Are Legendary Weapons USELESS In Starfield? | All 33 Effects Analysis

do Legendary Weapons matter in Starfield or are they overrated well I've been back of the lab testing and analyzing all 33 weapon effects to give you the lowdown on what's hot and what's not many of these are underwhelming downright terrible or a buggy mess While others are incredibly strong and make it possible to tear through even the toughest of foes like many skill descriptions in the game weapon effects also suffer from the extremely vague descriptors of exactly how potent their effects really are leaving you wondering what the hell do these even do it also doesn't help that the Starfield Wiki and many other supposedly reputable sources of information are completely inaccurate in many cases thankfully for you I've run the numbers and have actual evidence of these effects in action there's some wild stuff at the end so make sure to stick around let's take a look at the results to start there are a few very important things to understand when it comes to weapon effects the first being that there are actually three tiers to them which we'll call the rare epic and legendary tier on a legendary weapon for example you'll have three weapon effects the first being a rare effect the second being an epic and the third being legendary you will only ever get one effect from each tier on a weapon which unfortunately limits the number of possible legendary weapon combinations quite a bit similarly as you would expect from epic weapon drops they only roll epic and rare effects and rare weapons only rare additionally not every weapon effect can be rolled on every weapon type such as melee weapons being excluded from Rolling the extended magazine effect which is sensible now I've spawned thousands and I mean thousands of weapons just to see what kind of legendaries the game would spit out and for guns it seems like all effects are fair game though there are some combinations I've not been able to see naturally roll like 1-in punch on heavy weapons for example I can't say with certainty whether that's RNG working against me or that certain combos are just not possible to roll so let me know if you've ever seen one of those in the while because I've manually created some and they're kind of insane for testing to avoid multiple weapon effects acting at the same time or weapon mods I've rigged up an arsenal of plain weapons that each bear one single effect for more reliable testing results we're going to start with the rare effects and work our way to Legendary and I'll try to zip through the more clearcut effects anti Personnel is first up today and there's absolutely nothing special about it it's just 10% more damage to humans since they are the most common enemy type you'll fight unless you do a lot of exploration you'll actually get a decent amount of use out of it but 10% is pretty underwhelming bashing is next to useless unless you're a weirdo and are trying to do some pistol whipping only playr you get double gun bashing damage but I mean 0 * 2 is still zero so it may as well not be an effect all right you can do a little bit of damage if you H an enemy in the head but let's be real this is just a filler effect Berserker is actually kind of cool and rewards players for having less defensive gear equip this is specifically tied to your physical damage resistance and not your em or energy resistance above 250 Dr you'll have a 5% damage buff but anything below that in increments of 50 Dr your damage will increase by 10% each time all the way up to a 50% bonus when your Dr is below 50 so if you want to be a lewd little breath holding freak and go no suit no helmet no pants Into the Dark Void of space you'll be rewarded with a 50% damage bonus for your strange efforts being realistic though you'll probably only get practical value out of this on planets where you can safely take off your gear and even then you'll have to decide whether the damage resistance trade-off is worth the offensive bonuses I honestly think it's a good effect though as it encourages an alternative play style with real tradeoff so good job on this one Bethesda cornered is another risk reward effect that's instead centered around keeping your health low to receive scaling damage boost the lower your health get for every 10% HP you lose you gain 5% more damage up to 50% when your health is below 10% which is quite significant although you can surely imagine that would be difficult to sustain especially on higher difficulties that said you could probably sit comfortably at around 50% HP depending on what you're fighting and still benefit from a solid 25% damage increase which definitely isn't nothing so it's not half bad as a rare effect either disassembler is another boring effect that only gives 20% damage bonus to robots anybody who's put a good few hours into Starfield knows that robots make up a very small percentage of the enemies you'll fight in the game so this is a pretty ass effect barring the few instances mostly on abandoned spaceships where robots are the primary enemy extended magazine is a simple effect that doubles your magazine size it's extremely convenient to have on certain weapon types with low mag sizes like The Coachman that