I am level 25, on Hard mode, and have found that I have a very hard time killing most bad guys of similar level. I have a rare shotgun w/ exploding ammo that does 70 base dmg and it's my best weapon, but even still takes a good 10 shots to kill most robots or super mutants.
Last night I stumbled upon a .50 Cal Hunting Rifle, which I decided to pick up as I hadn't seen one before. It does 90 damage and has some mods for scope, fast reload, etc. I figured shotgun up close for 70 dmg + 15 dmg per exploding bullet would surely be comparable to the 90 damage .50 Cal, but to my surprise the Hunting Rifle does almost 5-6x the damage of any of my other 70 damage shotguns or 70 damage rare rifles (.308, .38, .45, laser). It kills most super mutants in 2 hits, raiders in 1-2, even level 30-35 enemies die in 3-4 shots.
Why does it do so much more damage? It isn't rare and has no special stats. I would think that going from 70 to 90 damage would be just over a 28% increase, but it seems more like 500%. I just want to understand why.
Best Answer
Because it's a bullet, not a spread.
Your shotgun does it's damage divided evenly among some (currently unknown) number of pellets. If every pellet hits, it'll add up to 70 damage (as far as exploding ammo goes, I'm not sure if we know if it applies to every shot or every pellet, but either way, we'll get into it). But if you miss with any pellets, your damage suffers. Additionally, the DR system in F4 is weighted against shotguns in general. Each pellet is DR'd separately, resulting in far less damage getting through.
Lets pretend your enemies have an average DR of 70. That means if your shotgun was loaded with slug rounds (which you can't do in the baseline game or any mods that I know of), you would deal ~35 damage per hit, because a 1:1 DR to Damage ratio reduces the damage by 50%. Now lets pretend your shotgun fires 5 pellets, for 14 damage each. The DR is now up to a ~5:1 ratio, which will be much less than 40% damage (~6 per pellet or ~ 30 damage if every one hits). Even if explosive ammo applies to each pellet, you're still around 29 damage, so a 5:2 ratio, still around ~61% reduction (~11 per pellet, ~ 55 if they all hit). You're also playing on hard, so each attack does 75% of the damage it should have when you're attacking enemies, dragging your damage down further. If it's more pellets than my pulled-from-thin-air-5, you're at an even greater disadvantage.
Whereas this sniper rifle, with it's 90 damage, somewhere around 45% of the damage is blocked, leaving you with ~50 damage, which is going to average MUCH higher than your partial hits with your shotgun.