Ohio, USA. Zone 6.
I'm pretty sure this is Black Nightshade, specifically *solanum americanum*, but nightshades make me nervous and I'd like another opinion before I go eating it.
Pros:
Cons:
Looking for advice to improve or alternate setups I could try.
I just finished a run using the Automatic Rifle from Dead Money and I figured I'd give my thoughts on it.
The Browning Automatic Rifle is an iconic firearm, used by G.I.s, G-Men, bootleggers, and bank robbers. But "iconic" isn't necessarily the same thing as "good." Weapons manufacturers hadn't quite nailed down the whole "light machine gun" thing yet in the 1920s so it's both heavy as fuck and has limited magazine capacity. It's at least better than the Chauchat which it shares its "walking fire" design with, but that's not exactly a high bar.
The version in New Vegas is in kind of an awkward position. It has the highest base damage but lowest rate of fire (even with its one mod) and lowest magazine capacity of any automatic weapon. It also has particularly high requirements at the same 8 Strength and 100 Guns as the Anti-Materiel Rifle and a similar weight of 16 while being one of the least accurate weapons in the game. The only weapons with wider spread values are SOME OF the shotguns. When using it yourself, it's pretty easy to see how wide its spread is, just look down the sights. No, don't look at the front sight ring, you want to aim using that giant square rear sight aperture. Because the weapon's spread is so wide, the sway from standing, moving, and not aiming (or not meeting requiremetns) is pretty negligible, so the best way to use it is to rest the butt on your hip, advance at a steady pace toward your target, and fill the air in between with lead. Just the way John Moses Browning intended.
The closest comparison I can find is the 12.7mm SMG. That's lighter, more accurate, and the GRA version gets bigger mags and a suppressor. The Auto Rifle's main advantage over that is higher base damage, but it also gets better ammo variety since it's chambered in .308. So you get the option to use hollow point against soft targets, armor piercing for hard ones, and JSP for 30% bonus damage no matter what. You also have the advantage of Dead Money giving you a lifetime's supply of .308 ammo via vending machine.
So the best use case for it is against large numbers of tough, armored enemies. Preferably melee enemies or in confined spaces where they're forced to get close where you're most effective. You know, like in Hoover Dam. I went NCR this round and it absolutely mulched centurions in the turbine areas. The worst case to use it is in open areas against ranged opponents... like most of the overworld.
So, would I use it again? Nah. The Police Pistol is way better for Dead Money, and if I'm getting the requirements anyway I'd rather just load explosive rounds in an AM Rifle.
I feel like the LOK-1 is a very misunderstood weapon. A lot of players seem to have difficulty using it effectively, and with the added complexity compared to normal weapons and how easy it is to build or use it wrong it's not hard to see why. I wasn't satisfied with the guides for it I could find, so I decided to make my own. Now a bit of a disclaimer, I'm not particularly good at video games and I'm definitely not LazyMaybe. I did my best to research and test everything I could think of but there's a lot of hidden depth to DRG's mechanics and I won't pretend to be an expert.
The Smart Rifle's main feature is the ability to lock on to targets when you hold down the trigger and charge up a burst of up to 12 bullets by default that rapid-fire when you release. Locked enemies will have a number appear over them representing how many bullets you've allocated towards them and an orange tracer that shows the path the bullet will take to reach it (it turns yellow if the path is blocked). Using this, you can steer your shots around corners and cover, or bypass armor plates to get at weakpoints for extra damage. That's right, despite being a literal aimbot, the gun does in fact reward you for taking the time to aim. It'll always try to hit the target in its center of mass so the closer the enemy weakpoint is to the center from your perspective, the easier it'll be to hit, while some particularly far offset weakpoints can be difficult to get at unless you have just the right angle. Note that the gun won't waste ammo on already dead enemies so overlocking a target will have no negative effect beyond simply taking a little more time than necessary.
