You're my favorite gun. You don't take forever to kill people like the PDW and NS-11P. You can actually hit the enemy unlike the Serpent and H-V45. You are not nerfed into useless trash like the underbarrel variants. I don't know, maybe I finally learned not to suck so much, or maybe I learned the concept of "effective range", but this gun does what the hell I want it to and what I want is to hit the enemy! With a laser sight it works great for close work and might not be a ranged beast, but honestly none of them are unless the enemy is shooting me (also, getting killed at sniper rifle range by non-SR counter-fire is ********). My four loadouts in order of range is now: Eidolon, Corvus, Pulsar VS1, Thanatos. Was it always the starter gun? I fell in love with this as I'm trying for the Assault Rifle directive to get the Darkstar. I never played Medic much since I'm goal-oriented or just having fun; either I'm piloting/driving vehicles, sniping, blowing up vehicles, and recently learned how to shotgun with LA. At first I thought I had to get the Medic Directive to get the Darkstar, whoops! But now I'm up another directive tier and I look forward to playing with it more.
Maybe not my favourite gun (feeling-wise i'm a NS-11A fan), but pretty close, so i understand. It feels like a good compromise overall, and my headshot rate with it is actually better than with more accurate weapons, go figure! The bigger thing i'd reproach it, is that i often end up with no ammo left (infantry engineers aren't that common outside of zergs), so i'm working towards the Darkstar now.
I had auraxiumed the H-V45 last year, and it was my all time favorite gun. Then it got nerfed so that it was only good in CQC. During that time I thought to myself: "Man, it would be awesome if there was a gun that sat between the Hydra and the Pulsar. Better than the Hydra at range and better than the Pulsar at CQC." Then the Terminus was released and my dream was realized.
VS1 is nice, I just can't help but keep coming back to it in the end. I still prefer the T1 or the Gauss over it though. For starter rifles and carbines, I feel the VS got the short end of the stick, honestly.
I've recently replaced my ALS with a grip, and it is a headshot beast in CQ whilst aiming down sights. It feels like VS' answer to the T1 Cycler.
You should try the Darkstar : it's a Pulsar VS1 with compensator (even less recoil) and unlimited ammo. I've fallen in love of this weapon.
Unlimited ammo seems nice at first but if you encounter a Heavy Assault you will die most of the time because 25 rounds simply isn't enough. Your weapon will overheat before the HA is down. And there are a lot of HAs in this game... The 25 rounds mag kills the Darkstar. My advice: don't use it, it will get you killed.
I've just finished to auraxium the Darkstar it 1 hour ago. About the 25 bullet drawback... Not really. If you have good accuracy, it's not a problem, even for HA. With my 29% accuracy, I generally never overheat, even on HA. The only thing you need to learn with the darkstar is to stop shot if your enemy isn't in your crossair, to save some bullet. With enough training, you will ate HA for breakfast with the ton of headshot you will do with this gun (I use x1 reflexe and it's basically a pulsar VS1 with compensator / forward grip : aka very accurate) But it's sure if you have low accuracy, it's a gun for you. High DPS gun are better.
Good god, Darkstar is junk. The only thing going for it is the low recoil, but it lacks any kind of punch, making it the worst of all the AR in the VS arsenal. I can't wait to finish auraxium that junk so I can go back to the Terminus.
Anyone saying the pulsar or dark star are any good are simply bad at the game or incapable of understanding how guns in this game works. And that's a fact.
NS-11A still superior! 35 rounds, higher accuracy, softpoint. i will take it any day even with its lower firerate. and for anything beyond mid-long range, Corvus for me :3
Not working on auraxing the Darkstar right now, but i've rescinded on my original good opinion of the Pulsar/Darkstar, and i have similar accuracy to yours (28.3% on my 400-ish kills Darkstar i believe). I also see the Darkstar as mostly a weaker Pulsar VS1 due to the compensator: while it doesn't seem to provide any bonus to vertical recoil (i checked in VR full auto-ing after emptying 5 rounds of the VS1 several times and compared Darkstar vs 25-round VS1 on a wall) it effectively kills hipfire with the gun. It's not like the Pulsar has high vertical recoil either way, so the Darkstar bears 2 penalties (mag size+ hipfire) for the benefit of infinite ammo. Also the foregrip-equiped Pulsar VS1/Darkstar/Equinox suffer from high horizontal tolerance, which makes it more likely to have stray bullets for any burst higher than 3 shots, considering it can go as far as 5 shots worth off of the original axis in these conditions. For reference similarly-foregriped Terminus and CME will go as far wide as 3 shots worth, the Corvus, H-V45 and NS-11A 4 shots. Though of course since the horizontal recoil difference between Corvus and H-V45 is so large to boot, the global angle of recoil is much higher for the latter and as such the Corvus is much more stable. But in the case of a Terminus/Pulsar comparison for instance, the Terminus has close enough horizontal recoil that it will always come out more accurate than the Pulsar VS1, despite the higher RoF, unless you have trouble managing vertical recoil, which should be a non-issue. Most of the other empires' ARs (including default choice) will only stray off 3 shots-worth of horizontal recoil themselves, and as such with a lower overall angle than the Pulsar VS1 base with the exception of the Carnage, TAR and GR-22. Which means that the only thing making Pulsar VS1/Darkstar/Equinox feel accurate is low RoF, but they're actually less accurate than most ARs or carbines, and only partially saved by their 0.25 move+stand CoF on that front. TL;DR: Solstice-base and TR/NC defaults are significantly more accurate than Pulsar VS1-base which got screwed on horizontal tolerance (same for quite a few VS LMGs and the Eridani while i'm at it).
FTFY The CME I've come around to as the second best VS AR after the Terminus since it's actually more accurate than the NS-11a at range. Really though, the VS Assault Rifles are proof that no Dev has ever played a VS medic for more that like 5 minutes.
The story of VS is that we only have 1-2 good weapons per class and that everyone cries for nerfs to those two weapons since they always die to them.
