| 1 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 2 | |
| 3 | [[folder:''Fallout'']] |
| 4 | * If your Gambling Skill is at 100% or higher, you almost can't lose at roulette if you keep placing low bets (about $2). All you need to do is to hold down the hotkey '1' in the dialogue at the table and wait until you're in the millions. Since everyone except the casinos have limited resources, the whole wasteland economy is somewhat broken. |
| 5 | * Even with a pitiful Barter skill level, other people's goods will be worth substantially less than yours. Thus, with a bit of swapping back and forth ''you can take everything a person is willing to sell you for free''. Later games fixed this by jacking up the merchants' selling prices so that even with a maxed Barter skill you still pay through the nose for items. However in all games it's possible to shoot the merchant in the face and take all their items for free - sometimes without even being attacked by guards for doing so! |
| 6 | * Traits and perks that reduce the AP cost of attacks are unbalanced. The Fast Shot trait reduces the AP cost of all attacks by 1, but prevents the character from making aimed attacks. Combine this with perks that also reduce attack AP cost, and by the time you're around level ten, a turbo plasma rifle whose shots cost 2 AP, and super sledge attacks only for 1. With a high Agility you can do 200+ damage per turn with no special preparation, which is enough to kill everything but a few bosses in one turn, or shred groups of super mutants. |
| 7 | * The Turbo plasma rifle, to the point that it got nerfed in Fallout 2. In the original game, it's point by point the best weapon in the game, dealing obscene amount of plasma damage which pretty much nothing can shrug off. With even the most regular build, it will be able to deliver 3 shots per turn. With an optimised one, it fires ''six'' times per turn, each dealing on average 52.5 damage. It also comes with the Weapon Long Range item perk, which doubles the effective range of fire (thus greatly decreasing the range penalties). |
| 8 | * As soon as the player is level 5 and reaches the 3rd town ([[HubCity The Hub]]), he or she can talk to a guy named Irwin for a quest to kill a few Raiders who took over his house. Nothing too hard at this point in the game for any decent combat character. The reward is a [[HandCannon .223 Pistol]]. It is considered ''the best'' [[BoringButPractical Small Gun]] in the game, using the plentiful and cheap .223 ammo and dealing a whopping 20-30 points of damage. It is good enough to carry the player through the game (or at least up until you can get your hand on the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Turbo plasma rifle]] and level up the Energy Weapons skill). Its only drawback is the rather small magazine size (5 shots) but that is not a deal breaker. |
| 9 | [[/folder]] |
| 10 | |
| 11 | [[folder:''Fallout 2'']] |
| 12 | * The [[BrilliantButLazy Gifted trait]] makes character creation a no-brainer. It gives you +1 to all SPECIAL stats, but at the penalty of -10 to all Skills and 5 less Skill points each level. The SPECIAL bonus nearly offsets the Skill penalty directly, and with a good Intelligence score you'll still have plenty of Skill points to sink into your prominent Skills you need to play the game. You basically need a specific reason to ''not'' take Gifted, like a SelfImposedChallenge or an unorthodox character build. |
| 13 | ** To a lesser degree, Good Natured. It grants +15 to Speech, Barter, First Aid, and Doctor, in exchange for a -10 penalty to Small Guns, Big Guns, Energy Weapons, Unarmed, Melee, and Throwing. The boosted skills are all ones you can make use of throughout the game, whereas you'll probably only make use of two or three of those combat skills, making the others {{Dump Stat}}s anyway, and the stat loss is nothing a couple skill points can't make up for within one level up. |
| 14 | * The Bozar in ''Fallout 2'' has the power of a minigun, the accuracy of an assault rifle, and an ammo type which is cheap to purchase, light-weight, with -20% Armour Class and damage modifier (means the target is more likely to get hit and take more damage) and sold in bulk just about everywhere. This makes it probably the ultimate weapon in-game. A group of shop guards in NCR you can meet fairly early on have the gun conveniently unequipped in their inventory. All of them are unusually easy to steal from, even with no points in the Steal skill. Commandeer two of these guns and stick them on a character with a decent skill in Big Guns and you have more than enough firepower to last throughout the rest of the game. Alternatively, you can get one even earlier by murdering Eldridge in New Reno -- he's alone and nobody will care if he dies. Legend has it that it was supposed to be a sniper rifle, but the devs accidentally made it automatic and decided to leave it that way. When the gun makes a return in ''New Vegas'', it's exactly that - an LMG-based ''marksman weapon'', rather than a typical fire support. |
| 15 | * [[FanNickname The Navarro Run]] sees this combined with DiscOneNuke: after leaving Arroyo, head straight for Navarro in the southwest corner of the map, save scumming to survive the lethal random encounters along the way. Once there, the fun begins... |
| 16 | ** Talking your way into the base is ridiculously easy, and when you do you're directed to a locker with contains the second best armor in the game for free, Advanced Power Armor. It'll make you pretty much invincible and gives a hefty +4 boost to Strength. The lockers contain numerous other goodies too, including a plasma rifle, combat shotgun, 10mm SMG, and a plasma pistol, ensuring most any character build will leave Navarro with a new gun they'll get a lot of use out of. You'll also have a lot of other items you can take with you to sell and amass a quick fortune. |
| 17 | ** While in Navarro, you can steal the Vertibird plans and take them to San Francisco a short distance further south to turn them into the Brotherhood of Steel. Doing so completes a quest that nets you '''massive''' experience, likely enough to boost you six levels or more. You'll also get access to the Brotherhood's outpost, which contains the pulse rifle and pulse pistol, two of the best energy weapons in the game, a suit of Brotherhood combat armor, and T-51 power armor. At this point you're just gathering stuff for your future companions to wield. |
| 18 | ** Without even having to go to Navarro, one can break the game by just hanging around outside San Francisco, where you'll often run into groups of Hubologists fighting Press Gangs and mercenaries. Just stand at safe distance and watch; the Press Gangs and mercenaries will be hostile to you, but the Hubologists will be friendly (assuming you didn't kill their leader in town yet). The Hubologists can win with fair consistency, and after they kill their enemies you can loot the corpses for Power Fists, Rippers, and Plasma Grenades, and then just pop by the shops in San Francisco to sell them off. |
| 19 | ** Speaking of San Francisco, the merchants there (Mai Da Chiang from Red 888 Guns, and Lao Chou from Flying Dragon 8) are oddly easy to pickpocket even with a low Steal skill and carry huge piles of money, meaning you can get tons of rare and valuable loot of all kinds. |
| 20 | * By knowing where to look and a small amount of reloading, a character can go from 6 points of Luck to 10. Combine this with Finesse and you get a total critical chance that will likely exceed 20%. Add in a P90 (every bullet can score a critical, every critical will have a HIGH chance to instantly kill a target) and the game is over barring a few more hours of mouse clicking. Being aware of the ways to boost statistics in this game also means you can get 10 ability points in EVERY SKILL when factoring in item bonuses. |
| 21 | ** Speaking of statistics, a player can have one companion for every 2 point of Charisma rounded down. The check for this is based on your CURRENT charisma score instead of your actual one. This means that by tripping on Mentats, a character so dumb they cannot normally understand human speech can have a loyal following of five lethally powerful companions who fill out all his/her dump stats and leave them with barely enough living enemies at the end of the first combat round of any encounter to get a punch in. |
| 22 | * Higher levels of Unarmed skill unlock access to powerful special attacks, starting from the value of just 55%. They come with increased base damage, ''greatly'' increased critical chance and ''armour piercing values''. With lousy 130% in Unarmed, the Chosen One can face in hand-to-hand combat everything on his path and beat the living shit out of it. Including things like Deathclaws, Wanamingos, Enclave soldiers or Super Mutants. No need to use any sort of Unarmed weapon either (in fact, those ''decrease'' the damage, as they override the mighty power of bare knuckles with weapon's stats). Oh, and the best part? Unarmed can be increased by anything between +25 to +50% ''for free'', without spending a single point on it. It is impossible to leave Arroyo with less than 55% in Unarmed thanks to free training. |
| 23 | * The Slayer and Sniper perks also turn into this by making every attack under their banner (unarmed for Slayer, ranged for Sniper) upgrade to a critical hit. Sniper in particular is lethal because when you use a burst weapon, every individual bullet fired in the burst gets the benefits. Grab a Minigun with a 30-round burst and watch the bodies explode. This also effectively negates the downside of the Fast Shot trait. |
| 24 | * [[DeadlyDoctor Living Anatomy]] and Bonus Ranged Damage perks. The former gives you +5 damage against biological targets, the later +2/+4 damage against everything when using [[BoringButPractical Small Guns]] or EnergyWeapons. These ignore ''any'' form of damage resistance [[note]]It was tested even with an EMP Grenade against humans - normally every non-robotic enemy has a 500% resistance to EMP[[/note]]. The damage increase is done to each bullet. The best [[GatlingGood gatling gun]] ([[AwesomeButImpractical which use extremely rare ammo]]) fires 25 bullets by burst. Assuming half of them (rounded down) hit (and from close range, they will), you inflict 12*(5+4) = 108 points of extra damage, enough to kill most target. And that's not even counting the normal bullet damage that goes through the armor. |
| 25 | ** The same applies to melee characters, when Bonus [=HtH=] Damage is picked. Considering how ungodly powerful melee and unarmed attacks can be on their own, adding from +7 to +13 (depending on Bonus [=HtH=] Damage rank) and then scoring a critical can leave enemies with gaping holes in their body after being simply punched. |
| 26 | * Boxing in New Reno. If you win, you get a Karma title giving you +12 normal damage threshold, and +4% to all resistances except fire. It is cumulative with armor. Normal damage is anything that isn't plasma, laser, fire, electricity and explosive. This means that you will take no damage from most attacks, and half damage from most more powerful enemies, without taking armor into account. Most enemies who use laser, plasma, fire and explosives are either using [[SortingAlgorithmOfWeaponEffectiveness low-tier weapons]], AwesomeButImpractical weapons, or plain non-military personnel (who don't wear effective armor and don't have much HitPoints). |
| 27 | * Jet gives you +2 Action Points, +1 Strength, and +1 Perception, all great combat buffs, but it comes with a high addiction rate and it doesn't pass out of your system like other drugs so you must use it constantly or suffer the stat penalties. Enter the Jet Antidote, which cures your addiction and can be used an infinite number of times. Just like that the drawbacks of Jet are gone with all the benefits still there. |
| 28 | * Maxing out your luck at 10, and getting the Jinxed [[note]]You and your companions suffer more critical failures, but so do your enemies[[/note]] trait causes the trait to basically rarely affect you. Use only unarmed combat [[note]]Where the critical failures are relatively less punishing[[/note]], and watch as enemies guns explode in their hands with every shot and they cripple their own limbs trying to punch you, making the game ''ridiculously'' easy. Congratulations! You're now a LethalJokeCharacter! |
| 29 | * The [[HandCannon .223 Pistol]] from Fallout 1 makes a comeback, and while it's outclassed by some of the new guns, its stats haven't changed, meaning it's still a very solid handgun. It's actually even better, since the .223 bonuses (it ignores 20% of the enemy's armor class and damage resistance) now finally work properly. |
| 30 | * Cassidy. Give him a high level rifle like the Gauss rifle and he becomes and absolute murder machine. The Gauss rifle alone itself counts as well, despite its relatively rare ammo. Because it does huge damage per single shot and has lightweight ammo, it's extremely difficulty to use it all up. |
| 31 | [[/folder]] |
| 32 | |
| 33 | [[folder:''Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel'']] |
