IMPORTANT Additions: Demolitions DOES work on hornet's nest shotguns making them even more lethal than they already are, thanks to everyone who mentioned this. Of course use with caution as it's incredibly easy to blow yourself up (you can't even be within 5m of your target on very hard without instakilling yourself). This also applies to explosive rounds but thankfully they're not as lethal to your own character. With that considered I'd for sure upgrade demolitions to a A tier as this is an extremely cheap way to consistently run high damage explosive weapons while also gaining some legitmate defensive bonuses along the way. I forgot to include that YES your particle beam weapons can benefit from the Lasers 4 Perk and the Ranks 1-3 damage bonuses too! PB weps are weird in that they don't benefit from ballistic type perks despite having a physical component but they are happy to take all the benefits of the laser skill alongside their main PB skill. They are already great weapons without skill point investment but this makes them even better. Cop an Eternity's Gate or equivalent PB rifle for optimal pew pew experience 🔫 A Note on the cutter - I've seen a few astute observers in the comments ask this so adding the answer to it here: "Wouldn't heavy weapons make the cutter more OP since it's a heavy weapon?" Excellent question! I failed to include this in the video but I tested the cutter with and without heavy weapons maxed and it has no impact on the burn damage portion of the cutter damage (my thought is because it's tied to lasers not the cutter). It does, however, improve the peanut damage that the cutter does but since that's a negligible amount of the cutter DPS I would still keep heavy weapons ranked as low as I have it in the video. Always great to see people coming up with awesome questions and points for why they'd rank skills differently! You can also just charge up a Novablast disruptor for a few seconds to dish out way more EM damage and it's usually enough to stun someone quickly (oversight to not include this). The point remains that incapacitation is a completely pointless skill. Also the variance on the weapon damages as some helpful people have pointed out is actually the "Handloading" weapon perk cycling a new value for the weapon every time a legendary is equipped. Weird programming but I understand why it's doing that at least. Interestingly there are many weapons that do this that also don't have handloading so I think it's a general issue with the game waiting for you to equip items before it runs a check on what the base values should get calculated to based on 1. Weapon perks 2. Weapon mods 3. Potentially skills (not sure on this one) How many skillpoints have you put into the combat tree so far? Personally I only put 2 points as I got a really lucky legendary roll and put strong mods on that weapon and now I steamroll just about anything I fight. I'm expecting a positive correlation between points invested in combat and higher difficulty levels, let's see how things play out... Let me know if I'm missing any hidden use cases for these skills!
Ive played through the whole game and did all side quests that i could find with the game on very hard and ive not invested a single point into the combat perk tree. I think im okay with the damage i do (although more would be nice) and i just think theres so many skills that unlock something new for me (like new attachments, recipes, decorations, stealth, lockpicking etc) that i cant really afford to spend skill points just so i do a little bit more damage which to me just equates to saving a few bullets. Same with the ship weapon skills although i would pick those over the combat skills. I think the whole skill tree in general is a bit lame. Its not crazy intricate where you can make a bunch of crazy cool builds, its mostly just small bonuses and then sometimes a skill will unlock a feature for you or something, pretty boring but i guess its the standard bethesda-rpg stuff like everything about this game
BTW (hoping u see this) explosive damage DOES impact explosive rounds on weapons. The damage gets split up, with part coming via the "round" (affected by ballistic) and part coming from the explosion area of effect. Explosive damage only affects the second number, (this also applies to grenade launchers as far as I know). I don't remember, and am on console, if the card damage changes or not but the damage from shooting stuff does.
I decided to fold and try Hornet's Nest now. It is stupid fun, and when I blow myself up it's just even funnier. To be nitpicky, the self-murder distance for me is 2m, having 3 points into wellness and 539 physical protection. Really wanting that 3rd demolitionist perk now though. I have 34 points in total in Combat, playing on Very Hard. Problem is they are spread around, having maxed both melee (where I started, with the false hope of melee being viable at some point), and pistols (because I did feel the need of a gun in the early game, but did not want to go with big guns. Have both Ballistics and Lasers at rank 4 and 3 respectively, and my current setup is Va'Ruun Inflictor, Hornet's Nest Coachman, and a Magsniper with its casual 1853 damage shots, not counting stealth bonus. A good chunk of the points were not invested until after I passed lvl 100 (now 133) Life has not seen fit to grant me boons in the form of rare/epic/legendary of any of the weapon types I now use, but so is life. Don't like doing cheese, and can't bother with it either, so I am left to roam with the basic ones. I found a single use for the EM damage though: levelling up Concealment. Knock something out, sneak behind it and melee, and as it is getting back up from waking you can knock it out with sneak damage bonus. EM required to knock something out does not seem to scale with level at all, so you can pick some high tier elite, tanky alien and max the skill very quickly (granted you have the skill points). I did not realize you could charge the Nova Blast though, interesting... Do hope we get some better use for them, aside from playing a pacifist* RP.
These are so well done. Every other skill "guide" is just somebody reading the perk trees aloud for 10 minutes so the research based approach is really appreciated! Looking forward to the science tree. A lot of those seem really situational and it's difficult to assess the value of mods without a lot of investment.
Bro I came into this game thinking I ain’t gonna waste any skills on combat. I’ll deal with the issue when I get there or lower the difficulty but this is very interesting good video man.
@@billywilson3285youll be fine if you stick to the settled systems. Dont go out into the deep without a level in scanning so you can keep distance from the aggressive xenos.
Have to admit though I didn't agree with a few ranks. Like crippling makes enemies stop attacking you, that's not "C". It's like having 100% damage resistance because you take zero damage
Thanks! Definitely trying to be thorough on these (which is why they take so long) and yet I STILL manage to overlook at leat a dozen things each time 😅 there's simply so many ways to play, thankfully everyone rescues me in the comments with the use cases I've missed
@@unclemumble So uh I'm on my first playthrough and cannot spend skill points into tech or science until your videos on come out on them so.... no rush
Wow thank you so much for the Super Thanks, that's extremely generous of you! I will 100% be looking into mods in a future video as I'm very curious how they all perform. From my general gameplay experience mods have made a giant impact on DPS, in same cases just as much if not more than some skills. Cheers!
This video was amazing. I wish they added more quest related reasons to use an EM weapon like bringing in bounties alive for a better reward etc. The UC faction was cool but very short lived. Ryujin's ones often get you spotted. It would have been perfect for Freestar Collective and bringing in the big bads but nope.
Teramorph- one of the VG quest…absolutely loved it. You get the option of using it or not in my case (because I didn’t realize by not listening to dialogue) but it to not kill friendlies attacking you. I won’t spoil it, but I’ll say you do learn a lot about the world of Star field through it.
@@nickeliacin9075 Yeah that was a pretty cool quest. UC is definitely one of my favourite factions. But that was kinda it. The Ryujin faction says to use them too but it usually gets you spotted due to bad ai design sadly.
Many missions like the Ryujins ones ask you to avoid detection or killings, when things go bad, equipping you and companion with non lethal weapon at least avoid the killings, but make it really painful.
The fact that the game makes you kill in several places where you could easily EM stun everyone and leave them alive is such a missed opportunity. It really angers me that even if I wanted to capture some criminals and bring them in alive, I don't get that option, nope gotta kill them. There are a few people in the different questlines that I wish you could incapacitate instead of kill.
solid idea. There was really only one time I had to use EM weapons (not counting the ones on my ship) -- during that Ryujin infiltration quest which needed a zero body count. Other infiltration missions, I just stealthed through no problem, but that mission had some pretty tight timings on guard routes and I had no choice but to stun a couple.
The ballistics thing where unequiping is changing the Damage value is actually due to the legendary perk "handloading". Everytime you fire/reload/load another round it changes the damage value of the next fired bullet, it has nothing to do with the actual perk.
@@MrZlocktar Yes. It works with each bullet. The negative is the damage boost is unreliable. So if you have a Hard Target Rifle that does 332 damage - the 5 round clip might go 647, 332, 542, 751, 332. For my setup I rarely get a headshot with it for less then around 5k but very often it will spike anywhere from 2-4k more damage. I love it, again the downside is that occasional you will get no damage boost on the round at all. But if it is legendary and you have all the sniper perks it hits like a truck no matter what but half the time does way more damage then it should. On something like a microgun the damage increase overall is going to be absurd.
@@MrZlocktar it's called Cornered. It raises damage as your hp decreases. If your hp is low and you equip an item with this, the damage on all of the weapons in your inventory will show higher.
When he talks about weapon damage around video time 3:10 he is mistaken. The reason the two weapon’s damage, he was showing in the video at the time, was changing was due to the trait hand loading volatile rounds. That trait cause your weapons damage to change on equip and reload.
2:53 that's the handloading effect doing that. Handloading gives you a random damage increase but also has a chance to do less than the base damage. It's not a bug.
Hmm I've noticed it on melee weapons as well but that doesn't have hand loading. Maybe close quarters impacting them? It probably is the handloading causing that though on the two guns in the video, thanks for catching that! It seems odd/misleading for it to flip flop around on the equip/unquip but I guess its just predetermining the damage value of the next shot that will be fired from it
@@unclemumble I've noticed this happening with a few weapons, a blue lawbreaker i had would do this but i figured it was bc i had the perk that does more damage in space/less on planets. Another rifle i use mostly has this happen as well but it doesn't have handloading either.
