Automatic weapons and dps.

[Zawarudo]

As a noob without any experience in the comando perk, I always thought the assault rifle was lame just because the combat rifle deals more damage per shot... Geez.

Finaly understanding the strong point of automatic weapons is their dps, I come to the realization that it could be a good weapon, outside of vats :P

So if we disregard weapon prefixes, which automatic you think has the highest dps?

[Slaughterer]

automatics are only good 'from the hip' because long range they plain suck.
That said, handmade AR or basic AR are the best because even if they do a little less base damage than the combat rifle, you can actually fire them without climbing.

[MTV]

Splattercannon is the best automatic weapon in the game. Oops you said disregard prefixes.

Handmade rifle or Assault rifle then.. You should try out the overdrive drug for commando.

[NecroMaster]

I once got an assault rifle drop with infinite clip perk on it.

I modified it to make it automatic and it was an over powered piece of ♥♥♥♥.

[ghpstage]

They are also good in VATS. The DAM/AP is considerably better than single shot forms of the same weapon and it gets around the recoil problem.
Sneak attacks with a suppressor can propel the DPS to truly monstours levels, where .38 pipe guns can greatly exceed that of laser gats. .38 Pipe, Assault Rifle and Handmade make for the best auto sniper bases.

Plasma may have higher dps on paper, but in practice the handmade rifle is going to be the best due to not having travel time, having almost no recoil to worry about and having access to a suppressor.

Automatics care about the parts you build them out of much more than any other weapon class.

[Doombringer]

The rate of fire in pipboy is the number of shots/10sec.
Weapons with the smallclipsize keywords reduce the displayed rate of fire (in pipboy) to account for frequent reloading.

Short Answer: use auto Handmade Rifle.

For autos, a handmade rifle is an assault rifle with 32 base damage (instead of 30), a better top auto receiver (+30% damage instead of +15%), a worse top semi-auto receiver (+115% damage instead of +75% damage & +50% rate of fire*), and better barrel mods.

* it actually divides the fire delay by 0.6667, so you end up with odd numbers (59.997 for assault rifle, pipboy doesn't round or show decimal places, but the rate of fire is much closer to 60 than 59.)

Plasma recoil is too high and the clip is too small to be that useful as an auto.
Minigun is only really useful if explosive, the low base damage is so so bad.
Combat/Radium Rifle don't handle as well as handmade/assault rifle, so they a noticable step down from handmade (also do way less DPS even if everything hits).
(There is a bug with radium rifle where pipboy will sometimes show rediculous rates of fire for radium rifle; it still fires at the same rate as an auto combat rifle.)
Auto-combat shotgun is just worse than an advanced one.
Gatling laser is the best weapon for settlers, but unless your target has minimal/no energyresist and you are close-ish to them it is worse for you than handmade.

[Slaughterer]

Not to mention, there's roughly a 25% chance for all energy weapons (musket included) to visibly hit and do zero damage. So the real-world damage of energy weapons is 25% less than displayed.

I tested this even with a 480 damage plasma vs Splatter Cannon/Problem solver (Both handmade AR's have the same legendary effect).

Even though they started off with base 100% damage, as an automatic they deal similar damage output to a single plasma shot in the first burst.

But due to the legendary effect of ramping up 15% damage per shot, it does 480+ damage for every burst past the 2nd.

Meaning at higher levels, the unique handmade assault rifles are flat out best in-game dps for the Commando perk. Period. Because they ramp up to 350% damage total or roughly 517.5 damage/burst at the 10th shot onwards.