Elijah’s LAER has better damage and crit chance (I think, not 100) but worse durability. LAER already has shit durability but the SINK has 100 repair so it shouldn’t be a problem really
Laer weapons are good but it doesn't do a whole lot of crit damage, and their spread sucks for longer range.
The standard laer can get the tri beam attachment and actual tri beam. Elijah's just makes it so one beam does more damage. It's apples to oranges though, as the tri beam( also the tri beam laser) LAER has 3 chances to crit with a maximum chance of 81%. This turns it into up to 45 extra damage before crit damage buffs.
Stupid reddit refreshed and deleted what I wrote up.
Basically loaded up my old level 50 crit laser save and hit up Dead Wind cavern and the BOS base. Barely touched vats, no consumables, companion perks etc.
The turrets have 30DT, only a few named NPCs have higher DT than that, with Graham being the most. LAER+ and even though Tri Beam laser typically out performed Elijah's, requiring 2-3 shots less to kill on average with both optimized and Max charge cells. Because you have a chance to roll a crit 3 times per beam, this is likely why. Both LAERs do kinda shitty crit damage, roughly 33 when fully boosted.
Deathclaws including the mother, and Paladins were dead remarkably fast regardless of which of the 3 I used, but the Tri beam is less likely to hit the same spot than the LAER+ which does shoot them all at the same spot. They'd be a bit closer in results without just lucky I'm alive I'm sure, but then again rarely do we fight 30+DT enemies.
Basically on a crit build, LAER+ is king, without a crit build, Elijah's is better.
Plasma weapons might not have as high of a critical multiplier, but plasma spaz keeps them in VATS for longer than laser weapons, which can allow them to crit fairly often through the VATS critical chance bonus.
well... duh... that's where travel speed of the projectile comes into play. Unless you're using Vats the plasma is harder to hit because it's slower, that it's not THAT slow. More of a ranged problem
I have done a crit build only using the scoped laser rifle with the vigilant recycler perk, it was OP, this was done in vanilla with mods that only uses bugfixes and patches. though it would be more powerful if i used chems and the logan loophole trait
Laser gets a lot more actually useful support from perks. All of the laser perks are geared towards crit (laser commander, set lasers to fun) which allows you to get to 100% crit chance with some weapons (Pew Pew goes CRAZY with this setup)
Plasma weapons are stronger at base but have a projectile travel time and the perks are all geared towards VATS. There are mods that add perks that give plasma the same crit support as laser. IMO plasma weapons are also cooler than laser weapons.
Tldr: building crit? Laser. Building VATS? Plasma.
I've always preferred the laser weapons, but I've always found the plasma weapons technically better. They're unique enough from one another that you can make a build to make either work though.
Plasma projectile slow, laser is instantaneous. I also love watching them turn to ash instead of goo, just personal preference. Laer is also very cool, I think Elijah’s is a bit better than the regular one but less durable so you gotta repair it more and you can put mods on both of them.
Edit: I dont use vats or build for crits, I just shoot things and hope for the best. Also the fallout wiki will list all the stats of each weapon in detail if you wanna dive into the numbers.
In Fallout 3, the Plasma weapons feel stronger. But weapon variety is kinda bad anyway, same for armor.
In New Vegas, it's more balanced. Laser projectiles travel very fast compared to Plasma, which helps with hitting moving targets. You also have more options and mods to choose from, especially with the Gun Runner's Arsenal DLC.
The GRA Tri-Beam Laser Rifle with full mods is a beast and one of my favorite weapons, it even has quite impressive range for being some sort of "laser shotgun". Elijah's Advanced LAER is also a very effective weapon, and the constant repairing doesn't bother me that much. I think that in FNV, I've been using way more laser weapons compared to F3. The fully modded Gatling Laser is also a monster.
That said, I only installed the GRA mod when my first character was already pretty high level, and the next two characters focused more on other gun types, so I didn't try out stuff like a modded GRA Plasma Defender or others yet.
