This mod largely stems from the annoyance that the Institute had somehow managed to design a lousier laser gun. In choosing a benchmark, the combat rifle was used as it seemed suitable to be identified as a damage output comparison. After all why make your own gun if it's not even at least up to par with a top-of-the-line. Especially one that is that bulky. Furthermore, the damage of the laser gun should be better than the "normal" laser gun, otherwise it would have made more sense that there are Institute mods for the "normal" laser gun rather than their own new gun.

Most of the numbers were derived by hunches, and then liberally scaled by only focusing on the per-shot damage. The principle is based on the idea that if we are doing a linear bump of the per-shot damage, then we won't need to mess around with the game designer's balancing of all the other stats.

Learning from early mistakes with tweaking Skyrim unarmed, avoiding anything to do with Perks would be the most ideal option. For Fallout 4, because the perks apply as multipliers to the weapon, there is an advantage gained in allowing less convulated solutions.

Fortunately, as it stands, there is only one fix value that is set for any weapon: on the base item itself it has a flat hardcoded value for its damage. Unfortunately, all weapon mods data for the Institute Laser work as a additive multiplier to that base damage.

Two options now present itself: attempt to 1) hard change all the weapon mods from a multiplier setup to a flat damage boost; or 2) change the multiplier values. Option 1 would mean way more overrides, so we shall go for option 2.

From the initial analysis that was documented on the fandom page, 25% decrease in weapon effectiveness was noted because the tier 0 and tier 1 mods (tiering of the the mods is expanded further in the damage numbers article) had a -0.25 multiplier for the capacitors. However, as the damage number crunching would show, this was a misleading first impression.

Ultimately, the final multiplier numbers that were settled upon would allow for Synths to have a huge spike in damage during early- and mid-game, by virtue of the fact that the highest tier of capacitor upgrades could be unlocked far earlier than the combat rifle as the perks required to craft those mods were not as high, and relatedly, those mods were found in level lists earlier for an equivalent tier (breakdown of this is further expanded in the damage numbers article).

Overall this mod should achieve three goals:
a) Make the Institute synths a scarier force to be encountered;
b) Ensure that despite having an earlier peak, still have energy weapons be on par but losing out to sneak-focused builds (it's a laser the light giant light show shouldn't be allowing you to be sneaky); and
c) Be better than the normal laser rifle.

Things get complicated once we move away from per bullet damage and start considering factors like number of projectiles (shotgun conversion) and fire rate (both shotgun and automatic conversion).

Loosely speaking, since we are tweaking only the per bullet damage, the other stats like magazine size and accuracy actually present significant variance and balance. Loosely speaking. So for now we press on and deal with automatics first.

We try to balance against a theoretical output of bullet * fire rate. Assuming the flat damage nerf is undone, then both lasers differ by 15.5% with the Institute holding the honours. Subjectively, we'll use this 15.5% advantage as it is and apply it to all automatic barrel mods to claw back the damage nerf.