Polished vs Pin-pointers for VATS

[CoolSensei]

Since the realization that conductors is pretty much an extra vampire effect for the 4th star and the AP portion of the effect is literal garbage and not actually the same 5% as with the health, i'm left with the option of Polished or Pin-pointers for my VATS heavy guns.

What do you guys think? Polished gets the full 60% damage at +100% (200% full condition bar with the line going through it) and progressively loses damage as the condition gets lowered.

I'm leaning more towards Pin-pointers because it does work on heads but people say it might not be intended so who knows what Bethesda is going to do in the coming weeks with 4-star balance. Also, people say that the damage boost doesn't work for the critical portion of the damage? Which i don't really get what it means? Does it only boost the damage of your non-crit shots?

[Phantom]

Polished is a tonne of work for 60% additive damage, most of the time you will be less IIRC improved repair kits are like 30-35%

Both of the weakpoint ones are 1.5x multipliers (for everything but criticals... including vats)

So if you had in theory a weapon that never got worse

if it was 100 + 60 = 160 you'd be slightly ahead of the 150 of pinpointers and a little more on crits

IF you have the additive perks
160 for ballistic out the gate
190 for energy

Now its 220/250 vs 240/285

If its say bloodied

Now its
365/395 vs 455/502.5

Add taking one for the team... and you are further pulling away, same with tenderizer, same with anyone using the new pyro / poison mod for the additive debuff they get... and that is best case for polishers... which honestly you won't ever have or won't have for very long

So on a min/max build pinpointers WILL do more damage easily especially in groups

With the vats criticals a perfect polished weapon will edge out pinpointers but not by a vast margin on a 2 shot = crit build... anything less than that and even a perfect one doesn't win

[Mooman]

On Reddit someone made a good point for polished in using it in raids only.

A fully linked raid team has no weapon durability loss as the bonus.

[Phantom]

Originally posted by Mooman:

On Reddit someone made a good point for polished in using it in raids only.

A fully linked raid team has no weapon durability loss as the bonus.

yeah a full raids team reallllllly mitigates condition loss

[intlgunmonkey]

Originally posted by Mooman:

On Reddit someone made a good point for polished in using it in raids only.

A fully linked raid team has no weapon durability loss as the bonus.

That explains a lot.
I’ve only just started using an ultracite Gatling laser after the update, and I heard people complaining about ammo loss and weapons breaking, and then I’ve gotten to the end with more cores than I started and no perceptible wear on my gun or armor (or the chainsaw I use for the crystal horde stage).

Makes sense now. Thanks.