| 34 | * Perk Mutate! went from one of the most useless to one of the most powerful. Why? Because it allows you to swap whatever trait your squad members have picked and retroactively pick Gifted for +1 to all stats instead. In the process this also takes out other trait, that usually was detrimental to their performance in the first place. |
| 35 | * The Small Frame perk is a solid choice: increase your agility by 1 at the cost of less maximum weight capacity. Since the game is squad based, you can just use your teammates for pack mules, negating the disadvantage. More Agility means better defense and better aiming. |
| 36 | * Grenades can be lobbed over barriers. This means you can sneak right to your enemies without being spotted and then throw a nade between them. The explosion will be stopped by the barrier, so you're safe, while the unlucky bastards are torn to shreds. |
| 37 | * Switching to real time mode when firing automatic weapons allows to unload insane amount of bullets into a single target all at once. Since EarlyGameHell is firmly in place, this allows to overcome issues like being stuck with AK-47 when your enemies are deathclaws or super-mutants that would turn you into mince in turn-based combat. |
| 38 | * [[Film/PitchBlack Riddick]], a recruit from a special encounter, on a virtue of having ''five'' perks already picked, despite only being level 10 upon recruitment - and some of them, while being very useful support perks on their own right, aren't normally worth picking due to limited number of perks you can get. Take him in and you will never need any other sneak character for tough missions requiring stealth. Combine with listed above Mutate! and you will get rid of his otherwise subpar Night Person trait. |
| 39 | * Browning M2 heavy machine gun. The gun is so ungodly powerful, by late game there is a good chance your squad will consist of two people carrying [=M2s=] and the rest working as {{Human Pack Mule}}s, carrying only .50 ammunition and no weapons on their own. And you will need a ''lot'' of ammunition that's also heavy, but the damage dealt and armour-penetration are well worth it. |
| 40 | [[/folder]] |
| 41 | |
| 42 | [[folder:''Fallout 3'']] |
| 43 | [[AC:Main game]] |
| 44 | * The friendly and intelligent Super Mutant Fawkes, whom you can rescue in the main quest. Later, he can team up with you if you have good Karma. He is [[NighInvulnerability nigh-invincible]], wields an incredibly powerful {{gatling|Good}} [[BeamSpam laser]], and he steals so many kills that most players have to fire him until and unless they've hit the level cap. He's even better with ''Broken Steel'', as he now levels with the player to become even better. |
| 45 | * The Grim Reaper's Sprint perk restores all AP if you kill an enemy in VATS. Now consider that with decent stats it's ridiculously easy to kill at least one enemy in each VATS cycle; also consider that while VATS lasts you're effectively invulnerable. Keep hitting the VATS key/button as you exit it, and you will slaughter every enemy in range while scarcely receiving any damage yourself. This perk was so gamebreaking in ''3'' that it was heavily nerfed in ''New Vegas'' and ''4'' along with VATS in general - time won't be frozen and you instead get 75% the usual damage. |
| 46 | * There is a setup that turns every single standard attack into a critical hit. Deathclaw Gauntlets do 20 damage per hit, a critical hit gives an additional 30 damage. As previously mentioned, they ignore armor, so they'll always do the full critical damage every single hit. |
| 47 | * The Dart Gun. The weapon itself doesn't do much damage, but it does have one very useful effect: -1000 limb damage to legs. This means that even DemonicSpiders like Deathclaws, Yao Guai, and melee-oriented Super Mutants can be crippled in one dart shot, effectively nullifying their speed advantage towards you and gives you ample time to switch to a more powerful weapon to finish them off. Combined with Sneak Attack Criticals and they won't know what hit them until it's too late, making it a [[LethalJokeItem Lethal Joke Weapon]]. This weapon was so much of a Breaker that it was excluded from ''New Vegas'' in an attempt to balance the gameplay, which did not sit well with some fans. |
| 48 | * The unique ripper, Jack, and the Deathclaw gauntlet for similar reasons: they both are effective with a critical centric build. The total crit chance that can be achieved for melee weapons is 33% (10 from luck, 5 from finesse, 3 from wasteland guru, and 15 from Ninja). The Deathclaw gauntlets have a whopping 5x critical multiplier. Meaning, at level twenty, you're liable to crit with every single strike dealing up to 250% damage, and ignore DR. This means that it will shred through any enemy that relies on high DR to survive, such as Enclave soldiers, with ease. Jack is an interesting case, though. Normally Rippers have a crit mod of 0, meaning they can't crit, while Jack has a crit mod of 1X. The way crits are coded, though, interact strangely with the ripper, as Jack deals 1 DR ignoring point of damage 30 times a second. The weapon checks for criticals every time it hits, but it doesn't multiply the damage it would deal (1 point). Instead, it uses the damage on the weapon card (30 points). Meaning a crit with better criticals perk will deal 75 damage. And keep in mind, this has a 33% chance of happening 30 times a second, and also ignore DR as well. |
| 49 | * Another melee example is the Shishkebab, a makeshift FlamingSword. It is a relatively lightweight weapon that not only deals decent physical damage, but it also deals damage over time via flames, making it one of the best weapons for a melee run. The already lethal fire damage can be even more lethal thanks to the pyromaniac perk.[[note]]Normally 2 damage over 5 seconds, to 3 damage[[/note]]. The best part is the components required to make this weapon are fairly common so it can become a DiscOneNuke. |
| 50 | * Ol' Painless, a unique version of the Hunting Rifle that can be acquired simply by going to the Republic of Dave in the furthest northeast corner of the map and getting Dave's key to his safe (you can complete a quest, or just kill or pickpocket him). It only has slightly more damage and worse durability than a normal Hunting Rifle....but it has a spread of 0. At a Guns skill of 100, every bullet lands ''exactly'' where the crosshairs are pointed. And it uses very cheap and common ammo that's available from the beginning of the game. Grind Guns as hard as you can and walk over to Ol' Painless and you can now snipe without a scope. |
| 51 | |
| 52 | [[AC:Operation Anchorage]] |
| 53 | * The Winterized T-51b Power Armor. Not the strongest armor in the game, but the developers accidentally put in the nigh-indestructible simulation version - odds are it'll never drop a single point of DR in an entire playthrough. |
| 54 | * The Gauss Rifle is an Energy Weapon in form of a sniper rifle. It has high damage, uses the common microfusion cells, knocks down enemies on critical hits, and has a critical multiplier of ''five''. |
| 55 | * The Chinese Stealth Armor makes you nigh invisible, provided you have decent Sneak (about 80). It allows you to sneak up to an enemy, from the front, set them on fire with a flaming sword, be pushed around by them, shoot them with little darts and plant explosives on them ''in full daylight'' without ever being detected. Thanks to the automatic critical when attacking undetected, most foes go down from the first hit. Got detected anyway? Retreat, wait a few seconds, be hidden again. Add to this that nobody gets alarmed by their friends suddenly going up in a blaze (more criticals), and you have the ultimate armor. On top of the Chinese Stealth Armor's greatness, you could put all the different variants of hats on while wearing the armor. Getting the DR of a light tank. '''And''' all of the stat bonuses (e.g. to Perception) from those hats stack too. The best proof of how broken it is, is how severely it was nerfed in ''New Vegas'': not only was the Stealth field effect removed from the Chinese Stealth Suit, but also from its fully upgraded ''improvement'' model, the Stealth suit mark II. Yes, a feature is so overpowered that not even the [[InfinityPlusOneSword infinite +1 armor]] of the game is allowed to have. |
| 56 | |
| 57 | [[AC:The Pitt]] |
| 58 | * The Steel Knuckles, having the ''lowest AP cost of any weapon in the game''. Combined with Paralyzing Palm, even Deathclaws are helpless in melee combat. |
| 59 | * The Perforator assault rifle beats out every other assault rifle in accuracy, comes with a scope to boot, and is silenced, allowing you to snipe enemies from a distance. |
| 60 | * The Auto Axe and its unique variant, the Man Opener, have rapidly spinning axe blades that are devastating against anything. The Trogs will run straight into the blades and be instantly sliced to death. |
| 61 | * The Metal Blaster, which simply put is a beam shotgun that fires a spread of nine beams. It is ineffective at long-range, but each of the nine beams can individually score a critical hit, so with some perks to increase critical chance it can one-shot a lot of enemies into ash. |
| 62 | |
| 63 | [[AC:Broken Steel]] |
| 64 | * The Tesla Cannon gained at the end of ''Broken Steel'' uses very common ammo and is (almost) a guaranteed 1-hit-kill, with area damage in case you miss. |
| 65 | * The Heavy Incinerator. Lobs fireballs at distance, with one fireball per flamer fuel unit, making ''much'' better usage of its ammo. And unlike Tesla Cannon, you can get it from Enclave Hellfire troopers as long as you're at least level 15, and has bigger ammo reserve. |
| 66 | * The Level 30 Perk "Almost Perfect," put in the game by Broken Steel. When you take it, it automatically raises all your SPECIAL stats to 9's. With careful planning, exploiting the Big Guns skill book glitch from the raider boss in Bethesda ruins, and abstaining from collecting any of the SPECIAL bobbleheads (with the exception of the Intelligence bobblehead in Rivet City) until after you take that perk, you can end up with a powerhouse of a character that has 10's in every SPECIAL stat, and 100 in every skill point. It takes a while to get there, but it is hilariously overpowering once you pull it off. |
| 67 | * With ''Broken Steel'', both Dogmeat and RL-3 become invincible companions on par with Fawkes, because they not only level with the player, but they do so at ten times the rate they're supposed to, becoming ungodly powerful ridiculously quickly. If you know where to go right away (and can scrounge up a thousand caps or so for RL-3), every other companion except Fawkes can be made immediately pointless. |
| 68 | |
| 69 | [[AC:Point Lookout]] |
| 70 | * From a simple side-quest (or SequenceBreaking) in ''Point Lookout'', you can get the Backwater Rifle, a unique lever-action rifle. While Lincoln's Repeater barely beats it in terms of standard damage and magazine capacity, the Backwater Rifle uses the very common 10mm ammo as opposed to .44 Magnum and has a critical multiplier of ''five'' as opposed to two. |
| 71 | * The Ghoul Ecology perk is bugged - it is supposed to add a flat five damage to all attacks directed towards Ghouls, but the extra damage is applied towards ''all'' enemies. This makes fast-firing weapons absolutely lethal. It turns the Minigun into a usable weapon and effectively doubles its damage, but when paired with the Vengeance (which already has an excellent DPS) it can melt the toughest enemies in the game in ''seconds''. |
| 72 | * The reward for beating the expansion is the Microwave Emitter, a unique lethal counterpart to the Mesmetron which uses microfusion cells and ignores armor. ''All'' armor. The Hellfire troopers are in for a nasty surprise. |
| 73 | |
| 74 | [[AC:Mothership Zeta]] |
| 75 | * Alien epoxy. It restores a ''fixed percentage'' of the durability on your equipped weapon based on your Repair skill - even weapons that can only be repaired by merchants. There are over a hundred throughout the Mothership and you can get an infinite amount after the expansion questline is completed. |
| 76 | * Even one of the basic alien weapons is a Game Breaker; the Alien Disintegrator. It packs a punch while having a ammo count of ''100 shots'' and literally reloads with a mere press of a button. You'll have thousands of shots if you save up throughout the expansion. |
| 77 | * Barring that is the Captain's Sidearm, a unique version of the alien blaster that fires a spread of energy like a pocket-sized shotgun. All that balances it is that it uses a different ammo source (alien power modules instead of alien power cells) that, once you're off the ship, are relatively difficult to get your hands on - but not impossible. |
| 78 | * Adapted biogel, bar none the best healing item in the game. Heals a flat 50 health per use, increased by 10 for every ten points in Medicine you have, and though they have a 50/50 chance of applying a random side-effect for 30 seconds, not all of them are negative - you could get e.g. 5 points of radiation per second, or one point taken away from your Intelligence, Perception, Endurance or Agility, ''or'' you could get 10 points of radiation ''taken away'' per second, an extra 5 HP healed per second, or ''two'' points added to Strength or Agility. |
