So I know there's a lot of confusion going around as far as what each weapon in everyone's arsenal does, especially when it comes to unique or divergent weapons built off of base weapons (Do I really only get 0.02 Horizontal recoil reduction for 100LP on a Dead Shiny Slugga or am I missing something not obvious?).

I think a good solution that wouldn't be too difficult to implement as it uses existing tech would be to simply have the unique weapons display their modifications in the attachments menu that all the default base weapons have. Time consuming? Yes. Difficult? No.

While diverting the bonuses from in the weapons themselves to the unique attachments would be extra work for the devs, this would allow much more scalability to create new weapons. Also if this move were to be made, earlier would be better than later before many more weapons are added.

I feel this has several benefits:

A: This would remove ambiguity about the different effects a unique weapon has vs the base one. (i.e. Burny Choppa would have an attachment: ON FIYAH +50 Ailment) and also sort them out into a nice neat list.

B: It would also clarify intentional effects from unintentional ones, like say if a unique melee weapon had a slower swing than normal, a Mod would clarify that the speed happened on purpose or perhaps the weapon was mis-classified as a Power Klaw instead of a Electrified Choppa Axe or the like.

C: Attachments could be updated piecemeal for patches, balance, etc. Again this would add clarity and reduce ambiguity. It would also reduce duplicate work. If 3 weapons all use the same attachement, but the attachment turns out to be broken or something, changing the one attachment affects all 3.

D: This would also open up the door for uniques with multiple unique attachments included. Say a unique Triple Rokkit Launcha but comes with extra attachments to customize the types of rokkits it fires. (This would be in lieu of a rokkit launcha that could change on the fly in the field with X which would be OP). Even if the extra attachments have to found separately, that would also allow existing weapons to gain new life instead of becoming old obsolete versions of shiny new stuff.

E: This would keep the tooltip clutter below a weapon to a minimum since it's already very full of the basic statistics like melee power/impact and gun spread etc. Up to 4 extra tooltips of screen space for the price of 1 without having to add scrolling!

F: Attachments would keep weapon selection clutter to a minimum in the loadout screen. In my previous triple rokkit example, with the current design, all 3 versions would have to be separate weapons, which would make the inventory eventually very busy with tons of duplicates and it would be hard to locate something specific.

G: This could be applied to base weapons as well. For example remove the Smart Pistol and instead add an attachment that makes the gun stay locked but reduce the damage by an amount to bring it back down to current smart gun levels. Then if you want to let another gun be smart, you simply flag the attachment as valid for that gun and bam, you're good to go, no new items required.

NOTE: The weapon ideas are just BS for example purposes only, and I play ork, translate to other races' weapons as you will.