One other benefit the smart rifle has that's unrelated to lock-on targeting is inherent armor break bonus. It's a hidden stat, but your bullets do an extra 50% damage to armor, and as per usual with armor break bonuses, that comes with the benefit of ignoring damage resistance on the shot that breaks through. This means that while the weapon design encourages you to steer your shots toward weakpoints, you're not punished too badly if you don't.
The inherent weakness of this design is that it's slow to respond to threats at close range. That second or two to lock on can feel agonizingly slow when a glyphid is already chewing on your shins. In those situations (or if you want to shoot something that it won't lock onto) you do have the option to tap fire in semi auto. It's not exactly a good option and very few of your upgrades or overclocks will improve it, but it deals decent damage with fairly good accuracy and makes a serviceable backup option.
Compared to Engie's other primaries, the LOK-1 performs very differently. Both the Warthog and the Stubby typically struggle with distant or armored enemies (barring a couple overclocks) but perform very well at close range and have specific upgrades or overclocks that encourage you to stay within a certain range of your sentries. The smart rifle for contrast is perfectly accurate at any range and tears through armor, but can struggle at close range and has nothing tying you to your turrets. With that comes a change in playstyle. You're encouraged to be more mobile than normal to keep engagements at longer ranges where you're most effective, and you're not really punished for choosing not to babysit your sentry nest.
The biggest weakness of the weapon is ammo economy. Part of the problem is that Engineer's primaries need to have an inherent limiting factor to balance them being paired with what's effectively a second even stronger primary in the secondary slot. If he had a primary weapon that allowed him to perform the same job as well and as efficiently as a different class while still retaining his overpowered secondaries, there'd be no reason to play that other class. So every time I compare a LOK-1 overclock to a different class's weapon, I want you to think about how incredibly broken that class would be if it could equip the Breach Cutter. The rest of the problem with ammo economy is the weapon's design implicitly encourages players to waste ammo. You see, the weapon's description says "SMG," the flavor text says "SMG," the visual and sound design both say "SMG," even a lot of the upgrades seem to be pushing you toward building and using it like an SMG. And if you do, it'll even work fairly well. For about 12 seconds. In practice, the LOK-1 is a sniper rifle in disguise, and your build and especially target priority need to reflect that if you want to use it well. In other words: you need to think like a Scout and prioritize high value targets.
The Smart Rifle is extremely effective against ranged enemies like spitters, spreaders, and mactera thanks to being accurate at long range. It handles enemies with weakpoints in their center of mass like mactera, scrabs, and korlok sprouts with ease. It's effective at punching through the armor of things like spitters, stingtails, and mactera brundles. It's great at spotting enemies that can hide in dark caves like acid spitters and cave leeches. And it deals guaranteed damage against evasive enemies like fester fleas, mactera (sensing a theme?), and seasonal skulls/elves/bunnies. However against large targets with particularly heavy or unbreakable armor like praetorians or bigger you'll want to wait until they get closer so you can curve your bullets around their armor (or trigger fear to make them turn tail), and enemies without weakpoints like sniper turrets or whose weakpoints are particularly offset from their centers of mass like patrol bots and wardens may be more bullet-sponge-y than they otherwise could be. But of course the biggest weakness is large numbers of weak enemies. Much like with Scout's primaries, the LOK-1 can be used to deal with swarms of grunts, but if you use it too much for crowds you'll run out of the ammo you need for high value targets. The difference is that all 3 of Engineer's secondaries can be easily built to delete dozens of grunts per shot.
Engineer is balanced differently than the other classes. Gunner, Driller, and Scout have most of their killing potential concentrated into their primaries with secondaries mostly there to cover specific weaknesses, while the Engineer has his damage spread pretty evenly between primary, secondary, and turrets. To use him effectively, you need to use all of his equipment in tandem to cover each others' weaknesses and enhance each others' strengths. In this case: building your secondary of choice to kill the maximum number of grunts takes pressure off your primary's ammo pool and lets you avoid being That Guy double dipping the resupply. All 3 of your secondaries can also be built to ignite medium to large enemies too, and spoiling the mods section a bit that's the secret to unlocking the LOK-1's full potential.
