Strategy:Son of a Gun

(0.9.9.7) Son of a Gun turns pistols from being a crappy starter gun into a real force to be reckoned with, and while on paper it may seem like Son of a Gun offers the same amount of bonus for every level, the bonuses actually become more significant the more of them you have. The final two levels in particular are a bigger deal than all the others combined, because they more than double the DPS of each pistol. Another particular milestone is getting Son of a Gun 3 right after Dualgunner, which triples your DPS compared to two levels ago.

• No traits: 5DPS
• SoG(x1): 7.5DPS
• SoG(x2): 11.67DPS
• SoG(x2)+DG: 19.44DPS
• SoG(x3): 20DPS
• SoG(x3)+DG: 33.33DPS
• SoG(x3)+MSs: 27.5 DPS
• SoG(x4): 45 DPS
• SoG(x4)+DG: 75 DPS
• SoG(x4)+MSs: 60 DPS
• SoG(x5): 100 DPS
• SoG(x5)+DG: 166
• SoG(x5)+MSs: 130 DPS

Even with no accuracy investment, pistols can hit enemies at the edges of your vision radius 74% of the time, as opposed to 50% of the time for a Chaingun, and you can additionally aim your shots for even more reliability. With one level of Son of a Gun, the pistol immediately becomes a bit better than a basic Chaingun with no trait investment. Chainguns do become better faster with levels of Eagle Eye, however, but if you're a Marine going for Ammochain, you're blocked from taking Eagle Eye.

Where Pistols inarguably pull ahead, however, is the first level of Dualgunner, the advanced trait that Son of a Gun leads to, and in most builds they are inseparable. Not always, however, as Sharpshooters are blocked from taking Dualgunner. At this level, however, Dualgunner gains the ability to fire two aimed shots in a single attack, which reliably kills basic formers and semi-reliably kills imps. With Son of a Gun 3, it always kills basic formers and reliably kills imps. (See Strategy:Dualgunner for details)

The downside to all this is that pistols in general need this trait to be usable main-line weapons, and the downside to using pistols as your main-line weapon is that Son of a Gun doesn't do anything for any other type of gun, and doesn't lead to anything that other builds could use. The choice to take the Pistol all the way is an all-in strategy, so for that kind of long-term investment, it needs to be worth it.

Another thing keen-eyed readers may have noticed is that these calculations are all for the basic pistol. That's because the vast majority of the time, you will find nothing better, so if you want to win the game, you have to be capable of doing so with just basic pistols. Unfortunately, there are no other pistols aside from the exotic and unique pistols, so being able to upgrade at all is a roll of the dice. More than any other weapon, pistols rely on mods to grow stronger, which also means they need Whizkid, which is a problem, because unless you're a Technician, Whizkid requires two levels of Finesse, a trait which becomes useless to a pistol build at level 13, the level you can take Son of a Gun 5. Technicians also can't use Dualgunner unless they're doing a no-mastery build, too, since Sharpshooter and Scavenger both block it!

Pistols benefit highly from being able to plan their approach and picking their battles, so intuition and hellrunner are a huge boon. Eagle Eye 2 gets pistols to the accuracy cap, so Intuition is a useful next step, and Hellrunner lets you run away from Demons without expending tactics, as well as buy you into the Dodging mechanic, which lets you reposition at will as long as you aren't surrounded.

Unfortunately, Bullet Dance is blocked from taking all of the above, and for this reason, it's by far the weakest of the pistol masteries. Its damage potential may be extreme, but that doesn't matter if you die before you get there, and you're forced to play such a glass cannon that you're likely to die after you get there too.

Unfortunately, two of the three pistol masteries have extreme difficulty reaching their Mastery. The saddest thing about pistols is that while they can do a lot of damage, they also lean heavily on their sub-weapons and their off-build survivability options until that damage comes online in the late-game, so they are unlikely to ever reach full potential because of all the roadblocks in their way. Many times, pistol masteries often either require that you take traits that don't work with each other, or block the ones that do, or both. Gun Kata is the one notable exception, since it requires Dodgemaster and auto-reloads on every kill, removing all of the pistol's weaknesses and gives it incredible survivability and sustained DPS. For these reasons, it is by far the strongest one, and the most likely to reach level 7 as well. The fact that Scouts can take Intuition for free isn't bad, either!

While Sharpshooter isn't blocked from taking traits that enhance it survivability, it takes by far the longest to reach its full potential since it blocks Dualgunner and requires Eagle Eye 3, which is literally useless for pistols unless you happen to find the Grammaton Cleric Beretta early enough for it to make a difference. It doesn't even have better DPS than SoG3 Dualgunner for all it throws in your way to get it! Sharpshooter would probably be far better if it were the lone level 4 Mastery, because even with its long wait time, it does have many upsides. As a Technician, you start the game with a T-mod, which means you fire much faster right from the start of Entryway. You have free access to Whizkid, so if you find any P-mods, you can take that and give them to your pistol, which helps narrow the DPS gap considerably. Once you get your mastery, if you have a Power mod on your pistol, Sharpshooter deals 100% reliable knockback, which gives it an easy way to push enemies out of LoS or into lava, all while shooting at mind-boggling speeds even compared to the Dualgunners. It's also probably the best Mastery to use with any of the rare pistols, so it becomes a monster in long challenge games, where encountering a rare pistol becomes an inevitability.

However, if you do find a rare pistol while running a pistol build, just about any pistol build could win the game for you. You could even do a single-pistol build with a General mastery and it could win the game. The rare pistols are all phenomenally powerful, one of them even offers an auto-nuke that doesn't destroy the weapon. Your ability to succeed with a pistol may often dictated by RNGsus, but on the flipside, no other type of build can instantly swing from "rough time" to "overpowered" quite like a pistol build.

For this reason, it can be a viable strategy to use a General mastery and buy into Son of a Gun in an Angel of 100 game, whether at the start or later on, because pistols truly do become monsters in the late-game. Scavenger is the poster child for this kind of playstyle because it can buy into Son of a Bitch and become a bigger DPS monster than Sharpshooter while also gaining rapid weapon affinity at the same time, but the other two classes can use Dualgunner with their General mastery, so in long games, General masteries are sometimes better pistol builds than pistol masteries!

On the whole, Son of a Gun can take a pitiful weapon and turn it into the best weapon in the game, and it's so good at it, it can be worth the exclusivity of its benefits, even if you don't take a pistol mastery! Pistols may not be any good without it, but there's a reason people rave about them!