| 79 | [[/folder]] |
| 80 | |
| 81 | [[folder:''Fallout: New Vegas'']] |
| 82 | [[AC:Main game]] |
| 83 | * Shotgun Slug ammo. Normally, shotguns do a fair amount of damage divided into several small bullets (around 7). This means that, once you start facing armored opponents, your shots won't do diddly. However, slugs condense that damage into a single shot that only has one times the DT subtracted, only losing the 30% damage multiplier shot has afterward. With the Shotgun Surgeon perk, your shots ignore 10 DT, meaning that anything wearing light armor may as well be naked. The higher level shotguns, in particular the hunting shotgun and its unique variant, Dinner Bell, can take out most any human target (excluding Lanius) with only a couple of shots at most. With Gun Runners Arsenal, you can buy Pulse Slugs, which do less damage, but are extremely damaging to robots and power armor. Combine this with Center of Mass and Bloody Mess, and you can reduce enemies to a pile of bloody chunks that are no longer identifiable as human remains. |
| 84 | * Turbo, a rare chem which creates a "bullet-time" effect that slows down everything except for the player, allowing you to dodge any attack with minimal effort. It is not a game breaker by itself because the duration is normally very short. However, with a certain combination of perks, it is possible to get its duration up to a full 30 seconds (a full minute with one of the traits found on DLC)--more than enough for you to win any encounter with a single dose. The other balancing factor is that it is extremely rare, but this too can be overcome if you find the recipe, because the individual components are fairly common - the only "rare" ingredient is a Cazador poison gland. |
| 85 | * Debatably an InfinityPlusOneSword, PEW-PEW is easy to acquire fairly early in the game with a bit of knowledge and consuming every bottle of Sarsaparilla you come across. While it has high ammo consumption and only hold two rounds before reloading, it comes an extremely easy to repair, improved holdout weapon, with insanely common ammo, that does some of the highest damage per shot, and with one of the highest crit multipliers and crit damages in the game. Even someone with no skill in energy weapons whatsoever can drop the highest level deathclaws in a few shots. Someone with a reasonably optimized energy weapons build, well... let's just say that those two cons pointed out above no longer matter. |
| 86 | * For those who don't mind outright [[GoodBadBugs glitches]], getting between 33K and 34K casino chip from any one casino and then dropping them causes the computer to go funny in the head, causing the dropped chips to overflow and read as negative. Picking the chips up again adds them to your inventory... [[MoneyForNothing only they can't be removed.]] Even by cashing them in. |
| 87 | ** Unless you save or load. [[PuffOfLogic Or look at them in your inventory, in some cases]]. |
| 88 | * Another programming oversight allows you to map any kind of ammo usable for the gun you are currently wielding into a quickslot. [[AbnormalAmmo And then use it in another gun by switching to said weapon of choice and pressing the hotkey.]] This allows for truly deadly combos like [[GatlingGood Gatling]] [[MoreDakka gun ammo]] being loaded into [[StuffBlowingUp an automatic grenade launcher]]. [[LethalJokeItem Or the Alien Blaster]]. [[NukeEm Or a Fat Man]]. [[RuleOfThree Or land mines]] to sell at enormous profit. [[OverlyLongGag Or the]] [[KillSat Euclid's]] [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill C-Finder]]. This glitch also has interesting interactions with DLC ammo. Load 20 gauge 3/0 ammo into a weapon, and watch it fire four bullets at once. Particularly effective with sneak-attack criticals or a grenade launcher (as the explosion damage of each grenade isn't reduced at all). Or load one of the ''Gun Runners' Arsenal'' mini-nuke variants into the Laser Designator from ''Lonesome Road'' for a rapid-fire nuke-spamming pistol. That doesn't use up a single mini-nuke. |
| 89 | * The YCS-186 Gauss Rifle. Its accuracy makes it very easy to get headshots from such a distance sneak attacks can be easily made even with a very poor Sneak skill. It is ''already'' strong enough to kill most human enemies without a crit; long-distance sniping can one-hit kill against almost anything. A Stealth Boy-aided sneak crit to the head can even kill the Legendary Deathclaw in one hit. You can find it for free as soon as you reach New Vegas, provided you know where to look. Just make sure whatever you shoot doesn't go flying somewhere you can't reach the body. For even more power, use Max Charge [=MFCs=], which will degrade the weapon more quickly but can be countered through use of weapon repair kits. |
| 90 | * Having Boone (enemy targets highlighted for you when you look down your sights) and ED-E (enemies show up on radar from the maximum distance possible) with you makes long-range sniping a breeze, especially if you have a suppressed sniper rifle like the Ratslayer. Boone ''by himself'' is a game breaker, as he can and will shoot every enemy you come across with pinpoint accuracy. Going anywhere with Boone will result in random rifle fire and [="+25 XP"=] notifications every few minutes. And that's ''before'' you find him an anti-materiel rifle... |
| 91 | * Though it starts out as more of a MagikarpPower, Unarmed becomes disgustingly powerful once you have the right perks and weapons. Actually fighting legitimately unarmed won't get you very far for long, but you can find Love and Hate a bit to the north of Goodsprings (though you may have to do some sneaking, as there are enemies to the north that you are not supposed to fight straight out of the game). This weapon will easily carry you for a good while, and within a few hours, you can get your first unique powerfist, the Paladin Toaster, which utterly TRASHES anything mechanical and trivalizes almost all combat in Old World Blues (you can even solo the giant mecha scorpion boss fairly easily with it). Then in Old World Blues, you can get a superheated Saturnite Fist, which honestly can let you tackle the rest of the game just fine. But that's not the gamebreaker. The gamebreaker is the Ballistic Fist, which is essentially a hand mounted ''shotgun''. With the right perks to raise your DT, you can face-tank and quickly cut down even Deathclaws with little effort. It is also great for Hardcore mode since fist weapons require no ammo, allowing you to save some inventory weight. |
| 92 | ** Unarmed is also Veronica's tagged combat skill, making her as much of a beast up close as Boone is from afar. |
| 93 | ** With the "Pyromaniac" perk (which was similarly gamebreaking in ''Fallout 3'' for making the Shishkebab a murder machine), the superheated Saturnite Fist actually ''out-damages the Ballistic Fist'' while weighing less, attacking faster, being easier to get, and it is a holdout weapon on top of it. It takes a while to set up (since the Pyromaniac perk requires 60 points in Explosives), but is well worth it for Unarmed-focused playthroughs. |
| 94 | ** And if you like the Ballistic Fist, just pay a visit to the Gun Runners and pick up the Two-Step Goodbye. It has two differences from the standard variant. One is an increased critical chance. The other is than when it kills an enemy with a critical hit (and with a high enough Luck stat, that’s almost every enemy it kills), the enemy will explode, damaging nearby enemies. While you don’t want to use it with friends nearby, it utterly trivializes fights with crowds of anything other than Deathclaws. |
| 95 | * A surprising gamebreaker is the humble cattle prod. While it does pitiful damage against anything, it still stuns nearly every enemy in 2 or 3 hits, leaving them at your mercy if you repeatedly restore the stun effect. You could literally [[CherryTapping poke them to death]]. This includes Deathclaws, Giant Radscorpion Queens, Cazadores, or even Securitrons. If enemies get too close, this is basically the perfect emergency weapon. |
| 96 | ** The Golden Gloves can do the same thing, but can also use unarmed moves and perks. These are also found in the casino floor of the Lucky 38, the same building that is most likely to be the player's [[StealthPun house]]. |
| 97 | * Sneak attack criticals are absolutely devastating, especially combined with a headshot. That's why weapons like the Ratslayer, which has weak stats, can be gamebreakers. For reference just how low the Ratslayer's stats are, the Silenced .22 pistol, the absolute weakest pistol in the entire game, has slightly higher DPS than the Ratslayer. Only three pistols (.22 pistol, 9mm, and Maria, the unique version of the 9mm) do less damage per shot. Despite this, it becomes devastating when used with sneak attack criticals. |
| 98 | * The perk "Concentrated Fire" keeps increasing the hit chance of each attack if you target several times the same body part during a specific VATS sequence. Not only attacking with a fast weapon allows to be almost sure to hit, but the bonus is combined with the one gained from perks which reduce AP cost in VATS. Some tests ended with an anomalously high high accuracy at far range with weapons with which scoring such hits would logically be impossible (although the perk doesn't bypass the maximum 95% accuracy rate). |
| 99 | * The Missing Laser Pistol is an unremarkable, basic laser pistol that comes at a point in the game where it is laughably weak... and is ''also'' a quest item, meaning that no one and nothing in the entire game can remove it from your inventory. This means that you can walk it straight through casino security without having to put a single point in sneak, you can take it to the Fort, and you can take it with you into ''Dead Money'' which is a great asset seeing as all of your other weapons completely vanish. |
| 100 | * A fully modified laser rifle. It is versatile, has good aim, can zoom like a sniper rifle, excellent firepower and ammo is easy to come by. With this and sufficient Energy Weapon skill and perks, you can easily take down a Deathclaw on your own. You won't need another weapon again. The only downside is the ammo weight in Hardcore Mode, but that's a minor inconvenience by comparison. |
| 101 | * For the game-within-a-game, Caravan is trivially easy to win once you've built up enough even-numbered cards and face cards. By stacking the deck with 6, 8, 10, Jack, and King cards, you can not only get a solid 26 on every caravan within a few moves each, but can also easily sabotage your opponent. |
| 102 | * The "Jury Rigging" perk lets you repair a weapon with any other weapon in the same category as it (i.e. one-handed guns, two-handed melee, etc.). Guns in the same group are often of wildly varying value--for instance, an anti-materiel rifle (5600 caps) can be repaired with a BB gun (36 caps) or Varmint rifle (75 caps). Since the repaired item will have a condition at least as good as the one it's repaired with, you can repair a very expensive item from any condition to full using one of a very cheap item that is in perfect condition (which are easy to find in poor condition and cheap to have repaired by [=NPCs=]). This effectively negates any effect condition will have one equipment you use, with a side-effect of ''destroying'' the game's economy: you can make thousands by just buying all of a merchant's high-tier but damaged items, repairing them, and selling them back for a massive profit. This doesn't have such a huge effect in the base game, because by the time you reach Jury Rigging's level requirement [[MoneyForNothing there's nothing money will really get you]], but ''Gun Runner's Arsenal'' adds loads of unique, powerful, and expensive weapons that you can only get from merchants--and they're often available extremely early in the game, just prohibitively expensive. |
| 103 | * Having minor radiation sickness (which only has a -1 Endurance penalty) with the "Rad Child" perk gives you 2 [=HP/sec=] regeneration. This is more than ''every other regenerative effect in the game and [=DLCs=] combined'' (with the exception of one potentially {{Permanently Missable|Content}} armor). If you're willing to handle the side-effects of the higher levels of radiation sickness, you'll be capable of standing perfectly still against anything short of a Deathclaw without dying. |
