Legendary weapon effects

For the Legendary armor effects in *Fallout 4*, see Legendary armor effects.
For legendary weapon effects in *Fallout 76*, see *Fallout 76* legendary weapon effects.
 File:Fo4 Critical Banker.png
In *Fallout 4*, **Legendary weapon effects** are special modifications applied to basic weapons that use special prefix modifiers, not obtainable elsewhere. Legendary weapons cannot be scrapped, but can be further modified and traded with vendors. An on-screen notification informs the player that they have picked up a Legendary weapon; in the Pip-Boy's inventory screen, they are marked with a star. Unlike unique weapons, they are randomized and are never named. Legendary effects can provide the same effects as most unique weapons, though; a "Relentless .44 pistol" is identical to Kellogg's pistol. Like unique weapons, Legendary weapons can be given a custom name.

## Location

Legendary weapons are most commonly found on the bodies of "Legendary" variants of enemies. These enemies spawn at random locations throughout the Commonwealth, the Island and Nuka-World, depending on the difficulty setting, and will almost always have a Legendary piece of equipment in their inventory. Legendary weapons can also be awarded for completing certain quests, and can be found in tribute chests or as rewards from the Nuka-Cade, albeit rarely.

## Legendary weapon prefixes

Most legendary weapons will have one of the following prefixes, which acts as a short description of the weapon's effects.

## Unique weapon effects

Some effects are not randomly generated legendary weapons. These are known as unique weapon effects, and they can only be found by adding the effect through commands, or getting the unique weapon that they are found on. A removable effect is a weapon mod that isn't legendary, i.e. it will block some other mod on the weapon but won't block the legendary mod the game uses to apply legendary effects, allowing the player to move it to a legendary version of the weapon.

## Detailed explanations

The legendary weapons and armor that are found on enemies are random; there are certain "pools" of said weapon and armor types specifically tied to the type of enemy and location in which they are spawned. Certain legendary variants of weapons encountered early in the game, such as laser muskets and pipe pistols, will not spawn on Gunners, but will always have a chance to be found on legendary enemies with an area-specific low level cap (e.g. the feral ghouls in Super Duper Mart).

### *Berserker*

* The **Berserker** effect works in reverse as well; having an excessive armor rating will actually decrease the weapon's damage to effectively nothing. The effect is not decreased by Radiation Resistance.
	+ The "Berserker" mod occasionally causes a miscalculation of damage; the damage decreases if not wearing any base clothing (army fatigues, vault jumpsuit, jeans and t-shirt, etc.).
	+ The damage calculation is also not shown until the weapon is equipped, and then it will also translate the effect onto other weapons when viewed in the inventory (which is correct; the effect on the equipped weapon will apply the same effect to grenades the player throws.)
	+ This weapon mod can be added to ranged weapons via console, e.g. "Berserker's Shielded Gauss rifle."

### *Cavalier's* and *Sentinel's*

Because the damage reduction from these effects will stack additively with legendary armor effects that grant a percent damage reduction (including Cavalier's and Sentinel's, as both are also armor effects), due to the fact that they actually add percentage points rather than an actual percent, equipping 7 such pieces that all apply +15% (e.g. Sentinel's on the player character's weapon, both legs, both arms, torso and head) will lead to 100% damage reduction, meaning the character takes no normal damage at all (though exotic effects such as bleeding will still cause damage). This causes enemies to panic and run away, due to how *Fallout 4*'s AI is programmed.

### *Crippling* and *Violent*

* The **Crippling** effect does not increase a weapon's attack power, but rather its limb damage. Therefore, enemies will still take the same amount of hits to defeat, but their limbs will be easier to cripple.
* **Violent** will kill a target faster (at the same speed as a Powerful weapon), but the time to cripple a target limb is the same as for **Crippling**, as the damage increase from it also applies to limb damage; the downside is the increased recoil. As a *general* rule, **Violent** is strictly worse than Two Shot.

### *Deadeye* and *Resolute*

* The slow time from the **Resolute** effect occurs not only when shooting the second to last bullet but also when player character switches to a weapon with the **Resolute** effect and a single round in the magazine.
* A **Resolute** laser musket's time slow effect will occur upon the first crank; the player character must wait a short while before resuming cranking or the effect will not activate.
* The slow time effects from **Dead Eye** and **Resolute** are not canceled when switching to a different weapon, thus technically allowing the effect to be partially transferred to it. This can be useful to make a better aimed sniper shot.