normally only has two shots and it's great for high rate of fire automatic weapons or even weapons that pack more of a punch where the increased mag size becomes large enough to finish off a full combat encounter with without forcing you to reload it's a solid quality of life effect that indirectly increases your DPS exterminator is the final enemy type effect but this time for aliens with a 30% damage bonus which is not terrible if you're doing a lot of Planetary Exploration again because this is exclusive to one enemy type however its General usefulness is diminished but at least it's the highest number increase of the three it's fine overall Furious is a pretty met effect after your first successful hit you deal 5% additional damage which stacks for every consecutive hit up to 30% on the sixth hit if you miss any shot you will reset the cycle so this is kind of ass as maintaining 100% accuracy is not necessarily easy for everyone or even possible in some cases because of the accuracy system and having to hit six shots before reaching Max potential on this is quite a lot I can't say I'd recommend this over most of the other rare effects instigating is a very strong effect on weapons that shoot a single powerful projectile like snipers or heavy launchers the first instance of damage on a full Health enemy deals double damage however this only counts the very first damage pop on a multi-shot weapon so this is horrible on shotguns or high rate of fire low per bullet damage weapons like micro guns so it's solid with the right weapon for opening up and engagement but that's about it oxygenated is just another hold breath booster that has your O2 consumption while scoped and holding your breath similar to what you'd get from the sniper certification skill it's certainly useful if you really need to hold your breath for an excessive amount of time to zero in on mult multiple targets but you may as well just upgrade the sniper certification skill if you're planning on using scoped weapons extensively anyways the final rear effect is one many of you have probably come across and if you're like me you groan when you see it it's the godamn space adep effect it's a classic weapon Ruiner for most of us where you get a generous 30% more damage while in space but negative 15% damage while Planet Side and we all know that time spent with boots on the ground is disproportionately higher than in space so I personally think this effect is hot garbage but maybe a few of you prefer to spend more time breathing recycled air and we'll get more use out of this our first epic effect is corrosive which is a reasonably useful effect that has an 8% chance to proc where each individual damage instance counts as a chance to activate so multi-shot weapons are very potent here as we'll see with many of the other similarly designed effects too you can only proc this effect once every 12 seconds but that 12se second cool down is specifically tied to that weapon so you can theoretically swap between multiple weapons with the same effect and stack it corrosive instantly deals 15% Max HP and energy damage while also reducing physical and energy resistances by 35% for 6 seconds now I won't get into the nitty-gritty of how damage resistance and armor penetration works but the long and short of it is that armor penetration sources interact multiplicatively meaning that the 75% armor penetration you can get from rank four in the armor penetration skill and the 35% you get from one stack of corrosive does not reduce damage to zero but rather 16.3% of its original value this means that corrosive becomes decreasingly useful as you invest further in armor penetration skills or weapon mods like depleted uranium rounds or armor piercing rounds that said the instant Max HP damage it does is still useful and free armor pen is still a net increase to DPS so it's not useless it's pretty bad on low rate of fire weapons though and the 12se second cool down tied to the weapon itself is ridiculous game design in my opinion I seriously question if this was intentionally done because Bethesda knew that it completely up game performance anytime one of these effects activates I've got a pretty powerful PC and no matter what settings I run anytime I proc an effect like this my game stutters for at least a second which is absurd it just works right crippling is a weird effect as it almost encourages Behavior that's counterintuitive to Conventional wisdom on dealing damage in Shooters when hitting a limb of an enemy your next shot will deal 30% more damage which you can stack repeatedly by shooting limbs only but obviously just aiming for the head would naturally net you more damage since those hits always deal double damage why would you sacrifice DPS potential aiming for limbs now I mean you could alternate between limb to head to limb to head but that would still be worse net DPS there is an argument that this could be more of a generosity effect that helps give some of your damage back for hitting limbs instead of more critical areas but I generally think this is a dumb effect that is massively eclipsed by some of the other epic effects so hand loading is another one of these vaguely described effects that reads volatile