On Borderlands Weaponry

This post is designed to fill the 9-10:30am gap in what's usually my normal morning work and internet routine, which today was sorted through in approximately thirteen minutes.

Having reached the level cap with my hunter in Borderlands, and now having access to two mass-farming locations, I'm left with some interesting equipment decisions.  Here's my current inventory, with some mild errors since I'm doing this from memory:

1) Combustion Hellfire (smg), level 48, 162 damage, 85 accuracy, 10.5 RoF, 55 clip, x4 fire
2) Explosive Equalizer (revolver), level 67, 402 damage, 88 accuracy, 1.6 RoF, 2 clip, x2 explosive, 3.5x scope, +24 ammo regen
3) Brutal Masher (revolver), level 65, 382x7 damage, 88 accuracy, 1.3 RoF, 2 clip, 3.2x scope
4) Pestilent Defiler (revolver), level 52, 702 damage, 92 accuracy, 1.9 RoF, 6 clip, x4 corrosive

The masher is basically a 1-handed shotgun with more damage and better accuracy, and utilizes the hunter's pistol skills.  I got my first masher in Armory PT1 at level 38 and used it straight through level 60, it's that good, and I never saw another one until last night.  At first glance it's everything I could have wanted out of the first one; triple nominal damage and a scope.  However, I've learned that the gameplay during the later levels is so different that this masher just doesn't work.

In playthrough 1, enemies took their sweet time lining up shots, took 3-shot bursts, then retreated to gather their nerves.  This permitted ample time to zoom into the scope and line up perfect headshots.  In playthrough 2, and specifically at max level and in the later DLC, they shoot from the hip with perfect accuracy, fire off twenty rounds, and stop only long enough to reload before draining your shield from across the map.  Lining up a headshot is virtually impossible.  Every grazing shot you receive knocks off your aim, and by the time it settles back, you're hit again.  In the half-second window you have when you're miraculously not being shot, enemies are strafing and dodging, and you still can't scope them.

This means the only reliable headshot is to similarly shoot from the hip, unzoomed, with wild abandon.  Which is basically impossible with a 2-shot revolver.  It takes me two shots to dial in the aiming precision to get the reticule perfectly on a moving target's head.  In a 6-shooter like the Defiler this gives me four devastating criticals.  In a 2-shooter like the masher and equalizer, it means I have to reload, and when I'm ready to shoot again I have to restart the whole aiming procedure.  It just doesn't work.

This means the Defiler is my go-to weapon at virtually all times.  The 6 shots and high rate of fire means headshot spam is relatively easy, and the lack of scope is irrelevant.  The Defiler, as a special weapon, also does bonus instant damage against armored enemies (like everything in DLC3 and most things in DLC4), extra corrosive proc damage (at x4), and can spread to nearby enemies if they're close enough to each other.  It's pretty much the perfect endgame gun, except for the occasional corrosive-resistant enemy, at which point it's either painful and slow going with the other revolvers, or whipping out the SMG for fire damage.  (The Hellfire is pretty much exclusively for Badass Chemical Lancers.)

So the Defiler is locked in, but what about the other revolvers?  I have a wide assortment of non-explosive equalizers in the bank, but they're all 2-shooters.  This masher is only the second one I've seen all game.  If I could find another scopeless 6-shot masher equalizer like in PT1, that'd be perfect, but I suspect the combination of random rolls necessary to get 1) the orange weapon with 2) the equalizer tag and 3) a masher accessory on it was a once-in-a-gaming-lifetime event.

In the end, I'll settle for whatever equalizer and x2 elemental revolvers I can find with 6-shots and a preferably 1.9 RoF.  Anything less will leave me continuing to farm new guns.

Which I'll probably continue to do, despite the library of new games I've purchased during Steam's Thanksgiving sale.  I've beaten VVVVVV and And Yet It Moves, which were both fantastic puzzle platformers, but thanks to the stage-based nature of those games it was easy to pick up for only twenty minutes at a time.  The save-anywhere feature in Borderlands made it just as easily pick-up-able.  The other acquisitions I want to try (Torchlight, Jolly Roger, Recettear) strike me as requiring longer gaming sessions and more focus, and that's been difficult to get lately.