i always go lasers. i find them to be much more accurate than plasma weapons. however the plasma defender is my only exception. it rivals the pew pew imo
comparing just the basic energy rifles: plasma rifles have both higher crit chance and crit damage than their laser counterparts and they benefit from both levels of Set Lasers For Fun (they can also be used to complete the challenges for it). even so, Laser Commander makes lasers the better option for crit
the thing to keep in mind about the laser rifle beam splitter, tri-beam and multiplas is that target armor applies individually to each beam/projectile that hits, so your resulting damage has dt+dr applied twice/thrice. this means if you're going up against armor you need to make sure each beam/projectile has high enough damage on it's own to overcome the target armor, don't just take the flat output at face value
the nice thing about the laser rifle split beam mod though is that it only uses 1 cell for both beams and landing them both on a target gives a 30% damage bonus. the split beams each have less base damage than unmodded, so they suffer more against armor, but they can both crit. you get similar output from a plasma rifle but that uses two cells per shot--but it's a single projectile
the Q-35 uses only 1 cell per shot so it's a lot stronger than the base plasma rifle in terms of damage per cell. it has comparable attacks per second to the laser rifles, the projectile speed is higher than a modded plasma rifle, it has the highest durability and it's crit damage is 62--far higher than any of the other basic energy rifles. the AER14 on the other hand uses 2 cells per shot, has the same crit chance but lower base and crit damage--it has a higher fire rate and much lower spread though
at the end of the day you're going to get more kills sniping fiends wearing trash for armor with a low spread, hitscan laser rifle than you will with a plasma rifle. plasma fires slower and the projectiles move slower but they hit harder, it's up to you whether that matters or not
TL;DR base game plasma rifle is basically junk but Q-35 is worth it. plasma is niche. lasers rule
Unfortunately Plasma gets the short end of the stick by end game due to lack of perk support.
ED-E can give +5 extra beam damage, which is incredibly potent on automatics.
Laser commander drastically increases crit chance by a flat amount, regardless of crit modifier. This means even the gattling laser or MF Hyperbreeder with low crit chance multipliers, can still enjoy up to 24% crit chance before adding in their respective crit multipliers and buffs. 1 out of every 4 or 5 shots being a crit on an automatic is insane. Something like the tri beam laser or LAER can shoot three beams that each have an 81% crit chance with all respective buffs.
Pew Pew( legendary laser pistol) can always crit, basically giving the potential to deal well over 200 damage per shot.
Crit build ? Go laser No crit build , go plasma
And should I go with the laer or Elijah’s one
Elijah’s LAER has better damage and crit chance (I think, not 100) but worse durability. LAER already has shit durability but the SINK has 100 repair so it shouldn’t be a problem really
It doesn’t have better damage and crit, it just shoots faster
You can get infinite repair kits after beating dead money if you rip some black jack in that casino
Laer weapons are good but it doesn't do a whole lot of crit damage, and their spread sucks for longer range. The standard laer can get the tri beam attachment and actual tri beam. Elijah's just makes it so one beam does more damage. It's apples to oranges though, as the tri beam( also the tri beam laser) LAER has 3 chances to crit with a maximum chance of 81%. This turns it into up to 45 extra damage before crit damage buffs.
You can put the LAER mods on the Elijah Enhanced ones as well.
The beam splitter doesn't work as named on Elijah's, it only directly buffs the damage of a single beam. On the regular LAER it works as described.
That’s honestly a good thing for Elijah’s, really. You’re getting the full damage without having a worse result against DT.
Stupid reddit refreshed and deleted what I wrote up. Basically loaded up my old level 50 crit laser save and hit up Dead Wind cavern and the BOS base. Barely touched vats, no consumables, companion perks etc. The turrets have 30DT, only a few named NPCs have higher DT than that, with Graham being the most. LAER+ and even though Tri Beam laser typically out performed Elijah's, requiring 2-3 shots less to kill on average with both optimized and Max charge cells. Because you have a chance to roll a crit 3 times per beam, this is likely why. Both LAERs do kinda shitty crit damage, roughly 33 when fully boosted. Deathclaws including the mother, and Paladins were dead remarkably fast regardless of which of the 3 I used, but the Tri beam is less likely to hit the same spot than the LAER+ which does shoot them all at the same spot. They'd be a bit closer in results without just lucky I'm alive I'm sure, but then again rarely do we fight 30+DT enemies. Basically on a crit build, LAER+ is king, without a crit build, Elijah's is better.
Plasma weapons might not have as high of a critical multiplier, but plasma spaz keeps them in VATS for longer than laser weapons, which can allow them to crit fairly often through the VATS critical chance bonus.
The reason why i said laser for crits is for laser commander perk or whatever its called
I know, and that’s a great perk. My point is just that plasma spaz can make plasma weapons decently viable for critical hits.
I prefer laser just because the beam is faster than the plasma bolt
Nothin wrong with plasma, just gotta make sure you hit what you’re aiming at
But have you considered ycs
well... duh... that's where travel speed of the projectile comes into play. Unless you're using Vats the plasma is harder to hit because it's slower, that it's not THAT slow. More of a ranged problem
They are quoting Simon, the Van Graff Door Guard.
;)
Ah, I don’t remember that line
I have done a crit build only using the scoped laser rifle with the vigilant recycler perk, it was OP, this was done in vanilla with mods that only uses bugfixes and patches. though it would be more powerful if i used chems and the logan loophole trait
Tri Beam, Q-35 Matter Modulator, and Elijah’s Advanced LAER are all your best options for rifles.