@@zSomertonnoh yes the space adept one 100% does this, you're right! It's definitely doing a calculation once you equip certain weapons as it's not factoring the mods and perks in until that point is my suspicion
Virtually all of skill points have been put into science, then a good chunk in piloting, and the rest in social with a tiny bit in physical and with none in combat. So I'm excited for the next one.
Indeed, Tech and Science are by far the most important skill trees, heavy investment in Tech is pretty much mandatory, and because of the UC Vanguard piloting simulator you can quickly grind the skills without cheesing the game getting into tough situations. Most of my skills go into Tech, then like 1/2 of that goes into science, modding is just so powerful. And outside of Science and Tech perks, I only put 1 in Theft, Stealth, and a few in scavenging which is honestly probably a waste but I can't help it. This is the ideal build in my eyes, I play exclusively on Very Hard no chems and ground combat is no trouble, only ship combat can be challenging could be a challenge. And investing in Science, specifically weapon modding is way more powerful than investing into Combat.
Same. Going for the skills that actually unlocks things instead of just boring % increases. Almost everything in Science, though a lot of the things are actually kinda crap. Then Tech for jetpack, hacking and C-class ships and ship modification. Nothing in combat, a single point in social and a few in physical.
Yeah, I was about to comment on this. Got an epic level Grandel super early in the game (Very hard) with explosive perk & it hasn't fallen off in terms of damage (level 49). That explosion proc hits way too hard & also knocks enemies back. With Demolition, I think explosive mod would become straight up broken.
When it comes to Demolition, the Coachman shotgun has a Hornet Nest mod that shoots explosives instead. Not sure if this works with Demolition since I've not tried it myself. But that said, the ammo for the Coachman is plentiful in comparison to actual rocket launchers. So if it works then I think it could be a better option for an explosion playstyle.
It does. It’s fucking stupid. Have the ability to upgrade weapons and built that. Damage is like 600 plus. Not sure if it’s per explosive it shoots but I just blind fire one tap everything in the damn game. It’s fun but I find every other weapon pointless to use now…
It does seem to work with demolition as my kills from my coachman add to the skill rank up meter. This is the only thing I was thinking about when watching this video. I’m using a legendary coachman with extended mags / lacerate / shattering with the hornet nest mod and it out damages everything else I have. It’s actually insane. The only issue is to not use it in close quarters as you just die immediately 😂
For the Incapacitation skill I believe charging up the nova blaster shot would make a big difference. With a fully charged shot you can knock out a human target in like 2-3 shots so I assume with the skill you can get closer to a 1-2 shot knockout, not including the sneak attack multiplier.
Yeah that's the one thing I noticed with this guide. Since he doesn't show any use of the fully charged EM guns I don't think he really tested for them. I'm not sure the skill would be worth the investment but maybe on certain niche builds.
Yeah you're 100% correct, great callout! It's funny I actually had put Nova blast originally but swapped it to equinox because equinox was technically the fastest at boosting up the EM bar assuming you didn't precharge a nova for 5-10 seconds. That said I should have shown it on screen with charged shots for comparison sake. That aside, the skill itself is still borderline useless as both a fully charged novablast and modded equinox can full stun almost any enemy with or with the rng of the 4th tier skill. Too hard to justify the points for the miniscule benefit
I think you might be able to reach breakpoints. The EM rifle was great when I started out, but turned out really weak later on(maybe because I ramped the difficulty). If you could achieve consistent 1-shots that'd be great.
i think shotguns synergize very well with sharp shooting since starfield seems to count shotgun hits by the pellet which means you'll be doing crits every hit.
@@freelancepear87kakkoka11 only thing more OP is a coachman modded with hornet nest. Need to max out weapon modding skill though but it's worth it. . .just be careful in tight and narrow spaces.
The cutter is a heavy weapon, so if you've already dumped 4 points into lasers and want to specialize in the cutter, heavy weapons 4 will help raise your durability.
I was thinking you could snag it for the 30% damage with the cutter. My quick and dirty amateur testing didn't see a difference, but maybe 30% isn't enough to make it tick to the next whole number? I figure the rank 4 resistance may not be relevant if it's only if you're aiming down the sights.
@@youtubesucks1821 _All_ guns are categorized with both a damage type (ballistic/laser/em/particle/explosive), and a weapon type (pistol/rifle/shotgun/heavy) for the purpose of skill eligibility.
@@goldenbatz Wow, I guess I never really payed attention to that. That's what I get for skipping all Dialogue and Story. They probably explained that at some point
13:32 - Casual bomb being dropped about Suppressors DOUBLING crit damage for Pistols and Snipers. I did NOT know about that! These videos are amazing dude. Thank you for your work!
This really confirmed all my decisions and on what i picked on the skill tree. Thanks for the more in-depth look into all of these and you're time and effort to get all these tested is appreciated.
Heavy Weapons also effects the Cutter making the beam even stronger. Idk about the fire effect, but anything that helps DPS is a good thing, also I'm pretty sure the '+25 damage resistance while aiming down sights' also works for it as well.
No damage buffs will help with Cutter. It's broken only because it's the only BEAM weapon in game with extreme high ROF in core of game engine, which procs fire from 4rd laser perks multiple times per combat, and fire does stacks. It's impossible to do with any other laser weapons because they don't have that much ROF, these are rifles, not a BEAM. There is one way to fix it - simply put stack of fire on max 2 or 3 stacks. It's not SKILL that is broken. It's the actual BEAM weapon with unlimited ROF is.
@@lancelot5878 He's right though, It's the fire ticks that are doing the vast majority of the damage (especially on harder difficulties) so a 30% buff to the cutter isn't doing much, though the DR while aiming is really good with the cutter since it has such short range.
I was recommended your channel and you are one of the best Starfield ressource out there. Thanks for everything, and im slowly binge watching all of your previous videos. Thanks!
Don't forget, demolitions also works with any weapon with explosive damage. Most rifles have an explosive damage mod, so you can stack the bonuses from balistics, rifles, and demolition.
Hey man, I just wanted to say these guides have been fantastic. As a starfield enjoyer, and a fellow (very novice) content creator I can clearly see the quality being upped with each of these videos too. You have quickly become a go-to resource for many explorers, no doubt.
2:47 - that's from the handloading perk. It can also happen with Wanted and Cornered. It's not a visual bug. It's is actually applying different damage per round.
Please keep this up. I really find these useful especially how you break down each individual tier level of any skill. You don't just say marksmanship is good. You go into the why.
Appreciate it! I definitely wanted to make a point of showing the skills in action to give more context to how they actually perform. It wasn't quite as useful for the 10-30% damage buffs but there are a lot of poorly described unique perks I thought people would benefit from really seeing before they decide to drop a skill point into it. Cheers!
First thing I look forward to this series every week so I got to say thank you for what you’re doing and I love your videos. Keep up the good work. As for weapons that are EM as far as the nova you have to charge it by holding down the fire trigger until the weapon vibrates then release and from my experience when I’m engaged in stealth 1 shot takes down every enemy Unfortunately everyone nearby is alerted.
Happy to hear! And yeah that was a silly omission, a charged Nova is actually quite strong which funny enough makes the incapacitation skill even less useful in my eyes
Demolitions boosts the coachman’s hornets nest rounds, which still use the normal caseless shotgun shells. Insane setup, as long as you don’t kill yourself Keep up the great work, you’ve got some great data points and have consistently put out the most in depth skill guides.
I've been looking forward to this video. I've been holding back using my skill points over the last week until I see all five of your guides - currently I'm sitting on about ten unused ones. 🤣
The EM damage bonuses are useful specifically for non-lethal stealth characters who are charging the disruptor *and* getting a sneak attack bonus. Great way to one shot take down an enemy without killing them (which is relevant to… one specific quest line, unless that’s your RP style)
For a future video, it would be good to go into the analysis and comparison of interactions of the Armor Piercing skill vs armor piercing rounds vs Shattering
Also, how shattering affects explosive damage. I got a coachman with explosive ammo and its legit the best weapon I found and few things survive a single shot
I love Incapacitation. Automatic refined equinox with all 4 ranks just humbles enemies and the duration is crazy long. Even on very hard. Of course I'm high level. Only the small clip sucks. But it's great to me, I use it all the time. I then sneak and x10 crit them with concealment 4 + melee rank 3. It's fun to me.
The real beauty was seeing Starfield's rare gunfish in their native environment for the intro. It brought a tear to my eye, and fuels my longing to return to that planet paradise.
Definitely super strong when built right, the range+accuracy is what's really lacking on them though. I find them best suited for combat in the major cities VS exploration
12:30 - You can actually charge the EM weapon instead of firing every round, it's one of those purposely untold effects that people had to find out from playing, Todd Howard even in a interview said they purposely didn't say everything on how to play the game to let players discover it on their own. Without the skill a fully charged shot will get nearly 100% to stun on the first hit, so raising the skill will let you 100% stun every time.
I think Balistics is a good catch-all early in the game. It was the first skill I maxxed purely because I thought that octopus patch looked cool. Lol Rapid Reload seems to be bugged for myself and some other players out there. The skill doesn't work if you have hand grenades equipped.
I love the badges, sadly they look cooler than they function half the time. Ballastics is definitely the best general weapon skill to upgrade unless you go crazy for the laser burn perk so your points were not spent in vain!