Tier 1:
A seemingly simple choice between +6 damage from Increased Caliber Rounds and +72 max ammo from Expanded Ammo Bags. Ammo seems like the obvious choice because it's the only way to directly increase reserve ammo (unless Ghost Ship decides to make an ammo overclock) which directly addresses the gun's biggest weakness. But even though it's a 33% increase to total ammo (40% if you ignore the rounds already in the mag), it's competing with a 28.5% damage boost for a difference in total ammo economy of about 4%. And once you factor in the health and armor break points that the damage boost clears (a surprising number of health bars are divisible by 27), damage can actually kill things more efficiently on top of just plain killing things faster. When writing this guide I mostly treated damage as the default choice. That said, there are a couple of mods and overclocks that scale better with ammo than direct damage so I'll make sure to point them out when they come up.
Tier 2:
Tier 3:
Tier 4:
Another seemingly simple choice. Either slightly faster lock on speed from Shutter Speed Sensor or more max targets from Aperture Extension. Lock on speed is a small but universally helpful bonus, and having more max targets is actually an anti-synergy with effects that trigger when you reach max locks. However once again there are a couple specific upgrades and overclocks that get much stronger with more max locks so it can be a situational pick on occasion.
Tier 5:
Eraser is the only overclock that adds any extra ammo to the weapon, and only as a side effect of 12 more rounds in the magazine. It also increases the maximum number of locks by 33%. This doesn't play well with Unstable Lock Mechanism, but other than that it's basically the same as a LOK-1 with no overclock at all.
Armor Break Module gives you a huge bonus to armor damage when you reach full locks. The game doesn't directly tell you how much it improves armor breaking and the information on the wiki is weirdly inaccessible (if any wiki editors are reading this, mouseover text is bad and you should feel bad). What it does is it boosts your armor break bonus from 150% to 1,400%. In any practical situation, this will always break armor in one shot. (If for some reason you go into a Hazard 5+, TE2, Elite Threat mission without any damage upgrades, you might need two.) The problem is that despite the impressive sounding bonus, in practice it's just a slight increase to something the gun was already good at. The overclock makes no practical difference against light armor (if you killed 12,000 grunts using exclusively body shots it might save you a single bullet), and while it's a bit better against heavy armor, it's still usually only one or two shots saved each against uncommon to rare enemies. Even in the cases where you're forced to break armor to get at a weakpoint, Executioner is still going to kill things in less shots most of the time. It's only really against the heaviest armor that you see a real benefit. Shellbacks are probably the best use case since without it, getting enough concentrated fire on a plate to break through it while the bug is rolling around is inconsistent at best. It lets you engage praetorians from further away by punching straight through their shells instead of aiming for their mouths or waiting for their butts to be targetable. Nemesis has some of its weakpoints under the heaviest armor in the game, and this can tear straight through it. And the dreadnought twins have armor plates over their weakpoints that regenerate every time they share health. And if you want, you can wiggle your aim around while firing to strip extra plates off to make things easier for your teammates. But there's a bit of an elephant in the room. If you really care about stripping armor, the Breach Cutter can be as good or better and doesn't have to use an overclock slot to do it.
Neuro-Lasso is one of those sneaky balanced overclocks that's really a clean in disguise. The only downside is capping the time you can hold onto the locks at 8 seconds, and without this overclock there's no reason to hold locks for any length of time at all. The upside is that enemies get dramatically slowed the more locks they have placed on them for as long as you hold them on target. It's 11% per level, you get a level on lock 1, 2, 4, and every even lock after that, and the effect stacks multiplicatively. So with the standard 12 locks it's ~55% slow, 70% with Aperture Extension, and if you have a second engineer with the overclock, it can go up to 85% where it hard caps.
