What is the handling stat?

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

So I know I’m not the first to ask this question, but from my research on the forums, there’s no concrete answer. what in the world does handling do? we can make guesses based on other games, or how it “feels” on different guns, but can someone answer what all it emcompasses?

is it ADS speed? recoil reduction? re-centering speed post recoil? weapon ready speed? CoV ignition speed?

usually it seems like gbx likes to leave things for us to research and number crunch (drop rates, legendary effects, etc), but as an intrinsic number on the weapon card, some enlightenment would be appreciated.

it’s bizarre having an entire stat taking up weapon card real estate that is largely ignorable and boosted by only a few skills.

are those skills worth it? why should I take amara’s +accuracy and +handling skill? it’s hard to know just how much value +handling stats hold compared to the rest of the obvious ones. we know the difference between 20% accuracy and 100% accuracy, fire rate of 2 vs 10, reload speed of 2 vs 4, etc but what is the difference between 20% handling and 80% handling?

I’d love a spotlight once a month where the dev team answers questions like this, regarding mechanics and thought processes, but if that doesn’t seem likely, just in the next hotfix post throw in a “handling is x, y, z” type of thing. hell, remove the stat from the item card and use that to show mayhem level!

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#2

The most common answer I have seen and observed is recoil, weapon spread and repair speed.

You are right though it is very hard to test out and, with the current meta weapons there is very little noticability in it.

#3

wouldn’t repair speed be governed by reload improvements? I’d figure anyway, but possibly not. they need clarification on how various stats work with CoV in general as well. magazine size/shots to break, reload speed/repair speed, ignition speed, etc

#4

I would think it should yes, as I said, those are the most common answers I have seen when I researched the same question.

I haven’t done any number crunching on it or live testing to see so this is second hand information at best.

Maybe I will dig out my stopwatch and give it a try :sunglasses:

#5

i can’t define it precisely, as the description of that thing in any game is hard to understand ( they didn’t mention it in term of gun data, like reloading, Recoil etc)

however there was some hints in the division 2, ubisoft, a talent ( TD2 buff = aniontment here), mentioned, …consumeing this handling can speed up reloading of a gun… i guess handling (in any game) is used to decreasing the reloading time . i think u see some game have a bar when reloading , this bar is the things of so called “handling”, if u is withing a certain area or time when reloading, u can get a buff on quickly refulling u magasing

summary, u can reloading much more faster with a buff on handling( depending on the time u press on reloading a gun)

Steady Handed(talent ) , TD2
–Landing a shot adds a stack of bonus 2% weapon handling. Max stack is 15. At max stacks each shot landed has a 5%chance to consume the weapon handling bonus and refill the magazine

this things is really tricky, generally, it’s so hard to feel this bonus or buff on a gun

#6

Handling is how much you will negate recoil while continuously firing, the more handling you have the more yours bullets will hit the same spot. Gun with poor handling have huge recoil and you cannot hit the same spot in continuous fire

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#7

Recoil height, recoil recovery, weapon sway

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