... and no one is more surprised than me that I found it in Iron Banner....but I think everyone will be surprised that my groove, is No Land Beyond.

Seriously.

The short version is it forces me to play a LOT more conservatively, which keeps me from rushing into scenarios I really shouldn't be in. It's also taught me the very valuable and relevant tactic of RUNNING AWAY when necessary!

I know you probably still think I'm kidding, but I'm definitely not.

I'm not saying it's a great all-rounder, but it's certainly (surprisingly) exactly what I needed.

Granted, I didn't score this KD every game, but I've NEVER seen anything like this before. I am more consistently over 1.0 now, which is not my norm.

Here's the longer version...

It started as a joke. I had been running around with Disciple in patrol waiting for our team to sign on, and I whipped out NLB because patrols are about the only safe place you can really mess around with it. I thought to myself, "maybe NLB can be used as more of a 'primary shotty' type role"; so I started running around slide-shotting Dregs - and due to habit always following up with a melee.

I then noticed that a melee right after firing NLB cancels out the chambering (bolt action) animation. I thought at first that it also sped up the reload, but a bit of testing showed that is not the case. (I now know there's a reload-sprint cancel-reload glitch that actually allows faster firing, but that's a bit much to pull off in IB under fire). What the melee-cancel allows you to do is re-ADS almost immediately after firing, instead of staring at a bolt-action animation that seriously messes with your aiming. This may not seem like much, but all I can say is; it is.

"SO WHAT?" you say? If all it does is skip the animation, but doesn't actually speed up firing, what help is that? Well, what this means is you can be re-acquiring your target (if you missed the head) or acquiring your next target while the next round is being invisibly chambered. This works well with the Prairie Dog tactic of popping in and out of cover. By the time you've popped out and back in, you're ready to fire and can already have sights on target. And with The Master perk, every single bullet coming out of NLB is far more potent than anything else another sniper will be throwing at you. Add to this the Blade Dancer's "Quickdraw" ability and NLB's Snapshot perk, and you've got some seriously fast target acquisition potential.

The awesome thing here is that I think NLB is actually a really useful weapon, but it's not unfair/unbalanced/uncounterable. For example; Praedyth's Revenge is still a BEAST but for COMPLETELY DIFFERENT reasons (fires faster than most HC's and doesn't move).

The bottom line is; I haven't ever considered myself a very competent PvP'er, much less a PvP sniper (even though that is my preferred PvE playstyle), but No Land Beyond has seriously given me more to think about and work with, and provided me with some freshness and fun in PvP.

Also, moments like THIS and THIS alone are worth the price of admission. ;)

Don't knock it 'til ya try it! :P