The benefit of this overclock is much more impactful the bigger your target is. Slowing 12 grunts by 11% isn't much help, especially since you can't sprint while locked on. But a dreadnought that walks and more importantly turns at half speed is a lot easier to deal with. You're just not going to be very good at killing it yourself. It doesn't directly hurt your damage output, but it doesn't help it like some of the overclocks coming up either. And taking advantage of the ability means very pointedly NOT shooting things. Mostly you're going to have to play bait while your team deals damage. However, there is a decent synergy here with Spinning Death since it makes it a bit easier to keep things in the blender. But you're going to need to practice the spacing and timing to make it work without getting caught yourself. Aside from Elimination missions, it might be worth considering for Escort or Salvage missions too, especially ones with Exploder Infestation warnings. In those cases, a single bulk detonator in the wrong place can spell failure, so being able to bait them away more safely and keep them away longer can be more helpful than killing them faster.
Because it's basically a clean, it doesn't change the build priorities much. You could take Aperture Extension in tier 4 if you want a stronger slow effect, but I find Shutter Speed Sensor to get to 50% slow sooner is usually better. It also helps to take Electrical Generator in tier 5 so you have a way to slow things in between locks.
Explosive Chemical Rounds makes it so every target that gets at least 3 locks placed on it will explode on the last shot (or the shot that kills it whichever comes first) for 50 damage plus 50 fear with a 4 meter radius, at the cost of some direct damage and reserve ammo. This is the only time where increased ammo in tier 1 and firing into crowds of grunts are unambiguously good choices. It actually makes it perform weirdly similar to the Gunner's Hurricane missile launcher. Not only do they both allow you pinpoint accuracy plus splash damage at any range, but the direct damage is the same too. Though they're not exactly the same in every respect. ECR is hitscan and has a wider blast radius, but the Hurricane has higher blast damage (when measured as the average of 3 bullets vs 3 missiles), better DPS since it can fire full auto instead of 3 round burst, and more ammo. As a reminder, a less efficient version of another class's primary can still be a very strong Engineer weapon. All it asks for in return is the ability to count to 3. I understand that may be difficult for some dwarves.
Jokes aside, there is definitely a learning curve to the timing and placement to get exactly 3 locks on the bug you want without wasting bullets on it or anything near it. It seems like you'd be able to turn on the wide lens and carpet bomb a swarm if you're not interested in playing Grenade Sniper, and sometimes you can, but more often than not all that does is kill one or two bugs and mildly annoy the rest. Smяt Targeting Software™ seems like it could help with that, but it's going to cause you to either over lock on your targets or not be able to reach 3 locks on weaker enemies, especially swarmers which this is otherwise incredible against. And blowthrough sounds like a good idea since you already want to fire into crowds, but its bugginess will infect the explosion effect and cause that to sometimes not work. So stick with Electro-Chemical Rounds even though direct damage doesn't matter as much.
Since this overclock makes the LOK-1 fairly effective at crowd control and still pretty effective at dealing with high value targets, but less effective against things praetorian-sized or larger, that shifts your priorities for secondary weapons more toward tank busting. Hyper Propellant, Overdrive Booster, or just about anything with the Breach Cutter should cover your bases very well. Or if you want to lean into a Gun-gineer playstyle, Spinning Death with stun makes for a bootleg shield substitute. Personally, I like Volatile Impact Reactor. That way I can double down on weapons that perform like altered versions of Gunner primaries, and steal some of Driller's thunder at the same time.