Your testing, analysis, and succinct wrap up is some of the best “time conserving” content on Starfield I’ve seen. Thank you for being clear and concise. Insta sub.
This is such a great series, looking forward to the next chapters. My personal experience on pistols. One of the first guns I looted was a superior Urban Eagle and it's literally seen me through the entire game so far. The crit dmg is epic. I keep trying other guns but I always go back to the deagle. I haven't invested any points in combat either. I'm about level 35
Oh man a superior anything is gonna be hard to beat! Urban eagles SMACK too. I've had a similar experience with a godly legendary Beowulf I've ran for 90% of my playthrough. Having the range and accuracy makes it so useful for planetary exploration and that's where my pistols have always fallen short
yeah, I got a calibrated star shard pistol and it one shots minions on very hard difficulty. I wonder if pistols have a higher base crit chance by default. feels like it in my experience (I'm lvl 50 pre-ng+)
@@unclemumble My usual gun for NG+ runs is an Advanced Beowulf. Semi-auto, AP rounds, high powered. High rate of fire semi-auto that hits for 250+ damage per trigger pull. 1-3 taps everything outside of legendary enemies. And common ammo too. It breaks open the game. Only gun you need if you're just trying to get through a NG+ run.
You have a gun that actually has superior in the name? Ive heard that superior guns are bugged in that they are still labelled advanced despite having the superior base damage
If you want consistant ammo for any gun till it fets patched. - Buy Titanium and Polymer. Stock up at a 2:1 ratio - Build an outpost - Place as many weapon cases as you can. Small has pistol ammo, medium has Rifle ammo, and large has heavy ammo. - once your desired cases have been placed, save the game. - Load that same save (if you end up reloaded it a 2nd time it prevents this from working on this placement of cases.) - Look at out outpost beacon and delete it. (All weapons and ammo will go into your ship then your inventory if your ship is full. - Rinse and repeat. Enjoy infinite ammo and maybe some good legendary weapons. NOTE that if you have over 100,000 ammo it will only show the left most 5 digits. So if you had 123,456 ammo it would only show 12,345. So for your sanity delete or sell any ammo above 95,000 ammo.
@@Boss0Leeny No, you build the cases, save the game and then reload it. Now all the cases you built have been populated with random guns and ammo. A patch ago these would be truly random weapons, some of them would be rare, epic, legendary, etc; and when you dismantle the outpost it would put them all into your ship's inventory or your own if your ship was full. As of a day or so ago they are now all just normal weapons and they all fall to the ground when you dismantle the outpost and you have to pick them up by hand. Still the best way to quickly spawn a ton of ammo and weapons to sell.
@@akonako364 Aka, being in poor sport of the game. It's not like ammo is hard to get normally, anyways. Just vendor stuff you loot and buy ammo off of them. I never ran out of ammo and had 1000s of each type just from buying all ammo at vendors every time I visited them to sell off loot.
@@akonako364 They patched it so that you no longer get legendary/epic/rare weapons from doing this, and the game already showers you in tons of stuff you can sell just doing quests. The main bottleneck to getting rich is waiting out the ridiculous refresh timers on all the merchants and the fact that ships are so much more expensive relative to gear/weapons with no way to offset that cost by selling your stored value in ammo. It's baffling game design and really unfun. The ship designer punishes you because anything you spend on your ship is just gone forever, and the mechanic you have available to recoup your money by selling all the stuff you've accumulated is a non trivial amount of time spent waiting out merchants and doing circuits of Neon or other high-density areas.
I would be interested in seeing the math of the claims about pistols being the least damaging weapon class, particularly with the hidden technique of the binary trigger, effectively turning them into full auto guns without the damage falloff of full auto.
@@Kyle-nm1kh Fair statements, and I never said the claims were wrong. Just that I would be interested in seeing comparisons in the math. On higher difficulties, the mag size could be considered a benefit, considering you can dump your damage, take cover while you reload, and repeat, minimizing the amount of time spent vulnerable.
All I know is that I'm playing on Very Hard and pretty much main a ballistic pistol and it puts down enemies quicker than almost all of my rifles. I have both skills maxed out, too. Another thing to take into consideration is the rolls you have on your weapons.
@beardedshawn I only played on hard, and put maybe 30+ hours so nothing ceazy, but a Rattler with a binary trigger was certainly putting in work. Most rifles were doing like 30-50 damage full auto, meanwhile a base Rattler doing 70 to 90. Not to mention the added benefit of pistol perks coming online sooner than rifle due to challenges and tiers.
Ammo shortage seems to be a big issue to some of these weapon types. I was disappointed to find you cant manufacture bullets, but hopefully that'll be added in an update.
Mumble, you’re the best!! This is the most informative RUclips experience I’ve ever had, you’re amazing I subscribed before launch and you’re the only guy I still watch please do the Tech Tree next. And when this starfield ride is over KEEP MAKING GAME REVIEWS. You’re awesome
16:00 I haven't extensively tested this, but I'm pretty sure Marksmanship works with burst fire weapons as well. "non-automatic" in Starfield doesn't mean what it sounds like. Leveling up the armor penetration perk requires you to get kills with "non-automatic" weapons, and my burst fire advanced Beowulf absolutely counted for those kills.
Love this series and I been loving my character plus this has shown on my combat centric Smooth Talker Bounty Hunter Level 34: +4 Commerce +3 Persuasion +4 Isolation +4 Ballistics +3 Rifle +2 Sniper +2 crit +2 armor pene. I'm working on that last few tiers of combat and my guy already feels Crazy with Revenant, Single Fire A 99 ad 1K damage MagSniper.
I’ve only put a single point into the combat skills, which went into grenades for the arc feature. I think over-leveled (currently 50) to get more skill points, so even playing on Very Hard is actually really easy 😔 I’ll probably install a difficulty mod or something.
Similar experience, I put 0 points in at level 56 now. Just ground other stuff, then got special projects 4 and I'm just on infinite resources and instantly making every weapon like double edps.
Yeah once you have the right weapons and you make a point of using cover there isn't much difficulty does other than make fights last longer. Also the fact that you can use as many medpack as you want to stack healing makes it easy to get out of any dicey situation. I would have really liked more intelligent AI as difficulty increased but that's obviously asking too much 😅
Starfield is the one Bethesda game In which we actually needed level scaling. Just doing the side missions and exploring has shot me to lvl 60, and now most worlds that I haven't yet explored are too easy. Where is the demon time black air force energy worlds? Even the terrormorph city Londinion is for some reason empty after your mission there and the terrormorphs out in the world are lvl 10.
Love this series. Extremely useful, informative and still straightforward. I really enjoy your video style over the "let's say the same thing 45 times to fluff video time" style. Thank you for your contribution to the Starfield community. One thing though.. where's the Tech tree video? I've searched for like 40 minutes trying to find it. Maybe I'm blind? Maybe it's coming soon? 😁
For me, pistols have high damage and decent dps and go ballistic with a binary trigger having the highest dps by a good margin, try it on the regulator, sure, you need to reload a lot, but it's like 2k dps where rifles are down in the 800-1200 range.
The explosive lvl 1 was all I felt like investing in for the combat tree. By the time I used the point though, I had a pretty solid idea of where to throw a grenade, but I use them more as a diversion and stun hit than anything since I'm generally using rifles for 90% of combat. I have a few nice pistols I can use for lower levels, or the Crimson Fleet pistol that acts similar to a one shot shotgun with a quick reload. I didn't upgrade to lvl 2 explosives SPECIFICALLY because I rarely take damage from enemy grenades, and if I flub my own throw or the animation fucks up as I'm running, I tend to take a hit from my own attacks way more often.
I have had a lot of visual bugs lately when it comes to stats, but I also had my ship only half render so I got stuck inside without beeing able to interact with the door, its a bethesda game after all and its eerily bug free so far
"Eerily bug feee so far." I was more than 100 hours into the game before I hit my first serious bugs, which showed up together for some reason. A few minutes on google found quick fixes for both of them. 1) After the "High Price to pay" mission I couldn't change my human companion until I made Vasco my companion. 2) Echoing sound. Force quit the game from the home page.
I also run into issues now, vendors disappearing, ships disappearing, names resetting to nonsense and just crashing. Somehow their patches made it worse
I don't play Starfield, and I saw a recommendation to check out this video because it would talk about funny bugs during the informative process and I was not disappointed. Good job. Videos like this, regardless of game, are vitally important.
At 2:50 the reason it gives a different damage value is because if the weapon has “handloading” as an effect it’s actually displaying the potential damage ranges. So if a weapon that would normally deal a flat 100 dps, it instead would deal 50-150 dps.
Great guides, best out there, heads and tails above the rest. I’d like to see a guide on how companion skills work, as there doesn’t seem to be a definitive conclusion, especially around ship related skills. Again, great job.
You are the GOAT my man! Some of these skill description are vague to the point of uselessness, some skills like Rejuvenation straight up don’t work, so your work is amazingly useful!
Consistent 40mmxpl rounds: Laredo Armaments on Akila. They're the manufacturer of the Bridger and can spawn up to 40 grenades. Edit: Centaurian Arsenal in New Atlantis can have to up 9 on sale. But, really, the Combat tree seemed so boring that I skipped it until I was a high level. By going for Weapon Modding in the Science tree you can get high powered, armor piercing rounds, put flechette rounds on shotguns that(as a special exception) deal full damage as automatic weapons, and more. It easily eclipses the base 30% damage from 3 ranks of a combat skill.
