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*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle is an even more extreme version of the Scoped .44 Magnum, sporting fantastic range, power, accuracy and a high crit multiplier at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better than the base model either.) Most players save their sniper rifles for special circumstances and opt to use a Hunting Rifle for general use instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has two quite good unique variants in Ol' Painless and Lincoln's Repeater, though the latter uses relatively scarce .44 ammo).
to:
*** Fallout 3's The Sniper Rifle is an even more extreme version of the Scoped .44 Magnum, sporting fantastic range, power, accuracy and a high crit multiplier at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better than the base model either.) Most players save their sniper rifles for special circumstances and opt to use a Hunting Rifle for general use instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has two quite good unique variants in Ol' Painless and Lincoln's Repeater, though the latter uses relatively scarce .44 ammo).
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*** The Broadsider is certainly this. It's a naval cannon scavenged from the ''[[CoolBoat USS Constitution]]'', rigged to a metal frame. It does ''a lot'' of damage, and shooting it as just as fun as it sounds. However, it's also very heavy, short-ranged, difficult to aim, only holds one shot (three if you upgrade it, but that's still not great), and uses extremely rare cannonballs. The Junk Jet, a fan favourite weapon from ''3'', has also been reduced to this. The most obvious is that junk is now incredibly useful for giving you crafting components for all kinds of crafting, so why would you want to get rid of it? Not to mention, unlike conventional ammunition, junk often has a weight, so you can't carry much.
*** Once again, the minigun. It's still heavy and has a long spin-up time before it actually starts firing, and it has the lowest damage per bullet of any gun so against heavily armored opponents it can only inflict ScratchDamage. And that's assuming that you actually hit- it's a fantastically inaccurate weapon so most of the bullets fired will miss. And it's got a very long reload animation.
*** Rather than simply throwing out 8 Mini-Nukes in one go, the Experimental MIRV Launcher is now much more ammo-efficient and sends out one nuke that splits up and rains multiple huge explosions directly down on enemies. The problem? It stops traveling horizontally in mid-arc, so the payload will drop down dangerously close to the wielder. This makes it far less useful for taking out enemies at a distance and increases the chance of you getting caught in the blast if you didn't lob it at just the right angle. [[YetAnotherStupidDeath You'll know you got it wrong if it instantly kills you]].
*** {{Averted|Trope}} with the Wounding and Explosive legendary modifications -- these two are such {{Game Breaker}}s in their own right that ''any'' weapon with them is insanely overpowered, especially weapons that put out large amounts of ammo. The Explosive Perk's splash damage ''can'' be a liability to the player and friendlies, but it's not a fatal drawback when you can also mow down disproportionately high-leveled enemies in just a few seconds.
*** Far Harbor adds the Harpoon Gun to this list. A very awesome heavy weapon that can be modded to fire either standard large harpoons or a FlechetteStorm of smaller projectiles, either of which will inflict heavy damage, it suffers from having the longest reload time of any weapon in the game, which is especially bad given that it's a single-shot weapon. It's also got fairly limited range, further making things bad. It can be good at picking off single targets from stealth, but against groups or against single targets tough enough to survive the first hit (like Deathclaws and Fog Crawlers), you'll be cut to pieces before you can reload it for a second shot.
*** Once again, the minigun. It's still heavy and has a long spin-up time before it actually starts firing, and it has the lowest damage per bullet of any gun so against heavily armored opponents it can only inflict ScratchDamage. And that's assuming that you actually hit- it's a fantastically inaccurate weapon so most of the bullets fired will miss. And it's got a very long reload animation.
*** Rather than simply throwing out 8 Mini-Nukes in one go, the Experimental MIRV Launcher is now much more ammo-efficient and sends out one nuke that splits up and rains multiple huge explosions directly down on enemies. The problem? It stops traveling horizontally in mid-arc, so the payload will drop down dangerously close to the wielder. This makes it far less useful for taking out enemies at a distance and increases the chance of you getting caught in the blast if you didn't lob it at just the right angle. [[YetAnotherStupidDeath You'll know you got it wrong if it instantly kills you]].
*** {{Averted|Trope}} with the Wounding and Explosive legendary modifications -- these two are such {{Game Breaker}}s in their own right that ''any'' weapon with them is insanely overpowered, especially weapons that put out large amounts of ammo. The Explosive Perk's splash damage ''can'' be a liability to the player and friendlies, but it's not a fatal drawback when you can also mow down disproportionately high-leveled enemies in just a few seconds.
*** Far Harbor adds the Harpoon Gun to this list. A very awesome heavy weapon that can be modded to fire either standard large harpoons or a FlechetteStorm of smaller projectiles, either of which will inflict heavy damage, it suffers from having the longest reload time of any weapon in the game, which is especially bad given that it's a single-shot weapon. It's also got fairly limited range, further making things bad. It can be good at picking off single targets from stealth, but against groups or against single targets tough enough to survive the first hit (like Deathclaws and Fog Crawlers), you'll be cut to pieces before you can reload it for a second shot.
to:
*** The Broadsider is certainly this. It's a naval cannon scavenged from the ''[[CoolBoat USS Constitution]]'', rigged to a metal frame. It does ''a lot'' of damage, and shooting it as just as fun as it sounds. However, it's also very heavy, short-ranged, difficult to aim, only holds one shot (three if you upgrade it, but that's still not great), and uses extremely rare cannonballs. cannonballs.
*** The Junk Jet,a fan favourite weapon the Commonwealth's answer to the fan-favorite Rock-It Launcher from ''3'', has also been reduced to this. The most obvious one is that with the introduction of the settlement system, every single junk is item now incredibly useful has value in being used in the workshop as material to build things and craft weapon and armor mods (compared to most junk items ''only'' having use as ammo for giving you crafting components for all kinds of crafting, the Launcher in ''3''), so why would you want to get rid throw any of it? it away? Not to mention, unlike conventional ammunition, junk often has a weight, so you can't carry much.
much (unless you entirely rely on the weightless pre-War money junk item).
*** Once again, theminigun.Minigun. It's still heavy and has a long spin-up time before it actually starts firing, and it has the lowest damage per bullet of any gun so against heavily armored opponents it can only inflict ScratchDamage. And that's assuming that you actually hit- hit your target- it's a fantastically inaccurate weapon so most of the bullets fired will miss. And it's got a very long at times the reload animation.
animation can be annoyingly slow.
*** Rather than simply throwing out 8 Mini-Nukes in onego, go like previously, the Experimental MIRV Launcher is now much more ammo-efficient and sends out one nuke that splits up and rains multiple huge explosions directly down on enemies. The problem? It stops traveling horizontally in mid-arc, so the payload will drop down dangerously close to the wielder. This makes it far less useful for taking out enemies at a distance and increases the chance of you getting caught in the blast if you didn't lob it at just the right angle. [[YetAnotherStupidDeath You'll know you got it wrong if it instantly kills you]].
*** {{Averted|Trope}} with weapons sporting the Wounding and Explosive legendary modifications -- these two are such {{Game Breaker}}s in their own right that ''any'' weapon with them is insanely overpowered, especially weapons that put out large amounts of ammo. The ExplosivePerk's one's splash damage ''can'' be a liability to the player and friendlies, but it's not a fatal drawback when you can also mow down disproportionately high-leveled enemies in just a few seconds.
***Far Harbor adds The ''Far Harbor'' add-on puts the Harpoon Gun to on this list. A very awesome heavy weapon that can be modded to fire either standard large harpoons or a FlechetteStorm of smaller projectiles, either of which will inflict heavy damage, it suffers from having the longest reload time of any weapon in the game, which is especially bad given that it's a single-shot weapon. It's also got fairly limited range, further making things bad. It can be good at picking off single targets from stealth, but against groups or against single targets tough enough to survive the first hit (like Deathclaws and Fog Crawlers), you'll be cut to pieces before you can reload it for a second shot.
*** The Junk Jet,
*** Once again, the
*** Rather than simply throwing out 8 Mini-Nukes in one
*** {{Averted|Trope}} with weapons sporting the Wounding and Explosive legendary modifications -- these two are such {{Game Breaker}}s in their own right that ''any'' weapon with them is insanely overpowered, especially weapons that put out large amounts of ammo. The Explosive
***
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* The "''VideoGame/Fallout2'' Hint Book", of... well, ''Fallout 2'', provides a massive amount of XP (which can be done repeatedly, letting you level up forever) and raises your skills to maximum, essentially giving you a perfect character... but you can only obtain it in the postgame. By that point, you've already done the entire main story and are strong enough to take down the game's [[FinalBoss strongest enemy]], so chances are nothing in the game could threaten you anyway. Lampshaded by the ingame description.
-->''Well, THIS would have been good to have at the beginning of the goddamn game.''
** A more conventional example from ''Fallout 2'' was the Pulse Rifle. Has the greatest damage of any single weapon in the game and is billed as end-game equipment. The problem? All the enemies you fight have silly levels of resistance to its electrical type damage and due to the way the game's burst fire mechanisms work, the most basic SMG you could use would do more damage. Many of the higher-level weapons suffer from this. Miniguns do no damage to anyone with armor as damage was subtracted on a per bullet basis. The Vindicator Minigun which does decent damage per shot has punishingly rare ammo. The true king of weapons is the [[MoreDakka fully-automatic]] and easily acquired BOZAR Light Support weapon which combines high burst value with a decent and plentiful ammo type.
*** Well, the silly level of elect resistance comes from any form of metal armor (which, to be frank, almost every human enemy towards the end wears), but energy weapons remain exceptionally useful versus monsters -- particularly the Deathclaws, Floaters and Centaurs that crop up towards the end, which tend to be resistant to physical attacks (including bullets).