rounds are designed to pack a bigger punch but aren't as stable and can fail on occasion what the hell does that actually translate to though in terms of damage so it looks like on the wiki they took a stab at this saying that there are percentile chances for certain damage increases and decreases to take place but I think that's complete because the numbers I've got from actual testing are all over the place and are definitely not in line with this I've had shots range from more than 100% additional damage down to half damage and everything in between it's simply not worth the effort to find an exact answer on what the probabilities of each outcome are here but from some reasonably extensive testing I can say that you definitely experience a net positive to damage that's probably somewhere around 15 to 25% it's a decent effect overall that's really just a damage buff with a little more flavor than a flat number increase which I think is fine Hitman is very simple you get 15% more damage while aiming so if you use scoped weapons and are happy to ad s in general this will be a nice small damage buff but if you're a hit firing Gunslinger then this will be next to useless that's it incendiary is actually insanely strong against enemies with high HP pulls and high damage resistance as it will instantly pop 12% of their Max HP when the effect procs along with another 24% of their Max HP over 4 seconds this effect is just like corrosive where it seems to have about an 8% proc rate and it is also gated by that 12C cool down which kind of sucks so you can actually see my game freezes just before an incendiary shot goes off and I think I finally figured out what's causing it every time you shoot the game decides whether the next shot will be imbued with the effect and when this happens it completely switches the ammo type of the gun or even worse the gun itself this is what causes the freezing which is the same as what so many people have experienced when equipping weapons with long names and lots of mods or opening the scanner with them equipped the patch that supposedly fixed this in late September did not work for everyone and in fact fact created the bug for many people including myself who had never previously experienced it so now that my weapon is imbued with that Special ammo type I can keep shooting the imbued shots until I actually hit an NPC with it once something is hit If you experience this freezing bug your game will freeze and then switch back to your original ammo type it's wild that this is actually how it works and this holds true for any of the effects that have this 12-second cool down tied to it weirdness as hide in incendiary is pretty damn good for an epic effect and only becomes more useful as you fight stronger foes Lasser is yet another Prime offender for inaccurate Wiki description and vague effect explanation on the wiki it says that it's a bleed effect that lasts for 4 seconds which is wrong it lasts for 6 seconds and it says that it has a 6% chance of proing honestly this whole percent proc chance on any of these effects we discuss is anyone's best guess unless someone's actually found the code to confirm it or you do a sample size with like 1,000 plus bullets fired to validate this manually from experience it does feel like they all hover around 5 to 10% though so this Wiki entry probably is not too far off but it still seems like whoever is entering this data is pulling numbers out of their ass for the most part with limited testing being done I still do appreciate it however as the majority of the simpler entries have been accurate what the description fails to mention though is that this bleed effect actually does 30% Max HP over those 6 seconds and you can reapply the bleed at any time during the initial bleed resetting this timer back up to the 6 seconds again which is different from the effects like corrosion and incendiary which have a fixed cool down this is very potent and works great on rapid fire or multi-shot weapons though it won't work on robots as they obviously have no blood to bleed because you can reapply the bleed this is probably one of the best epic effects and again it becomes better as enemies get stronger with the only drawbacks being that the bleed does take a while to deliver its full dosage of damage Med theft is pretty clearcut and it's not terrible but it's also nothing special you have a 5% chance to have enemies drop two Med packs on death and that's it maybe it's useful for a no Shop's fully self-sufficient playthrough but otherwise if you do a reasonable amount of Scavenging utilize cover efficiently while playing and you buy Med items from shops every so often you should never be running out of medkits I'd probably take more damage over this personally poison is very similar to our other damage over time effects but this time we get a 30% Max HP poisoning in energy damage over 10 seconds as well as a 30% movement speed debuff this comes with the same standard 12C cool down between reapplications and the 5 to 10% proc rate 10 seconds is kind of a long time for an effect to work its magic but I guess the movement speed reduction could be useful against melee enemies it's a bummer that this also can't be reapplied because