Plasma cutter vs Cattle prod

[Pctechnik]

Which do you - or would you prefer and why?

[Mtwarrior]

plasma cutter has a cooler effect when hitting, prod has a cooler unsheathe effect, but both as weapons alone are mid af on g frfr tbh

[Pctechnik]

Seem to both be comparable for damage and for single-handed weapons, the highest damage there is.

[Mooman]

Plasma cutter. Has elemental options which are the majority of the damage and does far more than advertised due to Bethesda 'quality'.

Combined with Hack and Slash will allow the elemental effects to spread within the explosion (visual, not a real explosion) radius. Ok for damage but can help tag.

Cattle Prod is... there... It's a fairly basic energy 1 hander that is only good for cosplay.

[Mooman]

I've posted again because I want to add some info after a bit of testing.

When it comes to melee it is easy to get armour reduction to a point where you will do as much (well, 99%) of the damage listed. Incisor perk, weighted arm mods (seem to be bugged to reduce by absolute value and not relative) and anti armour legendary effect.

This is important as all you do is add up all the various damage types. There is a catch... Plasma Caster and War Glaive with the pyro mods do a 25 dot over 5 seconds.

The dot isn't important, it is the 25 damage. That is added to the hit effectively increasing the damage beyond what other 1 or 2 handers can get.

Since all weapons in a class behave exactly the same the amount of damage is all that's important... unless you want a fire weapon for friendly fire which the top 2 have anyway...

Edit: Forget most of what is written here... the game is just a buggy mess... After doing a bunch more trials it just seems elemental damage is bugged. For straight physical damage I could get the expected damage. For any element, energy, fire, cold, the damage was always 10 more than expected (it wasn't bleed damage that added 10 as I first though, for heavy/searing/sharp/rocket sledgehammer), except the plasma cutter... It was 50-70 higher than expected... Maybe something will change next patch... (no... it probably won't...)