On your comment about demolitions ammo: I use a Hornet Nest Coachman. Now both grenades and other explosive heavies are obsolete, as this thing hits hard and the ammo is much more common than xpl too. Luckily landed one with extended mag so the fast 1-2-3-4 booms it can put out really adds up, and it is also good at getting people hiding behind cover. Incapacitation: Yeah... instead of leveling this, I just turn the difficulty down from Very Hard to Very Easy when doing a stealth mission. Boom, now my disruptor is a 1tap stun even without charging. Marksmanship: I'm not 100% sure but I think it applies to burst fire too. Whatever is going on, my suppressed burst Beowulf shreds. Of course so do my semi-autos: Orion, Inflictor, and suppressed Hard Target. But I've found all the Grunt magazines and have points in Sniper and Sharpshooting. So yeah, popping heads with crits.
I absolutely luv these kind of vids playing the game. As these kind of vids helps to demystify many the things in the game that just don’t have clear clarity to the player.
Yeah depending on the difficulty you can definitely hit a wall in the higher level systems. It's either painfully slow to kill, you take too much damage, or both
couple things I wanna mention for the guide. Laser despite the name actually just increases energy damage. Including particle beam weapons and applies to all energy bonuses despite it being called laser so arc welder can be improved by it as well though don't know if they trigger the burn effect and should be tested as well. Second Demolitions needs a second look at because of the mods Hornet Nest and Explosive rounds. Hornet nest is on the grenade launcher and the coachmen, explosive rounds are on shotguns rifles and pistols as well as demolitions count explosive legendary effect for it's kills so those also need to be tested to make sure demolitions gets a fair shake.
Great points! Yeah the lasers one is definitely interesting and it makes it even better, same seems to be the case for demlotions. I'll have to add some notes to address these and they probably each warrant a +1 rank with that considered
@@unclemumble it would be cool for a follow up eventually especially on the explosive stuff to see how effective the explosive rounds and coachmen with hornet nest. It's kinda hard to get an accurate test in normal gameplay.
15:45 Rifles rank 4 skill is bugged (as is Rapid Reload) if you have a throwable weapon equipped) - just an FYI to anyone trying to figure out why it’s not working.
thank you for doing more than just reading the description and telling us its good! ive been curious on how these skills work and if they’re practical. keep it up! and thank you!
thank you so much. I just found these talent tree guides of you a few days ago and they were so much help! I was looking forward to the combat one. thanks
Subscribed. I am currently using a Big Bang that has 4/7 mods. My physical is 175 and Energy 564. I love this guy. One or two shots most things are crossing styx.
After watching this, I'm happy to say I have only spent 3 points in the combat tier. I'm level 64 on very hard and I've run into little challenge combat wise. The next two lists I am VERY interested in as those are the ones I have invested the most in. Thank you again for all this hard work man.
When you get done with the skill guides (especially since this would feed well into the Tech skill tree), I'd love to see a detailed rundown of Ship weapons. The ship builder has really limited information, specifically telling you NOTHING about how many shots a weapon holds in a single charge or how long the recharge is, which are both really important things to know if you are trying to build the "ultimate" ship. Something your brand of testing could really help out with.
These are the types of videos that I look for, and I appreciate all the hard work you put into this. Liked and subscribed for the hard work. We do not need 29 more videos from 45 more ppl about the same 3 xp "glitches" it gun box glitch.
I've been playing a ballistic rifle playthrough and have discovered that burst fire mode counts as single shot at least as it relates to the lvl 4 Marksman perk. My burst fire Beowulf is knocking down enemies, although I can't tell if it is getting the bonus from the critical. My build looks like a sniper build but the burst fire with a helmet that has the Headhunter skill absolutely chews through enemies. I also got luck and got a cornered beowulf so as fights go on I get more deadly.
11:31 you can mod your shotgun with common ammo into rocket launcher, and this skill will affect it. This way you will combine ballistics, shotgun, demolishing and marksmanship.
06:44 Pistol Certification When you are talking crit chance, don't overlook the magazine perks that add crit effects. 09:03 Shotgun Certification angryturtlegaming was on his way to becoming an expert shotgunner when he discovered that 2 shotguns are bugged and don't gain certain perks from the build.
also this data explains a ton why armor piericing rounds are so damn strong. i appreciate the effort to get this data. its not just you describing the perks and giving an opinion but crunching the damage calculation numbers which always seem to be a point of mystery in many games these days
My current investment in the Combat Tree is 4 points in Dueling. I didn't set out planning a melee build, but early on, I made the mistake of landing on the wrong side of the tutorial mission planet, and fought a completely separate pirate gang than the one I was supposed to. Blew through all my ammo in the process. Picked up a rescue axe from one of their corpses, and started putting my points into dueling. Never looked back. Now I rock the Syndicate Enforcer.
Stealth perks mixed with a lot of the rifle perks, is probably the most OP build I have atm. Especially with a Va'Ruun Inflictor. Got one with Instigating, Hitman and Shattering, was 1 shotting just about everything with it, with some enemies needing 2-3 more shots, but usually it was always 1 shot.
If one does the side quests, some surveying, and a lot of scavenging per mission, you will stumble upon a lot of legendary weapons that take care of many of these skills. The tree can be used to supplement those weapons to great effect without having to spend points at the higher ranks of each skill. The lower ranked skills in this video, like targeting, can supplment the legendary weapons that already have armor piercing, the down effect, etc.
From my practical experience, from not investing in any of the "certification" skills to not limit what weapons I can use. With the ballistics and the non-automatic boosting skills, Beowulf and a slug modded Breach were by far the best performing weapons. I hear the Magshear is insane on full auto, but I didnt like tearing through my ammo so I stuck with semi-auto and built around that. Pistols might not scale nearly as well as rifles, but I really dug how the Urban Eagle and the XM-2311 felt to use.
IMPORTANT Additions: Demolitions DOES work on hornet's nest shotguns making them even more lethal than they already are, thanks to everyone who mentioned this. Of course use with caution as it's incredibly easy to blow yourself up (you can't even be within 5m of your target on very hard without instakilling yourself). This also applies to explosive rounds but thankfully they're not as lethal to your own character. With that considered I'd for sure upgrade demolitions to a A tier as this is an extremely cheap way to consistently run high damage explosive weapons while also gaining some legitmate defensive bonuses along the way.
I forgot to include that YES your particle beam weapons can benefit from the Lasers 4 Perk and the Ranks 1-3 damage bonuses too! PB weps are weird in that they don't benefit from ballistic type perks despite having a physical component but they are happy to take all the benefits of the laser skill alongside their main PB skill. They are already great weapons without skill point investment but this makes them even better. Cop an Eternity's Gate or equivalent PB rifle for optimal pew pew experience 🔫
A Note on the cutter - I've seen a few astute observers in the comments ask this so adding the answer to it here: "Wouldn't heavy weapons make the cutter more OP since it's a heavy weapon?" Excellent question! I failed to include this in the video but I tested the cutter with and without heavy weapons maxed and it has no impact on the burn damage portion of the cutter damage (my thought is because it's tied to lasers not the cutter). It does, however, improve the peanut damage that the cutter does but since that's a negligible amount of the cutter DPS I would still keep heavy weapons ranked as low as I have it in the video. Always great to see people coming up with awesome questions and points for why they'd rank skills differently!
You can also just charge up a Novablast disruptor for a few seconds to dish out way more EM damage and it's usually enough to stun someone quickly (oversight to not include this). The point remains that incapacitation is a completely pointless skill.
Also the variance on the weapon damages as some helpful people have pointed out is actually the "Handloading" weapon perk cycling a new value for the weapon every time a legendary is equipped. Weird programming but I understand why it's doing that at least. Interestingly there are many weapons that do this that also don't have handloading so I think it's a general issue with the game waiting for you to equip items before it runs a check on what the base values should get calculated to based on 1. Weapon perks 2. Weapon mods 3. Potentially skills (not sure on this one)
How many skillpoints have you put into the combat tree so far? Personally I only put 2 points as I got a really lucky legendary roll and put strong mods on that weapon and now I steamroll just about anything I fight.
I'm expecting a positive correlation between points invested in combat and higher difficulty levels, let's see how things play out...
Let me know if I'm missing any hidden use cases for these skills!
Ive played through the whole game and did all side quests that i could find with the game on very hard and ive not invested a single point into the combat perk tree. I think im okay with the damage i do (although more would be nice) and i just think theres so many skills that unlock something new for me (like new attachments, recipes, decorations, stealth, lockpicking etc) that i cant really afford to spend skill points just so i do a little bit more damage which to me just equates to saving a few bullets. Same with the ship weapon skills although i would pick those over the combat skills.
I think the whole skill tree in general is a bit lame. Its not crazy intricate where you can make a bunch of crazy cool builds, its mostly just small bonuses and then sometimes a skill will unlock a feature for you or something, pretty boring but i guess its the standard bethesda-rpg stuff like everything about this game
BTW (hoping u see this) explosive damage DOES impact explosive rounds on weapons. The damage gets split up, with part coming via the "round" (affected by ballistic) and part coming from the explosion area of effect. Explosive damage only affects the second number, (this also applies to grenade launchers as far as I know). I don't remember, and am on console, if the card damage changes or not but the damage from shooting stuff does.