| 104 | * Energy Weapons as a whole are pretty ridiculous, largely in part due to how easy it is to stay topped up on Energy Ammo so long as a Workbench is handy (which is "pretty much always" with Lonesome Road installed, see below). Unlike bullets, Energy ammo provides depleted energy cells after firing (35% chance of dropping a cell with standard cells of all three types, which is doubled to 70% with "Vigilant Recycler"), which can be recycled to the tune of 4 depleted cells (3 with "Vigilant Recycler") to one fresh cell, and the three different types of cells can easily be transferred to whatever type the player wants at any Workbench, making it trivial to load up on all three types at most shops and convert the unwanted types to the desired cell of choice. This is compared to making bullets at a Reloading Bench, which requires juggling primers, gunpowder, and hulls, the last of which is the only thing that can be recovered from conventional bullets. Best of all, with high enough Science, the energy cells can be condensed into extra powerful variations with improved armour penetration, more damage, and less weight in Hardcore Mode at the cost of increased weapon degradation, which can easily be counteracted with Weapon Repair Kits or Jury Rigging, and less likelihood of dropping spent cells, which is a small price to pay in comparison. |
| 105 | ** The "Laser Commander" and Rank 4 of the Camarader-E perk increase laser weapon damage by 15% and 5 respectively, including the Gatling Laser and Sprtel-Wood 9700, making them incredibly powerful. |
| 106 | * Once you hit Freeside, The Silver Rush is a great source of laser weaponry but that might be expensive. Short on caps and you don't have the Luck to clean out the casinos? Just physically carry what you want (with the Z key on PC) into the bathroom, shut the door so you're not visible to the guards and steal it. Don't need laser weapons? Just sell them for easy caps! |
| 107 | * The Legion dropbox, while not a weapon, can easily eliminate any limitation on the player resulting from not having enough caps. While you need to start off following the Legion path to get the quest "Caesar's Favour", even if you then side against the Legion the dropboxes will continue to be replenished every three days (you just won't be given the quest to go and find them and so will need to remember where they are). They contain denari (equivalent to 940 caps) and extra goodies as well. It is possible just to fast travel somewhere else "wait" three days and then travel back and get them again over and over again. It quickly becomes trivial to buy anything for sale/get any equipment repaired to full strength. |
| 108 | * The "Super Slam!" perk gives either a 15% or 30% chance (depending on what melee or unarmed weapon you use) to knock back your opponent, which doesn't seem like much on paper, but combine that with using a weapon that does with medium or fast speeds (that ideally also has a decent DAM rating), and the low percentage becomes irrelevant since you'd be hitting your opponents a lot, making it almost a certainty they'll find themselves lying prone and vulnerable, even striking them while they're down helps assure they'll stay down while you whittle down their health. This perk can even help you knock down a Deathclaw if you're fast and lucky enough to get the drop on one. |
| 109 | * Fittingly for a game set in a post-apocalyptic Nevada, having high Luck lets you break the bank at the casinos, and by extension, the game's economy. Having high Luck turns Blackjack into an almost guaranteed win, and between the Atomic Wrangler and the three casinos on the Strip[[note]]The Vikki and Vance casino opens up after completing "My Kind of Town" and the subsequent hidden subquest "A Team of Moronic Mercenaries", but will never open if "My Kind of Town" is failed for any reason[[/note]] the player can win upwards of 41,000 caps before getting banned from gambling, [[MoneyForNothing providing more money than they'll likely ever need]] as well as [[DiscOneNuke letting them afford endgame-level equipment as early as their first visit to the Strip.]] And that's before you even get to the Sierra Madre casino... |
| 110 | * Getting in the good graces of the Great Khans nets you access to their armory, where you'll find a vendor who sells a frankly irresponsible amount of ammo. If you have the caps (and you most likely will because the economy in this game can easily be turned into your personal plaything), you can go there and stock up on hundreds of rounds at once that seem to restock every three days. Likewise, if your reputation with the [=NCR=] is good (which is very easy to do in this game since a disproportionately large number of quests revolve around them), you gain access to a vendor in Hoover Dam who hoards an equally disproportionately large amount of ammo to sell as well, in spite of him saying that his supplies are restrictively limited due to the [=NCR=]'s conflict with the Legion ([[GameplayAndStorySegregation which is not true in gameplay as stocks from all vendors replenish every three passing in-game days]]). Despite being initially parsimonious at first, he eventually agrees to do business with you after passing an easy [=NCR=] reputation speech check. |
| 111 | |
| 112 | |
| 113 | [[AC:''Dead Money'' DLC]] |
| 114 | * The Automatic Rifle has good reload speed, good damage per shot, and good fire rate for high DPS. Its drawback is its low accuracy, which is made even lower if you don't meet its high strength requirement. Its low accuracy doesn't matter at close range, which is what most fights in the DLC are, and enemies attacking in melee (like [[DemonicSpider Deathclaws]]) are ripped to shreds in seconds. |
| 115 | * The "And Stay Back!" perk gives every projectile from a shotgun a 10% chance of knocking them down. Since standard buckshot is 7 pellets, this gives meat shots about a 50% chance (14 pellets and about a 75% chance using the double-barreled Sawed-off shotgun or Big Boomer) of rendering any enemy [[ContractualBossImmunity but Ulysses, Gaius Magnus, or Colonel Royez]] helpless for several seconds. Since you can still knock them down when they're in the middle of getting up, forcing them to start over, you're pretty much guaranteed to [[CycleOfHurting stun lock]] any enemy that you can engage at close range. |
| 116 | * The Holorifle. It is a scoped energy rifle that is, with Max Charge cells, outdone only by the Gauss rifles, but unlike Gauss rifles, a shot only requires one round of ammo, not four or five. Plus, it can be upgraded to do more damage, with reduced spread and improved condition. It also performs a damage over time effect to any enemy it hits. And while it can only be repaired by [=NPCs=] or weapon repair kits, at 100% condition, standard ammo causes no degradation. Use Overcharge or Max charge, though, and it takes damage, unless you have Raul's Full Maintenance perk. More importantly, it isn't affected by the Commando perk, or any of the energy weapons perks. While this sounds bad at first, this means that you DON'T need to take these perks if you're going to be a holorifle based character, freeing up several perks for character growth that you otherwise would not have available. The best part is that you don't have to hunt for this weapon, you receive it at the start of ''Dead Money''. The only thing you have to hunt for are the mods, two of which are located in areas you have to go to complete the storyline. |
| 117 | * Any player with a decent Luck stat can utterly break the game thanks to the Sierra Madre casino. Win enough chips to get banned from the casino, and you will unlock the ability to redeem "complimentary vouchers" for 1000 chips each at any Sierra Madre vending machine. Once you get back to the Mojave, 100 chips and a voucher will be delivered to the safe in the bunker every three days, for a total of 1100 chips (this will happen even if you don't get banned, but the vouchers will be useless as you won't have the ability to redeem them). Using the vending machine in the bunker, you can convert these chips into anything on the menu, particularly Stimpaks and Weapon Repair Kits. Congratulations, you now have infinite healing and weapon repair. To make it clearer, Stimpaks are 25 chips each, and Weapon Repair Kits are 20. For those of you not wanting to do the math: 44 Stimpaks. 55 Repair Kits. For free. Every three days. Just make sure to ''immediately'' redeem that first voucher you get upon getting banned, or else the ability won't carry over to other machines. |
| 118 | ** A glitch in the Xbox 360 and [=PS3=] version of the games gives the aforementioned complimentary vouchers awarded to the player at regular intervals a surprising use. When dropped the holotapes will float in the air, allowing a player who stocks up enough of them to build a chain of stairs to get to just about anywhere. It is popular to use mods to get the same effect in the PC. |
| 119 | ** If that's not enough, while you're at the SM casino you can trade all the chips you have 1 to 1 for pre-war money (which has 0 weight and 10 base value). With winning the maximum amount at the casino (which can be pushed by winning a Slot or Roulette jackpot), collecting all the pre-war money and chips you can find (including the snowglobe) and bartering with the automated vendors, you can get over 15,000 pre-war money, which can effectively double your money gain without weighing you down any. If you want to push things even farther, you can take your time and scrounge up every last loose item from around the casino and villa (and after completion of the final mission, everything in the rest of the DLC area) and sell it to the holographic vendor in the casino's bar area, who has a huge stack of pre-war money in his inventory. |
| 120 | * The extremely heavy but valuable gold bars. Using numerous weight-reducing tricks, a player can, unencumbered, carry about 5-7 total, which is more like 1 or 2 if you're properly armed. They're supposed to represent letting go of greed (unlike Elijah, who will stop at nothing to get inside the vault). Though it takes some cleverness, it is possible to carry out the entire stash with time to spare by exploiting scripted events. Getting away with all the gold will net you 389,943 caps -- it is impossible to find enough vendors in the entire game (DLC's and all) who have that many collective caps, let alone enough to buy a single bar off the player. Though the weight-to-value ratio is extremely low, it's undeniably convenient. |
| 121 | ** Where they truly break the game concerns vendors who are carrying the Gun Runner's Arsenal weapons, which can range from five to twenty thousand caps. Bring a few gold bars, and you can cut the price of, say, an Anti-Materiel Rifle with all of its weapon mods and a fair bit of ammo down to nothing. |
| 122 | |
| 123 | [[AC:''Honest Hearts'' DLC]] |
| 124 | * The Compliance Regulator from ''Honest Hearts'' [[CherryTapping does an absolute pittance of damage]] but every time it lands a crit it will stun the target for several seconds, making them easy to pick off with a more powerful weapon. It also has an amazing fire rate, making it easy to spam hits at a distant target and land at least one crit before it reaches you and uses the very easy to find Standard Energy Cells for ammo. The best part is that ''nothing'' in the game is immune to the stun, not even any of the end game/DLC bosses which are normally immune to being knocked down. If you crit it, it will fall over stunned for quite some time. |
| 125 | * The Survivalist's rifle is a 12.7mm variant of the service rifle, or in other words, a semi-automatic rifle with hefty damage per shot. It is even more devastating when combined with the Grunt perk, which boosts the damage of "infantry" weapons by 25%. This includes BoringButPractical weapons like the 9mm pistol and SMG (and their unique variants) as well as powerful unique weapons like the All-American, Thump-Thump, and the aforementioned Survivalist's rifle. |
| 126 | ** The [=JSawyer=] mod removes the All-American (and its non-unique variant, the Marksman Carbine) from the list of weapons affected by Grunt. Some of the weapons ''added'' to the Grunt list are ''grenade launchers'', as well as the very powerful This Machine, but this got removed. It's the only instance of a weapon getting removed from a perk list, too. That's pretty telling of how good this combination is. |
| 127 | ** With both weapon mods, the humble 9mm SMG is a terrifying beast against soft targets, with the increased magazine size and faster rate of fire playing perfectly into Grunt's 25% damage bonus. Combined, it can reach 250 DPS, comparable to the Minigun without its High Speed Motor. Vance's 9mm is even ''stronger'' still, with higher damage beating out its slower rate of fire. Regardless of which 9mm is used, however, it's enough to tear apart swarms of Cazadores, lightly armoured humans, or Nightkin with minimal effort-- especially with the homemade 9mm JSP points from the Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC and its Hand Loader perk. |
| 128 | * One of the new craftable items added by ''Honest Hearts'' is the Healing Poultice. It uses ingredients that are extremely common in Zion (and all but one of them are common in the Mojave as well), restores a hefty amount of HP, weighs very little, and restores limb HP as well. |
| 129 | * Weapons Binding Ritual may seem unimpressive, until you realize that the damage buff applies to each hit, unlike psycho's percentage base bonus. This make weapons like the Ripper and Chainsaw disgustingly powerful, since their hits ignore armor and come out multiple times a second. |
