OK, I’m sure there are others, and I welcome suggestions. But I was just finishing PT1 with my second Soldier and happened to find a relatively good Double Thumper that I levelled into just before reaching The Destroyer. Holy crap, did that make quick work of him! Between the lack of recoil and the relatively large crit zone, I killed that obnoxious boss in far less time than I have in multiple playthroughs with Lilith, Roland, or Mordecai.
If there are other good uses for Thumpers, I’m keen to hear them. I’ve never found them remotely useful in practice compared to good Stingers outside of this one niche case. I guess they could be useful for taking out similar enemies like Devastators or Knoxx, but I’ve always just used Defilers for those. With more typical enemies that move around a little bit, I’ve always found the ROF of Stingers much more deadly, and well worth the ammo cost.
Quite awhile ago, there was a guy called Scottes that did a truly impressive amount of various gun testing in BL1. Among other topics, he once checked out how well elemental Thumpers worked.
It’s quite a read, and if you’re interested in the details, by all means give it all a look.
In summary, when Lilith is pumped up with a solid amount of elemental tech-boosting skills, she can morph elementally juicy Thumpers into DoT stacking maelstroms. Since their fire rates are so low, they have plenty of time to recharge tech between shots, equaling bigger procs more often.
While I’m not a fan myself, there are those out there who like using them. The only thumper I’ve ever used was a Hellfire with an awful fire rate. Still, being a Hellfire everything melted just fine. Thankfully a better Hellfire dropped not too long after.
I read that long Thumpers post at some point, though I haven’t followed through every calculation. Still, the results don’t make Thumpers all that attractive. In the best case scenario (Lilith with max skills, a relatively stationary target with no crit zones), Thumpers come out a hair better than Stingers. And they save you considerable ammo in that comparison, which is nice. But that’s a very limited use case. Most targets have crit zones you can hit. And - more importantly IMO - most targets move around a fair amount. That’s the killer for Thumpers - if you miss a crit shot or miss a shot entirely, you’re giving up a lot of damage, whereas with Stingers you can more quickly adjust your aim. And that’s why Thumpers were good in my case against The Destroyer - that big eye just sits there waiting to be shot. But in the vast majority of cases, you and/or your target are in motion, making Stingers a lot easier weapon to score hits with. As long as you can keep up with the ammo demands, Stingers are more broadly useful.
I mean, both threads started out with the fact that Stingers are overall better weapons. I think the question then is “can we find a way to get Thumpers closer to Stinger-levels of usefulness?” Which, yes, we can. As long as they’re elemental and Lilith is all roided up with rid-rock, you can get (some)Thumpers up to the baseline you hold for most weapons. Overall the class is below expectations, but this gets a few special cases running with the pack.