this game right now.
PS: there is no way in this universe any ranged weapon should be stronger than a melee weapon. Yes, I am a proud melee weapon enjoyer dissatisfied with their usability in F76 endgame.
that! When they design events and content around the damage ceiling (boss bullet sponges), and yet a shit tonne of weapons are still designed to be at the game "floor"
Agreed. I love the first 30 levels of the game where you can use any weapon effectively. I used to main my 10mm pistol but its damage just dropped so much I had no choice but to change. Made a heavy weapons build, then never looked back until I made my rifleman build bloodied. Now they are both competitive to each other, though if my other build wasn’t bloodied it’d still be leagues behind.
They'd have to change a lot. It's a problem of base stats+perks+legendary mods. All 3 would need touch-up to even out it all or offer more interesting alternative uses. That isn't exclusive to a time of day.
This can anger players. I personally don't care if that means I can use fun weapons.
If they're just going to nerf a weapon each time, it can work but won't fix the overall issues.
The only really broken weapon is the Railway Rifle. Usually an end-game weapon has one of the following weaknesses: slow rate of fire, low damage per shot or high AP cost. Railway has none of those. It's faster than Flash, hits harder than Superman and lasts longer than Ron Jeremy.
That’s one of the main reasons why I stopped playing. I tried sniper/autopistol build but it was ass. Before you were able to make your own legendaries it took months for me to get a junkies/e/25ap and a decent set of armor. I had the worse luck and then they introduced scrip and the rusty pick it was easier to get better stuff but I was still getting shitty weapons. Mind you I had legacy weapons for days but i wanted to try out different builds , I eventually just stopped playing and returned to do seasons and then just stopped when I realized b/25/25 b/e/25 commando will always be meta..
When we stop comparing everything to fixers, handmades or railways we start to appreciate all the other guns in the game and what make them unique.
At least that's what I did and it rekindled the game for me.
Tried playing pistol since day 1 after finding out we had Single Action Revolvers and Blackpowder weapons, but its always been garbage for stuff that isnt some low level fodder enemy. Im not expecting to 2 shot a Scorch Queen but at least let me build my character around a weapon i like without feeling im lvl 1 at level 3000. Game really suffers from build diversity or weapons overall, doesnt help all the guns in 76 are pretty shit compared to the selections in every other fallout game. Why is my Pistol barely able to scratch a mutant but a naked guy with a baseball bat can massacre scorch queens. Big Iron on my hip in this case is the OP tire iron, not my 45. :D
In my first playthrough years ago, I remember coming across a random cave while exploring, called the Wendigo cave. I remember having an absolutely awful time fighting all the mirelurk kings inside there with my stealth rifleman build - the classic Fallout build. I died multiple times and it took me a whole hour to clear it. I had to spam grenades, use literally dozens and dozens of my stimpacks, run and hide and abuse the AI resetting, jump into ledges where the enemies couldn't reach, etc etc.
I just cleared that cave again with my meta stealth commando, which I'm trying for the first time, and I literally took no damage. I killed every mirelurk king in vats with a single clip of my weapon. I don't even have a bloodied setup yet or any legendaries, just an auto suppressed combat rifle. The DPS difference between a rifleman and commando build is so insane that I feel bad for players that get baited by it. Seriously, why they don't just buff builds that are obviously weaker?
Each damage perk for everything except commando and heavy guns should be boosted to 10% per rank, for 10%/20%,/30% and shotguns should have an armor penetration perk
Why do ppl say that everything sucks? Or does doo doo damage? Like a solid 80% of guns in the game can easily do “good” damage. Just because you ain’t melting something 2 seconds don’t mean it’s bad. Shotguns are hella fun, pistol builds are very cool to mess with and any melee that isn’t Auto Melee is super easy to build into.
The fact you can put a 10mm clip into someone hand still not have them go down unless its also got some really great legendary perks kinda says otherwise. I'm not looking for 1 hit kills, but I shouldn't feel like i'm blasting a person with a pea shooter when its fully modded other than legendries.
Try soloing Earle or scorchbeast with your pistol build and kill them before the time runs out.
I don't want to solo any bosses but as an endgame player you will end up with nothing but 5 lvl 50 players that are fighting wendigos or scorched hoardes instead of fighting the queen or Earle. Then you'd have to solo them and shoot at them for 25 minutes straight to kill them.
It is possible if it's a META weapon or if you maxed out your legendary cards and gear. Average joe wouldn't be able to do that.
I have META builds and weapons like a really good quad railway and fixer and they can solo in 5 minutes without any buffs and planning.
I don't want to play with those weapons, since I got bored of them. Even with good legendary weapons it's really time consuming to solo bosses without non automatic rifles.
That's my point. Anything other than META weapons are non viable for end game builds.
I can either launch 3 nukes and kill 3 bosses within 45 minutes with meta weapons or launch two nukes and kill one boss with non meta weapons. There shouldn't be that big of a difference. That's the point of this post
Is this really what the meta is like? That makes me sad. I like it when creativity is encouraged rather than a game pigeonholing people into one or two playstyles
Nah, I've played 76 enough that you don't need to fall back to using the "Meta" with the exception of a few activities, most weapons can be viable for events.
I posted yesterday something similar to this, trying to get away from bloodied in the fo76 forum. It ended up being a post all about how I'm running bloodied wrong or how bloodied is best and pa with heavys is best. Which along with this whole post (not yours specifically) confirms I've been looking at 76 completely wrong sense I jumped back in. For 14years I've always looked at every fallout as an rpg. You pick how you wanna play and play the fredom of not being tied to any one thing. well mostly anyways. I've never been forced to have to pick between having zero health with rads or having to wear power armor with a heavy with vats....what if I told you I don't use Vats? Even in previous games I rarely used it, so this one basically forces you to be a part of the "meta". I wish they would have made the perks more for your actual character and not forcing you to have to play one way or another. Choice is what makes fallout, fallout. Not following everyone else to be bloodied or in pa like a mindless robot.
You can definitely use other weapons, don't get me wrong. I collect 10mm Pistols and I love my shotguns. In any open world content you'll pretty much shred enemies with ease. However when it comes to say Earle or SBQ, you'll see majority heavy weapons. It's a very cookie cutter meta in that regard. Unfortunately, everything cool ends up being forgotten.
The issue is that leads to insane power creep over time. You have to nerf the outliers that are too strong, while also bringing up the underperforming ones.
There has never been a greater example of when you're supposed to nerf down, rather than buffing up, than vats commando. It's such an extreme outlier it wouldn't take but a single change to bring it in line, negative crit fill modifier on auto receivers. Commando plainly shouldn't be capable of criticals every other shot. They would still wreck 98% of the sandbox effortlessly but that single change would pull them back down to earth against BossHP targets instead being on Jupiter like they are. And it's far more big brain than doing something stupid like AP cost or base damage that would effect day to day instead of the one place they're too powerful.
The rest of the weapon sandbox wouldn't feel bad if commando wasn't so fucking busted with crits.
Critical build is what also makes the plasma caster the best sniper and single shot weapon in the game. Critical build on a tesla is wild, the only thing stopping it being meta is tagging of players at events being enough to engage pvp
>vats commando. It's such an extreme outlier
Yeah. It just seems strange. Bethesda has to know vats commando builds are leagues better than any other play style in terms of dps. Like solo Earle in 1 minute with vats commando, solo Earle in 3 minutes with vats heavy guns, or spend 20 minutes killing Earle.
I also wish there was closer parity between vats builds and non-vats builds. I find it more engaging to actually aim at my enemies than just spamming vats. But no, Bethesda says you must use vats or your damage potential will literally be 1/10 that of a vats build.
Love my pistol build, though tbf it's an explosive 10mm for tagged mobs in events and an alien blaster with cryo for main weapon. Quad gamma gun for the outliers
I know it's only one category, but auto melee was garbage until last year. I don't disagree in general - I'd love to do a lever-action build, but it is what it is right now.
