Are weapon augments broken?

Not sure tbh, I tried a lot of them and was very disappointed. I think it could be 50/50 as to them being Working as Intended™ or bugged. My personal opinion though is that damage wise they should have either a positive effect or a 0 effect. For instance, the beam mod, it made my SR do something like 75% less damage for what seems to be a cosmetic change.

Vintage Heat Sink works well for certain guns, but the beam emitter...is shit no matter what you do with it. 

HAHAH! I'm gonna try it to see how it is.

Honestly I feel that these super rare augs should have a net positive effect no matter which one it is. "Changes the behavior of the gun" should not mean "Makes the weapon worse." For instance my beam augment experiment was done using a black widow with full sniper tree, cloak tree and all possible damage increasing passives maxed. It could not shot even the weakest of targets. I'm talking a direct head shot was doing maybe 40% to 60% of the targets hp in damage, from cloak.

Beam Emitter is useless plain & simple.

Seeking Plasma on any weapon pretty much increases the weapons' effective range, especially on shotguns.
I wouldn't use it on accurate weapons or weapons that needs headshots like the sniper rifles.

Plasma Charge(forgot the name) augment have a short to medium range but increase damage & turns it into AoE dmg.
Charged attacks deals very good damage, slapped it on any pistol & you got yourself a mini grenade launcher.

Electricity augment is great at dealing damage against shield & it has a weak lock-on to your enemy, only hits at short to medium range though.
arguably the best augment for PAW.

Grenade augment relatively good on inaccurate high clip assault rifles like the Revenant or Valkyrie. each shot turns to AoE.
Very good on shotguns with low to medium spread. can't headshot.

Sticky Grenade augment, need more experiments on this. Tried it on AR,SR & pistols, but nothing good so far.
Not sure if we can headshot with this as I tried it with sniper rifle, deals somewhat more damage but nowhere near headshot damage.

Vintage Heat Sink reduces your weapons clip size but pretty much gives you infinite ammo. works best on very low ammo/clip weapons.
also can installed with other damage/mechanic altering augments.

The ones that change how a gun fires are pretty crap. Either they crap on the guns damage, or theres something like arching bullets or slow projectile speed that kill them for me. Augs like Shield Oscillator and Omni-converter are pretty useful though.

I wanted to make a topic on this as I had questions, but good to see one's already started. 

Electricity is very useful on the PAW. Also, I add bio-converter to the PAW, to offset its small clip capacity --> endless shield draining.

Vintage heat sink CAN be very useful, but only with high clip weapons (like revenant), or with weapons which only have 1 shot anyway. Anything between that, I wouldn't recommend.

The seeking plasma... I dunno, I tried it on the revenant once, but felt like the projectiles were just too damn slow to hit, while normal bullets have hitscan. I might try it again on my revenant in the future.

Sticky grenades are hilarious on fast-firing weapons. But kinda suck that you lose your headshot advantage, which is what I'm going for with my infiltrator/revenant profile.




All in all, yes, a lot of the weapons are nerfed by 'augments', and only a few combinations are worth doing. 
- High-cap assault rifle+vintage(+seeking plasma?)
- PAW+bio-converter(+electricity)
- 1 shot weapon + vintage

I had to mix and match a lot to see what worked and what didn't, so that gets kind of annoying. I think the worst part though is the difficulty of getting certain things back. Like, the gun I made has the electricity augment as well as vintage heat sink, but when I checked what I get back upon dismantling, I see that I don't get the augments returned, and for some odd reason the game doesn't allow me to get more.

It does need a fair amount of refining to get right, especially the issue of severe damage drop off. If I want to turn a sidewinder pistol into a Star Wars laser blaster, I should be able to do it, but that it'll ruin the gun just makes that turrible.

It'd be great if we could have more transparency when it comes to what the augmentations actually do. A lot of them seem to reduce damage by roughtly 75-80%, but there's actually nothing about these changes in the description.