I consider all of that, too, but how do you not also consider the destruction potential? I pretty much never use rockets now because of the potential of multiple kills with HMG. Granted, I have yet to experience whatever nerf Cody is talking about. Was there a recent one? As in the past-two-weeks recent (haven't played in two weeks)? If not, I'm still using my HMG and doing just fine. Also, rockets miss. If I only have three rockets and miss one or two, that sucks. I tear people up with my HMG.

A few reasons: In my experience, Heavy ammo spawn is such a giant clusterfuck that my chances of surviving long enough to get more than 2 or 3 kills are slim-to-none (I'm EXTREMELY aggressive in PvP, which leads to loads of kills and almost as many deaths). Plus I tend to spec my character out for best performance over the entire match, which means I emphasize special ammo perks over heavy ammo perks (since I will definitely use lots of special ammo while I might not even pick up heavy ammo once).

Finally, being a hyper-aggressive fool, I usually prefer to go mess with the enemy team during the heavy round, rather than try to pick it up myself ;)

If you have heavy ammo boosts for MG's you can still go that far with Thunderlord. It's still my crucible heavy of choice. Terminus if I for whatever reason decide I need a different exotic. Field scout + ammo boost puts it at about 55-60 or so.

I think the most I've ever gotten out of using rockets was 5 kills. And that was only because the other team waited long enough for me to shoot two Truth rockets at their heavy box.

Hm. I was under the impression that +ammo no longer let you get more than a certain number of rounds, like 32 for HMGs and 3 for rockets.

With Heavy Ammo boots, Quillim's gets 41 rounds. I'm not good enough for Korny's laser-accurate 4-rounds-per-kill, but 7 is pretty easy. If a teammate does a little damage to at least one of your targets, 6 kills/round is not unusual.

With all the best will... I don't think it has. The year one version's perk only put ammo back when you missed. It was so unstable that you miss quite a bit, so that seems like an ok idea - but in practice it was really just taking longer to kill things than other machine guns (due to missing). The way to mitigate that, of course, is either get really close, or shoot at something too big to miss (a boss) so that all the shots hit. But even then, you were just landing all your hits with a gun with mediocre stats. And you'd run out of ammo at the normal rate, and have to reload. I wanted to like that gun, and I did think it was amusing to stand there and shoot at nothing with it, and watch the ammo count barely go down at all. But I never had any practical use for it. A slow-firing, stable, legendary machine gun always put things down faster.

The year 2 version is a different kettle of fish. Because it's restoring ammo from the reserves on hit, so you can just throw a wall of bullets at something without ever reloading. The stats on it still aren't great, but there are some situations where it can do more damage in X amount of time than others, simply because you don't have to stop and reload.

IMO, SGA is tied with Dragon's breath for most-improved exotic. Both of them went from being nearly useless to being top-tier (in the right situation), at least in PvE.