ammo and its targets

[JohnMcHobo]

Concerning weapon ammunition, what are actually good or bad targets to the individual special ammos?
My observation so far:

W2C is the gold standard of special ammo. If you dont know what to load, load armor piercing rounds, they perform well at any point where you get your hands on them.

JHP seem to be kind of ...meh. They work well against rat hounds (which are not an issue at the point where you get the ammo), Ironhead coverall sledge hammerers (which is the best common use) and the natives of the Black Sea (which is the sole reason to stockpile them).
Against ANY other enemy type it felt like I just shot myself in the foot or could have used standard ammo for equal but cheaper results. Any good targets?

5mm Shock Rounds: Are they good against bots? Because they dont seem to EMP and 5mm has the issue of being a low damage calibre in general.

9mm Acid Rounds: Don´t use them on mutants or their doggos (...duh), but what are they actually strong angainst? Bots?
It does not seem to be damage over time, which brings us to:

7.62mm Shrapnel Rounds: Its a damage over time effect, so it might be useful on pistols and sniper rifles, but rather bad on automatic weapons, and good for hit and run tactics. Does bleeding bypass defensive measures like shields and armor?

8.6mm Incendiaries: 35% is not that great, you could use ARs or SMGs to pepper the enemy with them to increase your chances and set multiple targets on fire...but is that really better than just lobbing a Molotov?

.44 Explosives: Almost all guns using that cailber are single, high-AP-cost guns, so this allows you to fare better against larger groups.

12.7mm Contaminated Rounds: Great if you like committing war crimes.
Jokes aside the contamiated debuff rarely comes into play because 12.7 is a sniper caliber, which is a category of guns used to instakill a target and the gas cloud seems to be too small to be useful for crowd control :(

In almost all cases a dedicated grenade seems to do the job equally well or better.
Any thoughts on this?
Any recommendations for enemy types that are the rock to a paper eney type?

[Zeem]

You've got it mostly right, special ammo outside of W2C, JHP and incendiary is not worth the hassle.
Shock rounds could be OK versus robots and the like, but W2C or a higher caliber weapon perform a lot better in this role.
Micro-shrapnel could be good foraccumulating TfB stacks on a hybrid versatility SMG+melee, but at close range SMGs nuke anything anyway, and TfB stacks are acquired much faster with nail bombs anyway.
Acid is just additional damage, which is independent of weapon's base damage and can't crit. Outclassed by W2C/JHP every time.
Same thing with .44 explosive, although you might use the AoE for softening up locusts and burrower spawns around your primary target.
Contaminated rounds are useless since a proper 12.7 should kill anything in a single shot anyway.
But 8.6 incendiary is great on ARs and SMGs because it can set almost anything on fire (even industrial bots!) and against living targets it also doubles as crowd control, as being on fire inflicts fear.

[King Fossil]

Maybe the final patch will nerf AP ammo and we'll all be sad.

[nightshift]

I play as a sniper so maintaining distance is crucial. I carry a 7.62mm Smart Rapid Falchion as a sidearm along with my rifle for the Initiative bonus and to occasionally Kneecap Shot any tanky melee enemy that manages to get close with Shrapnel rounds. Very effective when you want to stop their advance and more CC along with flashbangs and Quick Tinkering is always welcome. It's 3 rounds of slow debuff that often allows easier re-stealth, plus a successful crit bleed usually takes care of the recipient.

Tried a Hammerer too once I got the blueprint for the explosive rounds and concluded that it is not really for my build that uses pistols for their utility mostly. Even for pistol builds it seems a bit situational to me as it won't do much in open areas but I can imagine it to be a godsend when fighting in narrow corridors. Or when you bear trap an enemy at a door and then start blasting into the crowd that's gathering up behind it.
While Incendiary can work with Rapid Shots I suppose (again, for dedicated pistol builds).

[King Fossil]

Originally posted by nightshift:

Even for pistol builds it seems a bit situational to me as it won't do much in open areas but I can imagine it to be a godsend when fighting in narrow corridors. Or when you bear trap an enemy at a door and then start blasting into the crowd that's gathering up behind it.

Still sucks. Its problem is that its damage doesn't scale with anything. Normal bullet damage keeps going up as you get better guns and increase your guns skill and critical chance, but explosive does 15-30+15-30 no matter what. It's only useful at the start of the game when you don't have the blueprint and can't afford to mass produce it anyway.
Zeem summed things up pretty well. Incendiary is useful for setting enemies on fire, everything else sucks.

[JohnMcHobo]

Originally posted by bearhiderug:

Originally posted by nightshift:

I play as a sniper...

Whats one or two of the lower cost snipers for ap usage?

I myself like the bio rounds. While not always the best i suppose, I enjoy applyin bio and shock.

As far as the 9m acid bullet, would anything from blob pistol or anything else have any synergy with the acid? I would think just fireing the blob pistol twice would be more effective then a follow up.
maybe acid just in case your that player who has nothing else to fire... and mechanical is nto cutting it

There is a unique sniper rifle, the Dragunov which is quite easy to acquire.
As for the non-mechanical damage: I guess that is a good point, although in many cases the W2C rounds still help a lot against such heavily armored foes.

[JohnMcHobo]

Little Update: JHP Rounds are effective against Mutants and their dogs.
Apparently they have only very small mechanical resistance.

[King Fossil]

Originally posted by JohnMcHobo:

Little Update: JHP Rounds are effective against Mutants and their dogs.
Apparently they have only very small mechanical resistance.

0 DR/DT, in fact. You can check yourself by getting mutated.

(do not actually get yourself mutated just to check)

[JohnMcHobo]

Originally posted by King Fossil:

0 DR/DT, in fact. You can check yourself by getting mutated.

(do not actually get yourself mutated just to check)

Wayyyyy to late. However I doublechecked it by shooting them because you can never be certain monsters the same way the player does.