| 130 | * Another craftable item, the Large Wasteland Tequila, is a bit harder to make (due to the limited number of Large Whiskey Bottles in the game, and the slightly uncommon Nevada Agave Fruits being a key component), but well worth the trouble. On top of providing a massive Strength bonus, it is one of the only ways to increase your base Damage Tolerance without Cass and her Whiskey Rose perk, at an impressive +6 DT (with max Survival) for two minutes. If you DO have Cass around, on the other hand, the real fun begins, as the much more sustainable standard sized Wasteland Tequila (which still requires an Agave fruit, though two bottles can be brewed per harvest compared to the Large version's one) still provides a DT buff. Because these buffs stack with each other, and the buff from drinking standard Whiskey with Cass as well, it's possible to get up to a '''natural +21 DT buff''' by chugging all three beverages, even before armour or perks come into play, making you borderline bulletproof. |
| 131 | * 'A Light Shining in Darkness', one of the rewards for completing the DLC, boasts more improved stats over its base counterparts than any other weapon. Tighter spread, higher damage, reduced AP cost in vats, improved critical damage, greater critical chance and even weighs less to boot. In practical use with the previously mentioned grunt perk, it can wipe out even the most powerful enemies with its well balanced fire rate. |
| 132 | |
| 133 | [[AC:''Old World Blues'' DLC]] |
| 134 | * The Tarantula frequency sonic emitter from Old World Blues is a pretty decent weapon on all its own, does good base damage, uses common ammo, sets enemies on fire with a critical hit. However, due to a game glitch, sometimes when scoring a crit the critical kill animation will play even though the target is still very much alive. Since the critical kill animation consists of exploding the enemy's limbs off, this results in a chance for an instant kill. |
| 135 | * The "Them's Good Eatin'" perk. 50% chance of finding some [[HyperactiveMetabolism rather filling foods]] every time you kill something, foods which can be crafted into something with even more powerful healing. You quickly start drowning in healing food, which you can use to recover HP at absurd rates, or simply sell, as they're also very, very cost-effective. It's especially good in ''Dead Money'', where healing items are otherwise extremely scarce. |
| 136 | * Christine's COS Sniper Rifle is a silenced sniper rifle with higher base damage than the regular sniper. At medium range or longer, it kills everything, and is a perfect weapon for stealth kills at any range. Its only drawback is its low ammo capacity, making it suitable to pair with the Automatic Rifle above, as they use the same ammunition. |
| 137 | * The "Heartless" perk, given to you at the ''start of the DLC'' makes you completely [[NoSell immune]] to poison. You can keep it at the end of the DLC (or exchange it for a perk that "only" gives you 50% poison resistance but other benefits). It makes normally DemonicSpiders enemies like Cazadores or Nightstalkers much more manageable since their venom attacks is negated and completely obsoletes several perks or items from other DLC that give you poison resistance. |
| 138 | * Turbo's GameBreaker potential is limited by its aforementioned rarity. The Implant GRX perk can be taken at level 30 and has the exact same effect as a dose of Turbo, albeit with a shorter duration. However, with the previously mentioned drug extending perks a single shot of GRX lasts 20-30 seconds, depending if you have rank one or two of the perk, more than enough to kill anything in the game, and if somehow you can't finish a fight up in time, take another FOUR to NINE doses (rank 1 or 2 respectively). That reset daily. It is also impossible to become addicted to it, and it stays with you in ''Dead Money''. The only real downside to basically being the Flash with a gun is an 8 Endurance entry fee. |
| 139 | * ''Everything in the Sink!'' Rare materials and valuable scrap metal can be salvaged from cheap junk through the Toaster, Book Chute, and Muggy, who can also provide free energy weapon ammo and scrap electronics daily. The Autodoc is a free doctor with some powerful (but expensive) upgrades. The Biological Research Station can recycle old plants to make the ones you need. The Sink can fill useless bottles with purified water, turning 1 cap items into 20 cap items. The Light Switches can give short but powerful buffs, and the Sink Central Intelligence Unit is able to fully repair your gear and trade back the caps. |
| 140 | |
| 141 | [[AC:''Lonesome Road'' DLC]] |
| 142 | * [[spoiler:ED-E]] is a deliberate GameBreaker given to you right at the start of the mission. Most notably, after collecting two circuit boards (one found in the same complex where [[spoiler:ED-E]] was activated), you will receive the option to have your weapon repaired by 25% ''once a day'' (thereby saving you thousands upon thousands of caps in repair fees), and you'll get free ammo every day (which, depending on your Speech or Repair skill, will net you [[=Energy/Microfusion=]] cells, flamer fuel or satchel charges). You'll never have to worry about weapon degradation or running out of ammo for the duration of the DLC. The best part, however, is that all these benefits ''[[spoiler:transfer over to the main game's ED-E]]''. |
| 143 | ** Not only that, but just ''installing the DLC'' makes main game [[spoiler:ED-E]] a traveling Workshop and Reloading Bench. |
| 144 | ** The Satchel Charges themselves can be this; originally supposed to be smaller, weaker landmines they were last minute changed into being more powerful than the already devastating Bottlecap Mines and with a shorter fuse - [[spoiler:ED-E]] can give you three per day and you can make more with common components. |
| 145 | * The best rocket launcher in the game, Red Glare, is more or less handed to you a third of the way through your quest, and three mods for it are sold at every Commissary in the Divide. If you've been saving your caps (or if you decide to abuse the Commissary's replenishing stash of caps), you can get all three mods as soon as you get it, and use the fully-upgraded auto launcher with the best zoom of any explosive weapon (4.35x) in the game immediately. |
| 146 | ** On that note, you'll be finding hundreds (literally) of rockets for the weapon throughout the DLC. With a Science skill of 65 and some of the odds and ends you'll be finding dozens of throughout the map or can buy for dirt cheap, you can use ED-E to convert the regular rocket ammo to [[StuffBlowingUp high explosive]] or [[KillItWithFire incendiary]] variants. The best part? The base value of a rocket is 25 caps. The variants go for ''six times that''. |
| 147 | * The "Voracious Reader" perk, which allows the player to craft skill magazines from the damaged books that you can find anywhere (if you already own at least one magazine of the concerned skill). This adds up greatly over the long run, as virtually any building you visit will have ruined books and magazines. |
| 148 | * The "Roughin' It" perk, combined with the "Home on the Range" perk from ''Honest Hearts'', allows players to sleep at any campfire and gain the benefits of an owned bed. While merely a convenient source of healing and the "Well Rested" +10% XP buff in normal mode, this is invaluable in Hardcore mode, where sleeping in unowned beds doesn't heal limb damage. With these two perks, the various campfires across the Mojave become a reliable, free source of infinite healing. |
| 149 | * While the Flare Gun looks like a JokeWeapon at first glance, [[GuideDangIt it has a hidden attribute]] that makes up for its many weaknesses: Abomination-type creatures (including Deathclaws) who are lit on fire by a flare [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere are forced to flee for the duration of the burning effect]] (10 seconds), which also prevents them from attacking. This allows the player to light an Abomination on fire, switch to another weapon, attack them with impunity, and then switch back to the Flare Gun in time to set it on fire once again. |
| 150 | * Blade of the West is a smaller, cleaner, faster and stronger version of the [[{{BFS}} Bumper Sword]]. While it having the largest base DPS among the bladed melee weapons is offset by massive strength and skill requirements, it still knocks the target down on critical hit and has a 1.5 critical chance multiplier. So, if you have 20% base critical chance, 30% of your hits will result in knockdown. Super Slam perk adds another 30% on top of that, and given how fast the damn thing swings, you can probably knock out cold anything up to and including a Legendary Deathclaw within the first second of spamming attacks and then brutalize it while helpless on the ground, even if you don't quite meet the requirements. When combined with admirable reach, this also makes it excellent for crowd control. And you can easily acquire one in Hopeville base HQ with a tiny bit of SaveScumming before entering - the Marked One inside has about 1/3 chance of spawning equipped with the blade. |
| 151 | * The Industrial Hand is a Power Fist combined with a Chainsaw that ignores both Damage Resistance and Damage Threshold. Unlike regular power fists, you can attack continuously by simply holding the attack button. Even with low Unarmed skill points, you will tear up anything that gets too close to you, including Deathclaws. Combined with specific Melee/Unarmed boosting perks and high Strength and/or Endurance, all enemies will simply drop dead the moment they get into close range. |
| 152 | |
| 153 | [[AC:''Courier's Stash'' and ''Gun Runner's Arsenal'' DLC]] |
| 154 | * The Vault 13 Canteen is a small item which you gain at the beginning of the game if you own the ''Classic Pack'' preordering bonus or the full ''Courier's Stash'' DLC. It is an infinite use canteen which is automatically drunk by the Courier. In casual mode, it only heals a small amount of hit points. In Hardcore mode, it decreases the thirst meter like any other water bottle; it isn't enough to completely remove the need to collect and drink water, but it helps a lot. |
| 155 | ** The healing from the canteen is hardcoded. If you play with the ''Project Nevada'' mod, its default settings turn off the healing factor of food and water, but this doesn't affect the canteen. |
| 156 | * The Esther unique Fat Man in the Gun Runners Arsenal. Not only does it do the most damage per shot of any weapon in the game, but it adds radiation and armor resistance to the wielder. While it weighs forty pounds and uses the heaviest ammo, this former can be halved and the latter can be alleviated by letting your companions carry some ammo. What makes it such a game breaker is that the DLC also adds a bunch of mini-nuke variants that can be purchased in respectable quantities every three in game days for a laughably low price. These give the weapon surprising versatility for such a powerful weapon. For example the tiny tots nuke splits into smaller nukes, allowing you to carpet bomb areas or use the weapon like an atomic shot gun, since each explosion's damage will be reduced by your armor and the weapons damage threshold. While its still not something you use all the time, it will still likely fell most of the opponents you find even slightly difficult otherwise. |
| 157 | * One major issue with the Fat Man launcher is its 30 lb. weight. Get the Heavyweight perk and buy the Fat Man-Little Boy kit and it now weighs just 7.5 lbs., less than a Laser Rifle. |
| 158 | * Most types of customized ammunition made with the Hand Loader perk trade off a mild penalty for a large bonus in another area (such as increased damage at the expense of reduced DT penetration, more spread, faster degradation, etc.) Most of the ones that don't are either fairly rare or require a nearly maxxed out Repair skill to make. The exception to this rule is the 5.56mm Match round, which, with a humble 50 Repair requirement, turns one of the most common types of ammo into a higher damage, reduced spread machine. While most 5.56mm guns are already pretty accurate, these rounds can also be used with a Light Machine Gun, turning the normally inaccurate, spray and pray death machine into a laser cutter capable of tearing apart most foes at any range, especially with the aforementioned Grunt perk from Honest Hearts. The All American also makes good use of the better ammo, being able to snipe enemies or unload from the hip with far greater efficiency. Lastly, it gives "That Gun" the best versatility of any weapon, being able to use more ammo types than any other pistol. |
| 159 | * The .50 explosive rounds, which add an additional 80 points of explosive damage, combined with a wide area of effect. When using the anti-materiel rifle's scope, nothing else in the game has the same combination of range, accuracy, and destructive power, with the bonus of being able to damage targets behind cover. When used to get sneak attack criticals, only the strongest enemies in the game can survive more than one hit, and a single bullet can easily wipe out groups of mid-level enemies. Though the ammo is pricy, you won't need much of it. |