*** The biggest problem with the pulse weapons is that they have a tendency to do critical hits very often, and critting someone with an electrical attack pulverizes them -- so you don't have a handy corpse to loot. You have to pixel-hunt for the loot at the base of the small ash puddle that remains of the enemy, then laboriously pick up every single drop. This gets old ''very'' fast.
** The Solar Scorcher you can pick up from an EasterEgg. It's basically a powerful solar-powered laser pistol that uses no ammunition. But it's prevented from reaching GameBreaker status by being only reloadable in bright light -- if you happen to empty the six-shot capacitor during the night or in a cave, it becomes entirely useless.
** The FN FAL is a decent rifle that can be upgraded with a laser sight. However, 7.62 mm ammo is shockingly rare. Same thing goes for other 7.62 weapons like the [=M60=].
* ''VideoGame/Fallout3'':
** Big weapons in general in ''Fallout 3'' are difficult to put to practical use for a variety of reasons[[labelnote:examples]] relative rarity of Big Guns within in-game stores and loot drops, the sheer costs of replacements to repair them and ammunition, etc.[[/labelnote]], which is likely the reason later games simply removed Big Guns as a skill entirely (redistributing the usual suspects as top-level gear in the Explosives, Energy Weapons, or Guns categories).
*** The Fat Man launcher fires miniature nuclear warheads. Its [[AceCustom unique variant]], the Experimental MIRV, is a weapon that can fire ''eight'' mini-nukes at once. Problems: there's a limited number of mini-nukes and no more spawn in weapon shops (seventy-two in the entire game), and the largest bosses in the game take maybe two hits to kill with a regular Fat Man. At most, you can fire a Fat Man 72 times and the Experimental MIRV 9 times per playthrough. And firing this weapon will very likely blow up the wielder along with the target, especially in the close-quarters fights that frequently happen in-game. Overkill much? Fire it once for the "cool value", then sell it or stick it in a locker and never use it again.
*** The Minigun is useless in VATS, goes through ammo like a broken sieve, is too bulky to carry as a backup, and worst of all doesn't do the damage you'd think it should (it cannot score critical hits, ever!). It also has a long windup sequence to get the barrel spinning while your target is blasting you to hell. Since it is only really useful at close range, it is outclassed by the flamer which has equally high damage potential and fires instantly when you pull the trigger.
*** The Missile Launcher has a clip size of one and takes too long to reload between shots to use as a primary weapon, and doesn't do enough damage per shot against high hitpoint targets to warrant carrying as a backup. It is also useless in VATS at long range as it will often miss. It also has the issue of likely blowing the player up while using it, with the tendency to violently scatter all items/loot within the blast radius.
*** The only Big Gun that seems practical enough for regular use is the Vengeance Gatling Laser, the unique variant of the standard Gatling Laser. However, spare Gatling Lasers are hard to find and are accordingly expensive, it deteriorates extremely quickly, rarely ever scores critical hits, and it can still go through ammo quickly if you aren't careful. Also, the only place where it's obtainable is a sanctuary filled to the brim with ''[[DemonicSpiders Deathclaws]]''.
** Many small guns and energy weapons also have this problem:
*** The Scoped .44 Magnum breaks down too quickly and its ammo is relatively rare, and the gun itself is difficult to find and is almost always in poor condition when found or purchased. This means you need to find several so you can repair them into a single pristine gun which starts deteriorating rapidly with every shot anyway. Its unique variants (Blackhawk and Callahan's Magnum) pack even more of a punch but degrade even faster. A better use for that .44 ammo is Lincoln's Repeater, a unique Hunting Rifle that can be repaired with its common variants.
*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle is an even more extreme version of the Scoped .44 Magnum, sporting fantastic range, power, accuracy and a high crit multiplier at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better than the base model either.) Most players save their sniper rifles for special circumstances and opt to use a Hunting Rifle for general use instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has two quite good unique variants in Ol' Painless and Lincoln's Repeater, though the latter uses relatively scarce .44 ammo).
*** The Alien Blaster will vaporize any standard enemy with one shot, due to its 100% critical hit chance and high base damage. But it breaks down very quickly (and can only be repaired by certain [=NPCs=] for cash) and has such a limited ammo supply that it's almost not worth using. Its best value is for headshots at EliteMooks in VATS where more conventional weaponry won't take them down fast enough.
** Melee weapons in general are almost always suboptimal for anything but sneak attacks. Why? Because most enemies will be shooting at you from a distance (and have friends around them doing the same all around the player), and the ones that don't (like Deathclaws) will have melee attacks that will kill you in one or two hits and therefore should be dealt with at range anyway. While MinMaxing your stats and perks to do insane damage with the Shishkebab while investing in the best-quality armor, defensive perks, and combat drugs to help you survive until you reach your target is a viable (and fun) option, it's never going to work as well as plain old BoringButPractical small guns.
*** [[PunnyName Jack the]] [[ChainsawGood Ripper]] takes the cake. It's a handheld {{chainsaw|Good}} with strong base damage that hits (read: gives {{Critical Hit}}s a chance to proc) over 30 times a second and has a great [[CriticalHitClass crit rate]], chewing through high-level enemies like nobody's business. He also degrades in quality incredibly quickly and can only be repaired by cannibalizing the already-rare standard Ripper for parts or [[CastFromMoney spending lots of caps with merchants]]. Expect to switch back to the equally-awesome but far more practical [[InfinityMinusOneSword Shishkebab]] after old Jack craps out in the middle of a long quest one too many times.
** The expansion DLC also adds a perk possible only at level 30 which results in a nuclear explosion around you when you hit 20 HP. While this sounds very awesome, it's not at all useful because while you aren't harmed by it, any nearby allies may be, and the nuclear explosions are actually rather small and it likely won't affect any enemy shooting at you. Therefore it only can really have an effect against enemies like Deathclaws, which cut through your HP so fast you'll likely be dead before you hit the threshold of 20HP ''without going to zero HP'' and it goes off, let alone survive the aftermath.
** There's also the Rock-It Launcher, an improvised device that uses the ShopFodder you pick up as ammo. Generally useless junk like bent tin cans and coffee mugs become lethal weapons with it. It's quite a bit of fun to watch a super mutant killed by a ballistic teddy bear. But in terms of utility, it's not all that strong as the ammo still has weight and weighs you down, and thus it can't even be as useful as a simple assault or hunting rifle with weightless ammo. But fun to play with just for the novelty. Barring specific mods, the Rock-It makes a very loud vacuum cleaner sound all the while you have it out. If the math's correct, it will drive you stark raving bonkers in 16.14 seconds.
* ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'':
** Consider the ARCHIMEDES II KillSat: when you fire it, it brings down a rain of laser-based punishment. Problems? Finding the tracking device you fire it with is a GuideDangIt, you only get to fire it once every 24 hours, it takes almost ten seconds to reach full charge, the tracking device inexplicably weighs ''15 pounds'', and you can hit yourself with it if you're not careful. It's even lampshaded in Veronica's personal quest, where she learns that the Brotherhood of Steel sacrificed half their numbers for what she calls "glorified artillery."
** It's hard not to get caught in the blast from the "Big Kid" ammo for the GRA Fat Man. For context, it deals far more damage than the standard Mini Nukes and leaves more radiation at the impact area, but the rounds are significantly heavier than the default version... so they can't be fired as far. In other words, Big Kid nukes are an even higher degree of "unnecessary overkill" compared to Mini Nukes and make it far, ''far'' easier for the player to get killed by their own round than normal.
*** The Fat Man in the base game is even worse, where its high weight is coupled with an extreme lack of ammo, a pitiful 14 (or 12, with the "Wild Wasteland" trait) compared to 70 free ones in ''Fallout 3'' along with the DLC having their own mini nukes. It also does 1000 less points of damage than its ''Fallout 3'' counterpart, and if you try and strengthen it with the Demolition Expert and Splash Damage perks, [[HoistByHisOwnPetard it will only make you more likely to have it blow up in your face.]] On the plus side, it's a fair bit more useful than its counterpart in ''3'', since the SequelDifficultySpike means that there are actually regularly-appearing enemies that would warrant a shot from the Fat Man to take down.
** The Meltdown perk causes a plasma explosion whenever you kill an enemy with an energy weapon, which inflicts damage proportional to the killing weapon's damage. Since the players and their companions aren't immune to Meltdown's explosion, the perk turns using energy weapons at close range into suicide[[note]]Meltdown also inexplicably affects the Thermic Lance, a high-damage DT-ignoring '''melee weapon''', turning one of the best melee options in the game into certain self-inflicted death[[/note]] and will quickly kill your melee companions. Meltdown is actually fairly useful to a player who uses energy weapons only for long range, but a player who isn't focused on energy weapons will have a hard time meeting the skill requirement of '''90'''.
** The king of this trope has to be the [[Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail Holy Hand Grenade]]. Available only in [[SillinessSwitch Wild Wasteland]] playthroughs, it's basically a hand-thrown grenade with similar properties to a Mini-Nuke. Too bad [[TooAwesomeToUse there's only three of them]], and because they're hand-thrown and have such a large and deadly blast radius, it's extremely likely ''you'' [[HoistByHisOwnPetard will be caught in the blast as well]]...
** Remnants Power Armor has the highest Damage Threshold of all armors, but degrades the fastest, is very expensive to repair, has lower Rad Resistance than the T-51b, gives a Charisma penalty due to its RageHelm being infamously scary in-universe, and there's only two of its kind in the game (three if you include the lighter Gannon Tesla Armor), one of which is earned from Arcade Gannon's companion quest, the other of which is found in a hard-to-reach Deathclaw-infested location.
