>Man, I've never understood you guys who play Fallout games using
>pistols and light armor one second longer than necessary.
>
>Step One: Find Arcade. Pester the fuck out of him until he and his
>formerly fascist buddies teach you how to use Power Armor. (Because
>honestly, dealing with the Brotherhood is just fatiguing.)

It's better than the first time around. In FO1, just to enter the BoS bunker, you had two choices: Invest in a set of electronic lockpicks to pop open the front door, or take a quest to delve into The Glow, a former weapons lab that was ground zero for a nuke strike and so pumps out enough radiation to melt your bones without a couple doses of RadX. By comparison, Vault 22 is a bit of a breeze.

>There is no step two. You load up the heaviest, awesomest,
>death-dealingest hardware available and murder everything. I'm talking
>the Gobi. The riot shotgun, for close quarters work (a favorite for
>clearing ghouls out of vaults or super mutants indoors.) The SMMG. The
>Smitty Special. The Sprtl-Wood 9700. The Q-35 maybe, if I'm going to
>be out in the field away from my repair benches for awhile. Really,
>anything using plasma. Red Glare if I'm feeling nasty.

Out of all those, the Q-35 is the only one I carry regularly. I hold to the 1st Recon motto: "The last thing you never see." Sniper rifles and silenced pistols for anything outside of shotgun range.

>Pistols are for that awkward period when you're still basing out of
>the hotel in Novac and the hunting revolver still seems like the best
>weapon ever.

Hunting revolver's got nothing on the Weathered 10mm Pistol, particularly because 10mm is pretty plentiful even early in the game.