This alone was probably the biggest factor that I considered when I was playing around with changing the Minigun damage a few months back and to be clear I'm talking about the troll weapon not the Tank Shredder.Lawlz wrote:... it's sort of nice to have a few more guns rival shit like Pbeam & railguns honestly ...
I originally did lower the damage because of everything mentioned already like extremely fast bullet travel time and near perfect accuracy. What happened was that we ended up with a weapon which no longer came close to the Particle Beam. And honestly how can you compete with a hitscan weapon with no falloff that can one shot all other armors and all turrets and also has no ammo and a very short charge time? It took a good fifteen seconds just to kill a base plasma turret with the Minigun after the nerf and if you started shooting a Titan or even a Builder they were able to turn and kill you first almost every time even though you started shooting first.
Ultimately I changed the Minigun damage back and gave it 500 ammo instead of unlimited and made it easier to see the projectiles, more so if you see a teammate getting hit you can then target the enemy that was shooting them just like how you can with the particle beam fade.
The point is the Minigun can't really be balanced out with simple changes to it's damage or ammo count or accuracy until we balance other weapons and armors respectively and we currently have some really unbalanced weapons when compared to others so we need to look at things holistically.