### *Defiant*

* The **Defiant** effect permanently doubles the damage for any weapon with a capacity of 1, as they are technically always on the "last round" before reloading.
	+ However, explosive weapons such as the Fat Man see almost no benefit, as the damage multiplier does not apply to explosive damage.

### *Explosive*

The **Explosive** effect is exceptionally powerful when paired with weapons with low base damage per projectile that boasts a high rate of fire or shoots several projectiles, as each projectile will produce an independent explosion, and the flat damage bonus itself is usually more than percentile bonuses.

* The damage dealt by the Explosive prefix is increased by the Demolition Expert perk as well as the Explosives bobblehead. With 4 ranks in Demolition Expert plus the Explosives bobblehead, Explosive weapons actually deal 32.25 explosive splash damage per projectile.
* The area-of-effect damage dealt by the Explosive prefix is also increased by Commando/Gunslinger/Heavy Gunner/Rifleman perks. Rifleman increases damage more than its counterparts due to also decreasing the target's Damage Resistance when resolving the hit.
	+ Minigun: the best example for the first case. Considering a base damage of 8 points per bullet, adding 15 points of explosive damage to every shot fired effectively triples the weapon's damage output even without taking the splash damage into account, as opposed to the "Mighty" Legendary Mod adding only 25% of 8 which is +2 to an end result of 10 versus 8 + 15 resulting in 23. Installing barrel mods somewhat weakens this effect, but it remains quite powerful regardless. The fact that the splash radius makes the minigun's inherent spread largely irrelevant only serves to further improve the effect's usefulness; as long as the weapon is aimed at the player character's target, it will hit it even if the bullets themselves don't connect.
		- For example, a base minigun does 8 damage per bullet. With Explosive, it does 8+15=23 damage per bullet. With rank 1 of Heavy Gunner, a +20% damage will be achieved, but that bonus is applied to both the original 8 and the explosive 15. It therefore does 1.2 \* (8 + 15) = 27 (rounded down) per bullet, instead of just (1.2 \* 8) + 15 = 24 damage. At rank 5, it therefore does 2 \* (8 + 15) = 46 damage per round, and NOT just (2 \* 8) + 15 = 31 damage.
		- The Demolition Expert perk only affects the explosive component. With rank 1, for example, the weapon then does 8 + (1.25 \* 15) = 26 damage per bullet. Similarly, maxed out the perk does 8 + (2 \* 15) = 38 damage per round.
		- Taken together, this allows the minigun to far exceed its traditional base damage, doing a maximum of 2 \* (8 + (2 \* 15)) = 76 damage per round, instead of the 46 damage per round as with other weapon classes.
	+ Shotguns benefit from explosive shots, multiplying their damage output based on the amount of shot/beams in each round fired.
		- An explosive combat shotgun with an advanced receiver (firing 8 projectiles instead of a base of 7), 3 star Demolition Expert and 5 star Rifleman can do up to 2\*100+(15\*1.75)\*8=410 Base Damage per shot. (V.A.T.S. does not take every projectile into account, and the weapon information shown on the Pip-Boy will fall short of the total damage.)
	+ This effect can only spawn on ballistic weaponry. Laser, explosive and other weapons cannot have this effect without mods or console commands. This is due to various glitches caused by other kinds of weapons.
		- Explosive weapons such as the Broadsider and missile launcher will not work with certain legendary effects, such as **Incendiary** and **Explosive**. These effects appear to replace the explosive damage with their own effect, reducing the weapon's damage dramatically.
		- Laser weapons such as the laser rifle appear to function as intended at first as the visual effect functions correctly. However, the actual damage of the explosion greatly increases, instantly killing almost any foe in a single hit. A scatter laser rifle with this effect can outdamage any other weapon in the game. They will also almost always kill the player if they get caught by any recoil damage.
		- Other energy weapons don't function correctly at all, and result in the gun changing its firing animations and sound effects from a laser/plasma/fire-based weapon to a ballistic gun, including a stream of casings being ejected from somewhere behind or inside the weapon.
	+ When firing Explosive-enhanced weapons in close quarters, their splash damage can injure the shooter just like grenades, missiles or any other explosive munitions do.
	+ Killing almost any sort of enemy with a powerful Explosive-enhanced automatic weapon in V.A.T.S. will often launch the target dozens of yards into the air and hurl them a considerable distance, especially if one of the salvo's first hits already dealt the killing blow. This can make finding the corpse for looting difficult at times.
	+ Explosive shots fired from a weapon with this modifier, and unlike shots fired with weapons bearing the Incendiary effect, will not ignite oil pools.

