» Thu Dec 30, 2010 9:45 pm
Without Point Lookout, A321 is about as awesome as it gets, in close competition with the Terrible Shotgun.
With Point Lookout, you get a whole lot of bonus damage per shot, which means auto-firing weapons suddenly gain a tremendous increase to their damage output. Sydney's SMG is spewing out a whole lot of bullets per second and +10 damage per shot fired mounts up to a whole lot, obviously. Flamers, cutters, Jack, Eugene, Vengeance... They all go from okay-good to various degrees of [censored] unbelievably awesome.
Before completing PL, it actually takes a little while to destroy things with Vengeance and I honestly didn't get why some people are so... infatuated with this gun. The warmup time makes it more time-efficient to skip bursts and instead go for continuous fire until the target dies. This means a fair bit of time being out in the open (and thus a good target for the buddies of whatever you're trying to kill) and it means a ton of used EC Pack rounds.
After PL, you point at the target, any taget really, and three seconds later even overlords are dead. Albino scorps, reavers, hillbillies, enclavers? Bleh, who cares. As the good old Delta Force 1 taunt goes, "Mess with the best a Vengeance-wielding post-Point Lookout character, die turn into a smoking pile of ashes like the rest". Still eats mad amounts of ammo but death and destruction is guaranteed. Hell, it's almost unfair to those poor behemoths. One shot with a dart gun, a few seconds of being laser-tagged in the face, and down they go. No chance whatsoever of getting within melee distance.
Who needs Fat Men and mini-nukes when your gun is doing at least 20 dmg per round, fires something like 20 rounds per second, and has a mag size of 240? That's 400 damage per second or 4800 damage over 12 seconds or one mini-nuke per 4 seconds or 3 mini-nukes per reload. If there ever was a weapon in a video game that is textbook sick, this is it.
And yes, I realise that this is a topic about your favorite weapon rather than about the most lethal one. I further realise that it's not actually all that cool or funny or immersive to run around with an gatling laser gun. I realise that it's essentially an http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InfinityMinusOneSword before PL and an http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InfinityPlusOneSword after. Personally, I vastly prefer smaller and more handy weapons. It's just very, very hard to compete with that insane damage output, particularly when most of the enemies you run into at high levels are plain bullet sponges. It's kind of odd to prefer running into deathclaws and enemy elite soldiers just because they take less ammo to kill than the BS-added monstrous enemies.