| 160 | [[/folder]] |
| 161 | |
| 162 | [[folder:''Fallout 4'']] |
| 163 | [[AC:Main game]] |
| 164 | * The settlement system itself breaks the game in numerous ways. Every item you build nets you a small amount of experience and it'll add up quick, so sinking time into building up settlements can level you up quite a bit. If a settlement produces more food and water than your settlers need (and they usually will, unless you assign a large number of them to defense or shops) deposits the remainder in the workshop for you to take, allowing you to get a steady supply of Purified Water for healing or selling just by building a large number of water pumps (which require minimal resources and no labor). You can also fill settlements with Mutfruit, Tato, and Corn crops, which are the ingredients needed to craft Vegetable Starch that breaks down into 5 Adhesive, a rather rare and valuable crafting component that is used for a lot of weapon and armor mods. If you build shops in them, the settlement will regarly generate a small amount of caps for you in the workshop, which you can grab whenever you swing by. The shops are also open to you, giving you more places to get rid of your ShopFodder and pick up valuable crafting components and ammo. The DLC add-ons listed below add even more ways you can use the settlement system to make the game easier, like building an army of robot caravans to patrol the wasteland and crafting rare and valuable equipment. |
| 165 | * If you go to The Castle with Preston and the Minutemen, then walk away with the mission incomplete (before clearing out the eggs), Preston will follow you forever. He does this as a Temporary Companion - meaning (a) you can also have a normal companion (b) while using this exploit, Preston uses the NPC script (like a provisioner) and therefore has an infinite supply of whatever ammunition you gave him earlier, and he can throw a single grenade an infinite number of times. |
| 166 | ** while this exploit is in effect, you cannot change his loadout or talk with him normally - he will merely repeat the same line about needing to focus on re-taking The Castle. To get the most out of it, you have to optimise his gear beforehand. |
| 167 | ** this can trigger some cut / niche content - Preston will comment on your interactions with Dogmeat. |
| 168 | * you can do essentially the same exploit with Travis (do most of his questline, then don't go into the brewery). |
| 169 | ** You can enhance him by leaving weapons and power armour near him, and he will pick them up in combat. Travis has the (unique?) feature that if you take him to the Museum of Freedom, and allow him to take the suit of armour, the parts will automagically heal. |
| 170 | ** He can potentially pick up (and exclusively use) a Ganna Gun if it has a higher DPS than his gurrent weapon. If so, he will infinitely heal enemy ghouls. To stop this, you can to steal (pickpocket) the ammo, or arrange for him to pick up an even higher DPS gun. |
| 171 | * In fine Fallout tradition, plain and simple sneaking is as overpowered as ever. True, ''Fallout 4'' makes it somewhat harder to max out the skill, mainly by forcing the player to collect ten skill magazines instead of just power-levelling with skill points like in ''Fallout 3''. However, most of them are fairly easy to acquire if one knows where to look, and once around five mags are collected and the regular Sneak skill is maxed at level 4 (character level 23), the Sole Survivor can squat in arm's reach and plain sight of enemies without being detected. Add to that the many, many silenced weapons, several more sneak-buffing perks as well as the possibility to make even power armor invisible while in sneak mode, and it's ridiculously easy to clear entire enemy bases with one shot per baddy and not a single aimed shot ever flying in the Sole Survivor's direction. And that's not even counting in the fact that sneak attacks are always critical hits that can inflict up to six times the base damage with regular perks alone. Your power-armored ninja just found an Instigating gauss rifle? [[CurbstompBattle Happy hunting!]] |
| 172 | * Legendary weapons and armor are intended to be buffs over normal weapons but can easily become this if they have the right effect. |
| 173 | ** The "Kneecapper" ability (20% chance to cripple both legs per hit), when found on any weapon that can rapid fire, is pretty much this game's version of the Dart Gun from ''Fallout 3''. Pump a few bullets in an enemy and even legendary deathclaws will be at your mercy. |
| 174 | ** The "Instigating" ability deals double damage if the enemy is at full health, which stacks with the sneak bonus. A .50 cal sniper rifle, laser musket or a Gauss Rifle can one shot almost any enemy this way. For non sneak builds, Heavy Weapons like the Fat Man will do insane damage with this ability if used on a group of healthy enemies. |
| 175 | ** The "Two Shot" ability makes a weapon fire two projectiles per shot for just one ammunition, which is naturally exceptionally powerful. However, it's not QUITE as utterly overpowered as it sounds: the second projectile only deals the base damage of the weapon, not the full damage considering player perks and weapon mods. This makes it less absurd on for example a fully modded sniper rifle with all the rifleman perks, though the extra damage is still quite effective. However, this fact is much less impactful on low damage, high fire rate weapons like the minigun (it does also cause increased recoil which comes into play with these, but the extra damage is well worth it), or weapons that already have massive base damage like the Fat Man. |
| 176 | ** The "Explosive" effect deals a bit of explosive damage to a small area, which isn't as heavily affected by armor. Not only does this explosive damage get boosted by the Demolition Expert perk, ''it's not affected by range''. You can take a weapon that's normally not good at range with this effect, like a machine gun (like Cricket's "Spray 'n Pray") or even better '''''[[ShotgunsAreJustBetter a shotgun]]''''', spray away, and watch the pretty little explosions. Shotguns are unique in the "Explosive" effect in that ''each pellet'' is explosive, and shotguns fire 7 pellets normally and 8 if equipped with a "Advanced receiver". Combine this with an aforementioned Explosives build and the game might as well just end right there. If it's a ''[[GatlingGood minigun]]'' that has this ability? [[DemonicSpiders Deathclaws]] might as well be [[TheGoomba Koopa Troopas]]. This is taken further with the common Pipe Pistol. An explosive Pipe Pistol can be modded to fit almost any playstyle, uses the ridiculously common and light .38 rounds, is not too unlikely to drop and barely weights anything to boot. Perfect for Hardcore Mode since ammo has weight, meaning you can hold over 70 rounds per weight unit, a volume matched only by 5mm minigun ammmo. |
| 177 | ** A "Wounding" legendary on any fast weapon completely trivializes anything, doing an absurd 25 bleed damage per hit, over 5 seconds. Bleed damage is easily the best damage over time in the game: it affects everything (even ''robots''), stacks unlike poison and incendiary damage, and there's no way to mitigate it beyond actual healing. With a high fire rate like a ripper or a minigun, even Behemoths and Mirelurk Queens will barely last 5 seconds as their health melts away. |
| 178 | ** The "Sentinel" Legendary prefix reduces all damage by 15% as long as the player is standing still. This effect stacks with multiple armor pieces and weapons, totaling 90% reduced damage[[note]]Headwear cannot drop Legendary variants[[/note]]. The player then becomes the ultimate StoneWall, able to reduce the attacks of even a Legendary Deathclaw on [[HarderThanHard Survival]] to ScratchDamage. You can make up for any missing Sentinel armor pieces with the Rooted perk, and for added hilarity take any perks that give you better healing. See the build in action [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww0elqpZfXo here]]. |
| 179 | ** The "Lucky" Legendary prefix doubles the damage of critical hits and refills your critical meter 15% faster. On critical hitting builds this prefix is extremely powerful, especially because the prefix will stack with any other critical damage boost effects you have. |
| 180 | ** The "Staggering" effect can effectively StunLock enemies with certain weapons. Due to the way they and the effect work, non-automatic combat shotguns are virtually guaranteed [NOTE: some enemies, such as robots, are completely immune to this effect] to stun the enemies, stunning with a 30% chance per pellet, and you can even buy one, "Justice", in Covenant. |
| 181 | ** With enough Caps, one can buy the Overseer's Guardian from Alexis Combes at Vault 81. It's a Combat Rifle (the third-tier rifle) with the "Two Shot" ability, has a very high ammo capacity, and it has a great rate of fire. This goes excellently with either a sniper build or an automatic build, though the increased damage isn't quite as impactful on the sniper as it seems (the second projectile only does the weapon's unmodded base damage) and the extra 25% recoil is rather significant on automatics. |
| 182 | ** Another one of the purchasable weapons with Two-Shot is the Big Boy from Diamond City's Arturo, a ''Fat Man'' with Two-Shot. Now add the "MIRV Launcher" mod to it, and you get to fire out two clusters of six nukes, giving you ''[[MacrossMissileMassacre twelve]]'' mini nukes for the price of one! Needless to say, this is enough to kill basically anything in a single shot, even without relevant damage boosting perks. |
| 183 | ** Pickman's Blade, which is easily obtainable through a short low level (excluding a scripted level 30 raider near the end) sidequest. It not only has wounding, but it's also a combat knife already upgraded to its highest rank. What does this mean? Every single hit from this little beauty does 40 extra unmitigatable damage. And being a combat knife it has the fastest melee swing in the game, able to swing 3 or 4 times for every swing of a slow speed weapon. As an added bonus, acquiring issue #2 of SCAV! in ''Nuka-World'' gives it, and several other bladed weapons, a permanent 25% damage boost. |
| 184 | ** You can get Righteous Authority by completing the first Brotherhood of Steel mission. It's a DiscOneNuke that uses very common and cheap ammo, is effective against nearly everything (including the newly-buffed robot enemies), stays useful throughout the game, and can be modded with a scope to boot. |
| 185 | ** The Cryolator, located in Vault 111, if you can get it early enough (Dogmeat can grab it the moment you acquire him, thanks to a GoodBadBug). While you won't have much ammo for it until much later (making the weapon somewhat TooAwesomeToUse), it's a very powerful DiscOneNuke, especially for Legendary enemies, bosses, and difficult encounters. |
| 186 | ** Final Judgement is a Gatling Laser with the "Rapid" effect, making it shoot 25% faster than normal and reload 15% faster. This turns into utter nonsense when you slap on charging barrels[[labelnote: description]] Charging Barrels reduces fire rate to a sixth to increase damage fourfold, losing some DPS to make it more ammo efficient (Although thanks to how armor works,this is still a DPS increase on many late-game enemies).[[/labelnote]]: The rapid effect's bonuses are calculated off of an [[BeamSpam unmodified gatling laser]], which more than doubles charging barrel's fire rate and brings it in line with most automatic weapons. And while burning fusion cores for ammo at first seems like the very definition of AwesomeButImpractical, the fact that you can get up to 1000 shots per core, which, with proper trade skills, can cost you a total of 240 caps a core, while "normal" ammo cannot go under 1 cap per shot, making it both an extremely powerful ''and'' economical endgame firearm[[note]]In survival mode, where ammo has weight, fusion cores weigh 4 pounds each. For 500 shots. This calculates to about 0.008 pounds per shot, a weight economy rivaled only by flamer and minigun ammo... ''until'' you put points into the Nuclear Physicist perk, which decreases the fusion core drain per shot by up to half (while you're still forced to reload every 500 shots, the fusion core will be placed in your inventory at 50% when you reload), making gatling lasers the undisputed king of ammo economy in ''Fallout 4'' by a wide margin.[[/note]]. Oh, and to cap off on the "Get four times what you paid for" spree, Charging Barrels doesn't affect the amount of shots in VATS; each burst fires off 10 shots for the same AP, despite each one doing QuadDamage. |
| 187 | * If you take it early, the Idiot Savant perk can give you so much XP that you can go up multiple levels just from completing quests. Even if your Intelligence is ''very high'' the boost comes often enough to be tremendously useful, which will further be boosted by Int like regular XP--a character with 10 Int and maxed Idiot Savant will average slightly more XP than one with 1 Int. The only downside from it is that you ''will'' get annoyed at the constant HYUK HYUK sound it makes when it activates. Although 10 Intelligence will only have a 2.5% activation rate for Idiot Savant, players can still use SaveScumming by quick saving before turning in quests that are worth a lot of XP and then reloading over and over again until Idiot Savant activates. |