### *Freezing* and *Plasma Infused*

**Freezing** and **Plasma Infused** mods are most effective on low base damage weaponry because the amount of damage added is independent of the damage of the gun and adding 10 or 15 to a smaller number has a bigger impact than on a larger one. However, this damage is per attack, not per projectile, so they have little effect with shotguns and energy weapons modded to have the scatter effect.

* The bonus damage from the **Freezing** and **Plasma Infused** prefixes scales with all relevant damage modifiers. That is, with 5 ranks in the appropriate damage perk (e.g. Gunslinger for non-automatic pistols,) a Freezing or Plasma-Infused will deal 20 points of bonus energy damage. However, with no ranks in the perk, the gun would only deal the base 10 points of energy damage. This bonus damage is also affected by other perks that modify damage, including Astoundingly Awesome Tales #07, and Lone Wanderer. For melee weapons, the damage is affected by the Rooted perk as well, but does not receive bonus damage from the Strength stat.
	+ **Freezing** weapons also have great synergy with critical-focused builds due to their freezing effect on critical hits. With Critical Banker, Four Leaf Clover and a freezing weapon with a low Action Point cost, each instance of combat can be opened by freezing up to 5 combatants (4 without the *Far Harbor* add-on,) reducing a numbers advantage or allowing free attacks for a time. Use of Overdrive allows this tactic to be used without a V.A.T.S. focused build when paired with a rapid-firing weapon.
		- Certain enemies, such as mirelurks, deathclaws and enemies wearing power armor, cannot be frozen.
	+ **Plasma Infused** weapons share many characteristics with "true" plasma weapons, including the latters' high chance of spawning several units of nuclear material on any defeated enemy. Gooifying the target with a critical kill shot virtually guarantees this, thus providing an abundant source for this crafting component, especially for player characters specializing in critical hit chance.

### *Furious*

* The **Furious** effect increases a weapon's damage by 15% after each consecutive hit. That is, hitting an enemy three times in a row will increase the damage of the third hit by 30%. The counter of consecutive hits is reset after not hitting the target for 10 seconds, or after hitting another target. Simply missing a target does not affect the counter, that is, terrain does not count as a target for this effect's definition of "same target," so the player can hit it without resetting the counter.
* The Furious effect does not increase the radiation damage on the radium rifle, only ballistic. This is because the radiation damage is actually an enchantment that is not adjusted by damage modifiers.

### *Incendiary*, *Poisoner's* and *Wounding*

These effects deal a static amount of damage over time which is not affected by any perk: Incendiary deals deals 3 fire damage per second for 5 seconds (15 total), Poisoner's deals 3 poison damage per second for 10 seconds (30 total), and Wounding deals 5 bleed damage per second for 5 seconds (25 total). In increasing order of utility:

1. **Poisoner's** deals a damage type most targets are immune or highly resistant to, and will in practice do the least of these. In addition, it does not stack with itself, so the faster a weapon shoots, the less noticeable the poison damage will be.
2. **Incendiary** is less resisted, but still enough so that as enemies' levels increase, the added damage will become less and less noticeable. Like Poisoner's, it will also not stack with itself, so slower is better, theoretically.
3. **Wounding** deals damage to which nothing in the game has any immunity or resistance to, and bleed damage also stacks with itself. This means that, for instance, getting hit twice with a Wounding weapon will cause a target to suffer bleed damage twice. Thus, this can be highly lethal on weapons with high rates of fire and/or multiple projectiles per shot (as each projectile Wounds individually), and while damage perks will not affect this, rate of fire perks such as Gun Nut can greatly increase the damage output from Wounding effects.

