How can I plan how much weight capacity I'll need?

Question

I'm trying to decide how to spend my skill points and I see "Weight Capacity" mentioned. I have no idea whether or not this is something I need.

• Does it affect the amount of ammo I can carry?
• Does it affect which weapons I can use or how many I can carry?
• What's the base weight capacity for a character? Does it differ by class?
• I have no concept of what a bonus of 50 would actually mean? What's that roughly equivalent to? An average pistol? An average shotgun?
• Is there anything besides skills (such as gear or research upgrades) that can increase my weight capacity?

Basically I'm looking for some hard numbers on how weight capacity is used so that I can plan out how much I need to bother getting.

Answer 1

Being below weight capacity proportionally increases power recharge speed. Being above it decreases it. Carrying less guns reduces your weight (thereby increasing recharge speed). It does not affect the amount of ammo individual weapons hold (mods do).

The wiki weapons entry doesn't currently have individual weights for weapons, but likely that information will be added soon. In the meantime on the weapon equip screen as you add/remove weapons it will give you a percentage penalty/bonus to recharge rate. This can give you a base idea, but ultimately if you use a lot of powers you'll want to equip as few weapons as possible and put some points into increased carrying capacity.

Answer 2

If you are a soldier who can carry 5 weapons, 50 points capacity bonus will basically reduce your recharge time by at least 3 seconds for all of your powers. I had concussive shot charging for like 12.2 seconds. I timed it then took away my sub machine pistol that weighed like 70 points. I timed the concussive shot again and it was around 8 sec. (On the weapon loadout screen, the weight bar goes up to 200 for soldier so the 50 points is like 3 or 4 sec taken away from recharge).