** The Stealth Suit Mark II from ''Old World Blues''. Sure, it gives you +25 Sneak, +1 Perception, +1 Agility, and +20% to Stealth movement speed when fully upgraded, and automatically injects Stimpaks and Med-X when you're injured, but tends to waste the former drug and get you addicted on the latter, and is for some reason classified as a Medium armor, therefore carrying a 10% running speed penalty, despite having a lower DT than the higher-level Light armors. Also, [[AnnoyingVideoGameHelper it talks all the time]].
** Mercy, the unique Grenade Machinegun, uses 40mm grenades instead of the usual 25mm, which means it packs more punch, but its ammo is significantly heavier in Hardcore mode, as well as being rarer and more expensive. Better traded for the 25mm Grenade APW from Gun Runner's Arsenal. The truly worse part of this is it's only in Dead Wind Cavern and guarded by the Legendary Deathclaw. Mercy becomes more of a BraggingRightsReward with this in mind.
** The ordinary Grenade Machinegun is already a prime candidate for the trope. It is incredibly heavy, difficult to repair, eats expensive 25mm grenades like they're candy, can easily hurt or even kill the user if not aimed carefully and will generally be total overkill for the vast majority of foes. Consider then that Mercy uses an even heavier and more expensive ammo type in exchange for even grosser overkill.
** Just like ''Fallout 3'', the Alien Blaster is the most powerful weapon in the game, and if you have the Jury Rigging perk, can be repaired with Energy pistols. The big downside, it only has 222 of its ammo in the entire game, and once it runs out, it becomes completely worthless. Worse, it replaces the YCS/186, which is a unique Gauss Rifle, and the YCS uses microfusion cells as ammo (something that is somewhat easy to get). In order to get the Blaster, you need to turn on Wild Wasteland, but in the long run, you're better off with the more practical YCS/186 instead of the awesome Alien Blaster.
** Terrifying Presence. You gain the opportunity for unique dialogue options that intimidate some of the most powerful and ruthless individuals in the Mojave into cowering before you, at the cost of the opportunity to choose a potentially more useful Perk.
** The Meat of Champions Perk requires you to eat the corpses of President Kimball, Caesar, Mr. House and The King, but enables you to get +1 to Strength, Charisma, Intelligence and Luck for 60 seconds after eating a corpse. One problem is that since Kimball only appears in one of the last story missions, you can only get this benefit toward the end of the main storyline. Another is that the people you'll need to eat will lock you out of every story path besides Wild Card (which partly exists for players who have burned their bridges with every other faction) and maybe the Legion (the least popular faction) if you let Caesar die and somehow manage to get away with eating his body. The third is the fact that the stat boost lasts for too short of a period of time to be worthwhile.
** In-universe, Cosmic Knives. Said to be super sharp and made of a 'space age saturnite alloy' that will never chip or dull, the blades ended up being so sharp that at least one chef at the Sierra Madre nearly lost a finger dicing vegetables, and they would destroy cutting boards in a normal day of use. They also retain heat terrifyingly well - after being left on a burner the blade would remain red-hot for hours, potentially causing even further damage as one could easily melt right through a table. Fortunately there is no risk of accidental harm when the player wields one; in fact, heating one creates one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game.
* ''VideoGame/Fallout4''
** For the most part downplayed, at least as far as weapons go. Many weapons are simply too heavy or use uncommon ammo to carry around and use all the time, but that hardly means you'll never use them. However, unlike in previous titles the lack of item health or skills mean you don't ''have'' to build a character around the idea of using awesome guns. With this in mind, There are plenty of points in the game when you'll know a tough fight is ahead and head back to base to dust off the Minigun and Fatman.
** The Gatling Laser is sadly this now. It uses the very rare fusion cores for ammo, the same as power armor. Without the right perks or weapon upgrades, it will eat fusion cores at unacceptably high rates for its damage.
*** Even if you fix the ammo consumption, you'll still have to contend with more ammo management issues. Because the weapon ''always'' uses the highest charged core in the inventory when reloaded or equipped, you can't just insert a partially-charged core, fire it for a while, insert a new core, sell the nearly-depleted core when you're done, and be done with it, clean and simple. No, instead, you'll have to micromanage the charge level and shot output of all the boatloads of partially-charged cores it'll produce, or else settle for an lower shot output when you run out of fully-charged cores.
** The Broadsider is certainly this. It's a naval cannon scavenged from the ''[[CoolBoat USS Constitution]]'', rigged to a metal frame. It does ''a lot'' of damage, and shooting it as just as fun as it sounds. However, it's also very heavy, short-ranged, difficult to aim, only holds one shot (three if you upgrade it, but that's still not great), and uses extremely rare cannonballs. The Junk Jet, a fan favourite weapon from ''3'', has also been reduced to this. The most obvious is that junk is now incredibly useful for giving you crafting components for all kinds of crafting, so why would you want to get rid of it? Not to mention, unlike conventional ammunition, junk often has a weight, so you can't carry much.
** Once again, the minigun. It's still heavy and has a long spin-up time before it actually starts firing, and it has the lowest damage per bullet of any gun so against heavily armored opponents it can only inflict ScratchDamage. And that's assuming that you actually hit- it's a fantastically inaccurate weapon so most of the bullets fired will miss. And it's got a very long reload animation.
** Rather than simply throwing out 8 Mini-Nukes in one go, the Experimental MIRV Launcher is now much more ammo-efficient and sends out one nuke that splits up and rains multiple huge explosions directly down on enemies. The problem? It stops traveling horizontally in mid-arc, so the payload will drop down dangerously close to the wielder. This makes it far less useful for taking out enemies at a distance and increases the chance of you getting caught in the blast if you didn't lob it at just the right angle. [[YetAnotherStupidDeath You'll know you got it wrong if it instantly kills you]].
*** {{Averted|Trope}} with the Wounding and Explosive legendary modifications -- these two are such {{Game Breaker}}s in their own right that ''any'' weapon with them is insanely overpowered, especially weapons that put out large amounts of ammo. The Explosive Perk's splash damage ''can'' be a liability to the player and friendlies, but it's not a fatal drawback when you can also mow down disproportionately high-leveled enemies in just a few seconds.
** Far Harbor adds the Harpoon Gun to this list. A very awesome heavy weapon that can be modded to fire either standard large harpoons or a FlechetteStorm of smaller projectiles, either of which will inflict heavy damage, it suffers from having the longest reload time of any weapon in the game, which is especially bad given that it's a single-shot weapon. It's also got fairly limited range, further making things bad. It can be good at picking off single targets from stealth, but against groups or against single targets tough enough to survive the first hit (like Deathclaws and Fog Crawlers), you'll be cut to pieces before you can reload it for a second shot.
** Someone made a mod that adds a Mini Nuke Minigun -- [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin a gun that fires mini-nukes as quickly as the minigun fires bullets]]. It destroys anything in its path, but consumes ammo at a horrifying rate when only one mini-nuke is enough for most targets, to say nothing of what happens when you fire so many at once. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRNRp3JoNls See it in action here.]]
-->''Well, THIS would have been good to have at the beginning of the goddamn game.''
** A more conventional example from ''Fallout 2'' was the Pulse Rifle. Has the greatest damage of any single weapon in the game and is billed as end-game equipment. The problem? All the enemies you fight have silly levels of resistance to its electrical type damage and due to the way the game's burst fire mechanisms work, the most basic SMG you could use would do more damage. Many of the higher-level weapons suffer from this. Miniguns do no damage to anyone with armor as damage was subtracted on a per bullet basis. The Vindicator Minigun which does decent damage per shot has punishingly rare ammo. The true king of weapons is the [[MoreDakka fully-automatic]] and easily acquired BOZAR Light Support weapon which combines high burst value with a decent and plentiful ammo type.
*** Well, the silly level of elect resistance comes from any form of metal armor (which, to be frank, almost every human enemy towards the end wears), but energy weapons remain exceptionally useful versus monsters -- particularly the Deathclaws, Floaters and Centaurs that crop up towards the end, which tend to be resistant to physical attacks (including bullets).
*** The biggest problem with the pulse weapons is that they have a tendency to do critical hits very often, and critting someone with an electrical attack pulverizes them -- so you don't have a handy corpse to loot. You have to pixel-hunt for the loot at the base of the small ash puddle that remains of the enemy, then laboriously pick up every single drop. This gets old ''very'' fast.
** The Solar Scorcher you can pick up from an EasterEgg. It's basically a powerful solar-powered laser pistol that uses no ammunition. But it's prevented from reaching GameBreaker status by being only reloadable in bright light -- if you happen to empty the six-shot capacitor during the night or in a cave, it becomes entirely useless.
** The FN FAL is a decent rifle that can be upgraded with a laser sight. However, 7.62 mm ammo is shockingly rare. Same thing goes for other 7.62 weapons like the [=M60=].
* ''VideoGame/Fallout3'':
** Big weapons in general in ''Fallout 3'' are difficult to put to practical use for a variety of reasons[[labelnote:examples]] relative rarity of Big Guns within in-game stores and loot drops, the sheer costs of replacements to repair them and ammunition, etc.[[/labelnote]], which is likely the reason later games simply removed Big Guns as a skill entirely (redistributing the usual suspects as top-level gear in the Explosives, Energy Weapons, or Guns categories).
*** The Fat Man launcher fires miniature nuclear warheads. Its [[AceCustom unique variant]], the Experimental MIRV, is a weapon that can fire ''eight'' mini-nukes at once. Problems: there's a limited number of mini-nukes and no more spawn in weapon shops (seventy-two in the entire game), and the largest bosses in the game take maybe two hits to kill with a regular Fat Man. At most, you can fire a Fat Man 72 times and the Experimental MIRV 9 times per playthrough. And firing this weapon will very likely blow up the wielder along with the target, especially in the close-quarters fights that frequently happen in-game. Overkill much? Fire it once for the "cool value", then sell it or stick it in a locker and never use it again.
