Strategy:Son of a Bitch

0.9.9.7

Son of a Bitch is the quintessential Rapid build trait. While any weapon or build can technically benefit from it, rapid weapons gain by far the most, as well as need it by far the most, because they fire a lot of bullets with a lot of damage variance, and +1 to each bullet's damage per level raises their minimum damage per bullet. A pistol can potentially do more damage in a single bullet than a Chaingun's entire burst without Son of a Bitch.

Unsurprisingly, because pistol builds tend to make pistols all about firing faster and stronger with their Son of a Gun trait, pistols do also gain a lot from Son of a Bitch... which is probably why almost all of the pistol masteries block it, and most of the rapid masteries also block Son of a Gun. Believe it or not, it's to keep Pistols from completely stealing the show, not to keep you from using both. Pistols gain so much from stacking Son of a Bitch on top of Son of a Gun that even without it, pistols already shoot way past rapid builds with Dualgunner. Hell, nothing is stopping you from ignoring all masteries to do that anyway, and it's probably worth it for a Technician because Sharpshooter offers nothing but damage, and it doesn't even do raw DPS better than the other masteries. The one Pistol Mastery that doesn't stop you from stacking them, Bullet Dance, blocks Eagle Eye instead, a painful loss, and to rub salt in the wound, it doesn't even let you benefit from its unique ability while using Aimed Shot.

Of course, in any build that doesn't stop you from stacking them, such as Scavenger, being able to add an extra 10 damage onto each pistol shot is worth giving up Dualgunner for, and makes it worthwhile to use Pistols as your primary weapon instead of rapid weapons, though you might only reach such high levels in an Angel of 100 game. Hilariously, once such a build reaches SoG3/SoB3, the damage is so high that it's straight up better than Sharpshooter. Your minimum damage per bullet becomes almost as high as the peak that Sharpshooter locks you at, and you can punch even higher given good rolls. Of course, Sharpshooter's advantage is that it needs far fewer traits to become pretty darn good, but if you expect to be able to get to really high levels in your run, Son of a Bitch can either let rapid weapons pave the way for a pistol build to take over in the late game, or let you run a rapid build that only carries one stack of bullets because you've got a pistol for bullet damage and you're using all your other inventory slots for cells.

While SoB may lead to Triggerhappy, triggerhappy is actually a bit more situational. Naturally, it will increase your DPS, but it will also increase your ammo consumption, so you need to make sure your build can handle Triggerhappy. It's entirely viable to go without Triggerhappy in a build that uses rapid weapons, but I would never go without Son of a Bitch.

Ya Girl Juniper (talk) 12:34, 28 May 2023 (UTC)