| 188 | * A Luck build can become ''very'' powerful. Being able to force {{Critical Hit}}s to happen as long as you have a bar is really nice, especially against bosses and Legendaries. With Critical Banker, one can store up to four of them at max level (with an added chance of gaining an extra crit when your bar fills up). Now combine that with Better Criticals and certain weapon mods to increase crit damage, Grim Reaper's Sprint (at max level, it triggers 1/3 of the time to recover all AP ''plus'' increase your critical bar) and Four Leaf Clover (each hit in V.A.T.S. has a random chance to fill a crit bar instantly, chance increases as level goes up) and you'll be pulling so many deadly critical hits out so fast it's not funny. In particular, the Double-Barrel Shotgun can get two simultaneous crit-boosting mods. Other sources can let a crit add 725% the weapon's base damage when [[AlwaysAccurateAttack every single pellet will hit the target]]. |
| 189 | * Oddly, the best late game Special for criticals isn't Luck. A maxed out Gun Fu (agility) build can throw down caltrops, and then select these as the first three VATS targets. The next 13 shots from the same round of VATS will all be criticals, so you can target enemies at large distances with 100% accuracy. You can therefore stay undetected and get massively boosted sneak attacks. To max out late game critical damage, only one Luck perk is required (Better Criticals). |
| 190 | * The Gauss Rifle hits extremely hard in this game, ''much'' harder than the .50 cal sniper rifle. And its unique variant, The Last Minute (obtainable after helping the Minutemen reclaim their base of operations and assisting them in a couple more sidequests), is even more ridiculously powerful with the "Crippling" ability. Put a suppressor on it and the damage this thing inflicts will be even crazier. |
| 191 | * The Alien Blaster isn't quite an InfinityPlusOneSword anymore that can melt enemies in a single shot, but with a high Science skill it can be converted from its finite supply of ammo to standard micro-fusion cells. This reduces the damage... by about 2%. And the damage decrease is offset by picking up Astoundingly Awesome Tales #4 in Hubris Comics, which makes the Alien Blaster deal extra 5% damage. |
| 192 | ** Perhaps more impressively, it has an incredibly low AP cost for each shot, for a weapon that deals this level of damage. At 10 Agility, it can fire between 5-7 shots, at 50 damage each. With a maxed Gunslinger perk, that transforms to 100 damage per shot. For a VATS-Based build, that's obscene, especially once you start getting critical hits involved. |
| 193 | * Due to the game's more fast-paced "realistic" gunplay, an Explosives build can be unbelievably powerful in this game, [[MagikarpPower although it takes a while for it to truly shine]]. However, with max Demolitions Expert, a modded rocket launcher, or a Fat Man, you will obliterate everything in the game with little trouble. |
| 194 | * If you do enough of the Railroad cache sidequests, you can talk to Tinker Tom and unlock the Ballistic Weave mod, which allows you to add armor to most forms of basic clothing, including clothing that can be worn under a full set of armor. The ingredients are rare, but so very worth it. Just how effective is this? The Mk 5 version provides a whopping 110 to ballistic and energy defense, which rivals most sturdy armor in terms of effectiveness. It also works on a select few ''hats'', meaning you can mod a '''fedora''' to give better head defense than freaking ''power armor''. This gives you a total of 220 ballistic and energy defense along with Luck/Charisma bonuses from both the hat and glasses. Combine with modded Heavy armor and you easily pass 300 ballistic and energy defense. Add the ballistic and energy defense perks and that can potentially pass 400. Even better, the materials might be rare, but Tinker Tom still starts selling enough Ballistic fiber clothing at a decent enough price that you can very easily scavenge enough Ballistic Fiber to upgrade whatever you want to the highest level possible of Ballistic Weave. Or, with enough caps, you can buy a shipment of Ballistic Fiber (which gives you 25 units of the stuff) from Kleo the robot in Goodneighbor and mod up your clothing and hat to [=Mk5=] (24 total fiber required) in one go. |
| 195 | * A modded Plasma gun is absurdly powerful, especially combined with the proper perks. A plasma sniper rifle when modded does more than 100 damage total before perks are added. Perks will double the damage, give this weapon the ability to penetrate armor [NOTE: this aspect of the Rifleman perk is broken in the base game, and doesn't work for energy weapons. There are mods to fix this], and have a bonus to making headshots. It is balanced by a high AP cost, but the right build can handle that. If you can manage a build that has the critical and AP bar fill one another, you can become a murder machine. |
| 196 | ** If you can get a Plasma gun with the Two Shot legendary effect, you can modify it into a Two Shot Overcharged Plasma Thrower, a plasma flamethrower with the size of a pistol but hits harder than the Flamer itself. Since it's a flamethrower, accuracy and range wouldn't even matter, you can use the Standard Grip and Standard Sight to further reduce the unnecessary weight until it become a featherweight powerhouse that can melt down everything. |
| 197 | * Kremvh's Tooth, the blade that you get at the bottom of Dunwich Borers is special, because it ISN'T legendary, but rather just a weapon with a unique mod. The mod boosts base damage, does wounding damage, and can be detached... and added to a legendary machete with a wounding effect. So you can do even more wounding damage. |
| 198 | * Similarly to the mentioned blade, Lorenzo's Artifact is attached to a standard Gamma gun. It appears to do less damage, but actually is spread across multiple damage types. It does Ballistic damage, True damage and if it hits the enemy head on, explosive damage TWICE. Add an Electric Signal Carrier and it inflicts energy damage too. One to two shots and even the bulkiest power armored enemies will have their parts stripped to the frame, and turn a sentry bot to junk. Enemies with Layered armor like Sentry Bots, Power Armored Enemies and Mirelurks get it worse, as the combination of damage is applied to each layer, meaning that all the above damage can be applied more than once over. You can even detach the Lorenzo's Artifact receiver and attach it onto a Legendary Gamma Gun. A Never Ending Lorenzo's Artifact Gun with Sharpshooter Grip and Signal Repeater, on the other hand, can [[MoreDakka shoot force projectiles like a machine gun without any worry about reloading]], tearing off limbs and shells apart as if you are cracking open an egg. |
| 199 | * Generally, the Ghoulslayer effect boosts damage to ghouls, Ghoulslayer's Gamma Gun, on the other hand, boosts radiation inflicted on ghouls and [[HealingShiv heals them]]. It might be useless on the first glance, until you realise it can be used for healing ''Hancock'', your heroic ghoul companion. In other words, as long as you don't attach Electric Signal Carrier, you can virtually heal Hancock without Stimpack provided you have a huge stock of Gamma Rounds. You can even attach Long Disk and Sign Repeater to boost the healing effect further. |
| 200 | * Due to an [[GoodBadBugs coding oversight]], the Yao Guai Roast gives much more than the 10% increase in melee damage listed in the game. How much, you ask? '''Five Hundred Percent.''' Doing over a thousand damage a hit with a super sledge? Yeah, you can do that. This allows you to tear through any humanoid enemy like paper, and when combined with Melee perks you can kill ''Mirelurk Queens'' with a single hit. It also works with DLC melee weapons, like the sledgehammer upgrades from Nuka-World or Far Harbor's Atom's judgement for extra broken fun. |
| 201 | * As Mini Nukes and Fat Mans are much more common in this game than ''Fallout 3'', the Fat Man actually becomes more viable in open spaces. The "MIRV Launcher" mod however makes this ridiculous. You launch a projectile that splits into six Mini Nukes. What makes this great compared to ''Fallout 3's'' MIRV? [[AwesomeButImpractical Fallout 3's MIRV required you to use eight mini nukes to fire it]]. ''4'''s requires ''one''. Yes, ''six Mini Nukes for the price of one''. The Big Boy takes this even further- since it comes with the Two-Shot attribute, you get ''[[MacrossMissileMassacre twelve]]'' Mini Nukes for the price of one. Just make sure not to get [[HoistByHisOwnPetard caught in the blast]]. |
| 202 | * If a settlement produces more water than the population consumes, the excess water will be periodically deposited in the Workshop in fairly large quantities. 100% free healing that heals roughly as much as stimpaks for much of the game (without relevant perks to upgrade Stimpacks). On top of that, when you use a stimpak you're treated to a short animation of the Sole Survivor injecting themselves with a syringe (unless you're in power armor or underwater), during which time you can't run or shoot or anything, even during combat. Purified Water doesn't have this problem, so unless you're healing limb damage, Purified Water is a lifesaver well throughout the game. If you still have excess water after this, you can always sell it to generate a decent income. |
| 203 | * Robotics Expert makes battling robots almost trivial since one can merely rush up to a robot, hack it, and either shut it down or activate its self-destruct. The only risk associated with this is that if you're in combat with it, the robot does get a few seconds to attack you before the interface to shut it off or initiate the self-destruct pops up, so having good armor/damage resistance or sneaking up to it is advised. Still, if done properly, it can make dealing with even the most powerful robots in the game child's play. |
| 204 | * The Deliverer is an incredibly powerful unique pistol. The weapon is already the most powerful option for players wishing to use 10mm ammo, but that's not what makes it such a game breaker. No the fact that the weapon has an almost negligible AP cost in VATS is what makes it so overpowered. With the Deliverer you can easily fire off enough hits to fill the critical meter and have enough left over to switch to a powerful weapon and get a crit shot with that. |
| 205 | * Chems have become massively effective in this game thanks to chemistry crafting stations and certain perks. The most noticeable change is with Jet, one of the more common chems. In previous games all it did was boost your AP for a short time. Now it works like [[BulletTime Turbo]], a GameBreaker itself from New Vegas, with the added benefit of being much more common and also being craftable the moment you leave the vault. It can also be mixed with other potent chems like Psycho and Buffout for a truly devastating cocktail. Still not good enough? Take the second rank of the Chem Resistant perk and you won't even have to worry about addiction, which turns these dangerous drugs into magic potions with no real drawbacks. Aside from a few rare situations (like when an enemy has a Fatman or hostages) a handful of these boosted chems and a gun with ammo is all you'll need to clear the room. |
| 206 | * Jet and Jet Fuel are not just useful chems for combat but also the easiest chems to manufacture (Jet requires only plastic and fertilizer, and Jet Fuel requires Jet and Flamethrower fuel). Jet Fuel, even at level 50 and above, gives 13 exp per unit, and Jet gives 1 exp a unit at that level. 14 exp total, even at a level where most basic enemies give that amount. So, provided you can find a plentiful supply of both, you can power level hard for as long as you have the materials, and end up with a powerful and useful chem. Plus, even without using these chems, they can be useful in that the components to manufacture them are usually less expensive than the sale price, especially if you scavenge the materials necessary. Flamer fuel is common at Saugus Ironworks, provided you're willing and able to tangle with the Forged, and plastic items are common throughout the Commonwealth. Fertilizer is generated steadily by cattle in your settlements. |
| 207 | * The Minigun Shredder mod essentially turns a Minigun into a deranged blender made of barbed wire and rust, where whenever it's spinning, it does additional damage to anything touching the gun itself. This does not require ammo, and does comically high damage, allowing someone to simply use the minigun in question as a cylindrical chainsaw, which happens to outdamage ''actual'' melee weapons by a mile thanks to its obscene attack speed. Putting the Shredder mod onto the [[DiscOneNuke/{{Fallout}} Ashmaker]]? It ''burns'' whatever get caught into the chainsaw. |
