Best Deathclaw recruit?

[Citronvand]

I would really like to use a deathclaw in my squad but I'm not sure which one:

Shriek
No glaring flaws except for chemical resistant (half drug duration). Good melee damage (8). Not sure how good "silent death" is in practice (double damage if backstabbing from sneak).

Shaav
Low carrying capacity due to small frame (only 125). Possibly great scout due to both Silent Running and Tunnel Rat (faster crawling speed). Weak as ♥♥♥♥ melee damage with only 1 bonus damage.

Krldraav (pronounced Krldraav)
Probably very lethal in melee due to high crit chance (13) and good melee bonus damage (8). Regains 5 AP after a kill. But here is the biggest problem, he can't use drugs & stimpacks! That means no psycho (50% damage resistance) or any other good drug. Without Psycho I fear he will get shredded very easily from shotguns/miniguns e.t.c.

Mother
Good overall except for her low melee damage (3) due to "domesticated". Has an additional 15% damage resistance from hide of scars.


Final notes:
I feel like Deathclaws in general are a bit gimped. The only thing going for them is good melee and high HP. But high HP doesn't mean jack♥♥♥♥♥♥when you cannot mitigate the damage. A deathclaw with the Hide of Scars perk has roughly the equivalent of a metal armor mk2. Which is ok at the start, but remember that is one less perk and deathclaws only gains perks every 4 level. If I wanted to min-max I don't think I would use a deathclaw at all.

[Citronvand]

I've now gained some experience with the deathclaws. On Springfield I used Shaav and Krldraav. Krldraav died from shotguns which is what I was afraid of, Shaav was ok, but his low carrying capacity and damage was disappointing. I loved his silent running however.

On St Louis I tried Mother. Was disappointing at first since the super mutants would have ~3 shotted her with their big guns. She lost like 1/3 HP from a burst. But after using Psycho, Afterburner Gum and Voodoo she entered ABSOLUTE BEAST MODE and proceeded to shred any mutie standing in her way while taking minimal damage, if any at all: https://imgur.com/a/AiecOxt She was great at cleaning up the trenches.

I haven't tried Shriek but I think he is going to have the same problem as Krldraav. Half drug duration probably means Psycho will run out in the mission, not sure what the duration it has but Voodoo lasted about 10-20 minutes on Mother and Psycho feels like a requirement. It was like night and day.

My current verdict is that Mother is the way to go. As long as you have drugs. She even gets a perk every 3 level and if you remove her Domesticated trait with Mutate she will deal more damage in melee, basically having no weakness, at least compared to the other deathclaws.

EDIT:
Found the duration for the drugs:
Buffout = 6 hours
Psycho = 4 hours
Voodoo = 20 minutes
Afterburner Gum = 2 Days (wtf)

So with Shriek those durations are halved. So I think it should be ok except for Voodoo. Some missions do take a long time so it's possible to exceed the 2 hour mark for Psycho but it is not as bad as I initially thought.

EDIT 2:
Disregard my previous edit, in Jefferson my drugs just run out and I'm pretty damn sure I didn't play for over 6 hours. So the duration is not real-time. If I had to guess it's probably around half, so a Psycho would last about 2 real hours. But that's just a guess. The important thing to take note of is that this severely lowers the usefulness of Shriek.

If I were to rank the deathclaws it would be:

Mother > Shaav > Shriek > Krldraav

[ApisMeli]

Thank you for this analysis. I really wanted a deathclaw on my team and tried Krildraav and found them not to be very useful, dying often. Hadn't tried drugs, though, except for anti-radiation ones, which seemed to have no effect.

[theworld]

Deathclaws are terrible because melee weapons are terrible[0], and the higher your difficulty the worse they are.

Drugs are OK when you're facing Super Mutants with normal weapons, but drugs cannot save you when energy and heavy explosives become the norm.

[0] The only exception is when you can "stun lock" a single target in CTB, but even that stops working vs robots who are too armored for that.

[rubyismycat]

Mother

[Othnielia]

i just use the deathclaws to carry guns/ ammo bc they have 350 pound carry limit.