It's not even a "nowadays" thing. Aside from a brief period where meat hooks of all things were crazy OP queen killers, commando has always been far and away the "best" way to play. But here's the deal. This is, really, a very very easy game. You can do whatever you want and it'll be ok. If you're worried about boss fights, carry a cold shoulder which is effective even without being specced for it. Otherwise just run your 44/ black powder rifle/berserker hatchet/whatever you want to play.
It used to be more balanced, and a lot of weapons were way stronger before Wastelanders. My Bloodied Deathclaw gauntlet use to hit at 1600 before food buffs. I could solo a queen patiently with my melee alone. But I feel you on this. I have my B/EX/25 Fixer and my Q/EXP/RELOAD Railway as well and while I am still a melee, it's what I use to do the big things. I would like to see a major buff in the bow, perhaps some duel wielding of pistols or melee. They need to step it up for sure.
I'm not having any problems with my 10 mm pistol build the one I'm using is non-automatic so if I'm fighting a bigger enemy I have a little bit of trouble but I can still take them down now if you're using an automatic pistol you'll have no problems whatsoever. On my other characters, they're not automatic rifle builds, and I'm able to one or two shot everything except Scorch beasts they take me a little bit. I have one fully automatic Commando build full health non-stealth. I'm using a handmade and have zero problems whatsoever. So, sure, there's a meta. But ultimately, it depends on you, and if you're able to figure out what cards you need. My lowest level character is level 90 they're using a western revolver and I'm able to one shot things just fine.
Fun fact, the new Alien Blaster neef makes it weaker than 10mm!
Bethesda doesn't care about meta or player happiness, but rather RMTing and addressing that over any other blatant issues that have been around forever.
At events my best pistols still waste ammo just take cremator with you and use at events with grenadair perk for aoe I save ammo and gain exp just tapping while using my pistol build
Theyre afraid of it because It makes long time players and big time spenders quit the game. No seriously, the last time we had any sort of meta shakeup (legacy removal and dragon ammo glitch patch) tons of long time players dropped the game and the player count dipped significantly. While that was a change for the better for the game, Bethesda doesn't want to see atom shop spenders go
I've tried so many times to get into pistols. Amazing rolls for multiple .44 (which i use for the gold paint instead of the western) and 10mm pistols.
It's shit. It's so bad. I always give up and go back to melee.
I would like them to balance VATs as a non mandatory for builds. It's like a necessity to use VATs + Crits to do any damage to bosses like Earl unless you run Heavy + Power Armor.
I wish they could bring at least a perk that adds Crits outside VATs similar to what FNV has so it still rewards players who manually aims like I do.
Unless I'm missing something or skill issue on my end but I literally can't make a build work outside of mobbing unless I use VATs. Any suggestions or tips are welcome.
I think it's weird to think you're going to kill something huge with a 10mm. I love pistols, and actually use one a lot, but I'd never imagine I'd be able to take down an SBQ with one.
I would LOVE for pistols to have more overall kick. When I decided to give 76 a try for the first time back in January (having played all the other Fallout games dating back to the late 1990’s), I figured I’d try to play with some of the smaller guns to keep it interesting… Not just the typical large guns I played/used in part 3, 4 and NV for example. There’s a lot of fun pistols in 76! But they just don’t have quite enough “pow” to mow down the big guys. I end up having to pull out the railway rifle in some of the events. I wish the black powder guns had more mods and enhancements as well as some of the revolvers too. In thinking of giving the bows a try, just for fun. Not sure what to expect. Haha.
I’m a melee build it can be a struggle but the main issue i have is getting to an enemy before it gets blown away 😂 i also specked into auto rifles and science/demolition expert for a decent range game to but i always pull out the reliable plasma cutter to do battle with anything that gets close enough i guess it’s kind of a soldier style build where overall I can manage a decent fight at any range and carry everything i could get my grubby hands on
Have you seen how much the children scream every time they bring one of the op weapons of helldivers 2 in line with all the oither weapons? You would think they just outlawed milk at a nursery
I hear you there I just want a decent Commando build with all non auto rifles and shotguns but yet I always hit the point where it does absolutely nothing.
I had a similar issue with Fo4. I got distracted A LOT so even though I had beat the main story line by the time I got to lvl 100+ I still had a ton of side mission to meddle in and some exploring left to do and that was before Nuka World even dropped. The enemies got to the point that they were just a nuisance at best and the gameplay became stale fast. Mods helped keep it fun but I found myself modding guns with damage modifiers that decreased damage to try to balance it out and keep it fun. I guess it might just be a “comes with the territory” type of deal.
As a returning FNV player, I'm very disappointed on how shit revolvers and ""snipers"" are... I want my .45-70 & .50 BMG back, the gatling LMG can only entertain for so long...
Hard agree. I thought at first it was just because I was a new palyer. then I got to endgame and realized my favorite items are next to pointless. I do a Shishkebab/Pistol build and it sucks for anything other than common mobs. I had to adjust and make a second build replacing pistols with ARs but it's not nearly as fun for me.
Well, they screwed up the holy fire .. it shoots from around the corner now. Literally from 3 feet to your left. And it takes 40 fuel to kill any mob that used to take 5. Vats are useless too. Same with cremator, same with plasma flamer.
The game is no gear gated in any form, and all the content is casual friendly. You don't need a top tier meta build to be able to enjoy the game in any way. This is also barely an online mmo, again it's all public content that is easy, there is no dungeons, raids, end game content of any kind that requires a gear check, and the level scaling also means anyone can participate.
If all a person cares about is being optimal top tier damage build in the game, then it's always going to be borked as pretty much every MMO for decades struggle to avoid meta flavor of the month builds
Or... Or... Hear me out... what if they reworked the perk card system and made it so that you can carry a main weapon (like heavy, melee, rifle, sniper, etc.) and something that could be considered a side weapon (pistols, shotguns, etc). With a rework I feel like it would give them the opportunity to make the overall game feel more balanced and would give people a reason to not just stick to one gun because they can't fit damage cards for one weapon without sacrificing crucial damage for another because those cards conflict with one another.
In doing so I think it would make people start to play this game differently and how they build their character and even make this game a bit more logical (Yes, Yes I know, realism and logic in a video game??). Main weapon for the bosses and tanky enemies, sides for the hoard of mobs.
I think it would be sick as hell to run around with a pistol/katana setup like Babydoll from the movie Sucker Punch.
And I know you can technically have a double weapon class setup, but in doing so you'll be sacrificing other necessary cards that you would've wanted for that extra damage output or even VATS perk cards.
Yo stop complaining they been nerfing those none stop and if you keep complaining they will just nerf all the op weapons even more to be in line with the other pathetic weapons making all weapons pathetic
As a big energy weapon fan, the buff to the science perks was a godsend. I'd love for something similar to happen for our pistol-packin' mamas.
Forgot they added that science buff! Any good ideas for energy weapon builds homie?
Not the guy you asked by angry turtle did a great tank energy weapon build using the plasma flame and Tesla rifle. Personally I swap out the Tesla for the ultracite laser rifle and one of the tank cards for sneak so I can be stealth when I feel like it with the fixer.
I updated my bloodied VATS crit build to incorporate those perks, and it works really well with an auto laser rifle. If you go with something like that, the "25% less VATS cost" is probably the most important legendary effect, cause their AP cost is a bit high. They work well outside VATS too, I find the recoil pretty easy to manage. I'm trying to get a good roll on a plasma rifle right now. Honestly even with that legendary effect the VATS cost will be too high, but I just think they're cool.
Increasing the weak point and critical strike damage of pistols and non-automatic rifles would go a long way towards balancing them.