Seeker Rounds actually gives you two separate effects. The main thing this overclock does is that once you lock onto a target, there's nothing that will stop your bullet from connecting. It'll simply teleport directly to the target and ignore any other bugs, dwarves, rock, stone, or anything else in the way. (And yes that means blowthrough is even less effective with this.) The other thing that it does is that once the bullet gets there, it'll teleport past the armor too. The armor piercing effect is a property of the bullets themselves and applies even without lock on, so this is the one overclock that improves tap firing, but it's a bit buggy and inconsistent. The shot still hits the armor and can break it if it does enough damage, but it simply ignores that armor's resistance. Except the armor piercing doesn't apply to the bonus damage from Electro-Chemical Rounds or Unstable Lock Mechanism, and even if there's a weak point under that armor you'll still only do body shot damage. The overclock also extends the angle you can turn without losing lock on but that's not really all that important. As a downside you get slightly slower reloads and HALVED firing speed.
This gives you the absolute worst DPS on the weapon, at roughly 3/4 of normal and half of both STOS and Executioner. The average time to kill doesn't suffer quite as much in practice, since you don't have to hold your fire if there's terrain, armor, or teammates in the way of your shots. And there are some corner cases where the unique features make it more effective than any other option. Namely, armor piercing gives you more options against unbreakable armor, and the ability to curve your bullets through the floor means that you can bypass a guard's legs to get at its face and one-shot crawling scrabs as easily as flying ones. But the better you get at the game and the higher the hazard you play, the less the benefits help and the more the slower damage hurts. So it really is kind of just a crutch. And hey I'm not here to judge. Like I said at the start, I'm not exactly great at this game so just between you and me this overclock works pretty well for me. If you're not sweating then it works... ok. And if you're playing drunk it's probably the best possible option.
Executioner cuts your ammo, mag size, and max targets by a moderate amount and rewards you with lock on speed that's twice as fast and +50% bonus damage to weakpoints when you charge a full burst (only 8 shots so not hard at all). Against large targets with big health pools and prominent weakpoints, this massively boosts both DPS and ammo efficiency. Against medium, high priority targets it's still great (particularly effective against mactera). Against small targets you lose 11% of your max ammo and gain nothing. Anything with a healthbar grunt-sized or smaller will die in the same number of shots either way. At least in any hazard level over 2. Theoretically if you took ammo in tier 1 instead of damage, Executioner would allow you to retain the same break points against small enemies with a lot more ammo for the best possible ammo efficiency on the weapon, but doing that costs you a lot of DPS against big targets and doesn't really actually work. Trying to get 4 simultaneous 2-lock headshots while all of those heads are moving is functionally impossible, and trying to get full locks on each of them individually is a huge waste of time that'll probably get you killed. Just build for max damage and use it for big game hunting. Let your secondaries deal with the trash.
With a 11112 build, a full 8 shot burst to the weakpoint will deal almost exactly as much damage as a Supercooling Chamber M1000 that's gone full Gigachad mode. Except, and I can't believe I'm actually typing this, Supercooling Chamber is ~50% more ammo efficient on paper. Granted, that assumes that you always use fully charged focus shots instead of tap fire, never miss a weak point, and most importantly never shoot anything weaker than a Warden so you don't waste damage on overkill. Since Executioner is much less punishing on all 3 of those fronts, the gap is going to be much narrower in practice. On top of Executioner charging much faster than SCC, getting potentially 40% more damage against burning and electrified targets, and not locking you in place when you fire. So I think the argument could be made that the Engineer version is actually the better option in this case.
Smяt Trigger OS™ speeds up target acquisition and firing speed by an insane degree and lets the gun auto fire and start reacquiring locks as soon as you reach full without releasing the trigger, and the only listed downside is that it cuts your max locks by 80%. And that's not even a meaningful downside since it'll still put bullets downrange faster than any other overclock. The unlisted downside is that since you lock and fire so fast, there's little to no time to adjust your aim or curve bullets to your advantage so it becomes extremely easy to waste ammo on terrain, armor, teammates, or just low priority targets. Trigger discipline and target priority were already the base weapon's biggest skill requirements, and STOS massively magnifies that.