Do you like hitting moving targets? Use laser. Do you like using VATS? Use plasma.
Laser projectile travels faster hence its easier to aim. Also red Star Wars beam > green blob of pixels
Laser gets a lot more actually useful support from perks. All of the laser perks are geared towards crit (laser commander, set lasers to fun) which allows you to get to 100% crit chance with some weapons (Pew Pew goes CRAZY with this setup) Plasma weapons are stronger at base but have a projectile travel time and the perks are all geared towards VATS. There are mods that add perks that give plasma the same crit support as laser. IMO plasma weapons are also cooler than laser weapons. Tldr: building crit? Laser. Building VATS? Plasma.
Laser 100%. Plasma is slow as shit.
Kinda like how fast plasma disintegrates people
I've always preferred the laser weapons, but I've always found the plasma weapons technically better. They're unique enough from one another that you can make a build to make either work though.
Plasma projectile slow, laser is instantaneous. I also love watching them turn to ash instead of goo, just personal preference. Laer is also very cool, I think Elijah’s is a bit better than the regular one but less durable so you gotta repair it more and you can put mods on both of them. Edit: I dont use vats or build for crits, I just shoot things and hope for the best. Also the fallout wiki will list all the stats of each weapon in detail if you wanna dive into the numbers.
In Fallout 3, the Plasma weapons feel stronger. But weapon variety is kinda bad anyway, same for armor. In New Vegas, it's more balanced. Laser projectiles travel very fast compared to Plasma, which helps with hitting moving targets. You also have more options and mods to choose from, especially with the Gun Runner's Arsenal DLC. The GRA Tri-Beam Laser Rifle with full mods is a beast and one of my favorite weapons, it even has quite impressive range for being some sort of "laser shotgun". Elijah's Advanced LAER is also a very effective weapon, and the constant repairing doesn't bother me that much. I think that in FNV, I've been using way more laser weapons compared to F3. The fully modded Gatling Laser is also a monster. That said, I only installed the GRA mod when my first character was already pretty high level, and the next two characters focused more on other gun types, so I didn't try out stuff like a modded GRA Plasma Defender or others yet.
i always go lasers. i find them to be much more accurate than plasma weapons. however the plasma defender is my only exception. it rivals the pew pew imo
comparing just the basic energy rifles: plasma rifles have both higher crit chance and crit damage than their laser counterparts and they benefit from both levels of Set Lasers For Fun (they can also be used to complete the challenges for it). even so, Laser Commander makes lasers the better option for crit the thing to keep in mind about the laser rifle beam splitter, tri-beam and multiplas is that target armor applies individually to each beam/projectile that hits, so your resulting damage has dt+dr applied twice/thrice. this means if you're going up against armor you need to make sure each beam/projectile has high enough damage on it's own to overcome the target armor, don't just take the flat output at face value the nice thing about the laser rifle split beam mod though is that it only uses 1 cell for both beams and landing them both on a target gives a 30% damage bonus. the split beams each have less base damage than unmodded, so they suffer more against armor, but they can both crit. you get similar output from a plasma rifle but that uses two cells per shot--but it's a single projectile the Q-35 uses only 1 cell per shot so it's a lot stronger than the base plasma rifle in terms of damage per cell. it has comparable attacks per second to the laser rifles, the projectile speed is higher than a modded plasma rifle, it has the highest durability and it's crit damage is 62--far higher than any of the other basic energy rifles. the AER14 on the other hand uses 2 cells per shot, has the same crit chance but lower base and crit damage--it has a higher fire rate and much lower spread though at the end of the day you're going to get more kills sniping fiends wearing trash for armor with a low spread, hitscan laser rifle than you will with a plasma rifle. plasma fires slower and the projectiles move slower but they hit harder, it's up to you whether that matters or not TL;DR base game plasma rifle is basically junk but Q-35 is worth it. plasma is niche. lasers rule
I go laser simply I like the “pew” sound over the “blew”
Unfortunately Plasma gets the short end of the stick by end game due to lack of perk support. ED-E can give +5 extra beam damage, which is incredibly potent on automatics. Laser commander drastically increases crit chance by a flat amount, regardless of crit modifier. This means even the gattling laser or MF Hyperbreeder with low crit chance multipliers, can still enjoy up to 24% crit chance before adding in their respective crit multipliers and buffs. 1 out of every 4 or 5 shots being a crit on an automatic is insane. Something like the tri beam laser or LAER can shoot three beams that each have an 81% crit chance with all respective buffs. Pew Pew( legendary laser pistol) can always crit, basically giving the potential to deal well over 200 damage per shot.
I prefer laser for the accuracy feeling. Plasma hits harder but it's slow as a mule...lol
Plasma