Fallout New Vegas Weapons: Every Class, Its Skill, Ammo and Best Pick

Every weapon in Fallout New Vegas answers to one of five skills, and the skill is the first thing to read on a weapon's card, before the damage. This page sorts the Fallout New Vegas weapons a player actually meets by class, gives each one's damage, ammunition and requirements, names the vendor who stocks it, and points out the pick in each class worth building toward. It is a reference for the base game and the Gun Runners' Arsenal pack; the add-on weapons are named in passing and covered on our DLC guide.

Two of our pages sit beside this one. The unique weapons page covers forty-two named guns, blades and fists and the spot each one waits in, so this page names the unique variants and leaves the directions to it. The items guide lays those locations over the skill book and magazine lists so one trip collects more. Damage figures below are per shot or per hit at full condition, from the Independent Fallout Wiki's weapon pages and Game8's class tables.

How Weapons Work

Guns covers everything that fires a bullet, from the 9mm pistol to the minigun. Energy Weapons covers lasers, plasma, Gauss rifles and flame. Explosives covers grenades, mines and launchers. Melee Weapons and Unarmed cover blades, clubs and fists, and Unarmed is the one skill seeded by two attributes, Endurance and Luck, per our attributes and skills page. Each weapon lists a skill requirement and a Strength requirement. The game's settings define a spread penalty for both, but modders who read the formula found that only the Strength one does anything in the unmodified game: each point of Strength you lack widens a firearm's spread, and melee and unarmed weapons take no accuracy penalty at all. Weapon Handling, at level 16 on our perks page, cuts every Strength requirement by two.

Condition is the other number that moves. A weapon does full damage from 100 percent down to 75 percent condition and then loses damage in a straight line to half at zero; every shot takes a flat 0.2 off the item's health, and the ammunition you load changes that rate. Repairs come from a matching weapon, from the Jury Rigging perk at Repair 90, from the weapon repair kits on our crafting page, or from the nine people on our repairers page. Ammunition subtypes are the cheapest upgrade in the game: hollow point rounds multiply damage (the .357 version by 1.75) but triple the target's Damage Threshold, armor piercing rounds take a little off the damage (.308 AP is 0.95) and 15 off the target's DT, surplus rounds do 1.15 damage and wear the gun three times as fast, and the hand-load recipes the Hand Loader perk unlocks at the reloading bench give rounds like the .357 JFP, at 1.25 damage, 3 off DT and a tighter spread. Energy cells have the same ladder: over charge is 1.25 damage and 5 off DT, max charge 1.5 and 10 off, at 1.5 and 2.5 times the wear.

Guns: Pistols and Revolvers

The pistol to build toward is the hunting revolver, which does more per shot than most rifles and whose unique is the Ranger Sequoia. Until then, Lucky in Primm is the early standout, and the Mysterious Magnum changes hands from the Lonesome Drifter for a Barter check rather than a fight; our unique weapons page has both. The Gunslinger and Cowboy perks reward this class, and the .357 and .44 rounds it uses are also what the cowboy repeater and trail carbine fire, which keeps one ammunition stock serving a pistol and a rifle.

Guns: Rifles

Rifles are where the Guns skill pays off in stages. The varmint rifle is a starting weapon whose unique, the Ratslayer, is a silenced night-scoped version in Broc Flower Cave that carries a sneak character for half the game. The hunting rifle at Guns 50 is the first serious .308 weapon, and This Machine, the semi-automatic .308 rifle earned at Camp McCarran, sits beside it. Guns 75 opens the sniper rifle and its unique, spelled Gobbi on our unique weapons page, in the locker at the Sniper's Nest. At Guns 100 the choice is between the brush gun's .45-70 rounds and the anti-materiel rifle's .50 MG, and the anti-materiel rifle's Strength 8 is the usual reason a rifle build visits Doctor Usanagi on our doctors and vendors page.

Guns: Shotguns, Submachine Guns and Heavy Weapons

Shotgun damage is the sum of the pellets, which is why Big Boomer's 120 at Old Lady Gibson's scrap yard reads so high; the Shotgun Surgeon perk is what makes the class work against armor. The submachine guns trade damage per shot for volume and share their ammunition with the pistols. The heavy end asks for Strength that only an implant or Weapon Handling provides: the minigun wants Strength 10, holds 240 rounds and is sold by the Gun Runners' Vendortron from level 16 or taken from NCR heavy troopers, and its unique, the CZ57 Avenger, is on our unique weapons page.

Energy Weapons

Energy weapons start slow because the cells are scarce and the early guns are weak, which is why the two uniques reachable at Energy Weapons 25 matter: the AER14 Prototype in Vault 22 and the Q-35 Matter Modulator, which our unique weapons page puts behind a locked shipment room at REPCONN headquarters. Gloria Van Graff at the Silver Rush in Freeside and Cliff Briscoe in Novac both sell plasma rifles, and the Fiends drop laser rifles. The class's ceiling is the Gauss rifle, sold by Knight Torres at the Hidden Valley bunker once the Brotherhood trusts you and carried by their paladins, and its unique, the YCS/186 at the mercenary camp, does 140 a shot on four cells instead of five. The wiki notes that the YCS/186 and the Alien Blaster occupy the same spot and the Wild Wasteland trait decides which one exists; our unique weapons page lists both. Laser Commander, Meltdown and Plasma Spaz are the perks this class is built on, and the laser rifle's three mods, focus optics for damage, a scope and a beam splitter, are the model for how mods work: bought from vendors and attached from the weapon's inventory entry.

Explosives

The missile launcher is the workhorse: Black Mountain's storage building holds one, the Vendortron, the arms merchant at the 188 Trading Post and Sergeant Contreras at Camp McCarran sell them, and Annabelle, its unique, is the reason our items guide sends you up Black Mountain, where a sniper on the summit carries it. The Fat Man is the ceiling, and our unique weapons page files one under a mislabelled heading at Quarry Junction. Demolition Expert and Splash Damage are the class's perks, and the Patriot's Cookbook magazines on our skill magazines page lend the ten points that make the 75 and 100 requirements reachable early.

Melee Weapons

Melee has two ceilings. The chainsaw and the thermic lance both do 100 a hit and ignore Damage Threshold, which makes them the answer to deathclaws and power armor. Oh, Baby! is the heavier hitter per swing but slow, and it shares the super sledge's Strength 8, which Knight Torres at Hidden Valley, NCR heavy troopers and the arms merchant at the 188 all supply. Every melee weapon gains a special V.A.T.S. attack at Melee Weapons 50; the super sledge's Mauler costs 10 extra action points, does half damage and can knock a target down. Piercing Strike, Super Slam and Slayer are the perks, and Grognak the Barbarian on our skill books page is the permanent skill gain.

Unarmed

The ballistic fist is the class's top damage and is sold by Blake at the Crimson Caravan Company, Knight Torres and Mick at Mick and Ralph's, and carried by Caesar's praetorian guard. Pushy is the interesting alternative: less damage, a Strength requirement of 2, and a hit that throws whatever it kills across the room. Our builds page walks an unarmed character from Love and Hate to Pushy, and our perks page lists the four unarmed moves that are taught rather than picked, Legion Assault, Ranger Takedown, Khan Trick and Scribe Counter, the last from Veronica once she has formal wear, which is on our companions page.

Where to Buy

Whatever the class, the unique variant is usually the better weapon and is usually found rather than bought, which is why the forty-two entries on our unique weapons page are worth reading before you spend caps on the ordinary version.