There's a couple of unique interactions with specific mods using this overclock. Tier 4 especially works a little weird. Since this overclock already makes target acquisition so fast that it's mostly a function of framerate, Shutter Speed Sensor seems useless, but taking it removes a fraction of a second delay between locking and firing and makes the weapon effectively full auto. This also makes it incredibly responsive against close range enemies, able to instantly delete grunts if you can aim for the head. Electrical Generator Mod also triggers in only 2 locks instead of 3 if you do that too. But taking Aperture Extension to double the burst size to 4 gives you much higher DPS against anything healthier than a grunt so it's better overall and is still way more responsive than any other LOK-1 overclock. In fact, it's tied for the highest DPS on the weapon and competitive with Engie's other highest DPS options like Hyperalloy Stubby.
Since you reach full locks almost instantly, there's very little reason not to take Unstable Lock Mechanism in tier 5, which lets you deal 130 damage per 4 round burst. If that number sounds familiar, that's because it's the damage of a focus shot from a vanilla M1000 that took its tier 1 damage upgrade. And the funny thing is, the ammo efficiency is nearly identical too. That's not necessarily a good thing, as the M1000's damage upgrade is relatively weak (on its own the only break point it really crosses over base performance is one shotting cave leeches) and it's competing with a very strong ammo upgrade. By contrast, if STOS takes ammo instead of damage in tier 1 it falls behind the 110 damage break point that makes the M1000 so effective, and still doesn't match the ammo efficiency. In other words: the best possible STOS build is the equivalent of a mediocre at best M1000 build. Not a bad thing for balance, yadda yadda, you get the picture. And STOS does have the advantages over the M1000 of aim assist, less chance of overkill*, and faster focus.
^(*The bug that caused STOS to waste ammo on already dead enemies was patched the week after season 5 dropped. If you're wasting ammo when using this, it's not because of that.)
Sniper rifle, not SMG. Think like a Scout. Pick off high value targets and use turrets, secondaries, and grenades for crowd control. 1111(1/2) are the best mods in most situations. Eraser is a nothingburger, Armor Break and Neuro-Lasso are minor upgrades for niche team support roles, Seeker Rounds is easy, Executioner is strong, STOS is fast, and ECR lets you play Gunner.
Purselane and its look alike prostrate spurge that were growing side by side. Double check that the "purselane" you pick doesn't leak milky sap where it breaks so you can avoid poisoning yourself.
Three-ish gallons of fresh greens and a gallon of smoothie mix later and the plants I actually put in that garden on purpose finally have at least a little space to grow. I'd say lesson learned but this stuff is pretty tasty so I may have to make this mistake again.
To those who aren't already aware, RJ250 is an overclock for the Engineer's grenade launcher that allows you to rocket jump at the cost of most of your damage. It's been fairly common knowledge for a while that if you take Incendiary Compound with it, it'll still deal enough heat to kill any grunts in the blast radius. What isn't well known and I couldn't find any info on, is what other targets it can still be effective against. And now that I have the sandbox to play in, I decided to test for myself.
Mods are 21123. Theoretically it could be more effective if you took damage upgrades instead of ammo, but more mobility is generally going to be more helpful than a little more damage. Incendiary Compound also converts half of direct damage so you can get an extra 30 heat on a direct hit by taking Spiky Grenade, and that's much more tempting. It allows you to burn a fair number of medium sized targets but makes it harder to use it to break your own fall.
I've split this into three categories: 1. Killed outright from blast damage. 2. Ignites and dies from burning. 3. Ignites and burns for a while but doesn't die from it (still useful if combined with weapons that deal bonus damage to burning targets). I'm only counting results from a single shot, not concentrated fire.
(Don't do this)
I want to add some shade to a south facing wall and I don't really have space for a tree. I'd like to have a climbing vine on a trellis but a lot of the ones I've been looking at are very aggressive and could potentially cause damage or spread out of control if I don't constantly keep them in check. I've heard coral honeysuckle is relatively tame, but I've got my hands full elsewhere with invasive bush honeysuckle and I don't want to add another front to that war. So I'd like to know what others' experiences with growing it are, or if it's a bad choice what other options might be better.