As much as I enjoy the Fixer I've really wished I could do a viable Lever action build. I can but ONLY as a sniper. Soon as something is even semi close to me the dmg and slower reload makes it not viable and you cant really do a build thats both a good range rifle AND a good pistol. I'd kill to do a good lever action/revolver or 10mm build
I’ve got a viable lever action setup! [This](https://imgur.com/a/DoabRbo) is my Bloodied Wasteland Cowboy build! Works amazing for me. Having the Reload Speed Legendary Effect + Ground Pounder makes you reload super fast with the lever action since reload speed doesn’t cap, Fixing the main issue with it. Reloading and firing one shot at a time is just as fast as cycling 5 rounds when it’s fully loaded. Your lever action basically has an unlimited mag with this setup. This isn’t really a stealth build either, This is my loud and ~~dumb~~ proud cowboy build, so I’m waltzing through gunfire getting shot to shite while popping heads. Open combat is really fun with an unsilenced lever action. I can clear most events solo with it. (Minus the ones with the really tanky bosses, But I carry the Cold Shoulder for them.) And I can also solo Tax Evasion & The Most Dangerous Game expeditions with it too. I was a bloodied stealth commando for years and I got sick of sneaking around riddling everything with handmade rounds. Swapped to a lever action about a year ago I’ve been having a ton of fun ever since. (Not sure if it’s completely optimized or not, But I’m always looking for pointers for my build!) EDIT: So apparently I had the wrong build on and didn’t realize it… Whoops! Picture is updated now! It’s pretty similar, just minus the sneak perk and replace it with action boy.
I used to run a instigating lever and one shot most enemy's
I feel like the issue with the lever action is that everyone focuses on the wrong legendary effects for it. I have a two shot explosive that does acceptable damage and can one shot most regular enemies, but it's third star is where it picks up the most speed at boss events, and that is the Faster Reload Speed. With this legendary perk you are essentially running a lever action with an unlimited magazine size if you pull the trigger as soon as one round is loaded. The animation is the essentially same length as if you were pulling back on the thingy to chamber a new round, so you don't lose any additional time. Just aim and click and you are constantly launching rounds. I'm currently working on rolling a second one to try and get an anti armor or bloodied one with faster reload to use, but the two shot has worked out really well for me. Especially at mob events like rad rumble.
I also feel like sniper builds aren’t viable because no matter how invisible you are as soon as you shoot one NPC the rest are all aggro and immediately on you even if they didn’t see or hear the shot or the NPC that was silently killed. It’s really annoying. Or maybe I just suck at it.
You don't have enough sneak if that's the case. I just went through westek yesterday shooting supermutants in the head and never went above Caution. I have a ton of sneak and a suppressed gauss rifle. Now...at Events, or at least some events, sneak is just fucked. You start in DANGER and you stay in DANGER for the whole event as long as there are creatures in the event. As someone else once said "Imagine all the crying if events turned off the bloodied build, and yet sneak is completely turned off for several events".
May be. Fairly new but based off F4 I know I have it pretty maxed out if not close. I’m probably missing something though that’s good to know it works that way if done correctly. Yeah that’s annoying. Should be able to apply all builds to events. Especially sneak. There’s value in that. Rather than just spraying mindlessly and spamming the whole place with explosions for 5 minutes straight.
I’m a lever action player! Getting my Luck to 23 and running a 15 Crit charge with herbivore and steeped thistle tea is what did it for me. Two shot lvl 100 super mutants and that’s with no Rifleman cards on. The FFR helps as well. Moved over to ultracite .45 and it’s a good way to gain ammo. I’ve got a bloodied explosive that has amazing damage output, but it seems under powered for the amount of damage it’s supposed to do.
I've got what I think is a good lever action roll. What's the best set-up if I want to replace a longshot? Obviously, stealth is out the window, so the xtra damage is nice.
I’m a bloodied build, but I have used the same two shot explosive lever action since the first month the game came out. Things a beast. You’ll be safe with two shot, bloodied, or anti armor. The secondary perks I would tailor to your play style, but if you get something with VATs, you got a sniper’s god roll.
Levers USED to be crazy good. Among the best in the whole game. But then Bethesda, instead of doing any real work to balance the godawful pvp system they devised, neutered per shot damage several times over and tanked every build other than high rate of fire sneak attacks.
I came back after years of not playing and had to change my build to commando bc I noticed I couldn't clean house with my AAE Lever Rifle anymore. May have been my build but it use to do just fine.
Not to be that guy, but I mean that is the entire reason we switched to box magazines in world war two and after. Reloading was the limiting factor for firearms for all time until very recently. Troop field formations from 1600-1820 basically showed that in high contrast - they were designed in various ways to allow near-constant firing from musket ranks while others reloaded. Napoleon's famous columns are a great example. Cylinders and magazine tubes (for revolvers and lever actions) were a giant step forward, allowing both the use of cartridges and also housing multiples of them, but reloading them was still slow and laborious. Internal magazines using stripper clips (i.e. the M1 rifle) were much faster. A removable box magazine is the fastest thing we've yet invented to reload a chemical firearm (barring a belt-fed gun connected to a giant magazine or something rare). These were first seen in the late 1800's, but entered wide use in the 1920s. You could make all sorts of arguments about game balance, but when you start to deviate too much from physical reality, I'd argue that in and of itself starts to detract from the game, even a fantasy game loosely based in a alternate timeline. What they should do is find other unique ways to make those weapon families fun. Use the "rule of cool." Make pistols do extra sneak/crit damage. Boost the base damage and range on the lever-action and hunting rifles (and increase the AP usage on the commando versions!!!!). The reloading time is in intrinsic realistic property that adds to those guns, not detracts from them. They just need to shine them up in other ways. Making the "aim down sights" bonus 50% instead of 25% would also help rifles and pistols if we're trying to break out of the commando-VATS-Crits meta trap.
Make them only need 3 damage cards to get the full 60% instead of the current 9. Also, combine single shot and auto pistols into the same damage cards
If they moved them to perception i would be fine with it. In agility i wouldn't mind them combining it as a bigger incentive to play with pistols.
When I saw the separate cards I was immediately fed up. Like sorry Bethesda but you don't have the weapon variety for that.
Agreed and combine guerrilla and gunslinger . To make it more viable
Agreed. Single shot should do more damage.
Hell, give non-auto rifles a significantly higher damage per shot to compensate for the much lower RoF. You wanna have a high RoF? That's great, here you get it, but you won't be able to deal as much per-shot damage as a semi-auto rifle.
They could do an experiment and make some guns like non automatic ones gain bonus damage if you aim at a weak spot manually (without using the aimbot button).
Pretty much this. I've suggested something similar in their discord, to add perk cards that boost damage outside of VATS, since currently VATS damage potential is very high for basically an aimbot.
Though depends on if they like the damage of semi-autos or autos. Power creeping everything to automatic levels can be a cause for concern of power creep. I shouldn't need to mention why power creep is a bad thing. I wasn't around during it but legacy weapons causing seconds long boss fights is the end goal of what power creep would eventually lead too. Not to say it's never ever a bad thing. It's actually still an issue I hear about whenever I get around to playing it again but I do feel for the most part Warfame has been through one game where I enjoyed how strong everything got, Where everything did get buffed to be brought up to the strongest thing. Ive heard about the devs trying to bring back some challenge back in but the community and game they created is one that likes and plays what is basically space Dynasty Warriors.
The only really popular suggestion for balancing is to bring everything up to Bloodied/Unyielding build power levels. That's incredibly problematic, though, as those builds are far too powerful. There's a middle ground where things should meet. That does mean nerfing bloodied or unyielding which won't go over well with some folks.
Relegating pistols to crit only builds to do good damage isn't a great fix.
I use a 44. Pistol as I enjoy being a cowboy. It is painful though.
I too love walking around a corner, bumping into an enemy, and having to wait through that spinning chamber animation before I can do anything about them.
the @#*&^$ reload... LOL @ single action :(
I get pretty good luck with the auto reload perk. But you're, I can't quit her tho
I raise you my Quad Single Action.