*** The Minigun is useless in VATS, goes through ammo like a broken sieve, is too bulky to carry as a backup, and worst of all doesn't do the damage you'd think it should (it cannot score critical hits, ever!). It also has a long windup sequence to get the barrel spinning while your target is blasting you to hell. Since it is only really useful at close range, it is outclassed by the flamer which has equally high damage potential and fires instantly when you pull the trigger.
*** The Missile Launcher has a clip size of one and takes too long to reload between shots to use as a primary weapon, and doesn't do enough damage per shot against high hitpoint targets to warrant carrying as a backup. It is also useless in VATS at long range as it will often miss. It also has the issue of likely blowing the player up while using it, with the tendency to violently scatter all items/loot within the blast radius.
*** The only Big Gun that seems practical enough for regular use is the Vengeance Gatling Laser, the unique variant of the standard Gatling Laser. However, spare Gatling Lasers are hard to find and are accordingly expensive, it deteriorates extremely quickly, rarely ever scores critical hits, and it can still go through ammo quickly if you aren't careful. Also, the only place where it's obtainable is a sanctuary filled to the brim with ''[[DemonicSpiders Deathclaws]]''.
** Many small guns and energy weapons also have this problem:
*** The Scoped .44 Magnum breaks down too quickly and its ammo is relatively rare, and the gun itself is difficult to find and is almost always in poor condition when found or purchased. This means you need to find several so you can repair them into a single pristine gun which starts deteriorating rapidly with every shot anyway. Its unique variants (Blackhawk and Callahan's Magnum) pack even more of a punch but degrade even faster. A better use for that .44 ammo is Lincoln's Repeater, a unique Hunting Rifle that can be repaired with its common variants.
*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle is an even more extreme version of the Scoped .44 Magnum, sporting fantastic range, power, accuracy and a high crit multiplier at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better than the base model either.) Most players save their sniper rifles for special circumstances and opt to use a Hunting Rifle for general use instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has two quite good unique variants in Ol' Painless and Lincoln's Repeater, though the latter uses relatively scarce .44 ammo).
*** The Alien Blaster will vaporize any standard enemy with one shot, due to its 100% critical hit chance and high base damage. But it breaks down very quickly (and can only be repaired by certain [=NPCs=] for cash) and has such a limited ammo supply that it's almost not worth using. Its best value is for headshots at EliteMooks in VATS where more conventional weaponry won't take them down fast enough.
** Melee weapons in general are almost always suboptimal for anything but sneak attacks. Why? Because most enemies will be shooting at you from a distance (and have friends around them doing the same all around the player), and the ones that don't (like Deathclaws) will have melee attacks that will kill you in one or two hits and therefore should be dealt with at range anyway. While MinMaxing your stats and perks to do insane damage with the Shishkebab while investing in the best-quality armor, defensive perks, and combat drugs to help you survive until you reach your target is a viable (and fun) option, it's never going to work as well as plain old BoringButPractical small guns.
*** [[PunnyName Jack the]] [[ChainsawGood Ripper]] takes the cake. It's a handheld {{chainsaw|Good}} with strong base damage that hits (read: gives {{Critical Hit}}s a chance to proc) over 30 times a second and has a great [[CriticalHitClass crit rate]], chewing through high-level enemies like nobody's business. He also degrades in quality incredibly quickly and can only be repaired by cannibalizing the already-rare standard Ripper for parts or [[CastFromMoney spending lots of caps with merchants]]. Expect to switch back to the equally-awesome but far more practical [[InfinityMinusOneSword Shishkebab]] after old Jack craps out in the middle of a long quest one too many times.
** The expansion DLC also adds a perk possible only at level 30 which results in a nuclear explosion around you when you hit 20 HP. While this sounds very awesome, it's not at all useful because while you aren't harmed by it, any nearby allies may be, and the nuclear explosions are actually rather small and it likely won't affect any enemy shooting at you. Therefore it only can really have an effect against enemies like Deathclaws, which cut through your HP so fast you'll likely be dead before you hit the threshold of 20HP ''without going to zero HP'' and it goes off, let alone survive the aftermath.
** There's also the Rock-It Launcher, an improvised device that uses the ShopFodder you pick up as ammo. Generally useless junk like bent tin cans and coffee mugs become lethal weapons with it. It's quite a bit of fun to watch a super mutant killed by a ballistic teddy bear. But in terms of utility, it's not all that strong as the ammo still has weight and weighs you down, and thus it can't even be as useful as a simple assault or hunting rifle with weightless ammo. But fun to play with just for the novelty. Barring specific mods, the Rock-It makes a very loud vacuum cleaner sound all the while you have it out. If the math's correct, it will drive you stark raving bonkers in 16.14 seconds.
* ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'':
** Consider the ARCHIMEDES II KillSat: when you fire it, it brings down a rain of laser-based punishment. Problems? Finding the tracking device you fire it with is a GuideDangIt, you only get to fire it once every 24 hours, it takes almost ten seconds to reach full charge, the tracking device inexplicably weighs ''15 pounds'', and you can hit yourself with it if you're not careful. It's even lampshaded in Veronica's personal quest, where she learns that the Brotherhood of Steel sacrificed half their numbers for what she calls "glorified artillery."
** It's hard not to get caught in the blast from the "Big Kid" ammo for the GRA Fat Man. For context, it deals far more damage than the standard Mini Nukes and leaves more radiation at the impact area, but the rounds are significantly heavier than the default version... so they can't be fired as far. In other words, Big Kid nukes are an even higher degree of "unnecessary overkill" compared to Mini Nukes and make it far, ''far'' easier for the player to get killed by their own round than normal.
*** The Fat Man in the base game is even worse, where its high weight is coupled with an extreme lack of ammo, a pitiful 14 (or 12, with the "Wild Wasteland" trait) compared to 70 free ones in ''Fallout 3'' along with the DLC having their own mini nukes. It also does 1000 less points of damage than its ''Fallout 3'' counterpart, and if you try and strengthen it with the Demolition Expert and Splash Damage perks, [[HoistByHisOwnPetard it will only make you more likely to have it blow up in your face.]] On the plus side, it's a fair bit more useful than its counterpart in ''3'', since the SequelDifficultySpike means that there are actually regularly-appearing enemies that would warrant a shot from the Fat Man to take down.
** The Meltdown perk causes a plasma explosion whenever you kill an enemy with an energy weapon, which inflicts damage proportional to the killing weapon's damage. Since the players and their companions aren't immune to Meltdown's explosion, the perk turns using energy weapons at close range into suicide[[note]]Meltdown also inexplicably affects the Thermic Lance, a high-damage DT-ignoring '''melee weapon''', turning one of the best melee options in the game into certain self-inflicted death[[/note]] and will quickly kill your melee companions. Meltdown is actually fairly useful to a player who uses energy weapons only for long range, but a player who isn't focused on energy weapons will have a hard time meeting the skill requirement of '''90'''.
** The king of this trope has to be the [[Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail Holy Hand Grenade]]. Available only in [[SillinessSwitch Wild Wasteland]] playthroughs, it's basically a hand-thrown grenade with similar properties to a Mini-Nuke. Too bad [[TooAwesomeToUse there's only three of them]], and because they're hand-thrown and have such a large and deadly blast radius, it's extremely likely ''you'' [[HoistByHisOwnPetard will be caught in the blast as well]]...
** Remnants Power Armor has the highest Damage Threshold of all armors, but degrades the fastest, is very expensive to repair, has lower Rad Resistance than the T-51b, gives a Charisma penalty due to its RageHelm being infamously scary in-universe, and there's only two of its kind in the game (three if you include the lighter Gannon Tesla Armor), one of which is earned from Arcade Gannon's companion quest, the other of which is found in a hard-to-reach Deathclaw-infested location.
** The Stealth Suit Mark II from ''Old World Blues''. Sure, it gives you +25 Sneak, +1 Perception, +1 Agility, and +20% to Stealth movement speed when fully upgraded, and automatically injects Stimpaks and Med-X when you're injured, but tends to waste the former drug and get you addicted on the latter, and is for some reason classified as a Medium armor, therefore carrying a 10% running speed penalty, despite having a lower DT than the higher-level Light armors. Also, [[AnnoyingVideoGameHelper it talks all the time]].
** Mercy, the unique Grenade Machinegun, uses 40mm grenades instead of the usual 25mm, which means it packs more punch, but its ammo is significantly heavier in Hardcore mode, as well as being rarer and more expensive. Better traded for the 25mm Grenade APW from Gun Runner's Arsenal. The truly worse part of this is it's only in Dead Wind Cavern and guarded by the Legendary Deathclaw. Mercy becomes more of a BraggingRightsReward with this in mind.
** The ordinary Grenade Machinegun is already a prime candidate for the trope. It is incredibly heavy, difficult to repair, eats expensive 25mm grenades like they're candy, can easily hurt or even kill the user if not aimed carefully and will generally be total overkill for the vast majority of foes. Consider then that Mercy uses an even heavier and more expensive ammo type in exchange for even grosser overkill.
** Just like ''Fallout 3'', the Alien Blaster is the most powerful weapon in the game, and if you have the Jury Rigging perk, can be repaired with Energy pistols. The big downside, it only has 222 of its ammo in the entire game, and once it runs out, it becomes completely worthless. Worse, it replaces the YCS/186, which is a unique Gauss Rifle, and the YCS uses microfusion cells as ammo (something that is somewhat easy to get). In order to get the Blaster, you need to turn on Wild Wasteland, but in the long run, you're better off with the more practical YCS/186 instead of the awesome Alien Blaster.
