Craftable weapons too late in game

[mojave_wastelander]

Craftable weapons are too expensive both in resources and skill requirements to be useful.
E.g. Freeze Ray requires ~2500 scrap, 1 frozen heart, 1 SR2000 rifle and 10 weird science to craft, then 10 sniper rifle to handle, obviously pretty late game requirements. By then most rifles on sale have better damage and lower requirements and the fact that rifle shoots in a line is more a detriment as the sniper is behind the team so you need either to move sniper or teammates.
Tried to build the spike driver and same conclusion, it feels like weapon crafting was added just as a way to quickly waste all that scrap that was collected during the game.

[Player#2201]

This might be a situation where the crafting system makes more sense in the full scope of the game (main + 2 dlc) than the way it exists now.
I had a new game all the way up to Yuma started before I began Steeltown, never selling junk/scrap as well as scraping all weapons, it still felt like I barely had enough. However, by the end of Steeltown, I noticed I'd collected about twice as much scrap there as I did the entirety of the rest of the game.
As far as the usefulness of the crafted weapons, I completely agree. None of them justify the cost or skill requirements compared to other weapons you could just pick up off the ground and mod (as much as I loved shrapnel bees, stacking status effects didn't match up to raw damage). If they lower the AP cost by 1 on all of those weapons, maybe I can see them being tactically useful.

[Papa Shekels]

I haven't even gotten to the testing yet because most of them require late-game weaponry to craft. With some luck, you can probably get it from vendors early on, and having 10x weapon modding and weird science is not too unreasonable by the time you get to denver for example. But by then you're relying on luck to supply you with the right gun, and will be using up most of if not all of your resources to make them.

I do agree that it feels out of place though. I feel bad that the game seemingly didn't get the time it needed, it was obvious at launch that a crafting system was intended but did not make it into the original product. This could be another such case where the balance revolves around something that isn't present. I went through steeltown on a level 9 team, and although a few parts were pretty challenging, the rest of the game (on supreme jerk mind you) is pretty easy since I can pass pretty much every skill check (even on harder skill checks) and wipe out half the enemies in one turn. Only issue is that because I'm so high level random encounter raiders have 1k+ hp and animals have 2-4k

[2 tay 3 súng]

I tested some crafted weapons and I find them so obsolete. The results weapons don't perform significantly better than the one use for crafting (and could be even be weaker), plus you will have to pay extra scraps and mods for making them.

The things that I found useful for crafting are weapon mods, some new armor mods and elite steeltown armors. Don't bother with others.