| 208 | * Upon defeating Swan, you're guaranteed to find a Power Fist with the Furious Legendary Effect, in which consecutive hits on the same target do increased damage. The Power Fist already hits pretty hard, but this effect will let it smash through the bulkier enemies with ease. If you want to really squeeze as much as you can out of this, switching between first and third person after an attack hits will allow you to attack again immediately. Pop a Psycho Jet and most enemies go down before they can even attack. |
| 209 | |
| 210 | [[AC:Automatron]] |
| 211 | * The robot modding options allow you for some downright ridiculous possibilities for robot customization. With the right crafting perks, you can easily build or mod existing robot companions into LightningBruiser powerhouses, sporting huge health, damage resistances, carry weight, with a choice of [[GatlingGood Gatling Lasers and Miniguns]], [[ShockandAwe Tesla Rifles]], or a number of devastating melee weapons; far outclassing what any other companion is capable of. Robot companions such as Ada, Codsworth and Curie, can also be modified into a Mr. Gusty, a Robobrain, or even a Mini-Nuke-toting Sentry Bot. And these three robots are considered "Essential" [=NPCs=], making them immortal, so you can hide behind them while they tear apart your foes. |
| 212 | * The Tesla Rifle's [[ChainLightning Arcing Effect]] allows it to mop up closely clustered enemies, and can be modded more a large number of situations. One well placed Charged Rifle, Shotgun or Lobber would allow a single cell to wipe out multiple enemies at once. |
| 213 | |
| 214 | [[AC:Wasteland Workshop]] |
| 215 | * The Fusion Generator provides 100 units of Power, far and above any other power source for settlements in the base game. Since all that power is in one unit, settlement size and resources spent on creating generators to give the same amount of power are greatly reduced for a larger return. Especially handy for creating massive settlement defense structures without needed to fuss with placing engines all over the place. |
| 216 | * The Decontamination Arch removes all Radiation on the player. This is an infinite use [=RadAway=] you can build at any settlement. On the Survival Difficulty you can eat uncooked food in your settlement and suffer no consequence. This is especially useful in the ''Far Harbor'' DLC, which is just in love with radiation poisoning. |
| 217 | |
| 218 | [[AC:Far Harbor]] |
| 219 | * Old Reliable is a Lever Action Rifle with the "Two-Shot" Legendary effect you can purchase from Dejen after reaching Acadia. Since it comes with a scope, you have an extremely powerful sniping weapon on your hands fresh out the store. |
| 220 | * Also bought from Dejen is Sergeant Ash, a Flamer with the "Kneecapper" Legendary effect. Considering the fire rate of Flamers, this weapon will have enemies spending most of the fight without legs. |
| 221 | * The Kiloton Radium Rifle, which you can purchase from a Children of Atom merchant named Brother Kane in The Nucleus, has the "Explosive" Legendary Perk. If having such a powerful effect wasn't enough, Radium Rifles already deal 2 types of damage (Ballistic and Radiation). Slap an automatic receiver on it, and you're spraying death in 3 delicious flavors. |
| 222 | * Found in a trunk in Echo Lake Lumber, The Harvester, a unique Ripper with the "Staggering" legendary effect. "Stunlocks for days" doesn't even ''begin'' to describe this thing, and short of a Wounding Ripper, this will be as good as you're gonna get. |
| 223 | * Atom's Judgement, a one-of-a-kind super sledge, is a quest reward from the Children of Atom. Atom's Judgement has a unique effect that grants it +100 Radiation damage in addition to its considerable normal damage, and this damage scales with all possible Strength boosting effects. It also has a hidden attribute that allows it to ignore a sizable percent of a targets radiation damage, including radiation ''immune'' enemies. If you've invested in melee damage, you'll often find yourself obliterating enemies in a single swing. |
| 224 | * The marine armor is one of the best non-Power Armor sets introduced. While very heavy, it has tons of damage resistance and can be worn over ballistic weave clothing to put it on par with most power armor. And if you keep the Children of Atom alive through the ending, there's a legendary armor piece that bolsters its defenses as you take radiation damage. The Recon Marine legendary version even allows you to slow time at a certain HP threshold. |
| 225 | * The Striker, a Fat Man modded to shoot Bowling Balls instead of Mini Nukes, with a severe loss of power. These Bowling Balls don't explode and can also be picked up after they're fired, which solves both of the usual problems for the Fat Man (unusable in close quarters due to blowing yourself up, and ammo being virtually impossible to find). It's also worth mentioning that the Striker's unique effect is a modification, so it can be taken off and put onto other legendary Fat Man launchers. Putting it on the Big Boy (a guaranteed Two-Shot Fat Man) is a net gain, since it'll then fire two Modified Bowling Balls for the price of one. |
| 226 | * The Robes of Atom's Devoted, which you receive just for joining the Children of Atom and going on a short hike, at first glance appear to be little more than a recolor of the basic Children of Atom robes, offering modest radiation resistance and little else. The robes' stats don't mention that the resistance they offer scales with your current rad accumulation, topping out at a resistance value north of 2500, making you immune to environmental radiation. Unfortunately, your maximum health is reduced by 80% or more at this point, making the protection AwesomeButImpractical. If you push your radiation exposure even further, say, by drinking irradiated water, the robes' true game-breaking ability kicks in: radiation poisoning ceases to reduce your maximum health ''at all.'' A character who wears the Robes of Atom's Devoted at all times can run around with 100% radiation and not a care in the world, apart from the minor InterfaceScrew of having their health bar covered by red. Using the robes in conjunction with Far Harbor's various means of powering oneself up through rads is just gravy. |
| 227 | |
| 228 | [[AC:Contraptions]] |
| 229 | * With the Contraptions DLC, three new features are now available that can be outright devastating: Gun manufacturing machines, armor manufacturing machines, and ammo manufacturing machines. With enough points in Gun Nut or Science, you can produce weapons that you would normally not be able to get until you reached a certain level (You can't manufacture a Gauss Rifle at level one, but you can produce submachine guns and hunting rifles well before you can get them normally). Normally, this wouldn't mean much, since the ammo for a higher level weapon is harder to find, but with the right raw materials, you can manufacture the ammo for these weapons as well. Best of all, the armor manufacturing plants can produce heavy armor pieces, including heavy combat armor (some of the hardest to get in the game), so you can produce the pieces you need for a full armor set without having to continuously hunt through shop menus or hope it randomly is attached to high level enemies. With sufficient raw materials, you can outfit your self, your party members, and every settler in every settlement you control, with top tier gear that will allow them to take on anything up to and including a herd of deathclaws! |
| 230 | |
| 231 | [[AC:Vault-Tec Workshop]] |
| 232 | * If you thought some other settlements were gamebreakers you haven't seen Vault 88. It has an absolutely enormous built in water purifier and automatically provides food for you settlers. If you clear it out to capitalize on its space and resources, its likelihood of attack drops to near zero even with minimal defenses. To make it even safer, if you go with the recommended Vault architecture and cover the majority of the cave floor attacking enemies won't even be able to spawn and you will successfully defend the settlement by doing nothing. Put in a couple missile turrets and enemies won't even attempt to raid it. You can literally have the entire settlement focused around making you money or doing other useful functions and they will all be happy as clams. |
| 233 | |
| 234 | [[AC:Nuka World]] |
| 235 | * The Disciples Blade weapon class is the most powerful "fast" attacking melee weapon in the game. With the right perks, each normal swing will do as much as 450+ damage per hit. This weapon type is what you get when the Super Sledge's damage is combined with the dps of a combat knife. |
| 236 | ** The Throatslicer, a purchasable Disciples Blade from Katelyn in the Nuka-Town Market, is essentially Pickman's Blade 2.0, boasting the same wounding effect but a significantly higher base damage that can be made even more absurd with perks and magazines in Nuka World. |
| 237 | * Splattercannon and The Problem Solver, two Handmade Rifles with the Furious Legendary effect. Said effect makes the guns deal more damage after each consecutive hit on a given enemy. Slap on the best automatic receiver you can and get to melting Mirelurk Queens in less than 10 seconds. These two guns can be obtained as early as gaining full access to Nuka-Town USA; Splattercannon can be bought from the market, and The Problem Solver is rewarded for passing a hard speech check. |
| 238 | * The Nuka-Cade can be broken by bringing either a Gamma Gun or any weapon with the "Explosive" Legendary effect. Get either type of weapon and play the "Bandit Roundup" Nuka-Cade Game. The splash effect of each weapon's shots will knock down all targets on screen, giving thousands of easy points that turn into hundreds of Nuka-Cade tickets. This is the fastest method of gaining Nuka-Cade tickets available. Likewise, bringing in a Ripper to Whack-A-Commie turns that game into an quick & easy ticket-spewer. |
| 239 | ** Speaking of the nuka-cade, you can bring your own weapons and utterly destroy all but the basket ball minigame. But that can be broken by grabbing one basket ball, holding it in your hands, then leaping onto the machine and moving a ball up and down the hoop. |
| 240 | * The Nuka-Nuke Launcher fires modified Mini-Nukes infused with Nuka Cola Quantum, which does a much higher base damage and radiation damage. Just like the Striker before it, it's a weapon mod that can be slapped onto the Big Boy to fire two Nuka-Nukes at once for a cool ''[[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill 8000 damage]]''. |
| 241 | * The Quantum Power Armor, a suit of X-01 with a powerful legendary effect: Extremely increased AP regeneration. With it, you can regain your entire bar much faster than ever before... and this is on top of all of the other boosts that power armor gives you. With Overdrive Servos and/or a Jet Pack, the Quantum Power Armor makes the Sole Survivor the definitive LightningBruiser, capable of charging or flying anywhere in a flash while flattening anything in your way; and with the Pain Train perk it's possible to end fights simply by [[DynamicEntry running into them or (if using Explosive Vents instead of Overdrive Servos in the legs) just landing near them]]. [[InfinityPlusOneSword It's objectively the best armor in the game.]] All you have to do is find all of the star cores to claim it. Happy hunting! |
| 242 | * ''Nuka World'' introduces a ''legendary'' Hub Alien Blaster. The original was already a Game Breaker in its own right, but with the "lucky" effect, it can fire off devastating critical hit after devastating critical hit. |
| 243 | * Aeternus is a Gatling Laser with the Never-Ending Legendary effect that, due to how the Gatling Laser works, functions as the name of the effect would imply. While firing the Aeternus for the first time consumes a portion of the Fusion Core's power, that's it. From that point onward, the gun will simply ''[[BottomlessMagazines not consume ammo]]''. Getting it is tedious (you've got to complete [[GladiatorSubquest Amoral Combat]] several times), but once you have, there isn't much that can stand in your path. Do note, however, that the buggy nature of this weapon means that it still depletes fusion cores and "loads" the highest fusion core you have every time you let off the trigger, so don't carry all your cores on you unless you want them all at 1%. |
| 244 | |
| 245 | [[AC:Creation Club]] |
| 246 | * The Sentinel Combat System gives you a NighInvulnerable additional companion. It is essentially an autonomous power armor frame that can be commanded via Pip-boy to escort you, even if you already have a companion. Since it is a power armor frame, it can already soak up a lot of damage based on the pieces you equip it with. It deals a lot of damage with its automatic laser rifle, but its true advantage is that no matter what, it cannot be killed. Its armor pieces can be depleted down to zero, but the frame itself can soak up fire all day and never ever be destroyed. Duck behind it and absolutely nothing can hurt you. |
| 247 | [[/folder]] |
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