**Wounding** is comparable to Explosive in that both deal per-projectile damage even against a single target, which is true of them and only them; **Explosive**'s damage is modifiable by perks, hits multiple targets and is instantaneous, but **Wounding** ignores all resistances (and the damage modifier from difficulty level).

### *Instigating*

* The **Instigating** mod is at its best when found on powerful semi-automatic or bolt-action weapons, like all kinds of sniper rifles and especially the Gauss rifle. Considering that most, if not all, hostiles will be at full health when the player character is setting up a sniper ambush against an enemy stronghold, automatically dealing double damage against them seriously increases the chance of handing out a chain of one-hit-kills. With a silencer modification, entire locations can be easily cleared with stealth. A fully charged sneak shot from a fully upgraded and silenced Instigating Gauss rifle, coupled with maxed Rifleman, Ninja and Mister Sandman is a virtually guaranteed one-hit-kill against anything that roams the Commonwealth, regardless of distance, difficulty setting and whether or not it was a headshot.

### *Irradiated*

* The **Irradiated** mod is potentially very powerful, scaling extremely well with higher difficulties and higher levels. When combined with the Nuclear Physicist perk, **Irradiated** weapons do 100 points of radiation damage (10% of max health). At lower levels and difficulties, the normal damage of the weapon may dwarf the 10% max health reduction (due to how radiation damage in Fallout 4 works). Indeed, even at high levels, properly upgraded and geared weapons may also do much better against many enemies. However, high-level human enemies may have over 1,000 health and, due to radiation damage ignoring player damage penalties in higher difficulties, a single irradiated shot could be worth hundreds of damage, highly effective on automatic weapons (even a low-level auto pipe pistol). **Irradiated** Gamma guns and Radium rifles are even more extreme.
	+ The **Irradiated** mod is also very effective against legendary enemies, as it reduces the maximum health points of the target, preventing the healing effect of the mutation.

### *Kneecapper*

* The **Kneecapper** mod does not increase limb damage in any way; rather, each projectile has a 20% chance to instantly cripple the target's legs.
	+ This makes the Kneecapper effect most effective on automatic weapons or shotguns, as any single hit will trigger the effect regardless of damage.
	+ The effect will trigger regardless of where the target is hit.
	+ The most obvious targets are all types of melee-focused enemies from mole rats or feral ghouls all the way up to deathclaws. A short burst will usually be enough to turn them into sitting ducks, making them unable to close in on their target and therefore depriving them of almost any threat potential.
	+ While enemies with ranged weapons still pose a threat even with their legs crippled, they collapse to the ground when the effect triggers and remain prone for some seconds, taking them out of the fight temporarily. If that enemy was shooting from behind cover, their line of sight will be broken, thus preventing them from attacking any longer until the Sole Survivor digs them out.
	+ Kneecapper weapons should not be used to attack flying Vertibirds. When the crippling effect triggers, it will cause a bug by instantly destroying the flyer's turbines while making it impossible to destroy completely. This can be especially aggravating during the quest Rockets' Red Glare for the Railroad, where an attacking Brotherhood of Steel Vertibird must be deestroyed.
		- Kneecapped Vertibirds will hover just above ground level for as long as the player remains in the area. Walking away should trigger their crash into the ground, destroying the Vertibird.

### *Lucky* weapon effects

* Does not stack with the Better Criticals perk.

### *Never ending*

* Powerful weapons that are balanced by reload times, such as the double-barrel shotgun, will have that balance removed; the effect in VATS will be identical to rank 2 of Quick Hands, while outside of VATS the benefit will depend on the reloading time of the weapon.
* It is not normally possible to find heavy weapons (like the Fat Man or missile launcher) with this effect.
* The **Never ending** mod sets ammo capacity equal to the amount one is carrying, eliminating the need to reload. However, this mod can make certain weapons unstable.
	+ For example, a laser musket with the effect will consume all ammunition for the gun that is currently in the player's inventory. However, as the musket uses its "energy reservoir" to store the crank charge, and this mod sets the reservoir size to the amount of ammo in the inventory, the mod effectively removes the crank limit. Since the damage of the weapon is based on how many cranks it is given, this gives that single shot a devastating amount of damage. For example, at 200 cranks, a single shot can do about 30,000 damage.
	+ The Gatling laser has a unique bug relating to this effect. When fired while the player has at least 3 fusion cores, the weapon will seemingly drain most of one core, but will then no longer drain any further energy, resulting in the weapon having infinite ammo. If the player has less than 3 cores, the weapon will instantly drain them. Despite its buggy nature, the unique Gatling laser Aeternus has this effect.