** Terrifying Presence. You gain the opportunity for unique dialogue options that intimidate some of the most powerful and ruthless individuals in the Mojave into cowering before you, at the cost of the opportunity to choose a potentially more useful Perk.
** The Meat of Champions Perk requires you to eat the corpses of President Kimball, Caesar, Mr. House and The King, but enables you to get +1 to Strength, Charisma, Intelligence and Luck for 60 seconds after eating a corpse. One problem is that since Kimball only appears in one of the last story missions, you can only get this benefit toward the end of the main storyline. Another is that the people you'll need to eat will lock you out of every story path besides Wild Card (which partly exists for players who have burned their bridges with every other faction) and maybe the Legion (the least popular faction) if you let Caesar die and somehow manage to get away with eating his body. The third is the fact that the stat boost lasts for too short of a period of time to be worthwhile.
** In-universe, Cosmic Knives. Said to be super sharp and made of a 'space age saturnite alloy' that will never chip or dull, the blades ended up being so sharp that at least one chef at the Sierra Madre nearly lost a finger dicing vegetables, and they would destroy cutting boards in a normal day of use. They also retain heat terrifyingly well - after being left on a burner the blade would remain red-hot for hours, potentially causing even further damage as one could easily melt right through a table. Fortunately there is no risk of accidental harm when the player wields one; in fact, heating one creates one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game.
* ''VideoGame/Fallout4''
** For the most part downplayed, at least as far as weapons go. Many weapons are simply too heavy or use uncommon ammo to carry around and use all the time, but that hardly means you'll never use them. However, unlike in previous titles the lack of item health or skills mean you don't ''have'' to build a character around the idea of using awesome guns. With this in mind, There are plenty of points in the game when you'll know a tough fight is ahead and head back to base to dust off the Minigun and Fatman.
** The Gatling Laser is sadly this now. It uses the very rare fusion cores for ammo, the same as power armor. Without the right perks or weapon upgrades, it will eat fusion cores at unacceptably high rates for its damage.
*** Even if you fix the ammo consumption, you'll still have to contend with more ammo management issues. Because the weapon ''always'' uses the highest charged core in the inventory when reloaded or equipped, you can't just insert a partially-charged core, fire it for a while, insert a new core, sell the nearly-depleted core when you're done, and be done with it, clean and simple. No, instead, you'll have to micromanage the charge level and shot output of all the boatloads of partially-charged cores it'll produce, or else settle for an lower shot output when you run out of fully-charged cores.
** The Broadsider is certainly this. It's a naval cannon scavenged from the ''[[CoolBoat USS Constitution]]'', rigged to a metal frame. It does ''a lot'' of damage, and shooting it as just as fun as it sounds. However, it's also very heavy, short-ranged, difficult to aim, only holds one shot (three if you upgrade it, but that's still not great), and uses extremely rare cannonballs. The Junk Jet, a fan favourite weapon from ''3'', has also been reduced to this. The most obvious is that junk is now incredibly useful for giving you crafting components for all kinds of crafting, so why would you want to get rid of it? Not to mention, unlike conventional ammunition, junk often has a weight, so you can't carry much.
** Once again, the minigun. It's still heavy and has a long spin-up time before it actually starts firing, and it has the lowest damage per bullet of any gun so against heavily armored opponents it can only inflict ScratchDamage. And that's assuming that you actually hit- it's a fantastically inaccurate weapon so most of the bullets fired will miss. And it's got a very long reload animation.
** Rather than simply throwing out 8 Mini-Nukes in one go, the Experimental MIRV Launcher is now much more ammo-efficient and sends out one nuke that splits up and rains multiple huge explosions directly down on enemies. The problem? It stops traveling horizontally in mid-arc, so the payload will drop down dangerously close to the wielder. This makes it far less useful for taking out enemies at a distance and increases the chance of you getting caught in the blast if you didn't lob it at just the right angle. [[YetAnotherStupidDeath You'll know you got it wrong if it instantly kills you]].
*** {{Averted|Trope}} with the Wounding and Explosive legendary modifications -- these two are such {{Game Breaker}}s in their own right that ''any'' weapon with them is insanely overpowered, especially weapons that put out large amounts of ammo. The Explosive Perk's splash damage ''can'' be a liability to the player and friendlies, but it's not a fatal drawback when you can also mow down disproportionately high-leveled enemies in just a few seconds.
** Far Harbor adds the Harpoon Gun to this list. A very awesome heavy weapon that can be modded to fire either standard large harpoons or a FlechetteStorm of smaller projectiles, either of which will inflict heavy damage, it suffers from having the longest reload time of any weapon in the game, which is especially bad given that it's a single-shot weapon. It's also got fairly limited range, further making things bad. It can be good at picking off single targets from stealth, but against groups or against single targets tough enough to survive the first hit (like Deathclaws and Fog Crawlers), you'll be cut to pieces before you can reload it for a second shot.
** Someone made a mod that adds a Mini Nuke Minigun -- [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin a gun that fires mini-nukes as quickly as the minigun fires bullets]]. It destroys anything in its path, but consumes ammo at a horrifying rate when only one mini-nuke is enough for most targets, to say nothing of what happens when you fire so many at once. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRNRp3JoNls See it in action here.]]
to:
* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}''
** The "''VideoGame/Fallout2'' Hint Book", of... well, ''Fallout 2'', provides a massive amount of XP (which can be done repeatedly, letting you level up forever) and raises your skills to maximum, essentially giving you a perfect character... but you can only obtain it in the postgame. By that point, you've already done the entire main story and are strong enough to take down the game's [[FinalBoss strongest enemy]], so chances are nothing in the game could threaten you anyway. Lampshaded by the ingame description.
-->''Well, --->''Well, THIS would have been good to have at the beginning of the goddamn game.''
** *** A more conventional example from ''Fallout 2'' was the Pulse Rifle. Has the greatest damage of any single weapon in the game and is billed as end-game equipment. The problem? All the enemies you fight have silly levels of resistance to its electrical type damage and due to the way the game's burst fire mechanisms work, the most basic SMG you could use would do more damage. Many of the higher-level weapons suffer from this. Miniguns do no damage to anyone with armor as damage was subtracted on a per bullet basis. The Vindicator Minigun which does decent damage per shot has punishingly rare ammo. The true king of weapons is the [[MoreDakka fully-automatic]] and easily acquired BOZAR Light Support weapon which combines high burst value with a decent and plentiful ammo type.
*** **** Well, the silly level of elect resistance comes from any form of metal armor (which, to be frank, almost every human enemy towards the end wears), but energy weapons remain exceptionally useful versus monsters -- particularly the Deathclaws, Floaters and Centaurs that crop up towards the end, which tend to be resistant to physical attacks (including bullets).
*** **** The biggest problem with the pulse weapons is that they have a tendency to do critical hits very often, and critting someone with an electrical attack pulverizes them -- so you don't have a handy corpse to loot. You have to pixel-hunt for the loot at the base of the small ash puddle that remains of the enemy, then laboriously pick up every single drop. This gets old ''very'' fast.
** *** The Solar Scorcher you can pick up from an EasterEgg. It's basically a powerful solar-powered laser pistol that uses no ammunition. But it's prevented from reaching GameBreaker status by being only reloadable in bright light -- if you happen to empty the six-shot capacitor during the night or in a cave, it becomes entirely useless.
** *** The FN FAL is a decent rifle that can be upgraded with a laser sight. However, 7.62 mm ammo is shockingly rare. Same thing goes for other 7.62 weapons like the [=M60=].
* ** ''VideoGame/Fallout3'':
** *** Big weapons in general in ''Fallout 3'' are difficult to put to practical use for a variety of reasons[[labelnote:examples]] relative rarity of Big Guns within in-game stores and loot drops, the sheer costs of replacements to repair them and ammunition, etc.[[/labelnote]], which is likely the reason later games simply removed Big Guns as a skill entirely (redistributing the usual suspects as top-level gear in the Explosives, Energy Weapons, or Guns categories).
*** **** The Fat Man launcher fires miniature nuclear warheads. Its [[AceCustom unique variant]], the Experimental MIRV, is a weapon that can fire ''eight'' mini-nukes at once. Problems: there's a limited number of mini-nukes and no more spawn in weapon shops (seventy-two in the entire game), and the largest bosses in the game take maybe two hits to kill with a regular Fat Man. At most, you can fire a Fat Man 72 times and the Experimental MIRV 9 times per playthrough. And firing this weapon will very likely blow up the wielder along with the target, especially in the close-quarters fights that frequently happen in-game. Overkill much? Fire it once for the "cool value", then sell it or stick it in a locker and never use it again.
*** **** The Minigun is useless in VATS, goes through ammo like a broken sieve, is too bulky to carry as a backup, and worst of all doesn't do the damage you'd think it should (it cannot score critical hits, ever!). It also has a long windup sequence to get the barrel spinning while your target is blasting you to hell. Since it is only really useful at close range, it is outclassed by the flamer which has equally high damage potential and fires instantly when you pull the trigger.
*** **** The Missile Launcher has a clip size of one and takes too long to reload between shots to use as a primary weapon, and doesn't do enough damage per shot against high hitpoint targets to warrant carrying as a backup. It is also useless in VATS at long range as it will often miss. It also has the issue of likely blowing the player up while using it, with the tendency to violently scatter all items/loot within the blast radius.
*** **** The only Big Gun that seems practical enough for regular use is the Vengeance Gatling Laser, the unique variant of the standard Gatling Laser. However, spare Gatling Lasers are hard to find and are accordingly expensive, it deteriorates extremely quickly, rarely ever scores critical hits, and it can still go through ammo quickly if you aren't careful. Also, the only place where it's obtainable is a sanctuary filled to the brim with ''[[DemonicSpiders Deathclaws]]''.
