Weapon stats (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Saturday, September 27, 2014, 13:40 (3946 days ago) @ General Vagueness

Why are there no numbers for half the weapon statistics/traits still? In particular, why not for rate of fire, which the description outright says is the number of rounds per minute? You can compare one to another, but only if you have one of the ones you want to compare equipped, and you can only compare two at a time. It would take a while just to compare a full personal inventory of just one type of item, I don't want to think about how long it would take to compare every type of item, let alone that and everything in your vault.... These stats tell you almost everything about a gun. It can't be hard, I don't see how it could take away from anything, they could still have the right trigger comparison thing, why is it acceptable to not just show us the damn numbers anywhere?
Not only that, but you can only compare weapons that are in the same class, so you can't figure out what's a better all-around weapon between two (or more) weapons in different classes without a good amount of testing, or going on b.net and inspecting the code for displaying a weapon's stats, if that still works. Of course, I've heard even the in-game comparison isn't that accurate or meaningful between different weapon types in the same class; if that's true, I want to know why it lets you compare them. I mean sure, range is going to be wildly different between a shotgun and a sniper rifle, among other differences that just won't compare well, but expecting players to apply a small amount of common sense, not to mention using numbers instead of bars, would make that not be an issue, I think.
Related to the above, how does damage work? Casual impressions, fan theories, official explanations, and the game itself all seem to be disagree with each other and themselves, especially when it comes to attack and impact, and especially what exactly attack does. Is just combined with impact in some way? Can you not damage enemies above a certain level with a weapon with a certain attack rating? Does it just lower or increase damage dealt based on level? Why do they even have two different stats that appear to be about damage dealt? How do enemy level and enemy defense rating form damage resistance? For PvP, how does a Guardian's armor rating figure into this? Bungie, please, would you tell us the formula for damage dealt/received? I know some group of people will figure it out eventually but you'd save a lot of time and wrong impressions and needlessly scrapped gear by telling us, even just partially.