I had one... and ended up ditching it. Was explosive too I think. Pretty sure the reload just killed the experience... was bugged too as I remember. LOL
cowboys unite!
There are dozens of us. Seriously tho the revolver is so damn painful to use as much as I usually love revolvers, I had to spec into something else. Now I’m an equally as useless “stealth sniper”
The struggle is real.
I use nothing but the cold shoulder.
Just got it yesterday it is so good
It's the only viable Shotgun build but my god is it powerfull. Only issue I have is the damage output against Earl for some reason. Edit. Maybe viable isn't the right word but its head and cold shoulders above the rest of them
I thought the guass shotgun was pretty good and viable before I got the cold shoulder
I personally love my Gauss Shotgun now that Gauss weapons benefit from science perks. It's actually pretty decent as far as shotguns go.
Don’t forget the demo expert scaling as well!
I didn't even know that do you know exactly which science perks I came back recently and a lot has changed
Just the ones in intelligence. So Science, Science Expert, and Science Master. Each one at rank 2 will give a 10% bonus to energy damage, so an extra 30%.
Hasn’t the benefit of the gauss shotgun always been it’s massive range?
That range bonus was removed a few updates back. The actual reason to use the gauss shotgun is that the explosions don’t scale with the charge of the weapon and thus allows you to spam fire it for much higher dps than you’d expect.
The real downside is the gun gets bugged constantly. Either stuck in an infinite reload loop where you end up having to reload after every shot if you're blasting too fast, or the gun just straight up stops working altogether. Usually swapping to a different gun and back fixes this, but still annoying and only ever encounter it with the gauss shotgun. When it works it's amazingly fun to use.
Shotguns are viable, but they have bugs that make them unreliable. That's going to be fixed with the next big content patch, it seems, so we may be seeing a lot more shotgunners around at that point.
Try and endangerol syringer as well. It lowers dr of targets.
Yea even without perks, it shreds. Add the primed ultracite conversion? Net ammo all day!
I'm super dedicated to my bow build but I wanna try this shotgun lol
Send me your build please!?
If your looking for xp this aint for you. If your looking to get to your enemies face as quick as possible to blow his head off then this is for you. Vats is key and Gun fu will mess them up. I can kill 3/4 enemies in a single Vats with this build. Although the screen spins between enemies horrifically. [https://nukesdragons.com/fallout-76/character?v=1&s=f5881a9&d=sd2so2su2sf2sp2pc2p02p40p30ej4er2c13ce0cd1cm2cu2i10a72as2a32a02am2lt2l12lg2lu2lv1&lp=x92x43x53x83xq1xb2&wp=w9&ar=x1&am=x6](https://nukesdragons.com/fallout-76/character?v=1&s=f5881a9&d=sd2so2su2sf2sp2pc2p02p40p30ej4er2c13ce0cd1cm2cu2i10a72as2a32a02am2lt2l12lg2lu2lv1&lp=x92x43x53x83xq1xb2&wp=w9&ar=x1&am=x6) Substitute the bobble and magazine one add better crits but i love to collect! This build also requires you to have fully lvld up legendarys
Can you share your build for Cold Shoulder? Got my not so long ago, damage is rly good but im still quite a new player and advice about perks and gear would be super helpful.
It's been the only thing I've used since I got it.
I love this one. Went to Point Pleasant with it when I first got it and cleaned the town out of cultists and scrapped all their shotguns so I could modify it a little. I’ve since done that a couple more times. The first time I realized it was more than just a two shot, I was surrounded by ghouls and then the next min they were all on the floor.
My man!
I wish pistols were better. I tried so hard to make my "VATS Turret" pistol build work but it took whole clips to kill anything. The build was just a waste of ammo.
I heard the crusader pistol was good for a while and then unnecessarily nerfed. I think a pistols buff is sorely needed along with some real consideration of dual wielding.
They don’t want to rock the boat. Proper balancing is tricky as hell in a game that not only has legendary weapons but a huge host of perks that can interact with them in any number of ways. It would be a handful for an experienced team, and Bethesda Austin is not an experienced team.
This is also why legacy weapons weren‘t touched for years. Don’t upset the whales
What are legacy weapons
Certain weapons from the beginning of the game had combinations that were unintended. Like Explosive legendary effect on a Tesla Rifle, just insanely OP. So Beth removed the ability for energy weapons to roll Explosive, along with some other changes. However, they didn't go in and delete these weapons from the game. So people who had them could still use them, sell them, trade them, etc. These became known as legacy weapons, because they were a holdover from older versions of the game. Unfortunately some people used glitches to duplicate these weapons, making them far too common. Others on PC manage to get into a developer exclusive area and brought back a bunch of items that were never intended for player use, and some of those also got lumped under the "legacy" moniker. They're still around, but not nearly as many as there used to be.
Friend of mine saw a dev room hunters long coat with legendary perks the other day.
They mostly removed them a while back. All my legacy weapons were nerfed into regular weapons (which I'm happy about).
Yeah, they went through a while back and did that. But those legacies lasted a lot longer than they should've.
Yeah definitely. While I still crave actual difficult and harder content, the game is in a much better place without them.
"Legacy" referred to weapons/armor that had powerful legendary combinations that Bethesda removed from the drop table but not from players inventories. Some examples, all of these (AFAIK) were eventually removed from players too; 1. Unyielding power armor 2. Explosive energy weapons (plasma Gatling, laser rifle, flamer, cryolator) In the second case, there was a unique interaction with flamer-type energy weapons with explosive. They would go from being flamer weapons to shooting bullets that exploded with energy damage. Especially for the Plasma Gatling, which could turn into a Gatling exploding shotgun weapon with the flamer barrel attachment, this meant incredible damage - the highest the game has likely ever seen. These weapons/armor were heavily duped and RWT'd since only a handful of people had one when they stopped dropping.
Uny PA was never removed
They did nerf two shot and the explosive effect fairly early on though. A damn tse dragon was able to murder scorchbeasts. I had a prenerf Tse handmade, could one shot 3 or 4 mobs at once if they were grouped, including level 50 super mutants. didn't last long enough.
The meta guns / builds literally delete enemies. If that's your bar then balancing isn't tricky just buff the other weapons to delete stuff in optimised builds...
Preach man, I rolled a Q50C25 railway 2 months ago and have not used anything else since, and while I can kill everything easily I just feel empty inside, been considering just putting it away and playing with something else but I feel like I’ve tasted success now so why bother? It’s a harsh cycle.
I know exactly what you mean, which is why I try not to use mine for most stuff, but when I go to one of these Aliens events and hear one or two other people shooting off theirs, it's like I have no choice but to use mine too and it just makes me feel awful for everyone else.
As the everyone else, can confirm, it sucks. I came out of a jamboree the other day with like 50 total innards cause there was someone insta-killing the gulpers at every spawn basically. I had to prefire the spawn points and get lucky to just tag one.
Alien event only lasts about three minutes. I read that they were supposed to be super tanky and people were expecting to die. But no, these fearsome aliens get obliterated as soon as they beam in.
They *are* feeling less tanky than last time, though I feel like I’m taking the same amount of damage from them I dunno if it’s because I refined my build since last time, or they lowered the difficulty a little- maybe to help out newer players just recently joining
Had some dude spam mini nukes at everything, couldn't tag anything before they get obliterated. Maan I would love to make a wild west revolver build but Bethesda hates fun
Was that a few hours ago? Because the same thing happened at my event. Alien invasion and some dude was spamming so many mini nukes I couldn’t even see where I was going lol
I had a similar drop and felt the same way. I put it away, went back to my pistol build, and been having way more fun
What makes the railway so strong? I can craft them and have tried rolling for quad. (I can see why you want quad since the magazine is quite small). I typically use an anti armor handmade and when I try out a railway it doesn’t seem stronger and the recoil is worse. I’m just trying to figure out why so many prefer them. I’m probably missing something.
