Originally Posted by
Aerocytes
Clearly you either don't have much experience with this game or never played a PE much, let me go into a bit of an explanation for you.
Currently, and for longer than I care to remember at this point, PE's have required stacking multiple mc5 implants to get the dex required for any sort of decent gun. Despite the fact that in some cases you can indeed use, say a TL82 plasma rifle, it will NEVER come anywhere close to the damage that a tl100+ rare will dish out. Certainly you can kill people with it, but only if your aim and dance skills outclass theirs massively.
Now on to the jack of all trades things. PE's have to squeeze shit implant builds and sometimes drugs just to use something like say the TL108AK. That's as far as we can go without a completely shit build. Dex is our main stat and thus it should be that we can use the low and mid range rares for said field, not the top obviously, but I'm not sitting here saying I want to use a dissi or FL. We take a sizeable drop in damage compared to spies in exchange for a decent bump in tank, that's how it's been for a while and it's been fine.
The way it is now with the implants on the test server, to reach the proper dex to get a proper weapon you have to stack implants that have some pretty serious detriments to them. They reduce your total str, they reduce your transport(loss in pierce/force resist here because you need more transport just to carry your gear set and a few clips of ammo) and you also end up losing a big chunk of agi and athletics, which is very painful considering the huge minuses you've already incurred in dex(pc/rc), con(you end up with 30-40 MINUS body health WHICH IS HUGE) and you drop str making it so you're stuck using pretty much the exact same armor a spy can.
So as a summary, your str drops which requires you to use the same armor spies do. Your con drops causing you to lose so much body health that if you want to use a heal tool your resists are just in tatters, and depending on the imp setup you go it tears apart your ability to use proper psi setup, and to top it off our dmg is even dropped MASSIVEly from this. Currently on live, by sacrificing agi etc I have 190 p-c and 180 something r-c respectively on my pistol and rifle PE's. On the test server due to implant requirements I'm down to 150pc and 120rc.
Essentially it comes down to this choice. Do you want to do the maximum dmg with a low end weapon, dealing about half the dmg output a spy has, while having a tiny bit more tank than they do, or do you want to try to use a proper weapon, deal a bit more dmg than before but have your stats tore up so bad that your tank is now comparable to a spy and you have much less dmg than they do still.
Also, stick to nonrare weapons? Again, only a TINY bit more tank than a spy and for that we have to swap in over half of our dmg output, which even now is less than a fucking spy? [Edited]
EDIT: monks are fucked too, but I don't really care about that so w/e have fun.