Cyberpunk 2077

Hard pass for me. I want my weapons as basic as possible, point and shoot with reliable damage. I only briefly tried a couple and switched back after like 30 minutes.

But I also don't do most of the perks/abilities from the skill tree either. I don't want to have to think about headshotting 3 enemies in 4.5 seconds and then reloading and then meleeing someone to blow them up and cause radius damage that is multiplied by the number of enemies in a 35 meter radius... I see enemy, I shoot enemy, enemy die, I loot enemy, repeat.

the legendary / iconic ones are pretty neat. There’s a great pistol you can swipe from the Arasaka estate if you sneak in there. With netrunning though they’re always kind of a backup for me. My last build was almost entirely dedicated to melting brains with contagion and system shutdown (or whatever it’s called). Stragglers got the bullets from around the corner.

Smart Weapons feel unreliable. Too many misses.

Breakthrough and Buzzsaw are my standard carry.

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Breakthrough

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Buzzsaw

Warden with two mag extensions are fucking shimra. And of course Ashura reigns supreme, at least if the distance is not too great. As for the rest.... well.

before the update that dropped with phantom of liberty they were a huge part of my decker build. Post Im all about the katana. tech sniper rifle is my main secondary. I still keep a smart shotgun as my teriary but im starting to wonder if its even worth the cyberware.

There are a few iconic ones that are really good, like the choi(?) pistol and the smg you can find on the Arasaka compound when you sabotage the float. The former shoots explosive rounds that usually 1-2 shot normal enemies when aiming at the head, and the latter shoots incendiary at multiple targets, especially great with the contagion hack explosive effect against groups.

Interesting that so many people don't like them, I always felt that they were a little op, not that I let that stop me of course, especially for my weaker characters (which is most of them). I think maybe the not hitting enough part might be from the lower quality weapons, so maybe the better ones hit more? I'm not sure. Also there are perks now that help with that, under Intelligence. Other than that, I also like the tech weapons. Power weapons are the only ones I don't like; so boring. 😛

My run with phantom liberty was with smart weapons. They were very good, up to max level. Some were quite bad, but most were excellent. I could overclock for big damage boost, by I almost never needed it.

And it was all categories: automatic pistols, smg, automatic rifles, sniper rifle, and shotgun.

The only drawback was for missions where I had to stay undetected. I fell back on quick hacks and a katana for that.

I recall they have worst stats usually, don't they? I tried once and it didn't seem very impressive but then I wasn't picking perks for them or anything. I'm curious how good they are, too.