Companion Weapons

[AgentTBC]

Quick and simple:  Are the different companions better with one type of weapon or another?  Or should I just give them whatever I have that seems to fit the current situation in terms of range, etc?

Like can they all use Heavy Weapons just as well as handguns or melee or long?

[Clawdius_Talonious]

They definitely seem to me to have preferences for certain types of weapons, if you give them a ranged weapon they dislike they're likely to use their melee weapon. That said there's a bit of logic underlying the process I'm not sure of, where e.g. Nyoka can have her preferred LMG and still want to swap into her melee weapon, despite the fact that there are multitudes of enemies surrounding you or what have you.

Giving Paravati an LMG early on resulted in her exclusively using her melee weapon, and they tell you what they want to use in dialog and with their initial load out. Whether or not this logic changes with time or anything like that I haven't had the urge to discover, and I'm not entirely sure why some of the things that happen happen. For instance if you steal Paravati's hammer and give her a tossball blocker she'll still use the hammer during her special attack, that seems more like a bug than a feature but maybe YMMV.

[AgentTBC]

Hm, thanks.  I'll just pay attention and see if they refuse to use the weapons I give them or not.

[GhostofAnakin]

Speaking of companion weapons/armor, there doesn't seem to be a way to unequip a mask/helmet from your companion and go back to not having one.  You can change the helmet to another one, but you can't just unequip it.

At least the option wasn't available to me on the PS4 version.  I tried on one of my spare masks with one of my NPC companions, didn't like the look of it, and wanted to just remove it but found I couldn't.  Only option I had was to exchange it for a different helmet.  But I couldn't go back to my companion simply not having a helmet.

[Omgilovesteak]

I was also wondering do bonus stats on armor help a companion. Like a +1 melee weapon bonus on armor or something like that. i can't tell

[Ommamar]

47 minutes ago, AgentTBC said:

Hm, thanks.  I'll just pay attention and see if they refuse to use the weapons I give them or not.

If you mean will they say ever not slot a weapon so far I would go with no.  Both Vicar and Pavarati indicated their strengths and preferences on what kind of weapon they would prefer.  I have had Vicar not use a grenade launcher I gave him although he slotted it no problem.  This might be a way to control how they attack in combat though so far I haven't found a melee weapon they wouldn't use. 

[AgentTBC]

The Vicar claims to prefer melee weapons but, sorry dude, I'm playing on Supernova so that's a recipe for being instagibbed.

He can use the tactshotgun and LIKE IT.

[RobbedofLife]

Mine always go into melee mode so i gave up and just keep em around as cannon fodder and for dialogue.

[Clawdius_Talonious]

5 minutes ago, RobbedofLife said:

Mine always go into melee mode so i gave up and just keep em around as cannon fodder and for dialogue.

You can specify that they stay ranged instead of mixed, the fourth tab displays their skills and current AI settings, that's pretty much crucial for Supernova at this point as they are far too squishy and if they are downed they're instantly permanently dead if you don't have high end perks that save them from that fate once every 15 minutes.

What I just realized is that if you go into the UI settings and turn off "Show base damage" (IIRC) it will display the damage done after stats are applied, this works for your companions too when they have items equipped so you can see what the difference is between weapons they prefer and what you have that does the damage type you'd like them to do (e.g. shock for robot fights.)

[RobbedofLife]

25 minutes ago, Clawdius_Talonious said:

You can specify that they stay ranged instead of mixed, the fourth tab displays their skills and current AI settings, that's pretty much crucial for Supernova at this point as they are far too squishy and if they are downed they're instantly permanently dead if you don't have high end perks that save them from that fate once every 15 minutes

Good to know. I only ever bothered to change their weapons so never went to in depth into their menu.

[Clawdius_Talonious]

Yeah I had just read the "mixed" setting on here moments before, looking at it myself there I just see ranged and close, but you can set what they prefer. I think with Paravati she had no heavy weapons skill and the damage of the LMG was small enough that she just started to use her close range weapon nearly exclusively due to that.