Did you test if the ignition beams on laser weapons benefit with the talent 4 for lasers?
I'm curious about heavy laser weapons like the arc welder. I get it uses ammo, but wouldn't it be higher damage than the cutter?
I decided to fold and try Hornet's Nest now. It is stupid fun, and when I blow myself up it's just even funnier.
To be nitpicky, the self-murder distance for me is 2m, having 3 points into wellness and 539 physical protection. Really wanting that 3rd demolitionist perk now though.
I have 34 points in total in Combat, playing on Very Hard. Problem is they are spread around, having maxed both melee (where I started, with the false hope of melee being viable at some point), and pistols (because I did feel the need of a gun in the early game, but did not want to go with big guns. Have both Ballistics and Lasers at rank 4 and 3 respectively, and my current setup is Va'Ruun Inflictor, Hornet's Nest Coachman, and a Magsniper with its casual 1853 damage shots, not counting stealth bonus. A good chunk of the points were not invested until after I passed lvl 100 (now 133)
Life has not seen fit to grant me boons in the form of rare/epic/legendary of any of the weapon types I now use, but so is life. Don't like doing cheese, and can't bother with it either, so I am left to roam with the basic ones.
I found a single use for the EM damage though: levelling up Concealment. Knock something out, sneak behind it and melee, and as it is getting back up from waking you can knock it out with sneak damage bonus. EM required to knock something out does not seem to scale with level at all, so you can pick some high tier elite, tanky alien and max the skill very quickly (granted you have the skill points). I did not realize you could charge the Nova Blast though, interesting... Do hope we get some better use for them, aside from playing a pacifist* RP.
The most useful series on Starfield
Agreed
Guy just became the jgod of starfield
Facts
This and the person that made the videos on all the hab interiors and cockpits.
Hands down
These are so well done. Every other skill "guide" is just somebody reading the perk trees aloud for 10 minutes so the research based approach is really appreciated!
Looking forward to the science tree. A lot of those seem really situational and it's difficult to assess the value of mods without a lot of investment.
Bro I came into this game thinking I ain’t gonna waste any skills on combat. I’ll deal with the issue when I get there or lower the difficulty but this is very interesting good video man.
@@billywilson3285youll be fine if you stick to the settled systems.
Dont go out into the deep without a level in scanning so you can keep distance from the aggressive xenos.
@@SuwinTzi ohh? Scanning does what?? I thought it was just additional colored zones for the rarer minerals. please explain! Thanks!
Have to admit though I didn't agree with a few ranks. Like crippling makes enemies stop attacking you, that's not "C". It's like having 100% damage resistance because you take zero damage
Betty howser with a grenade launcher is the ultimate combat skill tree substitute
With the level of first hand testing you're doing, these are the de facto best skill guides for Starfield out there.
Thanks! Definitely trying to be thorough on these (which is why they take so long) and yet I STILL manage to overlook at leat a dozen things each time 😅 there's simply so many ways to play, thankfully everyone rescues me in the comments with the use cases I've missed
@@unclemumble So uh I'm on my first playthrough and cannot spend skill points into tech or science until your videos on come out on them so.... no rush
Fantastic series. Please examine the Arc Welder and Hornet Nest mod on Coachman.
Thanks for the informative video.
Wow thank you so much for the Super Thanks, that's extremely generous of you! I will 100% be looking into mods in a future video as I'm very curious how they all perform. From my general gameplay experience mods have made a giant impact on DPS, in same cases just as much if not more than some skills. Cheers!
This video was amazing.
I wish they added more quest related reasons to use an EM weapon like bringing in bounties alive for a better reward etc. The UC faction was cool but very short lived. Ryujin's ones often get you spotted. It would have been perfect for Freestar Collective and bringing in the big bads but nope.
Teramorph- one of the VG quest…absolutely loved it. You get the option of using it or not in my case (because I didn’t realize by not listening to dialogue) but it to not kill friendlies attacking you. I won’t spoil it, but I’ll say you do learn a lot about the world of Star field through it.
@@nickeliacin9075 Yeah that was a pretty cool quest. UC is definitely one of my favourite factions. But that was kinda it. The Ryujin faction says to use them too but it usually gets you spotted due to bad ai design sadly.
Many missions like the Ryujins ones ask you to avoid detection or killings, when things go bad, equipping you and companion with non lethal weapon at least avoid the killings, but make it really painful.
The fact that the game makes you kill in several places where you could easily EM stun everyone and leave them alive is such a missed opportunity. It really angers me that even if I wanted to capture some criminals and bring them in alive, I don't get that option, nope gotta kill them. There are a few people in the different questlines that I wish you could incapacitate instead of kill.
solid idea. There was really only one time I had to use EM weapons (not counting the ones on my ship) -- during that Ryujin infiltration quest which needed a zero body count. Other infiltration missions, I just stealthed through no problem, but that mission had some pretty tight timings on guard routes and I had no choice but to stun a couple.
The ballistics thing where unequiping is changing the Damage value is actually due to the legendary perk "handloading". Everytime you fire/reload/load another round it changes the damage value of the next fired bullet, it has nothing to do with the actual perk.
Oh, so that's what it does.. does it work will full magazine? Or just one bullet? What's the negative part of this perk?
There is also a perk that increases damage you do the lower your health is. Equipping and unequipping these items will change damage values.
@@MrZlocktar Yes. It works with each bullet. The negative is the damage boost is unreliable. So if you have a Hard Target Rifle that does 332 damage - the 5 round clip might go 647, 332, 542, 751, 332. For my setup I rarely get a headshot with it for less then around 5k but very often it will spike anywhere from 2-4k more damage. I love it, again the downside is that occasional you will get no damage boost on the round at all. But if it is legendary and you have all the sniper perks it hits like a truck no matter what but half the time does way more damage then it should. On something like a microgun the damage increase overall is going to be absurd.
@@thefelsage How they call this perk?
@@MrZlocktar it's called Cornered. It raises damage as your hp decreases. If your hp is low and you equip an item with this, the damage on all of the weapons in your inventory will show higher.
When he talks about weapon damage around video time 3:10 he is mistaken. The reason the two weapon’s damage, he was showing in the video at the time, was changing was due to the trait hand loading volatile rounds. That trait cause your weapons damage to change on equip and reload.
2:53 that's the handloading effect doing that. Handloading gives you a random damage increase but also has a chance to do less than the base damage. It's not a bug.
Hmm I've noticed it on melee weapons as well but that doesn't have hand loading. Maybe close quarters impacting them?
It probably is the handloading causing that though on the two guns in the video, thanks for catching that! It seems odd/misleading for it to flip flop around on the equip/unquip but I guess its just predetermining the damage value of the next shot that will be fired from it
@@unclemumble I've noticed this happening with a few weapons, a blue lawbreaker i had would do this but i figured it was bc i had the perk that does more damage in space/less on planets. Another rifle i use mostly has this happen as well but it doesn't have handloading either.
@@zSomertonnoh yes the space adept one 100% does this, you're right! It's definitely doing a calculation once you equip certain weapons as it's not factoring the mods and perks in until that point is my suspicion
Virtually all of skill points have been put into science, then a good chunk in piloting, and the rest in social with a tiny bit in physical and with none in combat. So I'm excited for the next one.
Indeed, Tech and Science are by far the most important skill trees, heavy investment in Tech is pretty much mandatory, and because of the UC Vanguard piloting simulator you can quickly grind the skills without cheesing the game getting into tough situations. Most of my skills go into Tech, then like 1/2 of that goes into science, modding is just so powerful. And outside of Science and Tech perks, I only put 1 in Theft, Stealth, and a few in scavenging which is honestly probably a waste but I can't help it. This is the ideal build in my eyes, I play exclusively on Very Hard no chems and ground combat is no trouble, only ship combat can be challenging could be a challenge. And investing in Science, specifically weapon modding is way more powerful than investing into Combat.
That’s funny I have zero in science in my first playthrough and tier 4 skills unlocked in combat
Same. Going for the skills that actually unlocks things instead of just boring % increases. Almost everything in Science, though a lot of the things are actually kinda crap. Then Tech for jetpack, hacking and C-class ships and ship modification. Nothing in combat, a single point in social and a few in physical.
Demolition is a pretty good if you mod your weapon to do explosive damage or have a weapon with the legendary effect.
Yeah, I was about to comment on this. Got an epic level Grandel super early in the game (Very hard) with explosive perk & it hasn't fallen off in terms of damage (level 49). That explosion proc hits way too hard & also knocks enemies back.
With Demolition, I think explosive mod would become straight up broken.
When it comes to Demolition, the Coachman shotgun has a Hornet Nest mod that shoots explosives instead. Not sure if this works with Demolition since I've not tried it myself. But that said, the ammo for the Coachman is plentiful in comparison to actual rocket launchers. So if it works then I think it could be a better option for an explosion playstyle.