** *** Many small guns and energy weapons also have this problem:
*** **** The Scoped .44 Magnum breaks down too quickly and its ammo is relatively rare, and the gun itself is difficult to find and is almost always in poor condition when found or purchased. This means you need to find several so you can repair them into a single pristine gun which starts deteriorating rapidly with every shot anyway. Its unique variants (Blackhawk and Callahan's Magnum) pack even more of a punch but degrade even faster. A better use for that .44 ammo is Lincoln's Repeater, a unique Hunting Rifle that can be repaired with its common variants.
*** **** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle is an even more extreme version of the Scoped .44 Magnum, sporting fantastic range, power, accuracy and a high crit multiplier at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better than the base model either.) Most players save their sniper rifles for special circumstances and opt to use a Hunting Rifle for general use instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has two quite good unique variants in Ol' Painless and Lincoln's Repeater, though the latter uses relatively scarce .44 ammo).
*** **** The Alien Blaster will vaporize any standard enemy with one shot, due to its 100% critical hit chance and high base damage. But it breaks down very quickly (and can only be repaired by certain [=NPCs=] for cash) and has such a limited ammo supply that it's almost not worth using. Its best value is for headshots at EliteMooks in VATS where more conventional weaponry won't take them down fast enough.
** *** Melee weapons in general are almost always suboptimal for anything but sneak attacks. Why? Because most enemies will be shooting at you from a distance (and have friends around them doing the same all around the player), and the ones that don't (like Deathclaws) will have melee attacks that will kill you in one or two hits and therefore should be dealt with at range anyway. While MinMaxing your stats and perks to do insane damage with the Shishkebab while investing in the best-quality armor, defensive perks, and combat drugs to help you survive until you reach your target is a viable (and fun) option, it's never going to work as well as plain old BoringButPractical small guns.
*** **** [[PunnyName Jack the]] [[ChainsawGood Ripper]] takes the cake. It's a handheld {{chainsaw|Good}} with strong base damage that hits (read: gives {{Critical Hit}}s a chance to proc) over 30 times a second and has a great [[CriticalHitClass crit rate]], chewing through high-level enemies like nobody's business. He also degrades in quality incredibly quickly and can only be repaired by cannibalizing the already-rare standard Ripper for parts or [[CastFromMoney spending lots of caps with merchants]]. Expect to switch back to the equally-awesome but far more practical [[InfinityMinusOneSword Shishkebab]] after old Jack craps out in the middle of a long quest one too many times.
** *** The expansion DLC also adds a perk possible only at level 30 which results in a nuclear explosion around you when you hit 20 HP. While this sounds very awesome, it's not at all useful because while you aren't harmed by it, any nearby allies may be, and the nuclear explosions are actually rather small and it likely won't affect any enemy shooting at you. Therefore it only can really have an effect against enemies like Deathclaws, which cut through your HP so fast you'll likely be dead before you hit the threshold of 20HP ''without going to zero HP'' and it goes off, let alone survive the aftermath.
** *** There's also the Rock-It Launcher, an improvised device that uses the ShopFodder you pick up as ammo. Generally useless junk like bent tin cans and coffee mugs become lethal weapons with it. It's quite a bit of fun to watch a super mutant killed by a ballistic teddy bear. But in terms of utility, it's not all that strong as the ammo still has weight and weighs you down, and thus it can't even be as useful as a simple assault or hunting rifle with weightless ammo. But fun to play with just for the novelty. Barring specific mods, the Rock-It makes a very loud vacuum cleaner sound all the while you have it out. If the math's correct, it will drive you stark raving bonkers in 16.14 seconds.
* ** ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'':
** *** Consider the ARCHIMEDES II KillSat: when you fire it, it brings down a rain of laser-based punishment. Problems? Finding the tracking device you fire it with is a GuideDangIt, you only get to fire it once every 24 hours, it takes almost ten seconds to reach full charge, the tracking device inexplicably weighs ''15 pounds'', and you can hit yourself with it if you're not careful. It's even lampshaded in Veronica's personal quest, where she learns that the Brotherhood of Steel sacrificed half their numbers for what she calls "glorified artillery."
** *** It's hard not to get caught in the blast from the "Big Kid" ammo for the GRA Fat Man. For context, it deals far more damage than the standard Mini Nukes and leaves more radiation at the impact area, but the rounds are significantly heavier than the default version... so they can't be fired as far. In other words, Big Kid nukes are an even higher degree of "unnecessary overkill" compared to Mini Nukes and make it far, ''far'' easier for the player to get killed by their own round than normal.
*** **** The Fat Man in the base game is even worse, where its high weight is coupled with an extreme lack of ammo, a pitiful 14 (or 12, with the "Wild Wasteland" trait) compared to 70 free ones in ''Fallout 3'' along with the DLC having their own mini nukes. It also does 1000 less points of damage than its ''Fallout 3'' counterpart, and if you try and strengthen it with the Demolition Expert and Splash Damage perks, [[HoistByHisOwnPetard it will only make you more likely to have it blow up in your face.]] On the plus side, it's a fair bit more useful than its counterpart in ''3'', since the SequelDifficultySpike means that there are actually regularly-appearing enemies that would warrant a shot from the Fat Man to take down.
** *** The Meltdown perk causes a plasma explosion whenever you kill an enemy with an energy weapon, which inflicts damage proportional to the killing weapon's damage. Since the players and their companions aren't immune to Meltdown's explosion, the perk turns using energy weapons at close range into suicide[[note]]Meltdown also inexplicably affects the Thermic Lance, a high-damage DT-ignoring '''melee weapon''', turning one of the best melee options in the game into certain self-inflicted death[[/note]] and will quickly kill your melee companions. Meltdown is actually fairly useful to a player who uses energy weapons only for long range, but a player who isn't focused on energy weapons will have a hard time meeting the skill requirement of '''90'''.
** *** The king of this trope has to be the [[Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail Holy Hand Grenade]]. Available only in [[SillinessSwitch Wild Wasteland]] playthroughs, it's basically a hand-thrown grenade with similar properties to a Mini-Nuke. Too bad [[TooAwesomeToUse there's only three of them]], and because they're hand-thrown and have such a large and deadly blast radius, it's extremely likely ''you'' [[HoistByHisOwnPetard will be caught in the blast as well]]...
** *** Remnants Power Armor has the highest Damage Threshold of all armors, but degrades the fastest, is very expensive to repair, has lower Rad Resistance than the T-51b, gives a Charisma penalty due to its RageHelm being infamously scary in-universe, and there's only two of its kind in the game (three if you include the lighter Gannon Tesla Armor), one of which is earned from Arcade Gannon's companion quest, the other of which is found in a hard-to-reach Deathclaw-infested location.
** *** The Stealth Suit Mark II from ''Old World Blues''. Sure, it gives you +25 Sneak, +1 Perception, +1 Agility, and +20% to Stealth movement speed when fully upgraded, and automatically injects Stimpaks and Med-X when you're injured, but tends to waste the former drug and get you addicted on the latter, and is for some reason classified as a Medium armor, therefore carrying a 10% running speed penalty, despite having a lower DT than the higher-level Light armors. Also, [[AnnoyingVideoGameHelper it talks all the time]].
** *** Mercy, the unique Grenade Machinegun, uses 40mm grenades instead of the usual 25mm, which means it packs more punch, but its ammo is significantly heavier in Hardcore mode, as well as being rarer and more expensive. Better traded for the 25mm Grenade APW from Gun Runner's Arsenal. The truly worse part of this is it's only in Dead Wind Cavern and guarded by the Legendary Deathclaw. Mercy becomes more of a BraggingRightsReward with this in mind.
** *** The ordinary Grenade Machinegun is already a prime candidate for the trope. It is incredibly heavy, difficult to repair, eats expensive 25mm grenades like they're candy, can easily hurt or even kill the user if not aimed carefully and will generally be total overkill for the vast majority of foes. Consider then that Mercy uses an even heavier and more expensive ammo type in exchange for even grosser overkill.
** *** Just like ''Fallout 3'', the Alien Blaster is the most powerful weapon in the game, and if you have the Jury Rigging perk, can be repaired with Energy pistols. The big downside, it only has 222 of its ammo in the entire game, and once it runs out, it becomes completely worthless. Worse, it replaces the YCS/186, which is a unique Gauss Rifle, and the YCS uses microfusion cells as ammo (something that is somewhat easy to get). In order to get the Blaster, you need to turn on Wild Wasteland, but in the long run, you're better off with the more practical YCS/186 instead of the awesome Alien Blaster.
** *** Terrifying Presence. You gain the opportunity for unique dialogue options that intimidate some of the most powerful and ruthless individuals in the Mojave into cowering before you, at the cost of the opportunity to choose a potentially more useful Perk.
** *** The Meat of Champions Perk requires you to eat the corpses of President Kimball, Caesar, Mr. House and The King, but enables you to get +1 to Strength, Charisma, Intelligence and Luck for 60 seconds after eating a corpse. One problem is that since Kimball only appears in one of the last story missions, you can only get this benefit toward the end of the main storyline. Another is that the people you'll need to eat will lock you out of every story path besides Wild Card (which partly exists for players who have burned their bridges with every other faction) and maybe the Legion (the least popular faction) if you let Caesar die and somehow manage to get away with eating his body. The third is the fact that the stat boost lasts for too short of a period of time to be worthwhile.
** *** In-universe, Cosmic Knives. Said to be super sharp and made of a 'space age saturnite alloy' that will never chip or dull, the blades ended up being so sharp that at least one chef at the Sierra Madre nearly lost a finger dicing vegetables, and they would destroy cutting boards in a normal day of use. They also retain heat terrifyingly well - after being left on a burner the blade would remain red-hot for hours, potentially causing even further damage as one could easily melt right through a table. Fortunately there is no risk of accidental harm when the player wields one; in fact, heating one creates one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game.