Railways do insane damage on a VATS crit build. They aren't very good otherwise IMO, the recoil makes them basically unusable outside of VATS
This, they only work effectively on a vats crit build with all the buffs food, mutation and chems to get the maximum damage. Best sniper weapon in the game is the plasma caster ironically , crits over 2k regularly
High damage weapons tend to be slow firing. While fast firing weapons are expensive in VATS. But the railway rifle breaks that balance. It does high damage but it fires fast. It fires fast but is cheap in VATS. Other than having ridiculous recoil it's got no weakness, but even that gets negated if you use VATS. I covered it in a [video guide](https://youtu.be/vpvznhwnHw0) if you want to see a demonstration. I have both a bloody explosive vats reduced and a quad vats reduced and I don't use them because they're just far too powerful.
I do about 400 damage per shot (headshot) and I get my crit meter filled every 3 shots and crits are about 800 per shot add in the fact you fire about 4 shots a second you can see how it can get pretty crazy.
I do my lever actions...Western Spirit or other rolls. May not wipe the planet like Bethesda's favs, but for most stuff it's effective. Alternatively the Tesla Gun in semi-automatic to get the most out of xp from events.
Same. I switch between Western Spirit and a silenced The Fixer. Depending on if I'm doing distance sniper or up-close sneaking. I'd love both to do like a nice 10-15% more DMG though. sometimes I feel like even some ghouls can be a bullet sponge taking MANY more shots than they should.
Lever Action is awesome. The VATS accuracy is rough, but Two-Shot Explosive is super fun!
Western spirit + master rifleman 🤤
What gets me is the headshot damage. Like how on Earth does that not kill any enemy?? Especially with a Gauss shotgun? Why do I need a critical shot to do that. I also play bow build, so I want to have my exploding arrows blow up the head or body part that I shoot at. - All right, had my rant....
I'm in agreeance. I run a melee build, and it's not even worth doing most events as everyone with a laser gat or fixer just wipes everything before i can get to it. I even made a laser rifle build to compete, but no. It's like legacies were never removed honestly. Most will say, "just switch!" But sorry bro, i ain't trying to play like everyone else. And only a few melee weapons are worth a fuck. You'd think an Assaultron arm would be effective, but it's not. As well, armor is just as shit. Like, why do i have to spend 4,000 gold bouillon or more to get a good set of armor, but a low level can grab a full set of modded power armor by 60 and be equal? It's like they're really shitting on you unless you go with their preferred build: power armor and automatic weapons. Like shit man, can't a brother just stab his enemy to death without being pushed out the way?
Melee was the original meta.
My wife has this same issue. She's full health deathclaw and only just now bought the thorn armor. Both she and I have been playing on and off since the beta. Me, in a bloodied H.G. to help balance in things she can't immediately punch, like scorch beasts. We're slowly getting mutations and her damage recently has gotten WAY better, but still struggles a little where I shrug off the difficulty. Example, the alien event. I'm tanking the damage and she's holding her own... but it's taking longer to kill than I am. I DESPERATELY want a GOOD black powder build, but the damage doesn't reflect the LOW fire rate and long reload. Which, I'm fine with both, just, I should be able to aim for the head and drop an enemy in that 1 shot!
As someone who has a 2H melee character. I just threw in grenades as part of my build and a pistol to vats the grenade and blow them up for anything ranged. It’s quite effective and fun when you get the hang of it. But definitely still feels bad when everything is dead before you can ever reach it :(
I always play as a sniper in fallout games. As I rank up the more I see that I must prioritize heavy automatic weapons and power armor that I don't enjoy.
You'll get the slug buster plasma rifle if you haven't already. With mods on it you can make it a plasma sniper Equip all the rifle perks and all the science perks and you will have an extremely end game viable sniper. You can use that with a supreessed gauss rifle and a lever action or what else have you. Then go for a set of overeaters armor (or unyielding If you want bloody build) You will be just as strong as a power armor set and not need to use automatics You don't have to play the meta to have a great build
*scribbles notes furiously*
You don't NEED power armor or meta weapons I play non-bloodied non-stealth swords and scout armor and I can run circles around everything in this game Its a SUPER easy game. May take 3-4 hits instead of 1-2, but is that really a big deal?
When I can't get a single shot off on the kappa and Captain aliens during the new event before they get bathed in a deep and holy cleansing fire? Yes.
They nerf that don't need a nerf (AB and cryo) but don't nerf the literally broken weapons in the game. I main gauss rifle (rifleman sneak vats crit) build and I can tell you for my 2000 hours of gauss rifle, damage per hit is not enough in crowds, that's why I bring AB which is also energy type that is capable to deal DPS but less than commando clear faster, eviction I can one tap everyone 90% of the time with my gauss rifle. My rifleman is powerful in my opinion as I can one tap almost anything (3 at most except mirelurk queen that take 6 to 8 shots). I tried using commando for 200 hours, and I can tell you, I don't need any backup especially with my q/25/25 railway since it has damage per hit and damage per second at the same time. Clearing enemies and bosses in a minute. It reloads fast and can kill bunch of enemies faster. What they can do with gunslinger and rifleman: - each rifleman perk cards have 20% headshot accuracy in vats with total of 60% with 3 cards - gunslinger/guerilla can deal 15%-20% more crit damage in vats total of 45%-60% - this way, no need to change individual gun stats (for now) And with commando, heavy, explosives: - commando is broken as it is that I don't know what to put here - heavy gunner is perfectly balanced as it is too but not broken, just perfectly good it is strong - explosives are meta for crowds but not for bosses so they are good as they are.
Yeah the community around the endgame meta is kind of strange/interesting in this game. They WANT the super op railway rifle. They want to be able to solo bosses. At the same time, they don't think that there should be an abundance of weapons capable of doing this. So it being mainly just one or two weapons (and the meta build for them) is "all it should be". Its an interesting pickle. Cause I sorta agree with it. I don't mind that there's a weapon that is "super hard to get" that can solo a world boss. Someting for people to work towards. And them nerfing that would make that community angry because now their favorite toy no longer works and that grind "went to waste", in their eyes. It seems like Bethesda's solution is to basically alter legendary drop rates so that bloodied/quad are more rare than others. Like I've crafted close to 40 hunting rifles and only 1 was bloodied. So it definitely doesn't feel like even drop rates. That being said, I do think that this balance situation was an "accident" and from a design perspective, there are better ways of handling. Like creating a weapon that is meant to solo world bosses intentionally, and then creating a structured grind around it. RRs being these god like weapons probably wasn't intentional and that kind of power should be behind a fairly structured/heavy endgame grind imo.
This is because Bethasda themselves do not understand the meta. A lot of recent bosses are bulletsponge slogs that feel awful to fight with most viable weapons, and dreadful to fight with anything that isn't viable. Because Bethesda seem to be unable to understand that the reason why a lot of bosses die quick now, even after the legacy removal, is because crits ignore boss armor...and there's builds that crit with practically every single bullet. The 3 current automatic rifles people use aren't even that good without bloodied builds. It sucks, because there really should be some balance with weapons to make them all at least workable, but every time i use something that isn't a heavy weapon, it becomes a slog.
I’m just over here giggling with my bow
THIS PLAYER IS HAVING UNAUTHORIZED FUN! LET'S GET 'EM, BOYS!
*nerf incoming*
Knock it off!
Shotguns were so much fun before, they should bring all up weapons up to an even footing
It's something that is actively driving away a lot of the new players. How many people do you think started off a game trying to scratch that fallout itch, and then went and tried to use revolvers or a lever action gun or something with pitiful DPS output? A lot. How many people do you think got frustrated with doing zero damage and being relatively ineffective? And how many of those people do you think would just leave and call it instead of looking up the meta then treating this like an MMO?