of the cool down so it's not nearly as effective as it could be same as the others it's best for multi-shot high rate of fire weapons and becomes more useful as enemies get stronger radioactive is more of the same with a slight variation now you get 24% Max Health damage over 6 seconds but you can also demoralize the target forcing them to run away from you which can be useful in reducing the damage you take same cool down approximate proc rate and use case so nothing more to discuss here kind of sad that there's not much more variety between these effects our second last epic effect is rapid which increases attack speed by 25% now this is not really a 25% damage increase unless we're talking about melee weapons as you'll also be reloading more often so it's really just a worse version of a DPS booster and and it's almost just as boring I guess it's kind of cool that you can fire the micro gun a little faster than normal but you're still going to be chewing through the same amount of ammo per damage pretty mid our final epic effect is staggering which was a bit of a weird one as it was hard to see if it was actually doing much of anything against regular humanoid enemies but when I tested it against terramorph it was pretty obvious it does work there's about the same 5 to 10ish per chance to proc on any projectile hit and when it takes effect the enemy will be briefly staggered for just over a second which could prove quite useful on higher difficulties for damage mitigation you can't just focus fire and Perma stun an enemy however it seems like they must exit the staggered phase before hits will be able to proc the effect again if you have more than enough damage to dish out against enemies already I guess this could be a viable epic effect candidate but it honestly barely felt like it was working on humanoids and you need to be using a weapon with multi hit or high rate of fire for it to be effective at all we finally made it to Legendary effects and yet most of of them are pretty underwhelming and I would argue are not even worthy of that title we do have a couple that have earned their spot at the top though we'll keep things alphabetical here and start with concussive this is almost identical to staggering with about the same proc rate only it has the ability to fully knock down enemies which is immensely more powerful as it takes around 6 seconds for most enemies to pick themselves up leaving them fully vulnerable to attacks and more importantly keeping you from taking damage again if you've got enough damage to kill most enemies with these this is actually not a bad option there is a select type of encounter where this is actually incredibly annoying however and that's if an enemy has cover in front of them and you knock them down you are probably not going to be able to hit them until they get back up which is frustrating next we have demoralizing which we've seen in effect as part of the radioactive effect and it's kind of sad that this is a legendary effect sure it's nice that you can force enemies to run away making them deal no damage to you but it's also kind of a pain in the ass having to chase them down to finish them off I'd say it's just a worse version of concussive since they have what seems to be an ident iCal proc rate only I have a perfect Sitting Duck to fire at with concussive Elemental is just a roulette effect with the chance to dish out any of corrosive radiation poison and incendiary instead of just one of them this still suffers from the same 12C cool down however which is a massive shame you can find weapons with elemental and one of these epic effects on it though which can make for a seriously strong weapon when the effects both proc at the same time additionally when firing High projectile count multi-shot weapons there's a very very small chance that you can proc multiple of these effects at the same time I'm pretty sure that this wasn't actually intended Behavior this is just the result of how the effect actually works so it's definitely the most potent on mag pulses and non-s slug shotguns in any case Elemental is only as strong as the average potency of these four effects so it's strong but it's still held back by cooldowns which is lame explosive is really really bad and it's probably one of the absolute worst effects in the game all it does is provide a chance for every shot to be an explosive round but that explosive round does peanut damage so it's just complete I don't know how anyone thought this should be a legendary effect because it's embarrassingly useless and just Wast a slot for something that could have been really unique and interesting frenzy I guess is a slightly better version of demoralizing in some cases as it will instead Force the affected enemy to attack other enemies just like the social tree equivalent skill instigation does now this doesn't always work and they'll often still keep attacking you if you're too close to them and it doesn't work at all all if they're the only enemy around so its usefulness is quite limited because of this just another lackluster legendary effect that's a lazy rehash of something that already exists in the skill shattering on the other hand is surprisingly good albeit nothing exciting