* ** ''VideoGame/Fallout4''
** *** For the most part downplayed, at least as far as weapons go. Many weapons are simply too heavy or use uncommon ammo to carry around and use all the time, but that hardly means you'll never use them. However, unlike in previous titles the lack of item health or skills mean you don't ''have'' to build a character around the idea of using awesome guns. With this in mind, There are plenty of points in the game when you'll know a tough fight is ahead and head back to base to dust off the Minigun and Fatman.
** *** The Gatling Laser is sadly this now. It uses the very rare fusion cores for ammo, the same as power armor. Without the right perks or weapon upgrades, it will eat fusion cores at unacceptably high rates for its damage.
*** **** Even if you fix the ammo consumption, you'll still have to contend with more ammo management issues. Because the weapon ''always'' uses the highest charged core in the inventory when reloaded or equipped, you can't just insert a partially-charged core, fire it for a while, insert a new core, sell the nearly-depleted core when you're done, and be done with it, clean and simple. No, instead, you'll have to micromanage the charge level and shot output of all the boatloads of partially-charged cores it'll produce, or else settle for an lower shot output when you run out of fully-charged cores.
** *** The Broadsider is certainly this. It's a naval cannon scavenged from the ''[[CoolBoat USS Constitution]]'', rigged to a metal frame. It does ''a lot'' of damage, and shooting it as just as fun as it sounds. However, it's also very heavy, short-ranged, difficult to aim, only holds one shot (three if you upgrade it, but that's still not great), and uses extremely rare cannonballs. The Junk Jet, a fan favourite weapon from ''3'', has also been reduced to this. The most obvious is that junk is now incredibly useful for giving you crafting components for all kinds of crafting, so why would you want to get rid of it? Not to mention, unlike conventional ammunition, junk often has a weight, so you can't carry much.
** *** Once again, the minigun. It's still heavy and has a long spin-up time before it actually starts firing, and it has the lowest damage per bullet of any gun so against heavily armored opponents it can only inflict ScratchDamage. And that's assuming that you actually hit- it's a fantastically inaccurate weapon so most of the bullets fired will miss. And it's got a very long reload animation.
** *** Rather than simply throwing out 8 Mini-Nukes in one go, the Experimental MIRV Launcher is now much more ammo-efficient and sends out one nuke that splits up and rains multiple huge explosions directly down on enemies. The problem? It stops traveling horizontally in mid-arc, so the payload will drop down dangerously close to the wielder. This makes it far less useful for taking out enemies at a distance and increases the chance of you getting caught in the blast if you didn't lob it at just the right angle. [[YetAnotherStupidDeath You'll know you got it wrong if it instantly kills you]].
*** **** {{Averted|Trope}} with the Wounding and Explosive legendary modifications -- these two are such {{Game Breaker}}s in their own right that ''any'' weapon with them is insanely overpowered, especially weapons that put out large amounts of ammo. The Explosive Perk's splash damage ''can'' be a liability to the player and friendlies, but it's not a fatal drawback when you can also mow down disproportionately high-leveled enemies in just a few seconds.
** *** Far Harbor adds the Harpoon Gun to this list. A very awesome heavy weapon that can be modded to fire either standard large harpoons or a FlechetteStorm of smaller projectiles, either of which will inflict heavy damage, it suffers from having the longest reload time of any weapon in the game, which is especially bad given that it's a single-shot weapon. It's also got fairly limited range, further making things bad. It can be good at picking off single targets from stealth, but against groups or against single targets tough enough to survive the first hit (like Deathclaws and Fog Crawlers), you'll be cut to pieces before you can reload it for a second shot.
** *** Someone made a mod that adds a Mini Nuke Minigun -- [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin a gun that fires mini-nukes as quickly as the minigun fires bullets]]. It destroys anything in its path, but consumes ammo at a horrifying rate when only one mini-nuke is enough for most targets, to say nothing of what happens when you fire so many at once. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRNRp3JoNls See it in action here.]]
** The "''VideoGame/Fallout2'' Hint Book", of... well, ''Fallout 2'', provides a massive amount of XP (which can be done repeatedly, letting you level up forever) and raises your skills to maximum, essentially giving you a perfect character... but you can only obtain it in the postgame. By that point, you've already done the entire main story and are strong enough to take down the game's [[FinalBoss strongest enemy]], so chances are nothing in the game could threaten you anyway. Lampshaded by the ingame description.
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* In "VideoGame/NewHorizons", 1st rate-ships are floating fortress that's impervious to anything but forts and other 1st rates. They can obliterate anything smaller: nothing short but awesome. However, they need close to or over 1.000 crewmen to be controled without a performance suffering. It stuffs your entire hold with nothing but ammunition, gun powder and supplies to keep the men and cannons fed. Must already be rich just to pay the crew. Furthermore, repairs and ressources lost after every battle will be a huge drain on any fortune. They are a must-have for the biggest forts which may require a full fleet of them note, but other than that, a humble 3rd rate will do most jobs just as well with only a fraction of the costs.
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* In "VideoGame/NewHorizons", ''VideoGame/NewHorizons'', 1st rate-ships are floating fortress that's impervious to anything but forts and other 1st rates. They can obliterate anything smaller: nothing short but awesome. However, they need close to or over 1.000 crewmen to be controled without a performance suffering. It stuffs your entire hold with nothing but ammunition, gun powder and supplies to keep the men and cannons fed. Must already be rich just to pay the crew. Furthermore, repairs and ressources lost after every battle will be a huge drain on any fortune. They are a must-have for the biggest forts which may require a full fleet of them note, but other than that, a humble 3rd rate will do most jobs just as well with only a fraction of the costs.
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In "VideoGame/NewHorizons", 1st rate-ships are floating fortress that's impervious to anything but forts and other 1st rates. They can obliterate anything smaller: nothing short but awesome. However, they need close to or over 1.000 crewmen to be controled without a performance suffering. It stuffs your entire hold with nothing but ammunition, gun powder and supplies to keep the men and cannons fed. Must already be rich just to pay the crew. Furthermore, repairs and ressources lost after every battle will be a huge drain on any fortune. They are a must-have for the biggest forts which may require a full fleet of them note, but other than that, a humble 3rd rate will do most jobs just as well with only a fraction of the costs.
to:
* In "VideoGame/NewHorizons", 1st rate-ships are floating fortress that's impervious to anything but forts and other 1st rates. They can obliterate anything smaller: nothing short but awesome. However, they need close to or over 1.000 crewmen to be controled without a performance suffering. It stuffs your entire hold with nothing but ammunition, gun powder and supplies to keep the men and cannons fed. Must already be rich just to pay the crew. Furthermore, repairs and ressources lost after every battle will be a huge drain on any fortune. They are a must-have for the biggest forts which may require a full fleet of them note, but other than that, a humble 3rd rate will do most jobs just as well with only a fraction of the costs.
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In "VideoGame/NewHorizons", 1st rate-ships are floating fortress that's impervious to anything but forts and other 1st rates. They can obliterate anything smaller: nothing short but awesome. However, they need close to or over 1.000 crewmen to be controled without a performance suffering. It stuffs your entire hold with nothing but ammunition, gun powder and supplies to keep the men and cannons fed. Must already be rich just to pay the crew. Furthermore, repairs and ressources lost after every battle will be a huge drain on any fortune. They are a must-have for the biggest forts which may require a full fleet of them note, but other than that, a humble 3rd rate will do most jobs just as well with only a fraction of the costs.
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** Triple-multiclassing. Having all the abilities of a Fighter/Mage/Thief or Fighter/Cleric/Thief sounds tempting, but you'll lag behind in levels almost immediately since you're splitting your 1/6 party experience share three ways. Pair that with an experience cap of 2.95 million and at best all of your classes will be in the low double digits - so you'll be stuck with a low [=THAC0=] (10 tops), lackluster thieving skills and never get to memory-cast any spells above Level 6. Even with Throne of Bhaal installed and an experience cap of 8 million, you'll never break the 20s in any class except Thief while the rest of your party will likely be well into the 30s. Unless you're doing some kind of solo run challenge it's much better to have a good single, dual or 2-multi class to fill a specific niche well rather than being consistently mediocre at everything.
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** Triple-multiclassing. Having all the abilities of a Fighter/Mage/Thief or Fighter/Cleric/Thief sounds tempting, but you'll lag behind in levels almost immediately since you're splitting your 1/6 party experience share three ways. Pair that with an experience cap of 2.95 million and at best all of your classes will be in the low double digits - so you'll be stuck with a low [=THAC0=] (10 tops), lackluster thieving skills and never get to memory-cast any spells above Level 6. Even with Throne of Bhaal installed and an experience cap of 8 million, you'll never break the 20s in any class except Thief while the rest of your party will likely be well into the 30s. Unless you're doing some kind of solo run challenge it's much better to have a good single, dual or 2-multi class to fill a specific niche well rather than being consistently mediocre at everything. Or if you really want a versatile character who doesn't excel at any one thing, choose a Bard instead - they get some lovely support items and songs, plus a solid selection of weapons, spells and high level abilities and they level up fast (same experience table as Thieves).
