So with the White Nail changes coming next patch I thought I'd go over WotW and see how its stats fared with the ammo regen gone. I went into a gambit private match (no light variation, constant supply of ammo+enemies, great for testing things.) and got the following results ([url=https://imgur.com/FOyuFhE]image sharing broke, click for table[/url]). At a glance everything looks good. Whisper is still superior to secondary snipers but not quite as powerful as Darci, offset by Darci's need to reload. Lunafaction boots and Titan rally barricades negate Whisper's signature ability but they're not active all the time right?
Wrong. We need to look at this change from the perspective of those who care, the people going for max DPS in endgame content. Nobody cares what you use to kill Bracus Zahn for the 705th time, they care what you're using while running a new raid. We must assume that the player/fireteam is playing as optimally as they can in any given scenario, so they will have rally barricades/lunafaction rifts up for every possible damage phase. A warlock rift lasts for 15 seconds, a rally barricade lasts for 20 seconds and well of radiance lasts a whopping 30 seconds. All three of these last long enough to empty an entire Whisper reserve without reloading, with only the basic rift being too short to outlast a Whisper using two sniper reserve perks.
What this does is reduce the worth of White Nail to virtually zero. Whisper still does slightly more damage than Darci when using all your reserves so it's not completely useless, but more often than not the perk will go unused because there's no point risking missing a crit when you can reload for free anyway. Whisper's previous max damage was limitless as long as you kept landing precision shots and I understand why Bungie eventually chose to nerf it, but between Darci and barricades/Luna's the unlimited ammo was the only thing going for it.
My suggestion? Go for the middleground and give Whisper triple tap (gifting ammo to reserves to avoid confusing white nail). It retains some of the "shoot forever" feeling without actually being unlimited, plus it ups Whisper's maximum damage potential and further seperates its niche from Darci's: Whisper for long sloughs and Darci for quick bursts.
Just some thoughts and analyses. Would be curious to see what the community thinks of the triple tap idea.
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Would it break the game to make it a secondary? I’m not wasting a power ammo brick in a weapon whose only exotic perk is not having to reload, there are other things that make that possible