you get a 15% damage increase but you also get 30% armor penetration against all resistances which is pretty solid as we know this acts multiplicatively with other sources of armor penetration so its Effectiveness diminishes as you have more AP sources but this is still a solid effect over all that can help push you closer to dealing true damage to more resistant enemies now I will say I've had an isolated case where shattering does not work properly and it seems like it doesn't apply the armor penetration effect at all this is only against a level 94 terramorph and this is the only test where it's not worked correctly it's worked normally against everything else so take that with a grain assault there might be some issues with it but it's very rare skip shot is also clearcut you simply fire a second projectile every fourth shot effectively increasing your DPS by 25% this works with heavy weapon launchers as well as multi-shot Weapons which is cool nothing much more to say here it's decent but nothing special by any means so Tesla is a pretty interesting effect that hurls electric vehicles at your enemies every five shot hold on that's not right sorry it creates an electric explosion that deals 4.5% Max Health damage over 4 seconds the proc rate is also quite high and it's got to be close to about 20% what's different about Tesla is that not only can you reapply the effect without a cool down but it's also not based on the number of projectiles fired but instead just whether a shot is fired or not because of this it ends up making multi-shot weapons apply the Tesla effect to every single projectile fired in a single shot and the game will stack all of them at the same time normally it would just reset the damage counter but for example if you fired a MAG pulse which fires seven projectiles per shot it would actually end up shreding 31.5% Max HP off the target instead so for multi-shot weapons Tesla is pretty solid and otherwise it's a Nifty little damage bonus that you can continuously reapply second and last on our list is titanium all this effect does is reduce the base weight of the weapon it's applied to which I guess is neat for making micro guns way next to nothing an important note is that this only applies to the base weight and all added weapon mods will still be full weight which I've seen cause confusion for some people around how the effect works nothing game changing here and I'd take a cooler offensive effect over this speaking of which we have saved the best for last and that is one one- in punch this is absolutely Bonkers and is so much fun and unlock some ridiculous weapon combos I'll only showcase a few here as there's a whole other video I'll probably dedicate to the insanity that is 1in punch but here are some powerful things you can do with it the gist of the effect is that it quadruples the amount of projectiles per shot from the affected weapon at the cost of having the effective range and decreasing accuracy and rate of fire which will vary based on the weapon the net DPS increase in every instance is greater than the base and it lets you do things like 1in punch a rapid firing Equinox so that you can apply the rank four lasers burn almost as fast as a cutter you can launch four Rockets out of a Bridger or you can create an Omega hornets nest Coachman that generates so many explosions you'll have damage numbers flying out of the center of your screen for ages after every shot if you get your hands on a decent weapon with 1-in punch I highly recommend giving it a try we have now finally covered all 33 of the weapon effects so let's do a quick summary of what effects you should be keeping your eyes out for in game for rare effects Berserker and cornered are the most interesting while extended mag is a nice to have and instigating can be useful with the right weapons everything else is whatever or situational for epic effects I'd say most are decent with Med theft Hitman and staggering probably being the worst of the bunch and lacerate incendiary and corrosive being the best for legendary effects onein punch is just Godly explosive is dog and the rest have varying degrees of utility I wish there were a few more interesting effects in this list instead of half of them really being basic damage increases or essentially the same effect with a slightly different flavor but at least some are pretty solid that's all for today subscribe for more research backed no BS gaming content hit a patreon for Early Access to videos and other cool perks and check out my analysis and tier list of the tech skills next if you haven't already I'll see you in the next one peace

Channel: UncleMumble

Views: 77,980

Keywords: Starfield, Starfield news, Starfield rumors, Starfield weapons, Starfield Outposts, Starfield Crafting, Starfield Story, Starfield Lore, Starfield Quests, Starfield Spaceships, Starfield Traits, Starfield Skills, Starfield Backgrounds, Starfield Economy, Starfield Research, Starfield Planets, Starfield Factions, Starfield Crew, starfield direct, bethesda, todd howard, skyrim, fallout, goty, star, field, premium, settled systems, handbook, constellation, bgs, starfield handbook

Id: NBs3_GdyNL0

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023