Heh. Patterns change... (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 12:45 (3372 days ago) @ Revenant1988
edited by Cody Miller, Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 12:53

Unlikely on the superior weapon. They are all balanced pretty well, with each class having some "high performance" options.

Even for Normal hand cannons, if you are good they are objectively better for mobs in PvE than autorifles.

Think about it this way: hand cannons do all their damage in huge chunks, rather than spread out over time like ARs. When you land the first shot, the enemy is dead with a hand canon, but not with an AR. Even if they have similar DPS, the hand cannon is better because a dead enemy isn't doing damage to you or your fire team. This makes encounters much much easier since you are being shot less.

Say for argument's sake that a particular hand cannon shoots 1 time every 3 seconds and does 100 damage on cric. The autorifle shoots once a second, and does 33 damage on crit. Enemies have 100 health. Same DPS.

But after 1 second, the enemy is dead with the hand cannon. It takes 3 seconds to kill an enemy with the auto rifle. So that's 2 seconds where you aren't getting shot. So even though in both cases you can;t start shooting enemy 2 until second 4, you get the kill quicker with the hand cannon, and end up better off.

This is conversely why low impact high rate of fire hand cannons are bad; since they increase the time to kill even though they may do more DPS overall.

Hand cannons are less susceptible to depreciation because of attack rating, because of their potential for overkill. It's why fatebringer is still the best PvE hand cannon despite being 300 attack. A good hand cannon will last you a long time.

This is of course provided you can land critical hits consistently.

In PvP this is different because critical hit are not one shot kills, but hand cannons are still extremely good in terms of time to kill. I use TDYK because of the insane range and stability. It's like having a higher powered scout rifle.