### *Nimble*

* The **Nimble** modifier can be used by players wearing power armor to significantly boost their movement speed while sneaking. Although it can be difficult to walk around with certain weapons sighted (such as weapons with actual scopes), aiming down the sights of a small nimble pistol while sneaking in power armor results in a faster movement speed faster than normal (standing) running in power armor.
	+ The movement speed while overburdened is the same as that while not overburdened, thus, a player can continue moving at running speed while overburdened simply by aiming down a **Nimble** weapon's sights continuously.

### *Nocturnal*

The **Nocturnal** modifier works in the following way:

* 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM: 33%
* 6:00 - 9:00, AM or PM: 66%
* 9:00 PM - 12:00 AM: 150%
* 12:00 AM - 6:00 AM: 200%

Thus, the "average" multiplier across an entire day (if the player did not simply switch weapons during off-hours) is 97.625%, i.e. a Nocturnal weapon does less "damage per day" than a normal weapon.

### *Penetrating*

* The **Penetrating** mod's effectiveness, due to the exponential curve of armor based damage reduction, does not vary with the target's armor after a certain threshold. When the target's armor rating is less than 15% of the weapon's damage, which is very little, the damage is applied in full (meaning 99%) and the Penetrating effect wasted. If the armor rating is between 15% and 21.4%, a Penetrating weapon will still do full (99%) damage while a standard variant will already experience damage reduction, making the Penetrating weapon increasingly better by comparison (0% to 13.9% more damage). Past this point, which is still very low for semi-automatic weapons, having the Penetrating mod means a static 13.9% increase in effective damage.
* When looking at the effect in the Creation Kit, the effect used to determine the percentage of Armor/Energy penetration is the same as the Rifleman perk, which means that unlike what the **Penetrating** effect description says, this effect does not ignore the enemy's Energy Resistance.Template:Verify

### *Rapid*

* The **Rapid** mod uses the weapon's *base* firing rate, so a weapon modded to reduce its firing rate in exchange for more damage, such as a Gatling laser using charging barrels. Due to the way the game calculates bonus percentages, a Gatling laser with the Charging Barrels mod (-83.5% rate of fire) and the Rapid prefix (+25% rate of fire) shoots more than twice as fast as it normally would, at 41.5% of the standard firing rate instead of 16.5%. This effect is essentially what makes the unique Final Judgment variant so deadly. It also largely eliminates the Charging Barrels' greatest drawback (very low rate of fire) and thus makes it far more useful in fights against numerous weak and/or fast-moving enemies that are normally hard to hit, in addition to still inflicting large amounts of damage to anything else as well, no matter how heavily armored it might be.

### *Staggering*

* The **Staggering** prefix, when applied to a weapon with a very high fire rate (such as a ripper or flamer) or with multiple projectiles (such as a combat shotgun), will usually render the target helpless while being hit, reducing the toughest enemies to easy targets. This is especially effective when combined with other effects that can cause stagger, such as Commando or the knockdown effect of Sniper.
* Based on stats from the Creation Kit, non-automatic weapons have a 30% to stagger a target each hit, while automatic weapons have 5%. One-hand or two-hand melee weapons have 50%, which allows weapons like The Harvester to stunlock an opponent.

