So I finally have been trying the ubiquitous Palindrome/Icebreaker loadout the last couple days. some early struggles but now doing better. I think I can see the inherent power of the loadout already.
It's tough, it basically requires a total rewiring of my brain after hundreds of crucible hours played trying to keep distance between me and enemies and use Mida or a pulse to advantage.
I've also found HC/IB it seems to pair way better than other loadouts with bladedancer/shinobu/skips (which I main anyway). I guess because you can throw the skip then jump around shooting them. Also i imagine because each HC shot packs more damage than any other gun, so just one shot finishes them off much more often.
I've seen mobility increases exponentially with HC, as well. I see myself hopping around a lot more.
It does introduce the issues I always find with a sniper, which is I can tend to get way too passive, and try to "force" the use of the sniper rather than let it come to me. Actually though with this loadout that seem MUCH less of an issue than when I used to use Mida/LDR or what have you. Maybe it's the state of mind of knowing you have unlimited ammo with IB, I dont know.
Also, didn't know IB does 160 to the body. That explains a lot of it's popularity right there. The real key to snipers IMO has always been the body shot cleanup kill, and 160 allows that, almost any preexisting ding to an enemy and 160 will kill them. It's hard to think of much that's going to do less than 40 damage to a player after all.
I have been getting back into sniping more easily than I thought though.
It's stupid and seems self evident and I'm sure I already knew it, but a reddit comment made me understand the loadout much better, the comment said you will get the most kills with this loadout, just kill with hand cannon up close, then outside pulse/Mida range go to Icebreaker.
But I will say, this may be the most unbalanced Destiny has ever been. As far as viable primaries, there's really only one, Palindrome/Eyesluna (which are basically the same gun). Competitive loadouts, only one, IB/HC. Yeah, there's a distant 2nd of Mida and a Sidearm. But it's a very distant 2nd. Maybe the most distant any 2nd place meta loadout has ever been. And there's almost no variety beyond that, either. Looking at Trials reports stats, Hawksaw pulses are a very distant 3rd even to Mida's distant 2nd (and seem to be falling off more and more). The fallof of top guns to everything else is a yawning cliff, again worse than I can ever remember really... And AR's barely exist and haven't for ages on top of all that.
The thing is the community has become so biased towards and aggressively protective over hand cannons, that I am sure Bungle is afraid to balance other primaries to be competitive again (let alone actually nerf hand cannons). So the community essentially demands this incredibly unbalanced state, but it's still disgusting. Perhaps with a clean slate (so they can avoid the angry community backlash to anything touching HC's) Bungie will allow the 75% of primaries in the game that aren't hand cannons to be competitive in D2, but knowing Bungie I dont have all that high of hopes.
To dive into the numbers, Trials report for last week's Trials, which was on Black Shield, if anything a slightly larger map biased slightly away from hand cannons. Weapons ranked by kills. Also, I group similar guns (archetypes) that have a number of kills that is significant, to get a better real picture. So Pali/Eyes/Lord High Fixer are basically the same gun, grouped. same with Hawksaw/Blind Perdition/PDX45/BP adept.
https://leaderboards.trials.report/
#1 Icebreaker, 2.3 million
Palindome/Eyesluna combined=2.6m
Can anything challenge these monsters? Not really.
Sidearms? Wormwood (1.1) +Ironwreath (.4)=1.5. higher than I thought, but still not even challenging IB. There aren't other sidearms that put up significant numbers.
Can any primary groups challenge Pali/Eyes? Nope.
Mida is at about 1.1. Wayyy behind, not even half. The next Mida archetype is Distant Star at 57k kills, so not even a blip.
Hawksaw type? We have Hawksaw 332k, Blind Perdition Adept 212k, BP non adept 173k, PDX 45 96k. Total ~800k. Cant even challenge Mida, less than 1/3 of Pali/Eyes. So much for the meta Pulse rifles. All these pulses plus Mida (about 1.9) still are way less than Pali/Eyes (2.6).
Burning Eye is worth a mention, as it's not Mida archetype. Still, both versions combine at 286k. Add that to all the others and Mida we still haven't reached Pali/Eyes.