On the wiki page for combat skills the formula given indicates that weapon damage should scale linearly with weapon skill from 0.5x at 0 skill to 1.5x at 100 skill. However the wiki page with the formulas for combat damage indicate that it scales from 0.5x to 1.0x. So I did some testing:
- I have a normal Hunting Rifle with no mods that is fully repaired
- The Hunting Rifle is listed as having 52 base damage on the wiki
- I have no perks that affect damage
- At Gun skill 25 the damage stat on the weapon is 36
- At Gun skill 50 the damage stat on the weapon is 43
If the damage scaled like the page for combat skills describes I would expect the weapon damage to be 1.0x at 50 skill, which should be 52. But it's 43.
If the skill multiplier instead scaled linearly from 0.5x to 1.0x I would have expected the damage to be 39 at 50 skill. It's possible that it scales non-linearly from 0.5x to 1.0x, the wiki page with the damage formula doesn't specify that the 0.5x to 1.0x scaling is linear.
If we assume that the base damage is in fact not 52 it's possible to make sense of this with a 0.5x-1.0x scale at a base damage of 58.
To sum up:
- The listed damage on the weapon in game could be wrong (UI bug)
- The page on the wiki describing combat damage could be wrong
- The page on the wiki describing weapon skill effect could be wrong
- The base damage for Hunting Rifle on the wiki could be wrong
- Multiple of these could be wrong at once
- I'm missing something
Best Answer
The scale is from 0.5x at 0 weapon skill to 1.0x at 100 weapon skill and the base damage listed on the wiki is correct.
I noticed that for all weapons the damage seemed to be 10% higher than expected. So I used console commands to remove the Cherchez La Femme perk and discovered that the numbers now made sense. The perk is supposed to add 10% damage only to female targets, so now I'm curious if this is a UI bug or if it actually just adds 10% damage no matter the target.