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** Triple-multiclassing. Having all the abilities of a Fighter/Mage/Thief or Fighter/Cleric/Thief sounds tempting, but you'll lag behind in levels almost immediately since you're splitting your 1/6 party experience share three ways. Pair that with an experience cap of 2.95 million and at best all of your classes will be in the low double digits - so you'll be stuck with a low [=THAC0=] (10 tops), lackluster thieving skills and never get to memory-cast any spells above Level 6. Even with Throne of Bhaal installed and an experience cap of 8 million, you'll never break the 20s in any class except Thief while the rest of your party will likely be well into the 30s. Much better to have a good single, dual or 2-multi class to fill a specific niche well rather than being consistently mediocre at everything.
to:
** Triple-multiclassing. Having all the abilities of a Fighter/Mage/Thief or Fighter/Cleric/Thief sounds tempting, but you'll lag behind in levels almost immediately since you're splitting your 1/6 party experience share three ways. Pair that with an experience cap of 2.95 million and at best all of your classes will be in the low double digits - so you'll be stuck with a low [=THAC0=] (10 tops), lackluster thieving skills and never get to memory-cast any spells above Level 6. Even with Throne of Bhaal installed and an experience cap of 8 million, you'll never break the 20s in any class except Thief while the rest of your party will likely be well into the 30s. Much Unless you're doing some kind of solo run challenge it's much better to have a good single, dual or 2-multi class to fill a specific niche well rather than being consistently mediocre at everything.
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** Triple-multiclassing. Having all the abilities of a Fighter/Mage/Thief or Fighter/Cleric/Thief sounds tempting, but you'll lag behind in levels almost immediately since you're splitting your 1/6 party experience share three ways. Pair that with an experience cap of 2.95 million and at best all of your classes will be in the low double digits - so you'll be stuck with a mediocre [=THAC0=] (10 tops), lackluster thieving skills and never get to memory-cast any spells above Level 6. Even with Throne of Bhaal installed and an experience cap of 8 million, you'll never break the 20s in any class except Thief while the rest of your party will likely be well into the 30s. Much better to have a good single, dual or 2-multi class to fill a specific niche rather than being consistently mediocre at everything.
to:
** Triple-multiclassing. Having all the abilities of a Fighter/Mage/Thief or Fighter/Cleric/Thief sounds tempting, but you'll lag behind in levels almost immediately since you're splitting your 1/6 party experience share three ways. Pair that with an experience cap of 2.95 million and at best all of your classes will be in the low double digits - so you'll be stuck with a mediocre low [=THAC0=] (10 tops), lackluster thieving skills and never get to memory-cast any spells above Level 6. Even with Throne of Bhaal installed and an experience cap of 8 million, you'll never break the 20s in any class except Thief while the rest of your party will likely be well into the 30s. Much better to have a good single, dual or 2-multi class to fill a specific niche well rather than being consistently mediocre at everything.
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*** Ironically the best option for a backstabbing class isn't a Thief at all, but rather the Stalker Ranger kit. Better [=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies overall, plus they don't have to worry about managing their Thief skill points for other things since they only have Hide in Shadows/Move Silently. They can also dual to a Cleric to get the benefits of that class, though that limits them to Quarterstaves and Clubs for backstabbing (and the best backstabby weapon is a staff, so that works out well). The Shadowdancer kit in Enhanced Edition can also Hide without having to be out of sight at the cost of a lower damage multiplier and a small hit to spendable points (20 points per level vs 25); plus they can still Dual to bolster their [=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies.
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*** Ironically the best option for a backstabbing class isn't a Thief at all, but rather the Stalker Ranger kit. Better [=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies overall, plus they don't have to worry about managing their Thief skill points for other things since they only have Hide in Shadows/Move Silently. They can also dual to a Cleric to get the benefits of that class, though that limits them to Quarterstaves and Clubs for backstabbing (and the best backstabby weapon is a staff, so that works out well). The Shadowdancer kit in Enhanced Edition can also Hide without having to be out of sight at the cost of a lower damage multiplier and a small hit to spendable skill points (20 points per level vs 25); plus they can still Dual to bolster their [=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies.proficiencies.
** Triple-multiclassing. Having all the abilities of a Fighter/Mage/Thief or Fighter/Cleric/Thief sounds tempting, but you'll lag behind in levels almost immediately since you're splitting your 1/6 party experience share three ways. Pair that with an experience cap of 2.95 million and at best all of your classes will be in the low double digits - so you'll be stuck with a mediocre [=THAC0=] (10 tops), lackluster thieving skills and never get to memory-cast any spells above Level 6. Even with Throne of Bhaal installed and an experience cap of 8 million, you'll never break the 20s in any class except Thief while the rest of your party will likely be well into the 30s. Much better to have a good single, dual or 2-multi class to fill a specific niche rather than being consistently mediocre at everything.
** Triple-multiclassing. Having all the abilities of a Fighter/Mage/Thief or Fighter/Cleric/Thief sounds tempting, but you'll lag behind in levels almost immediately since you're splitting your 1/6 party experience share three ways. Pair that with an experience cap of 2.95 million and at best all of your classes will be in the low double digits - so you'll be stuck with a mediocre [=THAC0=] (10 tops), lackluster thieving skills and never get to memory-cast any spells above Level 6. Even with Throne of Bhaal installed and an experience cap of 8 million, you'll never break the 20s in any class except Thief while the rest of your party will likely be well into the 30s. Much better to have a good single, dual or 2-multi class to fill a specific niche rather than being consistently mediocre at everything.
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** Backstabbing. Sure its impressive to hit for triple digit damage and gib enemies doing it, but it takes a lot of faffing around with limited use invisibility items/spells or running completely out of enemy sightlines to Hide in Shadows, plus thieves' mediocre [=THAC0=] ensures you'll often miss anyway. Not to mention basically everything you'd want to backstab - you know, powerful critters like dragons, demons, most mages and basically every boss - are immune to backstabs and/or see right through invisibility anyway, even with Non-Detection active. Unless you want to run multiple Thieves, it's best to focus on the essential thieving skills (Find Traps , Open Locks and maybe Detect Illusion) in a multi/dual class setup and support in combat with much more reliable weapons (fighter/thief) or spells (mage/thief).
*** Ironically the best option for a backstabbing class isn't a Thief at all, but rather the Stalker Ranger kit. Better [=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies overall, plus they don't have to worry about managing their Thief skill points for other things since they only have Hide in Shadows/Move Silently. They can also dual to a Cleric to get the benefits of that class, though that limits them to Quarterstaves and Clubs for backstabbing (and the best backstabby weapon is a staff, so that works out well). The Shadowdancer kit in Enhanced Edition can also Hide without having to be out of sight at the cost of a lower damage multiplier and a small hit to spendable points (20 points per level vs 25); plus they can still Dual to bolster their strengths.
*** Ironically the best option for a backstabbing class isn't a Thief at all, but rather the Stalker Ranger kit. Better [=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies overall, plus they don't have to worry about managing their Thief skill points for other things since they only have Hide in Shadows/Move Silently. They can also dual to a Cleric to get the benefits of that class, though that limits them to Quarterstaves and Clubs for backstabbing (and the best backstabby weapon is a staff, so that works out well). The Shadowdancer kit in Enhanced Edition can also Hide without having to be out of sight at the cost of a lower damage multiplier and a small hit to spendable points (20 points per level vs 25); plus they can still Dual to bolster their strengths.
to:
** Backstabbing. Sure its impressive to hit for triple digit damage and gib enemies doing it, but it takes a lot of faffing around with limited use invisibility items/spells or running completely out of enemy sightlines to Hide in Shadows, plus thieves' mediocre [=THAC0=] ensures you'll often miss anyway. Not to mention basically everything you'd want to backstab - you know, powerful critters like dragons, demons, most mages and basically every boss - are immune to backstabs and/or see right through invisibility anyway, even with Non-Detection active. Unless you want to run multiple highly-specialized Thieves, it's best more effective to focus on the essential thieving skills (Find Traps , Open Locks and maybe Detect Illusion) in a multi/dual class setup and support in combat with much more reliable weapons (fighter/thief) (Fighter/Thief) or spells (mage/thief).
(Mage/Thief).
*** Ironically the best option for a backstabbing class isn't a Thief at all, but rather the Stalker Ranger kit. Better [=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies overall, plus they don't have to worry about managing their Thief skill points for other things since they only have Hide in Shadows/Move Silently. They can also dual to a Cleric to get the benefits of that class, though that limits them to Quarterstaves and Clubs for backstabbing (and the best backstabby weapon is a staff, so that works out well). The Shadowdancer kit in Enhanced Edition can also Hide without having to be out of sight at the cost of a lower damage multiplier and a small hit to spendable points (20 points per level vs 25); plus they can still Dual to bolster theirstrengths.[=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies.
*** Ironically the best option for a backstabbing class isn't a Thief at all, but rather the Stalker Ranger kit. Better [=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies overall, plus they don't have to worry about managing their Thief skill points for other things since they only have Hide in Shadows/Move Silently. They can also dual to a Cleric to get the benefits of that class, though that limits them to Quarterstaves and Clubs for backstabbing (and the best backstabby weapon is a staff, so that works out well). The Shadowdancer kit in Enhanced Edition can also Hide without having to be out of sight at the cost of a lower damage multiplier and a small hit to spendable points (20 points per level vs 25); plus they can still Dual to bolster their
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*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle is an even more extreme version of the Scoped .44 Magnum, sporting fantastic range, power, accuracy and a high crit multiplier at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better than the base model either.) Most players opt to use a Hunting Rifle instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has two quite good unique variants in Ol' Painless and Lincoln's Repeater, though the latter uses relatively scarce .44 ammo).
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*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle is an even more extreme version of the Scoped .44 Magnum, sporting fantastic range, power, accuracy and a high crit multiplier at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better than the base model either.) Most players save their sniper rifles for special circumstances and opt to use a Hunting Rifle for general use instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has two quite good unique variants in Ol' Painless and Lincoln's Repeater, though the latter uses relatively scarce .44 ammo).