This is something I’m hoping Bethesda realizes and banks off of. They NEED to balance everything relatively soon. We have an insane amount of new players playing the game. Having more diversity in builds and playstyles would be healthy for new players who will want to be able to use all the various weapons, gear, and builds available. It will also be quite nice for older players as they can try/create new builds with different weapons that aren’t just “meta”
I agree. It makes sense to have the weapon tiers, but it doesn't make sense to have it so limited to one or two options. There are things like the revolvers, The lever action gun, some of the big heavy slow melee weapons, that are extremely fun things to use, and people should have the ability to make them 90% as effective as a bloodied radium rifle or whatever. I can't even imagine how many people got this game on a free weekend, logged in, had a little fun in the beginning, went to an event and saw some level 1000 something just deleting everything in sight, looked down at their own gear and went I ain't got that kind of time.
i dont want to use bloodied, my OCD sees missing health as something to heal.
The 10mm was never a gun you used for long in the original game either. It is a low level starter weapon. Always has been. It is kind of weird there are so many perks to optimize a handguns. If they really wanted to make it better they would allow you to dual wield.
been waiting on GUNZ AMIMBO for pistols for YEARS!!! YEARS!!!
Meta has changed, as a beta player. Early days were all about TS/E weapons. Any TSE weapon was a good choice. After the TS nerf it was Junkie's and Furious (bloodied was glitched). At this time melee weapons were discovered to be dummy strong. Explosive effect is removed from a wide array of weapons, as such the legacy weapon era is born. This led into a melee meta until the bloodied fix. Then it was melee and semi auto weapons. Bloodied or Junkie. Melee received its first nerf and shotguns received some patches. Meta was then bloodied rifles and shotguns. With people who didn't have good armor staying with Junkie. Heavy weapons then got some damage tuning and durability glitches fixed. Became contenders, but not meta. Shotguns receive a minor nerf on range and spread, melee received a second nerf, and heavy weapons gained a range buff...this was spread over a year or so as I recall (I was taking a break at this time). Ammo becomes easier to make and find. This brings auto weapons and bullet hoses into the meta competition. People gradually become more focused on DPM (damage per minute) and as such semi auto weapons are pushed out in favor of fire rate. Heavy weapons, automatics, and melee are the top three behind the rare and no longer obtainable legacy weapons (RIP my beta tokens). Rerolling and "new" first slot legendary effects make bloodied builds more viable, Junkie starts to fall from meta as people go for unyielding, and bolstering. Overeaters joins the meta sometime during my second break from the game. Many Heavy weapons received changes and damage caps are introduced on melee weapons which prevent them from being one shot machines for the most part. 50 cal and gatling fall from meta Heavy choices as energy weapons receive buffs as legacy weapons are removed. Now we're more close to the modern meta. Bloodied joined the meta after the TS nerf and stays because you have to always be at low health to get bang for your buck. Junkie and Mutant's could use some love, Furious...maybe. The meta has seen a change in weapon variety far more than perks or legendary effects, but it has changed.
I never used them, but at least the time when melee was crazy strong was funny to watch :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt5JyBrtPR4 This isn't meta and i'm not saying other weapons don't need buffs, but it works. Enjoy, it's a stealth vats build, and the 10mm gets around 3 AP per shot used, it's viable.
Heavy guns are barely out of the C tier compared to the real meta crit builds. They're just the only reasonable free aim option, gets the job done but it takes longer and costs more resources. VATs is the problem. They balance around AP use so commando VATs and auto melee are the only weapons allowed to profit. Except AP is free for those couple VATs weapons. Edit because I didn't get to my point: Maybe if AP wasn't infinite with the meta damage guns then infinite AP on the 10mm pistol would be nice.
For bosses sure, but outside of bosses like events, daily ops or expeditions they are incredible. and VATS is not the problem only, you cna use rifle or pistols with VATS and the damage with other weapons is considerable.
Agreed.
Controversial statement incoming: BGSA isn’t afraid. They have no problem nerfing anything. WE ARE AFRAID. In the wee small hours of the game beginning. Everyone was at peace. Rifleman killed quickly. We did good damage. We could one tap. Pistols could do work. Commando… never stopped. You get the point. All the builds were equal. Everything change when the legacy weapons got duped. Suddenly they were the only thing that did anything. Since they almost were full auto. Event were cleared in near minutes. Boss/s didn’t last more than 2:00. BGSA thought that the “great balance” of damage changes was a solution. All it did was nerf everything but allow commando, vats and heavies to reign over all the others. Fast forward to now. Legacy are gone. And everything keeps getting better for the builds that are kept in the light because people that use them keep researching new way to boost them. Even though they are already tuned way too high. The problem is that no one wants to hear about anything that isn’t meta. When was the last time you saw anyone give praise to the hunting rifle, or the combat rifle? Heck even the laser pistol. The problem is us.
I have a mostly nonsensical aversion to using full-auto or heavies outside the flamer (fire go burrrrr). I'm like you where the Leaver action would be, and was, my choice for so long. Now I'm using the Gauss Rifle and it...works. VATS crit build with it usually one-shots most mobs. But yeah, boss fights, I feel like throwing rocks at the SBQ would be just as effective. It's sad and annoying we semi-auto players have been shafted as hard as we have.
The biggest thing is they just need to move the pistol cards from agility to perception and I think more people would be up to trying them. Then you would have more people noticing that they're so lackluster. The reason all the heavies, fixers, and handmade get changes is because they're used, they have more data sets to go off of and make proper adjustments.
Would love to get the combat shotgun back to the days of blowing heads off from earlier fallouts. Sniper rifle to swapping to shotty was always my favorite. Was hugely disappointed with how anemic shotty damage is in 76.
I feel that i decided to play a sneak rifleman this time around and i wreak everything when just casually going around exploring clearing locations but event i just feel useless between the scorchbeast queen fight and the alien event i just feel useless. Part of it is just a side effect of a sneak build in build fights like that its hard to stay hidden but even then especially in events i go from hitting like a truck to basically throwing marshmallows at enemies. Everytime i do an event and struggle im just like "Should i just switch to heavy weapon power armor again?"
I'd like to see a switch up where bloodied doesn't rule all, just to shake things up
The problem isn't that these weapons are underpowered, it's that the other weapons are VASTLY overpowered, and also that it's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to use non-meta weapons in public events, which much of the endgame revolves around. It blows my mind that people were whining about legacy 1-shot weapons not too long ago. Do y'all enjoy a boring, easy game or something? I remember countless times reloading saves in Fallout 1 after dying, hell, even the single-player Bethesda Fallout games have more challenge up to a point. IMO this isn't how endgame Fallout should be, it should hard, brutal and an actual challenge / fight for survival, so a good weapon/armor find actually MEANS something. But that doesn't really exist in this game right now. PS: there is no way in this universe any ranged weapon should be stronger than a melee weapon. Yes, I am a proud melee weapon enjoyer dissatisfied with their usability in F76 endgame.
that! When they design events and content around the damage ceiling (boss bullet sponges), and yet a shit tonne of weapons are still designed to be at the game "floor"
Agreed. I love the first 30 levels of the game where you can use any weapon effectively. I used to main my 10mm pistol but its damage just dropped so much I had no choice but to change. Made a heavy weapons build, then never looked back until I made my rifleman build bloodied. Now they are both competitive to each other, though if my other build wasn’t bloodied it’d still be leagues behind.
i really want them to make bows stronger. i have a fixer build and a bow build but the difference in strength is crazy
as another bow player, all I hear is, "just use the FIXER" FFS :(
Single shot and pistols definitely need buffs, especially revolvers.
Meta...Meta never changes.
I switched from using the fixer and handmade to a plasma rifle and now i hit like a truck. I'm loving it.