It does. It’s fucking stupid. Have the ability to upgrade weapons and built that. Damage is like 600 plus. Not sure if it’s per explosive it shoots but I just blind fire one tap everything in the damn game. It’s fun but I find every other weapon pointless to use now…
It does seem to work with demolition as my kills from my coachman add to the skill rank up meter. This is the only thing I was thinking about when watching this video. I’m using a legendary coachman with extended mags / lacerate / shattering with the hornet nest mod and it out damages everything else I have. It’s actually insane. The only issue is to not use it in close quarters as you just die immediately 😂
Its pretty op but situational, youll just kill yourself with it indoors.
@@alcazabarailings ki me more than enemies
Fascinating, thanks for sharing! Looking forward to testing all weapon mods out to see other interesting interactions like this
For the Incapacitation skill I believe charging up the nova blaster shot would make a big difference. With a fully charged shot you can knock out a human target in like 2-3 shots so I assume with the skill you can get closer to a 1-2 shot knockout, not including the sneak attack multiplier.
Yeah that's the one thing I noticed with this guide. Since he doesn't show any use of the fully charged EM guns I don't think he really tested for them. I'm not sure the skill would be worth the investment but maybe on certain niche builds.
Yeah you're 100% correct, great callout! It's funny I actually had put Nova blast originally but swapped it to equinox because equinox was technically the fastest at boosting up the EM bar assuming you didn't precharge a nova for 5-10 seconds. That said I should have shown it on screen with charged shots for comparison sake.
That aside, the skill itself is still borderline useless as both a fully charged novablast and modded equinox can full stun almost any enemy with or with the rng of the 4th tier skill. Too hard to justify the points for the miniscule benefit
TIL you can charge the Nova Blaster.
Is just like with the Magshot Sniper?
I think you might be able to reach breakpoints. The EM rifle was great when I started out, but turned out really weak later on(maybe because I ramped the difficulty). If you could achieve consistent 1-shots that'd be great.
With the addition of bounties that you should bring back alive, it's made the Nova Blaster a useful tool with this skill for aspiring bounty hunters
i think shotguns synergize very well with sharp shooting since starfield seems to count shotgun hits by the pellet which means you'll be doing crits every hit.
That's why Boom Boom(bought at Neon weapon store) is so OP. Its explosive. . .per pellet.
@@chadharger9323 gotta keep that in mind.
@@freelancepear87kakkoka11 only thing more OP is a coachman modded with hornet nest. Need to max out weapon modding skill though but it's worth it. . .just be careful in tight and narrow spaces.
The cutter is a heavy weapon, so if you've already dumped 4 points into lasers and want to specialize in the cutter, heavy weapons 4 will help raise your durability.
It must count as both then, because it is 100% a laser weapon
I was thinking you could snag it for the 30% damage with the cutter. My quick and dirty amateur testing didn't see a difference, but maybe 30% isn't enough to make it tick to the next whole number?
I figure the rank 4 resistance may not be relevant if it's only if you're aiming down the sights.
@@youtubesucks1821that is how it works
@@youtubesucks1821 _All_ guns are categorized with both a damage type (ballistic/laser/em/particle/explosive), and a weapon type (pistol/rifle/shotgun/heavy) for the purpose of skill eligibility.
@@goldenbatz Wow, I guess I never really payed attention to that. That's what I get for skipping all Dialogue and Story. They probably explained that at some point
13:32 - Casual bomb being dropped about Suppressors DOUBLING crit damage for Pistols and Snipers. I did NOT know about that!
These videos are amazing dude. Thank you for your work!
max damage hornet nest coachmen with maxed demolition and isolation user: i am the doombringer of every organic thing and robot i see in my path
This really confirmed all my decisions and on what i picked on the skill tree. Thanks for the more in-depth look into all of these and you're time and effort to get all these tested is appreciated.
Heavy Weapons also effects the Cutter making the beam even stronger. Idk about the fire effect, but anything that helps DPS is a good thing, also I'm pretty sure the '+25 damage resistance while aiming down sights' also works for it as well.
No damage buffs will help with Cutter. It's broken only because it's the only BEAM weapon in game with extreme high ROF in core of game engine, which procs fire from 4rd laser perks multiple times per combat, and fire does stacks. It's impossible to do with any other laser weapons because they don't have that much ROF, these are rifles, not a BEAM. There is one way to fix it - simply put stack of fire on max 2 or 3 stacks. It's not SKILL that is broken. It's the actual BEAM weapon with unlimited ROF is.
@@MrZlocktarget your facts straight bud
@@lancelot5878 He's right though, It's the fire ticks that are doing the vast majority of the damage (especially on harder difficulties) so a 30% buff to the cutter isn't doing much, though the DR while aiming is really good with the cutter since it has such short range.
@@MrZlocktarlook at the retard trying to push a pair of nerd glasses on his nose when the game ain’t even been out a couple months😂😂😂. Shut up
I was recommended your channel and you are one of the best Starfield ressource out there.
Thanks for everything, and im slowly binge watching all of your previous videos. Thanks!
Don't forget, demolitions also works with any weapon with explosive damage. Most rifles have an explosive damage mod, so you can stack the bonuses from balistics, rifles, and demolition.
Hey man, I just wanted to say these guides have been fantastic. As a starfield enjoyer, and a fellow (very novice) content creator I can clearly see the quality being upped with each of these videos too. You have quickly become a go-to resource for many explorers, no doubt.
2:47 - that's from the handloading perk. It can also happen with Wanted and Cornered. It's not a visual bug. It's is actually applying different damage per round.
First time viewer and by far the best tier list ive seen for starfield
I have no idea what your other videos are but the amount of effort you put into this deserves my sub
Please keep this up. I really find these useful especially how you break down each individual tier level of any skill. You don't just say marksmanship is good. You go into the why.
Why would he take it down??
@@bombomosI think they mean “keep this up” as keep up the good work
Appreciate it! I definitely wanted to make a point of showing the skills in action to give more context to how they actually perform. It wasn't quite as useful for the 10-30% damage buffs but there are a lot of poorly described unique perks I thought people would benefit from really seeing before they decide to drop a skill point into it. Cheers!
First thing I look forward to this series every week so I got to say thank you for what you’re doing and I love your videos. Keep up the good work.
As for weapons that are EM as far as the nova you have to charge it by holding down the fire trigger until the weapon vibrates then release and from my experience when I’m engaged in stealth 1 shot takes down every enemy Unfortunately everyone nearby is alerted.
Happy to hear!
And yeah that was a silly omission, a charged Nova is actually quite strong which funny enough makes the incapacitation skill even less useful in my eyes
Demolitions boosts the coachman’s hornets nest rounds, which still use the normal caseless shotgun shells. Insane setup, as long as you don’t kill yourself
Keep up the great work, you’ve got some great data points and have consistently put out the most in depth skill guides.
Yeah I was gonna bring that up, HNCM is an insanely powerful weapon mod, the fact demolitions buffs it hard carries the skill imo.
I've been looking forward to this video. I've been holding back using my skill points over the last week until I see all five of your guides - currently I'm sitting on about ten unused ones. 🤣
Loving your skill breakdown series. Always good to know I am reading the skills the right way.
Love what you’re doing man! Def the best Starfield vids on youtube! Can wait to see whats next after the skill trees! Maybe powers?
Powers is out! I have a list that is too long of things I can cover next. I may have to poll what people are most interested in seeing next
Very thoroughly explained without a lot of bs.
Great work!
Love the tier Summary, so I can skip to the end and decide which one I needed to watch.
Been waiting for this one ! Thank you so much for getting back in the lab for us ❤
Appreciate your work. Nothing I can see to improve on. Please keep on bringing those videos, *thank you!*
The EM damage bonuses are useful specifically for non-lethal stealth characters who are charging the disruptor *and* getting a sneak attack bonus. Great way to one shot take down an enemy without killing them (which is relevant to… one specific quest line, unless that’s your RP style)
Awsome video. Looking forward to others like it. Thank you so much for all of your hard work.
For a future video, it would be good to go into the analysis and comparison of interactions of the Armor Piercing skill vs armor piercing rounds vs Shattering
seconded!
Great idea! This may be a relevant comparison during a weapon mods video. I could probably fit this into another combat overview type video as well
Also, how shattering affects explosive damage. I got a coachman with explosive ammo and its legit the best weapon I found and few things survive a single shot
Yes please
I love Incapacitation. Automatic refined equinox with all 4 ranks just humbles enemies and the duration is crazy long. Even on very hard. Of course I'm high level. Only the small clip sucks. But it's great to me, I use it all the time. I then sneak and x10 crit them with concealment 4 + melee rank 3. It's fun to me.
Cutter counts as a heavy weapon. You can stack these bonuses.
It is irrelevant for its burn dmg
The real beauty was seeing Starfield's rare gunfish in their native environment for the intro. It brought a tear to my eye, and fuels my longing to return to that planet paradise.
Pistols can do MASSIVE DPS with the binary trigger upgrade - I've got an Advanced Regulator with an extended mag that does like 2500 damage per second
Definitely super strong when built right, the range+accuracy is what's really lacking on them though. I find them best suited for combat in the major cities VS exploration
@@unclemumble Pistols are also good if you are boarding and capturing ships.
12:30 - You can actually charge the EM weapon instead of firing every round, it's one of those purposely untold effects that people had to find out from playing, Todd Howard even in a interview said they purposely didn't say everything on how to play the game to let players discover it on their own.
Without the skill a fully charged shot will get nearly 100% to stun on the first hit, so raising the skill will let you 100% stun every time.