This is mostly just me writing out my thoughts for my own benefit again, but I figure someone else might find it interesting.
So the problem with analyzing these traits is that they effectively have two completely different effects depending on whether you're aiming in V.A.T.S. or manually. VATS is a lot simpler and more intuitive so I'll cover that first. Effectively they just add extra X1.2 or X0.8 multipliers to the existing accuracy and AP cost calculations. Like normal, they can't prevent you from getting to 95% chance nor can they take you over that. Which means that it just changes the distance that you hit max accuracy and the number of times you can queue attacks at that range. Depending on the type of VATS build you're going for, extra accuracy or volume of fire could help a lot.
Manual aiming is where things get weird. First off, the firing rate does not apply to fully automatic weapons at all. It might make a slight difference if you do short bursts or tap fire, but when you're holding down the trigger that LMG is going to do the same 720 RPM no matter what. Second weird thing is that there's actually two completely separate "spread" stats and these traits only affect one of them. Game files refer to them as "weapon spread" and "player spread" but for the sake of clarity and descriptiveness I'm going to call them "bloom" and "wobble."
"Bloom" is the angle the projectiles can deviate from the center of the aiming point, and is specific to the weapon. You can modify it with weapon mods (Hunting Shotgun choke, Minigun damped subframe, etc) or with ammo (match hand load, slugs, etc) but it's completely unaffected by perks, traits, skills, chems, or other player abilities. Doesn't matter how steady you hold it, that Automatic Rifle is still gonna send the bullets wherever it damn well pleases.
"Wobble" is how much the aiming point of a gun moves around the screen. You can see this most clearly when aiming with scopes, but if it gets bad enough it can be clearly visible all the time. No matter how bad the wobble, the gun itself will be just as accurate as normal. No matter how badly you use it, that Anti-materiel Rifle will shoot exactly where the crosshairs are pointed. Having less than a gun's Strength and skill requirements, having broken arms, walking, running, standing, and shooting from the hip will all add increase wobble, and perks and traits can reduce it. But there is a lower bound and you can reach it without perks. If you have the requirements for a weapon, are crouching, still, and aiming down sights, that's as close to 0 sway as you can get.
So the builds you want to use these traits for when manually aiming are the reverse of the ones you want in VATS. Trigger Discipline gives you little to no benefit when sniping, but if you use full auto weapons at close range and shoot from the hip while moving, it makes it a bit easier to keep them on target. Sort of like a free version of the Run n' Gun perk. On the other hand, Fast Shot can boost the firing rate of things like the Anti-materiel rifle by a noticeable degree with no meaningful penalty to accuracy (and can also be really good with things like the Hunting Shotgun at close range) but doesn't make machine guns any better.
In my opinion, Trigger Discipline pairs well with the Grunt perk and Fast Shot works well with the Cowboy perk. For Trigger Discipline, use All-American's high accuracy and very low AP cost to rack up VATS headshots at long range then swap to an SMG or LMG to run n gun. Lever and bolt action guns are already more fun to aim manually so Fast Shot can boost their DPS by a lot with little downside, then at close range you can swap to a Hunting or Riot Shotgun to delete everything in a general direction.
Except...
Steady sets all wobble to 0 and accuracy in VATS to 95% no matter what. Jet boosts AP for more attacks in VATS and can be turned into Rushing Water which boosts the attack speed of every weapon by 50%. Both can be combined at the same time for both effects. And if you take Logan's Loophole they last twice as long and have no downside. And Logan's Loophole effectively has no downside itself since the average casual run can easily end before getting anywhere near level 30, and completionists can swap traits in Old World Blues at level 29.
In conclusion: winners do drugs.
Local soil & water conservation was giving out free trees so I grabbed a couple spicebush and white pine. Kind of regretting not grabbing redbud while I was there but I only have so much space.