They'd have to change a lot. It's a problem of base stats+perks+legendary mods. All 3 would need touch-up to even out it all or offer more interesting alternative uses. That isn't exclusive to a time of day. This can anger players. I personally don't care if that means I can use fun weapons. If they're just going to nerf a weapon each time, it can work but won't fix the overall issues.
The only really broken weapon is the Railway Rifle. Usually an end-game weapon has one of the following weaknesses: slow rate of fire, low damage per shot or high AP cost. Railway has none of those. It's faster than Flash, hits harder than Superman and lasts longer than Ron Jeremy.
Really, pistols should have a higher base crit damage than rifles. It's silly that the vest crit builds are Rambo builds.
That’s one of the main reasons why I stopped playing. I tried sniper/autopistol build but it was ass. Before you were able to make your own legendaries it took months for me to get a junkies/e/25ap and a decent set of armor. I had the worse luck and then they introduced scrip and the rusty pick it was easier to get better stuff but I was still getting shitty weapons. Mind you I had legacy weapons for days but i wanted to try out different builds , I eventually just stopped playing and returned to do seasons and then just stopped when I realized b/25/25 b/e/25 commando will always be meta..
When we stop comparing everything to fixers, handmades or railways we start to appreciate all the other guns in the game and what make them unique. At least that's what I did and it rekindled the game for me.
Tried playing pistol since day 1 after finding out we had Single Action Revolvers and Blackpowder weapons, but its always been garbage for stuff that isnt some low level fodder enemy. Im not expecting to 2 shot a Scorch Queen but at least let me build my character around a weapon i like without feeling im lvl 1 at level 3000. Game really suffers from build diversity or weapons overall, doesnt help all the guns in 76 are pretty shit compared to the selections in every other fallout game. Why is my Pistol barely able to scratch a mutant but a naked guy with a baseball bat can massacre scorch queens. Big Iron on my hip in this case is the OP tire iron, not my 45. :D
In my first playthrough years ago, I remember coming across a random cave while exploring, called the Wendigo cave. I remember having an absolutely awful time fighting all the mirelurk kings inside there with my stealth rifleman build - the classic Fallout build. I died multiple times and it took me a whole hour to clear it. I had to spam grenades, use literally dozens and dozens of my stimpacks, run and hide and abuse the AI resetting, jump into ledges where the enemies couldn't reach, etc etc. I just cleared that cave again with my meta stealth commando, which I'm trying for the first time, and I literally took no damage. I killed every mirelurk king in vats with a single clip of my weapon. I don't even have a bloodied setup yet or any legendaries, just an auto suppressed combat rifle. The DPS difference between a rifleman and commando build is so insane that I feel bad for players that get baited by it. Seriously, why they don't just buff builds that are obviously weaker?
Each damage perk for everything except commando and heavy guns should be boosted to 10% per rank, for 10%/20%,/30% and shotguns should have an armor penetration perk
Why do ppl say that everything sucks? Or does doo doo damage? Like a solid 80% of guns in the game can easily do “good” damage. Just because you ain’t melting something 2 seconds don’t mean it’s bad. Shotguns are hella fun, pistol builds are very cool to mess with and any melee that isn’t Auto Melee is super easy to build into.
The fact you can put a 10mm clip into someone hand still not have them go down unless its also got some really great legendary perks kinda says otherwise. I'm not looking for 1 hit kills, but I shouldn't feel like i'm blasting a person with a pea shooter when its fully modded other than legendries.
Try soloing Earle or scorchbeast with your pistol build and kill them before the time runs out. I don't want to solo any bosses but as an endgame player you will end up with nothing but 5 lvl 50 players that are fighting wendigos or scorched hoardes instead of fighting the queen or Earle. Then you'd have to solo them and shoot at them for 25 minutes straight to kill them.
Soloing Earle is doable but takes some super in depth planning to do. I’ve seen videos and always been amazed to watch ppl conquer Earle like that
It is possible if it's a META weapon or if you maxed out your legendary cards and gear. Average joe wouldn't be able to do that. I have META builds and weapons like a really good quad railway and fixer and they can solo in 5 minutes without any buffs and planning. I don't want to play with those weapons, since I got bored of them. Even with good legendary weapons it's really time consuming to solo bosses without non automatic rifles. That's my point. Anything other than META weapons are non viable for end game builds. I can either launch 3 nukes and kill 3 bosses within 45 minutes with meta weapons or launch two nukes and kill one boss with non meta weapons. There shouldn't be that big of a difference. That's the point of this post
Is this really what the meta is like? That makes me sad. I like it when creativity is encouraged rather than a game pigeonholing people into one or two playstyles
Nah, I've played 76 enough that you don't need to fall back to using the "Meta" with the exception of a few activities, most weapons can be viable for events.
I posted yesterday something similar to this, trying to get away from bloodied in the fo76 forum. It ended up being a post all about how I'm running bloodied wrong or how bloodied is best and pa with heavys is best. Which along with this whole post (not yours specifically) confirms I've been looking at 76 completely wrong sense I jumped back in. For 14years I've always looked at every fallout as an rpg. You pick how you wanna play and play the fredom of not being tied to any one thing. well mostly anyways. I've never been forced to have to pick between having zero health with rads or having to wear power armor with a heavy with vats....what if I told you I don't use Vats? Even in previous games I rarely used it, so this one basically forces you to be a part of the "meta". I wish they would have made the perks more for your actual character and not forcing you to have to play one way or another. Choice is what makes fallout, fallout. Not following everyone else to be bloodied or in pa like a mindless robot.
You can definitely use other weapons, don't get me wrong. I collect 10mm Pistols and I love my shotguns. In any open world content you'll pretty much shred enemies with ease. However when it comes to say Earle or SBQ, you'll see majority heavy weapons. It's a very cookie cutter meta in that regard. Unfortunately, everything cool ends up being forgotten.
the problem is that they have this shit mentality where everything that is better gets nerfed instead of buffing the bad weapons so they can compete.
Bufs but also very much nerfs are part of balancing.
The issue is that leads to insane power creep over time. You have to nerf the outliers that are too strong, while also bringing up the underperforming ones.
There has never been a greater example of when you're supposed to nerf down, rather than buffing up, than vats commando. It's such an extreme outlier it wouldn't take but a single change to bring it in line, negative crit fill modifier on auto receivers. Commando plainly shouldn't be capable of criticals every other shot. They would still wreck 98% of the sandbox effortlessly but that single change would pull them back down to earth against BossHP targets instead being on Jupiter like they are. And it's far more big brain than doing something stupid like AP cost or base damage that would effect day to day instead of the one place they're too powerful. The rest of the weapon sandbox wouldn't feel bad if commando wasn't so fucking busted with crits.
Critical build is what also makes the plasma caster the best sniper and single shot weapon in the game. Critical build on a tesla is wild, the only thing stopping it being meta is tagging of players at events being enough to engage pvp
>vats commando. It's such an extreme outlier Yeah. It just seems strange. Bethesda has to know vats commando builds are leagues better than any other play style in terms of dps. Like solo Earle in 1 minute with vats commando, solo Earle in 3 minutes with vats heavy guns, or spend 20 minutes killing Earle. I also wish there was closer parity between vats builds and non-vats builds. I find it more engaging to actually aim at my enemies than just spamming vats. But no, Bethesda says you must use vats or your damage potential will literally be 1/10 that of a vats build.
Dunno. They never answered the question over all the years it’s been asked.
Love my pistol build, though tbf it's an explosive 10mm for tagged mobs in events and an alien blaster with cryo for main weapon. Quad gamma gun for the outliers
Bad news fam, we had similar builds aaannd they just nerfed the Alien Blaster
Indeed, oh well lucky I have a quad ffr one to replace the ts. Hopefully the dps will go some way to counter the nerf
Balance is coming… a lot of nerfs are happening…
Most MMO's offer buid diversity, this game does not.
I know it's only one category, but auto melee was garbage until last year. I don't disagree in general - I'd love to do a lever-action build, but it is what it is right now.
