I have been playing a Rifle based character that uses Melee for some stealth kills. I have a lot of .38 and 10 mm ammo building up because I use .45 and .308 in my rifles. I converted my best 10 mm Pistol to automatic and tried it on some Mole Rats. The results were good in V.A.T.S. and in real time. Even though Ghouls are not the strongest enemies in the game I fell back to using my .45 Overseer's Guardian Combat Rifle instead of trying the 10 mm pistol or my .38 automatic pipe-rifle. The Guardian would one shot most of the Ghouls. My original idea was to save my .45 ammo by using the 10 mm pistol on weak enemies like Mole Rats. But I was using so much ammo on the Mole Rats it would probably be better to sell the .38 and 10 mm ammo and buy .45 with the caps instead.
Using the automatic weapons was fun but using the Guardian was just safer and probably cheaper. If I was using a regular Combat Rifle the switch to automatics may have made sense. Unless I find an automatic weapon with a legendary effect that increases damage significantly the automatic weapon experiment is a failure for right now. I have seen video of legendary explosive variation of automatic weapons and the results look great. I will report back when I get more experience, but for now rifles seem the way to go.