I think Balistics is a good catch-all early in the game. It was the first skill I maxxed purely because I thought that octopus patch looked cool. Lol
Rapid Reload seems to be bugged for myself and some other players out there. The skill doesn't work if you have hand grenades equipped.
I love the badges, sadly they look cooler than they function half the time. Ballastics is definitely the best general weapon skill to upgrade unless you go crazy for the laser burn perk so your points were not spent in vain!
@@unclemumbleWhite hot bullets (and penetrator ammo) FTW.
Equipped grenades affect reload speed? Am I reading that right?
@@BiomechanicalBrick Unfortunately, yes. 😔
Your testing, analysis, and succinct wrap up is some of the best “time conserving” content on Starfield I’ve seen. Thank you for being clear and concise. Insta sub.
Really appreciate that sentiment, thank you! I still have lots to improve on but I try to learn something with each video I put out :)
This is such a great series, looking forward to the next chapters.
My personal experience on pistols. One of the first guns I looted was a superior Urban Eagle and it's literally seen me through the entire game so far. The crit dmg is epic. I keep trying other guns but I always go back to the deagle. I haven't invested any points in combat either. I'm about level 35
Oh man a superior anything is gonna be hard to beat! Urban eagles SMACK too. I've had a similar experience with a godly legendary Beowulf I've ran for 90% of my playthrough. Having the range and accuracy makes it so useful for planetary exploration and that's where my pistols have always fallen short
yeah, I got a calibrated star shard pistol and it one shots minions on very hard difficulty. I wonder if pistols have a higher base crit chance by default. feels like it in my experience (I'm lvl 50 pre-ng+)
@@unclemumble My usual gun for NG+ runs is an Advanced Beowulf. Semi-auto, AP rounds, high powered. High rate of fire semi-auto that hits for 250+ damage per trigger pull. 1-3 taps everything outside of legendary enemies. And common ammo too. It breaks open the game. Only gun you need if you're just trying to get through a NG+ run.
You have a gun that actually has superior in the name? Ive heard that superior guns are bugged in that they are still labelled advanced despite having the superior base damage
Thanks for taking the time to do this. Very useful. I can't believe some of the skills don't do what they say.
For some reason equiping a throwable can sometimes disable the reload buff perks!
I'm really enjoying these videos, Mumble. Thanks for all the hard work!
If you want consistant ammo for any gun till it fets patched.
- Buy Titanium and Polymer. Stock up at a 2:1 ratio
- Build an outpost
- Place as many weapon cases as you can. Small has pistol ammo, medium has Rifle ammo, and large has heavy ammo.
- once your desired cases have been placed, save the game.
- Load that same save (if you end up reloaded it a 2nd time it prevents this from working on this placement of cases.)
- Look at out outpost beacon and delete it. (All weapons and ammo will go into your ship then your inventory if your ship is full.
- Rinse and repeat.
Enjoy infinite ammo and maybe some good legendary weapons. NOTE that if you have over 100,000 ammo it will only show the left most 5 digits. So if you had 123,456 ammo it would only show 12,345. So for your sanity delete or sell any ammo above 95,000 ammo.
I don't get this.
So PLACE the ammo "inside" the case?
Or will the Empty cases THEMSELVES give you ammo ❓❓
@@Boss0Leeny No, you build the cases, save the game and then reload it. Now all the cases you built have been populated with random guns and ammo. A patch ago these would be truly random weapons, some of them would be rare, epic, legendary, etc; and when you dismantle the outpost it would put them all into your ship's inventory or your own if your ship was full. As of a day or so ago they are now all just normal weapons and they all fall to the ground when you dismantle the outpost and you have to pick them up by hand. Still the best way to quickly spawn a ton of ammo and weapons to sell.
Technically that glitch/exploit is actually a free weapon lootbox and also free infinite money.
@@akonako364 Aka, being in poor sport of the game.
It's not like ammo is hard to get normally, anyways. Just vendor stuff you loot and buy ammo off of them. I never ran out of ammo and had 1000s of each type just from buying all ammo at vendors every time I visited them to sell off loot.
@@akonako364 They patched it so that you no longer get legendary/epic/rare weapons from doing this, and the game already showers you in tons of stuff you can sell just doing quests. The main bottleneck to getting rich is waiting out the ridiculous refresh timers on all the merchants and the fact that ships are so much more expensive relative to gear/weapons with no way to offset that cost by selling your stored value in ammo. It's baffling game design and really unfun. The ship designer punishes you because anything you spend on your ship is just gone forever, and the mechanic you have available to recoup your money by selling all the stuff you've accumulated is a non trivial amount of time spent waiting out merchants and doing circuits of Neon or other high-density areas.
Been waiting for this, thanks for the videos, keep it up.
I would be interested in seeing the math of the claims about pistols being the least damaging weapon class, particularly with the hidden technique of the binary trigger, effectively turning them into full auto guns without the damage falloff of full auto.
Short range and mag size
@@Kyle-nm1kh Fair statements, and I never said the claims were wrong. Just that I would be interested in seeing comparisons in the math. On higher difficulties, the mag size could be considered a benefit, considering you can dump your damage, take cover while you reload, and repeat, minimizing the amount of time spent vulnerable.
All I know is that I'm playing on Very Hard and pretty much main a ballistic pistol and it puts down enemies quicker than almost all of my rifles. I have both skills maxed out, too. Another thing to take into consideration is the rolls you have on your weapons.
@@JustSilverCh nothing stopping you from taking cover with a larger mag size. That's just tactics
@beardedshawn I only played on hard, and put maybe 30+ hours so nothing ceazy, but a Rattler with a binary trigger was certainly putting in work. Most rifles were doing like 30-50 damage full auto, meanwhile a base Rattler doing 70 to 90.
Not to mention the added benefit of pistol perks coming online sooner than rifle due to challenges and tiers.
I think Pistol Certification would be a much more viable skill if you could dual-wield pistols. Reloading would be a pain though.
Ammo shortage seems to be a big issue to some of these weapon types. I was disappointed to find you cant manufacture bullets, but hopefully that'll be added in an update.
Mumble, you’re the best!! This is the most informative RUclips experience I’ve ever had, you’re amazing I subscribed before launch and you’re the only guy I still watch please do the Tech Tree next. And when this starfield ride is over KEEP MAKING GAME REVIEWS. You’re awesome
Really appreciate it, thanks for sticking around! There's so much more to cover!
You can charge em weapons and easily stun enemies with one shot
EM weapons are cool for somewhat pacifist runs, just gotta hope there are no heart patients in Starfield. 💀
16:00 I haven't extensively tested this, but I'm pretty sure Marksmanship works with burst fire weapons as well. "non-automatic" in Starfield doesn't mean what it sounds like. Leveling up the armor penetration perk requires you to get kills with "non-automatic" weapons, and my burst fire advanced Beowulf absolutely counted for those kills.
After this - i cant wait for the "Can you beat starfield with the Laser Cutter ONLY" Challange videos
Love this series and I been loving my character plus this has shown on my combat centric Smooth Talker Bounty Hunter
Level 34:
+4 Commerce +3 Persuasion +4 Isolation
+4 Ballistics +3 Rifle +2 Sniper +2 crit +2 armor pene.
I'm working on that last few tiers of combat and my guy already feels Crazy with Revenant, Single Fire A 99 ad 1K damage MagSniper.
I’ve only put a single point into the combat skills, which went into grenades for the arc feature. I think over-leveled (currently 50) to get more skill points, so even playing on Very Hard is actually really easy 😔
I’ll probably install a difficulty mod or something.
Grenades is in the second tier tho 🧐
Similar experience, I put 0 points in at level 56 now. Just ground other stuff, then got special projects 4 and I'm just on infinite resources and instantly making every weapon like double edps.
Yeah once you have the right weapons and you make a point of using cover there isn't much difficulty does other than make fights last longer. Also the fact that you can use as many medpack as you want to stack healing makes it easy to get out of any dicey situation.
I would have really liked more intelligent AI as difficulty increased but that's obviously asking too much 😅
Starfield is the one Bethesda game In which we actually needed level scaling. Just doing the side missions and exploring has shot me to lvl 60, and now most worlds that I haven't yet explored are too easy. Where is the demon time black air force energy worlds? Even the terrormorph city Londinion is for some reason empty after your mission there and the terrormorphs out in the world are lvl 10.
Aw nwoo gwame twoo easwy?
Love this series. Extremely useful, informative and still straightforward. I really enjoy your video style over the "let's say the same thing 45 times to fluff video time" style. Thank you for your contribution to the Starfield community. One thing though.. where's the Tech tree video? I've searched for like 40 minutes trying to find it. Maybe I'm blind? Maybe it's coming soon? 😁
For me, pistols have high damage and decent dps and go ballistic with a binary trigger having the highest dps by a good margin, try it on the regulator, sure, you need to reload a lot, but it's like 2k dps where rifles are down in the 800-1200 range.
The explosive lvl 1 was all I felt like investing in for the combat tree. By the time I used the point though, I had a pretty solid idea of where to throw a grenade, but I use them more as a diversion and stun hit than anything since I'm generally using rifles for 90% of combat. I have a few nice pistols I can use for lower levels, or the Crimson Fleet pistol that acts similar to a one shot shotgun with a quick reload. I didn't upgrade to lvl 2 explosives SPECIFICALLY because I rarely take damage from enemy grenades, and if I flub my own throw or the animation fucks up as I'm running, I tend to take a hit from my own attacks way more often.