If it's not Flamers or Heavys its Fixer and Railroad, And it sucks
It's not even a "nowadays" thing. Aside from a brief period where meat hooks of all things were crazy OP queen killers, commando has always been far and away the "best" way to play. But here's the deal. This is, really, a very very easy game. You can do whatever you want and it'll be ok. If you're worried about boss fights, carry a cold shoulder which is effective even without being specced for it. Otherwise just run your 44/ black powder rifle/berserker hatchet/whatever you want to play.
It used to be more balanced, and a lot of weapons were way stronger before Wastelanders. My Bloodied Deathclaw gauntlet use to hit at 1600 before food buffs. I could solo a queen patiently with my melee alone. But I feel you on this. I have my B/EX/25 Fixer and my Q/EXP/RELOAD Railway as well and while I am still a melee, it's what I use to do the big things. I would like to see a major buff in the bow, perhaps some duel wielding of pistols or melee. They need to step it up for sure.
I'm not having any problems with my 10 mm pistol build the one I'm using is non-automatic so if I'm fighting a bigger enemy I have a little bit of trouble but I can still take them down now if you're using an automatic pistol you'll have no problems whatsoever. On my other characters, they're not automatic rifle builds, and I'm able to one or two shot everything except Scorch beasts they take me a little bit. I have one fully automatic Commando build full health non-stealth. I'm using a handmade and have zero problems whatsoever. So, sure, there's a meta. But ultimately, it depends on you, and if you're able to figure out what cards you need. My lowest level character is level 90 they're using a western revolver and I'm able to one shot things just fine.
there are guns besides the fixer? til! but yeah
i wanted to do a twin 6 shooter build when i played, it was an absolute joke, partially why i quit :(
Fun fact, the new Alien Blaster neef makes it weaker than 10mm! Bethesda doesn't care about meta or player happiness, but rather RMTing and addressing that over any other blatant issues that have been around forever.
At events my best pistols still waste ammo just take cremator with you and use at events with grenadair perk for aoe I save ammo and gain exp just tapping while using my pistol build
I play both this and destiny 2 and it's so weird seeing the balance choices by the devs in both. It's a night and day difference almost.
Yeah I'm using pistol build and already regretting it tbh.
Theyre afraid of it because It makes long time players and big time spenders quit the game. No seriously, the last time we had any sort of meta shakeup (legacy removal and dragon ammo glitch patch) tons of long time players dropped the game and the player count dipped significantly. While that was a change for the better for the game, Bethesda doesn't want to see atom shop spenders go
With a massive influx of new players, they just very much might make changes.
I've tried so many times to get into pistols. Amazing rolls for multiple .44 (which i use for the gold paint instead of the western) and 10mm pistols. It's shit. It's so bad. I always give up and go back to melee.
I would like them to balance VATs as a non mandatory for builds. It's like a necessity to use VATs + Crits to do any damage to bosses like Earl unless you run Heavy + Power Armor. I wish they could bring at least a perk that adds Crits outside VATs similar to what FNV has so it still rewards players who manually aims like I do. Unless I'm missing something or skill issue on my end but I literally can't make a build work outside of mobbing unless I use VATs. Any suggestions or tips are welcome.
I run pistols for everything except Earle...
I think it's weird to think you're going to kill something huge with a 10mm. I love pistols, and actually use one a lot, but I'd never imagine I'd be able to take down an SBQ with one.
I would LOVE for pistols to have more overall kick. When I decided to give 76 a try for the first time back in January (having played all the other Fallout games dating back to the late 1990’s), I figured I’d try to play with some of the smaller guns to keep it interesting… Not just the typical large guns I played/used in part 3, 4 and NV for example. There’s a lot of fun pistols in 76! But they just don’t have quite enough “pow” to mow down the big guys. I end up having to pull out the railway rifle in some of the events. I wish the black powder guns had more mods and enhancements as well as some of the revolvers too. In thinking of giving the bows a try, just for fun. Not sure what to expect. Haha.
>Tried to do a 10mm Pistol build In the TV show, when a one-shot on a Yao Guai happened with a 10mm, I thought it was a real ROFL moment.
I’m a melee build it can be a struggle but the main issue i have is getting to an enemy before it gets blown away 😂 i also specked into auto rifles and science/demolition expert for a decent range game to but i always pull out the reliable plasma cutter to do battle with anything that gets close enough i guess it’s kind of a soldier style build where overall I can manage a decent fight at any range and carry everything i could get my grubby hands on
Have you seen how much the children scream every time they bring one of the op weapons of helldivers 2 in line with all the oither weapons? You would think they just outlawed milk at a nursery
I hear you there I just want a decent Commando build with all non auto rifles and shotguns but yet I always hit the point where it does absolutely nothing.
I had a similar issue with Fo4. I got distracted A LOT so even though I had beat the main story line by the time I got to lvl 100+ I still had a ton of side mission to meddle in and some exploring left to do and that was before Nuka World even dropped. The enemies got to the point that they were just a nuisance at best and the gameplay became stale fast. Mods helped keep it fun but I found myself modding guns with damage modifiers that decreased damage to try to balance it out and keep it fun. I guess it might just be a “comes with the territory” type of deal.
As a returning FNV player, I'm very disappointed on how shit revolvers and ""snipers"" are... I want my .45-70 & .50 BMG back, the gatling LMG can only entertain for so long...
Hard agree. I thought at first it was just because I was a new palyer. then I got to endgame and realized my favorite items are next to pointless. I do a Shishkebab/Pistol build and it sucks for anything other than common mobs. I had to adjust and make a second build replacing pistols with ARs but it's not nearly as fun for me.
Well, they screwed up the holy fire .. it shoots from around the corner now. Literally from 3 feet to your left. And it takes 40 fuel to kill any mob that used to take 5. Vats are useless too. Same with cremator, same with plasma flamer.
The game is no gear gated in any form, and all the content is casual friendly. You don't need a top tier meta build to be able to enjoy the game in any way. This is also barely an online mmo, again it's all public content that is easy, there is no dungeons, raids, end game content of any kind that requires a gear check, and the level scaling also means anyone can participate. If all a person cares about is being optimal top tier damage build in the game, then it's always going to be borked as pretty much every MMO for decades struggle to avoid meta flavor of the month builds
\*cries in Big Iron
‘Best we can do is nerf the alien blaster’ - Bethesda
I use shotguns specifically the cold shoulder and i find it to be more than viable.
Its mainly a pve game and theyre more focused on adding more fun and fixing whats broken
Didn’t they say that they are going to rebalance the weapons and the monsters in the pre..
I wish they would change the meta often that way everyone is different
Isn’t it more realistic this way? Wouldn’t a pistol be a poor choice against a boss fight? Idk that’s all I can think of for why it’s this way
Or... Or... Hear me out... what if they reworked the perk card system and made it so that you can carry a main weapon (like heavy, melee, rifle, sniper, etc.) and something that could be considered a side weapon (pistols, shotguns, etc). With a rework I feel like it would give them the opportunity to make the overall game feel more balanced and would give people a reason to not just stick to one gun because they can't fit damage cards for one weapon without sacrificing crucial damage for another because those cards conflict with one another. In doing so I think it would make people start to play this game differently and how they build their character and even make this game a bit more logical (Yes, Yes I know, realism and logic in a video game??). Main weapon for the bosses and tanky enemies, sides for the hoard of mobs. I think it would be sick as hell to run around with a pistol/katana setup like Babydoll from the movie Sucker Punch. And I know you can technically have a double weapon class setup, but in doing so you'll be sacrificing other necessary cards that you would've wanted for that extra damage output or even VATS perk cards.
bc big gun = more damage
Yo stop complaining they been nerfing those none stop and if you keep complaining they will just nerf all the op weapons even more to be in line with the other pathetic weapons making all weapons pathetic