[AgentTBC]

There do seem to be marginal differences when I swap weapons in and out with "Show Base Damage" turned off.   But nothing too major yet given none of our stats are even at 50.   But Parvati still does a ton more damage with a Flamethrower (Heavy Weapon) than even my best non-Heavy guns despite it looking like she doesn't have much if any Heavy Weapon skill (since the listed damage decreases a touch when I equip it on her).  So the stat of the weapon still predominates.

A related question re: companions:

All companions I've found so far have 3 skills listed on their Details page.  Why only those 3?  If those skills are higher than mine and that companion is in my party, does their skill get used in place of my own?  That would make sense for things like Hacking or Lockpicking but not so much for sneaking?  What's felix going to do, sneak for me?

[nize2864]

Companions main skills that are shown in the companions stats tab are the ones that boost your own by some percentage.  As for what weapons they prefer... No idea but I've had parvati using the unique machine gun found in the first area and she was wrecking everything with it until I've got her a flamethrower. So I'd say they are proficient in all weapons probably. 

[Horrorscope]

15 hours ago, RobbedofLife said:

Mine always go into melee mode so i gave up and just keep em around as cannon fodder and for dialogue.

What if you changed their AI setting to Ranged only? I've kept balanced and I have noticed they switch between both.

[Horrorscope]

17 hours ago, Omgilovesteak said:

I was also wondering do bonus stats on armor help a companion. Like a +1 melee weapon bonus on armor or something like that. i can't tell

This is a good question, I just figured the number in () under each Skill is the number we all enjoy and use, but I guess I don't really know that. I do know items with stat modifiers do not stack, the greatest number will be all that is needed. I thought Josh has talked about this in the past and he prefers stacking because it is easier for the game player to understand and I agree, not stacking adds a lot of going back and forth on the companions to max out what you could have, make sure you have one high in hack and then no one else uses hack mods, it becomes cumbersome. I thought his preference was stacking and then with that the bonuses singularly are not as great but have a higher top end if you really want to focus on a few, to me that is a better micro-managed situation.

Edited October 29, 2019 by Horrorscope

[AgentTBC]

I've been messing around with it and, really, I don't see any particular reason you just don't want to stick the highest DPS (or highest burst) damage weapons you have on every companion regardless of type, taking into account range if you want.  

And while there may be extremely marginal advantages to pumping a couple of stats on different companions with armor, really you're probably just better off throwing the heaviest piece of metal you can find on them for the highest armor rating.   At least as far as your companions are concerned keeping them alive is a lot more important (on Supernova) for obvious reasons than trying to squeeze one extra point of Hack out of somebody.

At least through level 10-12 I think light armor is pretty underpowered compared to heavy.  The extra skill boosts are very tiny if any at all.

 

[AgentTBC]

I mean, for RP reasons I'm keeping a handgun on Ellie but probably I should just give everybody flamethrowers or something for effectiveness.

[AgentTBC]

If anyone is still reading this, I did a couple of tests on questions I and others had.

First, companion skills including weapon skills are affected by armor mods.  You can test this for the science/stealth skills easily enough but making sure they worked for ranged was a little trickier because and I'm lucky I noticed this... the stats on the weapons you see only update when you zone transition or save and load the game.  So at first it looked like Ranged Weapon Skills +5 didn't work but once I understood I had to save/load or zone transition it started to update.

Note that I do not know if this is a DISPLAY BUG where the stats update but you can't see it until then or if its a functional bug where the stats themselves don't update until transitions.

Second, I'm not sure people realize but weapon damage is only indirectly changed by weapon skill via critical chance and weapon sway.  Direct damage increase comes from the attributes not the skills.  I did some quick and dirty tests and of the first four companions and Ellie seems the best with all ranged and heavy weapons while Vicar Max is the worst, though the differences are mostly not enough to be all that worth worrying about (like a 5% difference between best and worst.  Very marginal.)  Felix is, unsurprisingly, the best at BASHING STUFF with melee weapons and the difference is a bit bigger with a 10-15% difference in damage.  Vicar Max is again the worst with melee weapons though, again, the differences between the middle of the packers and Max is marginal.

This is at around level 10 so the differences may start out at the lowest point and increase over time as levels increase.  Will have to check again later and with other companions.

But for now it's clear you'd rather have a good weapon of a non-optimal type on the companion than a medium weapon of the optimal type.

Edited October 30, 2019 by AgentTBC