Power Arm + Melee Weapon?

[Jacbo]

If I have a pawn with a power arm and I give him a melee weapon, will he be better or worse than just the power arm and no weapon?

[elipod]

Armed can be better or worse than unarmed, depending on your weapon. You can check expected melee damage in info tab for your pawn.

Pawns uses all availble melee attacks at random, some are weighted more than others. Say: punch is more common than bite for humans and spear thrust is more common than punching with fists or bashing with spear handle. Adding weak melee weapon will add weak common attacks to attack pool, reducing overall DPS.

[Jacbo]

With a weapon it's a few points higher in dps but a few points lower in average damage. I'm not really sure which is better.

[Sad Cat]

Originally posted by jacob123456798:

With a weapon it's a few points higher in dps but a few points lower in average damage. I'm not really sure which is better.

Depends on a few things. Heavy hitting weapons like spears and longswords, depending on quality, have the opportunity to straight up one hit kill something, or in a single attack sever limbs, dramatically lowering their opponents ability to fight back. The downside to that of course is that misses are far more detrimental. In otherwords, things with higher damage per attack but lower DPS have the potential to end a fight quicker or reduce the enemies effectiveness more easily, but tend to suffer in longer sustained fights and missing an attack could be devistating for you. This is why when I give my pawns weapons I tend to give the hard hitting up front damage weapons such as the sniper rifle, spears, and longswords to pawns that have high skill. Much less chance to miss that way.

Sniper rifles actually have less DPS than say an assault rifle, but a sniper rifle can potentially shoot off limbs or out right kill a target in a single bullet, where as an assault rifle will be better for prolonged fights that require higher sustained damage and have multiple targets coming at you.

Pawns that need to be trained still or have low skill but little potential to really ever be good with a weapon get faster shooting/attacking weapons. Since they're going to miss a lot anyway, might as well go the spray and pray approach to them. This also skills them up faster. Autopistols are good for this since they're some of the fastest firing weapons in the game. Also keep in mind that automatic weapon skill gain is per burst, not per bullet, so this makes autopistols and revolvers better than say a machine pistol or SMG for leveling shooting with.

[Jacbo]

Does having a power arm on say the left and a bionic arm say on the right still improve the accuracy? I know it used to but that was because a power claw would reduce manipulation and the bionic arm would increase it. But I had checked and after I installed the power arm on my pawn, he had the same manipulation but his work speed was lower.