### *Two-shot*

* The **Two shot** modifier makes the weapon fire an additional projectile while still using only 1 ammo and at slightly reduced accuracy and can greatly increase recoil. The game adds the base (i.e. unmodded) damage of the gun to its current (modded) damage and then splits the combined damage evenly into two projectiles. For example, an unmodded hunting rifle does 37 damage, while a .50 cal hunting rifle does 64. So a Two-shot .50 cal hunting rifle does 64+37 = 101 damage, resulting in two projectiles hitting for 50.5 each. The damage value displayed in the Pip-Boy is the damage of both projectiles combined.
	+ It is not normally possible to find heavy weapons like the missile launcher or harpoon gun with this effect.
	+ The game uses the combined damage to calculate the damage reduction multiplier of the target's armor, so when both bullets hit, it does the same damage that one bullet with the combined damage would do. Therefore a Two-shot weapon will do more damage than the shots of an identically modded normal weapon and its unmodded variant combined.
	+ As only the weapon's base damage is added, a shot from a heavily modded version of a two-shot weapon may do significantly less than twice the damage of a shot from a non-legendary version of the weapon modded in the same fashion. It does, however, help punching through the target's armor, delivering more of the applied mods' damage.
	+ Two shot has an ability to provide a slight damage up when applying weapon mods which reduce damage. As it uses the base damage for the second projectile's damage, a mod which lowers damage (such as an automatic receiver) will be averaged with a higher damage rating, giving both bullets slightly higher damage than the weapon would have without Two shot.
	+ Upgrading a Two Shot Fat Man like Big Boy with the MIRV modification will result in the weapon carpet-bombing a huge area with twelve mini nukes instead of six while simultaneously and massively reducing its range, potentially catching the player in its own fire.
	+ When applied to an unmodified double barrel shotgun, it will double its base damage, but cause it to have zero accuracy, meaning it will only be effective at point blank range.
	+ A Two Shot railway rifle will shoot two railway spikes, and because of this, enemies killed with such a weapon have a chance to drop two railway spikes instead of just one.
	+ All Two Shot weapons can deliver up to double the damage of their base, unmodified variant. This means that a Two Shot weapon can easily do more damage than an identical weapon with one of the race-specific damage prefixes (Assassin's, Exterminator's, Ghoul slayer's, Hunter's, Mutant slayer's, Troubleshooter's). For example, given two fully identically modified .50 sniper rifles, one a Ghoul Slayer's and one a Two Shot, the former will do 64 base damage to any enemy and (64 \* 1.5) = 96 to ghouls; while the latter will do a consistent (as demonstrated above) 101 damage to any and all enemies, ghouls or not. This means that any Two Shot weapon effectively makes all race-specific variants of most weapons obsolete. This can exclude some rapid fire weapons however, as the extra recoil may make them difficult to use.
	+ Two Shot fully stacks with the laser musket "cranking" mechanic and doubles or almost triples its output. As a four-crank capacitor and long barrels are available with Science! 1, a legendary drop with 248 damage per shot is potentially available very early.
	+ While rare, a Two Shot weapon can miss on a critical hit.

### *VATS enhanced*

* Ranged weapons will use 25% less AP and gain 33% increased hit chance; on melee weapons will have their AP cost by reduced by 40%.
* Low AP-cost weapons such as the Deliverer can easily queue 16 attacks, the maximum amount per use of V.A.T.S.

### *Junkie's*

* Works on missile launcher.
* Dark Craving does not count as an addiction for this effect.

## Console commands

Legendary effects can be added to items through the console by following the next steps:

1. Drop the item on the ground.
2. Pick up the item in the air by holding E (how one would normally drag ragdoll and other objects around).
3. Open console and enter "GetPlayerGrabbedRef." This returns the RefID of the item the player is holding in the air.
4. Take note of the returned RefID.
5. Look up the ModID below for the desired legendary weapon effect, note it as well.
6. Enter the following in the console (substitute the appropriate RefID and ModID): Template:Console
7. For example, the player would enter in something like this: Template:Console.
8. The item will drop to the ground, and when the player goes to pick it up, they will get an overview similar to the one the player gets when they pick up any given legendary item for the first time.

As a simpler alternative to points 2 - 4, the player can simply left-click on the item when it is lying on the floor. The RefID will then be displayed on-screen just as if one used the mentioned console command. Certain weapons can be challenging to left-click when dropped, so if this is unsuccessful, use Template:Console instead.

The player can't stack several mods on a single item, but they can replace a mod with another one via the console.

## Bugs

* Template:Platforms Enemies that die while frozen respawn in a broken state, laying on the ground immobile and unable to fire.Template:Verify
* Template:Platforms Using Furious power fist (and possibly other Furious items) causes the currently increased DMG percentage to be applied to the displayed DMG of all weapons in the trading and workbench inventory screens, but not in the PipBoy. The damage of the other weapons does not increase due to this bug. Template:Verify
* Using VATS with a Deadeye weapon can cause the game to move at normal speed in VATS, making enemies somewhat harder to target.

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