No, stability means next to nothing because if you have moderate skill you can land the same percentage of bullets. Impact in relation to fire rate is the key determinant of DPS. What I meant though was: Shadow Price and Shingen are the best... actually some legendary weapons get different perks, my shadow price for instance got extended mag OR the stability perk, as well as the bottom half of clip does extra damage..meaning that for the Iron Banner I got 21 of 42 bullets that would do massive damage.

[quote]No, stability means next to nothing because if you have moderate skill you can land the same percentage of bullets. Impact in relation to fire rate is the key determinant of DPS. [/quote] My point was, I already calculated the DPS for all the Auto Rifles. It doesn't matter what rate of fire or Impact you have. They all fall under 3 categories and they all deal virtually identical damage over time (excluding Focused Fire and the starter rifle). The base RoF and Impact stats of Auto Rifles are thus irrelevant in regards to anything other than recoil and ammo efficiency. What you basically just said was, "It doesn't matter that maximum rate of fire Auto Rifles tend to kick more. If you're skilled you can still land all headshots and deal the same DPS as Shadow Price." Yes, you COULD use a wildly inaccurate piece of turd as a weapon and deal the same DPS if you hit the head. The question is, why would you purposefully use an inaccurate weapon when it doesn't kill any faster than the accurate one? That was my point. It was just a misunderstanding, anyway. Shadow Price is low RoF (450), Shingen-E is medium RoF (600), so by high RoF I thought you meant guns like Sahara, Doctor Nope and Unwilling Soul (all 900) so I pointed out that they were usually much more inaccurate than lower RoF models and don't kill any more quickly than them. There isn't much to pick from for ARs. Anything you can land consistent headshots with, has enough range to not hit the falloff on most maps and a large enough magazine to kill a couple of players in a row is good. As for Glass Half Full... it adds a small damage bonus, maximizing at 6% for the last round of the magazine. At least, according to the guide. It's not enough to save a single bullet in the grand majority of encounters. I think Suros Regime's effect is stronger but even then, you need to empty your magazine to the last several rounds to save a bullet. In terms of perks, all guns not purchased from a vendor (with some exceptions, such as Raid weapons) pull all of their perks from pools based on their rarity and weapon type. There's some thousands of possible combinations for most base models... which makes debating which guns are best boil down to the base stats before the perks and which vendor gun has the best perks.

As per your last paragraph: but that would make any discussion [i]entirely[/i] academic, and mean nothing in terms of real world application, wouldn't it?

Indeed. Letting a specific roll of a gun control the conversation or failing to ever mention the existence of perks at all will both make the discussion lose applicability. Most models that share a rate of fire are close enough in performance that the perks will matter more than the base stats anyway.