I have had a lot of visual bugs lately when it comes to stats, but I also had my ship only half render so I got stuck inside without beeing able to interact with the door, its a bethesda game after all and its eerily bug free so far
"Eerily bug feee so far."
I was more than 100 hours into the game before I hit my first serious bugs, which showed up together for some reason. A few minutes on google found quick fixes for both of them.
1) After the "High Price to pay" mission I couldn't change my human companion until I made Vasco my companion.
2) Echoing sound. Force quit the game from the home page.
I also run into issues now, vendors disappearing, ships disappearing, names resetting to nonsense and just crashing. Somehow their patches made it worse
I don't play Starfield, and I saw a recommendation to check out this video because it would talk about funny bugs during the informative process and I was not disappointed. Good job. Videos like this, regardless of game, are vitally important.
Shattering legendary effect feels like a must for ballistic / shotguns
Instigating is what I have on my pistol and shotgun. I love it. Not may that make it past the first shot.
At 2:50 the reason it gives a different damage value is because if the weapon has “handloading” as an effect it’s actually displaying the potential damage ranges. So if a weapon that would normally deal a flat 100 dps, it instead would deal 50-150 dps.
Laser is the best combat perk hands down
Pew pew!
Lazer swords when?
Great guides, best out there, heads and tails above the rest. I’d like to see a guide on how companion skills work, as there doesn’t seem to be a definitive conclusion, especially around ship related skills. Again, great job.
You are the GOAT my man! Some of these skill description are vague to the point of uselessness, some skills like Rejuvenation straight up don’t work, so your work is amazingly useful!
Consistent 40mmxpl rounds: Laredo Armaments on Akila. They're the manufacturer of the Bridger and can spawn up to 40 grenades. Edit: Centaurian Arsenal in New Atlantis can have to up 9 on sale.
But, really, the Combat tree seemed so boring that I skipped it until I was a high level. By going for Weapon Modding in the Science tree you can get high powered, armor piercing rounds, put flechette rounds on shotguns that(as a special exception) deal full damage as automatic weapons, and more. It easily eclipses the base 30% damage from 3 ranks of a combat skill.
A great insight thanks!
And yeah hard agree, science tree does it all, it helps with so much
On your comment about demolitions ammo: I use a Hornet Nest Coachman. Now both grenades and other explosive heavies are obsolete, as this thing hits hard and the ammo is much more common than xpl too. Luckily landed one with extended mag so the fast 1-2-3-4 booms it can put out really adds up, and it is also good at getting people hiding behind cover.
Incapacitation: Yeah... instead of leveling this, I just turn the difficulty down from Very Hard to Very Easy when doing a stealth mission. Boom, now my disruptor is a 1tap stun even without charging.
Marksmanship: I'm not 100% sure but I think it applies to burst fire too. Whatever is going on, my suppressed burst Beowulf shreds. Of course so do my semi-autos: Orion, Inflictor, and suppressed Hard Target. But I've found all the Grunt magazines and have points in Sniper and Sharpshooting. So yeah, popping heads with crits.
I absolutely luv these kind of vids playing the game. As these kind of vids helps to demystify many the things in the game that just don’t have clear clarity to the player.
My favorite starfield channel. Keep up the good work!
Great timing, was having trouble with some Mercs yesterday and feel I shouldn't ignore this skill tree any longer.
Yeah depending on the difficulty you can definitely hit a wall in the higher level systems. It's either painfully slow to kill, you take too much damage, or both
thanks so much, I really enjoyed the past 2 of these and I can't wait for the next 2
couple things I wanna mention for the guide. Laser despite the name actually just increases energy damage. Including particle beam weapons and applies to all energy bonuses despite it being called laser so arc welder can be improved by it as well though don't know if they trigger the burn effect and should be tested as well. Second Demolitions needs a second look at because of the mods Hornet Nest and Explosive rounds. Hornet nest is on the grenade launcher and the coachmen, explosive rounds are on shotguns rifles and pistols as well as demolitions count explosive legendary effect for it's kills so those also need to be tested to make sure demolitions gets a fair shake.
Great points! Yeah the lasers one is definitely interesting and it makes it even better, same seems to be the case for demlotions. I'll have to add some notes to address these and they probably each warrant a +1 rank with that considered
@@unclemumble it would be cool for a follow up eventually especially on the explosive stuff to see how effective the explosive rounds and coachmen with hornet nest. It's kinda hard to get an accurate test in normal gameplay.
I really like the visual at the beginning with the skills all leveling up. Very satisfying hah
I love the badges
15:45 Rifles rank 4 skill is bugged (as is Rapid Reload) if you have a throwable weapon equipped) - just an FYI to anyone trying to figure out why it’s not working.
These videos are so well made. Please keep it up
thank you for doing more than just reading the description and telling us its good! ive been curious on how these skills work and if they’re practical. keep it up! and thank you!
thank you so much. I just found these talent tree guides of you a few days ago and they were so much help! I was looking forward to the combat one. thanks
Subscribed. I am currently using a Big Bang that has 4/7 mods. My physical is 175 and Energy 564. I love this guy. One or two shots most things are crossing styx.
After watching this, I'm happy to say I have only spent 3 points in the combat tier. I'm level 64 on very hard and I've run into little challenge combat wise.
The next two lists I am VERY interested in as those are the ones I have invested the most in.
Thank you again for all this hard work man.
When you get done with the skill guides (especially since this would feed well into the Tech skill tree), I'd love to see a detailed rundown of Ship weapons. The ship builder has really limited information, specifically telling you NOTHING about how many shots a weapon holds in a single charge or how long the recharge is, which are both really important things to know if you are trying to build the "ultimate" ship. Something your brand of testing could really help out with.
Definitely on the list! There is way too much obscurity when it comes to numbers in this game
3 words; Vanguard Obliterator Autoprojector… that is all
These are the types of videos that I look for, and I appreciate all the hard work you put into this. Liked and subscribed for the hard work.
We do not need 29 more videos from 45 more ppl about the same 3 xp "glitches" it gun box glitch.
Welcome aboard! Glad you're enjoying
I've been playing a ballistic rifle playthrough and have discovered that burst fire mode counts as single shot at least as it relates to the lvl 4 Marksman perk. My burst fire Beowulf is knocking down enemies, although I can't tell if it is getting the bonus from the critical. My build looks like a sniper build but the burst fire with a helmet that has the Headhunter skill absolutely chews through enemies. I also got luck and got a cornered beowulf so as fights go on I get more deadly.
11:31 you can mod your shotgun with common ammo into rocket launcher, and this skill will affect it. This way you will combine ballistics, shotgun, demolishing and marksmanship.
On Reddit it said the damage reading bug is to do with the handloading perk as there is actually rng for bullet damage built into the perk
Iv been waiting for this video 😅
06:44 Pistol Certification When you are talking crit chance, don't overlook the magazine perks that add crit effects.
09:03 Shotgun Certification angryturtlegaming was on his way to becoming an expert shotgunner when he discovered that 2 shotguns are bugged and don't gain certain perks from the build.
love these videos brother! can't come out quick enough
Glad you're enjoying!
also this data explains a ton why armor piericing rounds are so damn strong. i appreciate the effort to get this data. its not just you describing the perks and giving an opinion but crunching the damage calculation numbers which always seem to be a point of mystery in many games these days
Liked, subscribed, rang the bell, and commented to show how much I appreciated this video! Thank you
My current investment in the Combat Tree is 4 points in Dueling. I didn't set out planning a melee build, but early on, I made the mistake of landing on the wrong side of the tutorial mission planet, and fought a completely separate pirate gang than the one I was supposed to. Blew through all my ammo in the process. Picked up a rescue axe from one of their corpses, and started putting my points into dueling. Never looked back. Now I rock the Syndicate Enforcer.
Stealth perks mixed with a lot of the rifle perks, is probably the most OP build I have atm. Especially with a Va'Ruun Inflictor. Got one with Instigating, Hitman and Shattering, was 1 shotting just about everything with it, with some enemies needing 2-3 more shots, but usually it was always 1 shot.
Keep up the good job. Definitely the best analytics on Starfield on RUclips. Thx a lot!
Bro! I've been waiting on the this video specifically for awhile. I can't wait to see your tech video! Keep it up 👍
If one does the side quests, some surveying, and a lot of scavenging per mission, you will stumble upon a lot of legendary weapons that take care of many of these skills. The tree can be used to supplement those weapons to great effect without having to spend points at the higher ranks of each skill. The lower ranked skills in this video, like targeting, can supplment the legendary weapons that already have armor piercing, the down effect, etc.
Thanks for the videos I cannot imagine how much time it takes to figure all this out!
From my practical experience, from not investing in any of the "certification" skills to not limit what weapons I can use. With the ballistics and the non-automatic boosting skills, Beowulf and a slug modded Breach were by far the best performing weapons. I hear the Magshear is insane on full auto, but I didnt like tearing through my ammo so I stuck with semi-auto and built around that.
Pistols might not scale nearly as well as rifles, but I really dug how the Urban Eagle and the XM-2311 felt to use.