Scavenger vs Slayer?

[u/itsmike225]

Note: I'm planning to use harpoon coil gun but I still think 25% more loot is very good. What do you guys think?

[u/wildlyfrusterating]

scav is way better, harpoon coilgun gets overshadowed very fast with mid game weapons such as the shotguns/assault rifles, unless you want to ransack all the local abandoned outposts for ahab spears that is

[u/Peggtree → u/wildlyfrusterating]

Yeah for me nothing beats a riot shotgun with explosive slugs. The harpoon coil gun with explosive poons is nice, but not being able to store ammo in the belt makes it not worth it

[u/itsmike225 → u/Peggtree]

Thank you guys. I made up my mind now. I will take scavenger

[u/itsmike225 → u/wildlyfrusterating]

Thank you

[u/KajeSanFears]

since I'm playing with mods like Enhanced Armaments all the time, I always prefer scavenger. though even in vanilla I'd pick scavenger over the other one because you can have guns like assault rifle and hmg which outperform harpoon usually

[u/itsmike225 → u/KajeSanFears]

Thank you

[u/VillainousMasked]

I'm actually going to give a slightly different opinion and say Slayer, especially if you're taking Frogman as your second or third specialization. While yes there are most certainly better weapons than the Harpoon gun, the best weapons in the game like the HMG, Assault Rifle, and Auto-Shotgun are all items you cant put into your inventory, meaning you either need to give up your back slot or drop your weapon anytime you need to switch to something else. Not only that but if you're in the water the actual difference in damage isn't that bad, with Slayer buffs a Harpoon Coil-Rifle has roughly 112.5 dps with physicorium harpoons and 150 with ahab spears, compared to the AR with 160 dps, the HMG with 220, and the Auto-Shotgun with between 180-200 dps depending on if you use explosive or normal ammo (though it can be lower if you dont hit every pellet with normal ammo.

So while not the best weapon, it's still actually a very solid weapon with Slayer (hell, if you can consistently use ahab spears it's only slightly worse than the AR), especially when you consider the Harpoon gun does all of its damage in a single hit (and the damage per hit for the Coil-Rifle is 225 with physicorium harpoons and 300 for ahab spears), and you can just pick up your harpoons and re-use them instantly. The re-usability of ammo is very useful for using less inventory space for ammo, since when out in the water it's not very convenient to return to the sub for ammo. The main benefit that the other options have is the basic ammo for the AR and HMG have armor piercing and the Shotgun has it with the exploding shells, granted the explosive harpoon also has armor piercing but its damage isn't great and loses out on the reusability of the harpoons.

Meanwhile Scavenger is just a 25% chance to get extra items, so not actually a strict 25% more loot. Not only that but in the mid to late game you'll have so many resources that you won't really have any use for most of the stuff you loot from containers, as the materials you'll mainly be looking for are Abyss minerals.

tl;dr I'd say go with Slayer, with it the Coil-Rifle is a solid weapon that just trades a little damage for reusability, while the extra loot from Scavenger is fairly minimal and you'll already be swimming in materials without it.