Best perks to take to improve damage?

[Salem Graves]

I'm currently level 36 and have jjust been taking weight reducing perks up until this point and I've noticed my damage has completely fallen off. Anything stronger than a ghoul and it takes me 20+ headshots to kill them, forget fighting legendaries or large beasts, I'd break 3 different guns trying to bring one of them down. I use a lever rifle currently, so should I just stack rifleman perks or are there better perks to take? Like armor penetration?

[ImCalledBethy/Sparklefarts5]

https://nukesdragons.com/fallout-76

[PotatoBasket]

make sure your weapons are up to level, too. No point shooting an SQB in the head 1000 times with a level 25 lever action, eh? I mean I guess if you really hate her...

[Hefutoxin]

Skip the obvious perks that people are suggesting. Assuming you magically got all of the Rifleman and Bloody Mess perks right this second, that's... +75% damage. In reality, you'll be halfway through your 40's by the time you get all that, and the sponginess of the enemies will have increases a lot by then.

With Lever Action Rifle, your focus should be on Stealth and Sneak Attacks. Each Sneak Attack is +100%. So what you really want is to keep yourself doing Sneak Attacks as much as possible, which means the perk "Sneak" as well as pumping Agility as high as you can.

Your second goal is VATS Critical Hits. For that, you want to boost Luck as high as you can to fill your critical hit meter more per shot.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Mooman:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von lucg:

Don't underestimate the "Tenderizer" and the "Bloody Mess" perk cards, too ... .

This. Tenderizer can be misleading based on the description, but it does far more than expected because it is a debuff to your target.

To add background as to why "Tenderizer" is special:

Nearly all damage boosts in Fallout 76 are off base weapon damage. So if you see +10% damage, it's not 10% of whatever damage you are currently doing, it's only 10% of your base weapon damage added.

Tenderizer is an enemy debuff that causes them to take 10% more damage, which is after all damage has been added together. If multiple people are using it, it stacks up to a maximum of 40% damage for everyone against that enemy.

[Salem Graves]

I try to stick to stealth but usually after the first kill, I’m detected and it’s guns blazing from there. But I’ve also barely invested into agi.

[Hefutoxin]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Unremarkable Rat:

I try to stick to stealth but usually after the first kill, I’m detected and it’s guns blazing from there. But I’ve also barely invested into agi.

Yeah, you need Agility for Stealth. You also need to keep your pipboy flashlight off.

[RMPyro]

At higher levels after level 50, you need to replace bad perk cards with better ones. Focus more on one weapon type like assault rifles, then add other perks to increase the dmg on that weapon type instead of using multiple weapon perks.

You also need to find better weapons, at level 50 scrip the useless weapons and armors, and buy legendary modules. Use those modules to upgrade an max level weapon, until you get the legendary stats you want.

[Salem Graves]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von RMPyro:

At higher levels after level 50, you need to replace bad perk cards with better ones. Focus more on one weapon type like assault rifles, then add other perks to increase the dmg on that weapon type instead of using multiple weapon perks.

You also need to find better weapons, at level 50 scrip the useless weapons and armors, and buy legendary modules. Use those modules to upgrade an max level weapon, until you get the legendary stats you want.

Can weapons go above level 50?

[lucg]

nope ... !

[Salem Graves]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von lucg:

nope ... !

Coool thanks!

[climbingeastofwinter]

I just gave the lever gun and gauss rifle a try, and my general sense is that you aren't doing anything wrong Unremarkable -- semi-auto and full-health gameplay is just really rough. Around level 45 you'll be able to pick up a flamer with a napalm tank mod and, with barely any perk cards, have a weapon with a base paper damage of like 95 with a much higher rate of first. If you swapped into tesla bracered power armor right now and ate tasty hound stew as a carnivore, you'd probably be punching for ~800 damage.

The game is sort of 'balanced' in the sense that everyone can respec when they want and use what they want. The weapon classes themselves aren't necessarily balanced well against each other.

Perkwise, it's going to be hard to push your damage beyond 75% (20% from 3-3* rifleman perks, 15% from bloody mess 3) with rifles but Adrenaline 5 (agility) stacks up to +60% damage with kills refreshing the 30s duration of the buff, so if you can keep that up it could be a big help.

Without getting weird, I'm not sure theres much more you can do. A bloodied build would give you another +165% damage (or so) and also more than double your available action points, make your VATS accuracy amazing, and help your vats crits charge much faster.

If you're willing to supplement your riflery with grenades, demolitions expert 5 (intelligence) and a well placed grenade or two really will help you to clear non-boss, non-event content.