Why are the supermutants insane?

[Orpheus]

I only find it hard if I try to use a specific gun all the time with the wrong ammo, like 9mm pistol or smg. That's not going to do anything, if you want to RP like that perhaps you need a mod to add AP rounds to all weapons or a mod like signature weapons.

A 9mm pistol/smg against a Super Mutant....You know what, I'll add that to my "Ridiculous stunts I want to try on Fallout for the sake of it" list . Btw, by mod, I meant weapon attachments not mod as in game mods. What I meant are things like laser rifle with a beam splitter and such.

It's absolutly possible with grunt, maria and a high luck build. With grunt, at 100 gun skill, the damage of maria go to 25. You can manage with TTW to get a critical chance of 26 (10 base, 5 finesse, 3 build to destroy, 3 survival guru, 5 sergeant RL3), which with Maria equal 52. With better criticals and the professionnal, you can reach around 70 damage on a critical shot (and you do a critical shot every two shot).
Notice that with a jhp ammunition, you will gain + 65 % damage (which mean you will get to 25 damage to 40 damage with Maria). The super mutant will have double damage threshold (15 to 30) so basically, you will do the same damage with and without jhp for regular shot, but your critical shot will be much more damagefull with JHP.
Honnestly, it's not even a stunt, it's an absolutly viable build, even against overlords.
With a smg it's possible too, and again with or without jhp, all your damage will be absorbed by the damage threshold. So you better use JHP because you will do anyway 20 % of the damage. With grunt + JHP, even 20 % of the DPS of the 9mm SMG is enough to get ridd of a basic super mutant.

[darkkira1332]

I'm talking about stock 9mm guns but hey thats another thing to try.

[Orpheus]

It can works too with the same build, especially against a basic super mutant. Against more powerfull supermutant, a hell of a lot of drugs and it will be fine. But that describe a lot of situations in fallout.

[karrie]

My question is when to use hollow points and armor piercing ones?They both have minus dt but the first one has more dps..

[Decker]

Armor Piercing (AP) rounds subtract from target DT. They often inflict slightly less raw damage than normal rounds. This means that AP rounds are best against well armored targets, especially when fired with a relatively low critical hit chance.

Hollow Point (HP, JHP etc) multiply the target DT upwards, it is actually increasing armor effect against the damage. They also multiply any damage getting through DT. This means that HP rounds are best against unarmored or lightly armored targets. They can also work well against armored targets if shot with a high critical hit chance.

Succesfull Critical Hits always bypass all armor and DT. Critical Hit with a hollow point round is more damaging than with AP or normal round. Critical Hit chance is affected by Luck stat as well as skill, perks and the actual weapon being used. Critical Hit damage multiplier is also applied on top, in addition to the weapon this depends on perks like Better Criticals (for all critical hits) or Ninja (for sneak attack criticals only).

[Peter Curtin]

With my current play-through (set on Very Hard, which is a literal game-changer), I've found that the Riot Shotgun (make one yourself with Gunsmith perk - much more powerful than a Combat Shotgun) plus the Shotgun Surgeon perk (-10 to target DT), plus head shots will just obliterates the skulls of anything below an Overlord.

For full effect this requires a Stealth-based character to get close enough -- then you get the automatic critical hit multiplier when you surprise them. It's quite doable, because Super Mutants aren't exactly perceptive.

It also makes a big difference if you take the second rank of the Gunsmith perk; with that rank you can convert your Riot Shotgun to "fully automatic" so it fires three-round bursts in VATS. All of this is right in line with what Roy said, just chiming in.

[Risewild]

Gunsmithing is from a mod with the same name. Made by Puppetron.

You can only craft these weapons in base TTW:

• Bottlecap mine
• Bottlecap mine, efficient
• Cosmic knife clean
• Cosmic knife super-heated
• Cryo Grenade
• Cryo Mine
• Cryolator
• Dart gun
• Deathclaw gauntlet
• Dog tag fist
• Fat mine
• FIDO
• Fist of Rawr
• Gas bomb
• Knife spear
• Knife spear clean
• MFC cluster
• MFC grenade
• Nuka-cocktail
• Nuka-grenade
• Powder charge
• Powder charge, efficient
• Railway Rifle
• Rock-It Launcher
• Satchel charge
• Shishkebab
• Time bomb
• Time bomb, high yield
• Tin grenade

Since I had this list hanging around, I thought it could be useful for anyone that is interested in what weapons they can craft in TTW.
I hope there's nothing missing from it, the list is a bit old.

[RoyBatty]

Nothing missing, we haven't made/placed the schematics for the cryo mines/grenades yet. And darth is still working on that I think. We haven't decided what kind of damage to put on them as we feel they should do some rather than just slow enemies and do DoT. There's also a Cryo perk that would effect them and the Cryolator.

[Kinderblut]

You could always use BLEED paired with WTHeskett's Damage Multiplier (I found x3 or x4 is best). That generally makes combat more tense.