Radium Rifle

[Ricardo]

So guys a legendary explosive radium rifle just droped here from some random raider, i was wondering which one is better, Spray'n pray or this one ??

[SaltPoweredRobot]

Well, an unmoded Radium Rifle with the Explosive effect does slightly less damage than an unmoded Spray n' Pray, but it also does bonus Radiation damage. So it would be largely up to preference: Do you want a gun that by itself does more damage, or a gun that does bonus damage with Radiation?

[Chaosium]

The machine gun is a total waste of bullets compared to a radium rifle, switch to the latter without question

[Ricardo]

So i just tested the rifle and yes it's not even modded yet and it does more damage than Spray n' pray, its not automatic but i like it's rate of fire, so yeah i answered my own question, that thing is op...

[wtiger27]

The Overseer's Guardian is better than ether of those, after it has been fully modded. Plus it can be easily got very early in the game.

Also radiation damage is totally useless on some enemies. Ghouls, robots, to name just two.

[Fumo Bnnuy n Frends]

Radium for humans
Spray and pray literally anything else.

Such bs that rad damage doesn't affect other creatures. It really or only works on legendary humans or if they use stimpacks sometimes. The rads deplete max health you can regenerate so it helps against health refilling or legendary enemies.

That being said the rad damage imo should've been more for the radium rifle since the little it does is hugely offset by the bullet damage itself.

Same with the poison damage. What little it does it really only serves that little medium ground before you can one shot most enemies but take away more than 3/4th of their health. The slight poison damage helps finish em off.

Compare rads to say the atom hammer and the melee ofsets the rads it gives off but was a nice idea in theory where it was almost 50/50 normal damage / rad damage

[LOKI]

Pick the radium rifle why it have 3 type of damage the normal the radiation and the explosive if you level up the rifle skill and explosive and the radiation perk you gonna have a good mighty ass-kicking rifle in your hands.

[Kalypso]

Radium Rifle gets more damage overall with upgrades, as well as more range. There is not much benefit to using it over the SMG unless you are semi early game struggling to get enough of the ammo type for it.

[The Inept European]

The radium rifle with explosive is clearly better than the SMG with explosive, IF you can find or build an auto receiver for the radium rifle.

While the radium rifle remains semi auto, it will remain situation dependent.

[darinbob]

Radium rifle is from a DLC, not one of the original weapons. I tend to avoid it until I'm actually doing that DLC, asmany of the DLC weapons are very overpowered.

[Ricardo]

Yeah guys, i'm going to go with Spray'n pray for now, mostly because i don't have any automatic guns in my arsenal.

[ghpstage]

The radium is much better in most cases, but there is a grey area hanging around when suppressors come available (IIRC Spray and Pray comes with one). If you are making good use of a suppressor then you may well be better off with Spray and Pray for quite some time.

Originally posted by darinbob:

Radium rifle is from a DLC, not one of the original weapons. I tend to avoid it until I'm actually doing that DLC, asmany of the DLC weapons are very overpowered.

FO4 manages to avoid this in the most part by having the overwhelming majority of DLC weapons be gimmicky crap. Nuka World melee stands out as the biggest OP issue, and the handmade does become the games apex gun late in the game (but has crazy upgrade requirements.

The radium is basically a combat rifle variant that offers similar but generally lesser performance while having harsher upgrade requirements, and compensates by giving some (almost completely useless) bonus radiation damage. It's nothing special.

[darinbob]

Right, forgot that the radiation damage doesn't really do much when added to normal damage. Whereas ballistics+energy for 50 points each is 100 damage, ballistics+radiation for 50 points each is just 50+ points damage that doesn't heal without radaway. Though the radiation uses different defense, and you can mod to get more radiation than ballistics. Also, a lot of the scarier enemies shrug off radiation.

[Fumo Bnnuy n Frends]

Originally posted by darinbob:

Right, forgot that the radiation damage doesn't really do much when added to normal damage. Whereas ballistics+energy for 50 points each is 100 damage, ballistics+radiation for 50 points each is just 50+ points damage that doesn't heal without radaway. Though the radiation uses different defense, and you can mod to get more radiation than ballistics. Also, a lot of the scarier enemies shrug off radiation.

imo it would've been better to have radiation weapon kills give nuclear material instead of plasma cartridges. Like lazer vs plasma weapons lazers are more accurate but deal less damage while plasma does more but is slower and less accurate. Giving the nuclear material chance to rad weapons would've actually made them more useful.

That or maybe some mechanic where being near irridiated areas or the water would make rad damage double or triple depending on the intensity.

[ghpstage]

50 rads is not the same as 50 ballistic, they both act against a different point pools. The rad pool on any entity is always 1,000, and 50 rad damage against this would cause a reduction of 5% of max hitpoints (assuming zero resistance). Considering it only works against a select few enemies that is pretty pathetic.

As it can only be buffed by nuclear physicist and the irradiated legendary its hard to justify bothering to take them over the many things that would buff the ballistic damage.

I could see it being of note were you to storm a high level gunner base run and gun style at low levels, or simialr against hermit crabs, but in normal use its a bit of a joke.
It does a better job of annoying players, as dealing with rads in the field on survival is much more of a pain than plain damage.

[ErzPaladin]

Originally posted by Cute Loli Vampire of Christmas:

Originally posted by darinbob:

Right, forgot that the radiation damage doesn't really do much when added to normal damage. Whereas ballistics+energy for 50 points each is 100 damage, ballistics+radiation for 50 points each is just 50+ points damage that doesn't heal without radaway. Though the radiation uses different defense, and you can mod to get more radiation than ballistics. Also, a lot of the scarier enemies shrug off radiation.

imo it would've been better to have radiation weapon kills give nuclear material instead of plasma cartridges. Like lazer vs plasma weapons lazers are more accurate but deal less damage while plasma does more but is slower and less accurate. Giving the nuclear material chance to rad weapons would've actually made them more useful.

That or maybe some mechanic where being near irridiated areas or the water would make rad damage double or triple depending on the intensity.

I'm using a legendary Plasma Combat Shotgun and I've used the Radium Rifle for pretty a while. And I've never got any plasma- or nuclear material or something like that. Which is why, your answer kinda makes me curious~~

I've switched from legendary radium rifle to a legendary combat rifle which does +25 additional wounding dmg and I can say, that this works for me a lot better than the radiation effect did. You can really see how the wounding/bleeding effect stacks with each bullet over a certain duration (3-4 secs?).