Damage types: lasguns vs firearms.

[Rragar]

One interesting thing I've found is that it seems lasguns deal more damage against unarmored enemies, and firearms that shoot bullets, deal more damage against anything that has armor.

I managed to test this in the Psykhanium, using a lasgun and a "bullets" gun that dealt almost the same damage (164 and 165, respectively), no damage modifiers, and no blessings, and the same stopping power modifier (80%).

The lasgun killed the unarmored annoyances much faster; most noticeably, the mutants and ragers. When used against any armor type however, it seemed to deal significantly lower damage, sometimes taking almost twice as many shots to kill the enemy.

The bullets/kinetic gun showed the opposite behavior; unarmored enemies took more shots to kill than I expected, but the armored one were going down as fast as the lasgun was killing the unarmored ones.

Has anyone noticed the same? Or am I missing some kind of hidden attribute at play here?

[Theutus]

You can look at the advanced stats and it should show you exactly the damage it does against different enemy types

[☭Dictatorship™]

Probably intentional
V + tab a weapon to see the damage stats against different armour

[Fingeris]

Lasguns deal more damage to "far" targets

Ballistic weapons to "close" targets

+you can check the exact damage that each weapon deals to different enemy types in the TAB menu

[Onimaho]

Doesn't apply to heavy stubber.

That weapons bullets bounce off armored enemies.

[varicose 'vascular' vinny]

Yeah stubbers need that painful 0.5 flak mod looked at. Doesn't stump Gorgo with that 230~ damage but the other 2 are miserable on flak. Which happens to be most gun enemies.

Anyways lasguns usually have really high finesse mods against flak to work around this. Like las pistol that can one shot scab stalkers without a perk, but takes like 10 body shots. That is the most extreme case for damage disparity though.

[Arani]

Originally posted by Rragar:

...

You're mostly right but it depends on the weapon and attack type. As others said, you should use V + Tab (I think they're the default binds) to examine weapons. The detail view is extremely accurate and good, but it comes with some exceptions and other stuff you should know:

• The attack breakdowns show the damage with your weapon's base stat values. So it shows the real values after stuff like Damage, Stopping Power, Penetration etc.
  
• But this also includes the First Target stat, which can be misleading. Because with cleave attacks, only the first target hit will benefit from the First Target stat, everything else will will not only lose that bonus, but also suffer further reductions due to cleave.
  
• Cleave itself is completely bonkers and the stat descriptions basically might not mean anything at all. There are YT videos with people showing stuff like weapons with higher cleave, actually having lower cleave, and higher cleave damage, actually resulting in much lower cleave damage. So generally speaking the only thing you can tell with Cleave is that bigger is better, but you won't really have any idea how much better, what if any breakpoints are there, etc.
  
• The details window does NOT include the bonus damage from perks. So if details show you'll be doing 100 flak damage, but you have a perk for +25% flak, then really you will be doing 125 flak damage.
  
• On melee weapons, be sure to view each different attack in a combo as their damage can differ too.
  
• Across all weapons, never assume weapons of similar types share the same "logic". One lasgun might have really high flak dmg relative to the rest, another variant of the same weapon might have a really low flak dmg relative to the rest.
  
• The same "never assume" applies to crit, weakspot, and crit & weakspot damage too. Many weapons have blessings that buff crit%, but their bonus damage on crit is so infitesimally tiny there's no point ever investing in it.
  
• Speaking of crit, the game doesn't show you anything about crit values. All classes have a base 5% crit chance, except vets who have a 10% crit chance. Some guides / people claim the Laspistol has a 15% crit chance, but given the context and how they count this with vet builds, this seems to be wrong. Instead it seems more likely that Laspistols actually have a +5% crit chance, so that would make for a total of 15% base for vets, and 10% for anyone else.
  
• The details pane also doesn't show the true ammo count, because especially energy weapons consume varying degrees of ammo. Helbore III for example has an average of 600 ammo, but consumes 9 per each fully charged shot. So if you use charged shots, the weapon actually has a tiny fraction (almost 1/10:th) of the clip size and total ammo compared to what the game claims.
  I made a comparison once and still refer to it. Far as I know nothing has changed:
  https://steamcommunity.com/app/1361210/discussions/0/3761101693157090064#c3823032780420091228

And that's the gist of it really. :>

[DLCI]

Originally posted by Fingeris:

Lasguns deal more damage to "far" targets

Ballistic weapons to "close" targets

+you can check the exact damage that each weapon deals to different enemy types in the TAB menu

This is an incredibly important detail to know when selecting your gun and is actually not shown anywhere except in the attribute description window.

Lasguns (excluding laspistol) have damage falloff the closer a target is to you, but this turns into a damage bonus at long range that increases the farther you are away from a target.

Kinetic weapons (autoguns etc.) have damage falloff the farther a target is from you, but this turns into a damage bonus if they are at very close range.

In most situations it is far harder to keep enemies at a distance than to keep them close, so the kinetic profile is usually more effective on average. Specials are the obvious exception to this, because they get a lot easier to kill when you can pick them off at very long ranges when they are still separated from other enemies.

Originally posted by Arani:

The details window does NOT include the bonus damage from perks. So if details show you'll be doing 100 flak damage, but you have a perk for +25% flak, then really you will be doing 125 flak damage.

Finesse bonuses above the weapon's baseline are also not shown on the breakdown. Very high finesse weapons with a 2.3x will hit considerably harder on weakspot/crit compared to an unmodified 2.0x one, even though the attack details will show maybe a 5-10 point difference.

Originally posted by Arani:

Cleave itself is completely bonkers and the stat descriptions basically might not mean anything at all. There are YT videos with people showing stuff like weapons with higher cleave, actually having lower cleave, and higher cleave damage, actually resulting in much lower cleave damage. So generally speaking the only thing you can tell with Cleave is that bigger is better, but you won't really have any idea how much better, what if any breakpoints are there, etc.

Many weapons have weird cleaving profiles that there is no way of deciphering except through experimentation. One of the best examples would be dueling swords.

MK II and MK IV dueling swords have a limit of about 3 unarmored or infested enemies on light swings, but they will cleave 100% of the damage through to all 3 targets, making them better against horde enemies than you might expect. I do not know any other weapon that works this way.

Another example I can think of would be the recent changes to slab-shield that put a minimum damage cap on the cleave. Unlike most weapons that do increasingly less damage until it reaches zero, this allows some amount of damage to continue cleaving indefinitely. This makes it a lot better vs. very large groups where you would normally deal only stagger/impact after 6-7 targets.

Some weapons cleave through bonus damage from power or feats to multiple targets, while others only add any bonuses to damage dealt to the first target. Many ogryn weapons have this penalty, and I think cleavers may be the only ogryn weapon that doesn't. This is very noticable with blessings like thrust that add large power bonuses.

[Brother Bigot]

Originally posted by Fingeris:

Lasguns deal more damage to "far" targets

Ballistic weapons to "close" targets

+you can check the exact damage that each weapon deals to different enemy types in the TAB menu

Inb4 no blessings for hitting targets from range
Guns get blessings for close range kills ok fatshark