Weaponsmith Archive

I think you should forward this post to Dawggy, he seems to know everything......

Seen that in the trade forums, but he does have a point. Many of my early pistols were high dps with SAC in the 87-92 range. At the time I was pistoleer and those pistols just plain burned action way to fast. Now we have Power Cells and can make pistols double capped or very close. The problem is that I can easily cap SAC on rifles/carbines without enhancers and still maintain 265-270+ dps. Aim for that with a pistol and you get 85+ SAC and most of the DPS coming from speed. So you do less damage but shoot faster. Every special uses action, with a pistol you have to shoot more often to get the job done, resulting in more action cost/damage done.

Then comes the paradigm. I lower SAC which lowers DPS, which means it now takes even more specials to kill your target, which in turn causes more action burn.

All of this is true, of course, but people tend to disregard the fact that pistols are the best weapons in the game for state attacks, i.e. you can use a blind/bleed/stun/whatever attack with both a rifle and a pistol, but you get the same effect faster and with lower sacdrain if you use the pistol.. I tend to think that makes the lower damage output of the pistol balanced..