Interesting. I wasn't aware of the infinite ammo trick. Actually I don't think I've gotten a weapon with unhinged or even frenzy yet (certainly not recently) for some reason, and my hours played is 192. Although I spent much (half?) of that time re-leveling other characters and farming level 19 mods because I'm playing with a friend who had low play time and I didn't want to advance without him.
I've never seen a Frenzy drop either, but I'd never use it anyway because of the <4B restriction. Unhinged is really common though, I get it on so many of my LMG drops that I don't even keep them all for recalibration anymore.
The problem as I saw it is that the +30 mag was a must-use mod and any AR that couldn't use it was unusable. After the nerf I was able to use FAMAS without feeling like I was being stupid. Also how early and easily obtainable it was. When re-leveling I was trying different weapons but just went back to the police M4 because everything else felt significantly worse, even after the mag nerf. If ARs needed more mag capacity, it should probably partially be innate with mods granting less instead of a single mod doubling capacity.
Extended mags are very strong but it's not like there's any competition in that slot when other mag mods are all junk even compared to just +10 rounds... so of course everyone wants the +20 ones now and most people dislike the nerf from +30 to +20 even if the change from -RoF to -reload speed mitigates it somewhat. It's a Division thing imo. ARs were used by the vast majority of players in Div 1, and we all had mags that held ~67 rounds. Changing that in Div 2 just feels wrong. It didn't just hurt ARs either; before the WT4 patch I used a rifle as my secondary and having 60 rounds in a pre-nerf Mk17 was great. Now with all the nerfs the entire rifle class is underwhelming and in dire need of an across the board buff.
FAMAS is a poorly designed gun as soon as you get to content where it can't kill before reloading. It has a decent damage increase, but not anywhere near large enough to account for the missing mag slot, and it has awkward (non-vertical) recoil compared to the other laser-accurate ARs. It's not entirely the extended mag's fault though; the F2000 is kind of shitty due to arbitrarily missing a rail slot and the loss of 5-7% chc there. People avoid using the Classic M60 because it's missing a barrel slot too.
The reason I don't like LMGs personally is the low accuracy. Headshot damage is so goddamn high that it's a huge DPS increase to land them, so accuracy translates to DPS. Also I'd just assume kill stuff from farther away. (I loved MK17s at the start before I tried accurate ARs) Although I certainly prefer LMGs when confronted by multiple mobs charging at me from the same direction from a fairly close distance, but that's too situational for me to want to switch to it.
You just have to play LMGs entirely different from how you'd play other builds. HSD is just for MMRs imo, maybe rifles but I still don't see much point in using a rifle at all now. They mostly build around something like 10-14/2/x though, which is not a style of build I would ever use, especially not when I only play solo. ARs are all about crits (RIP after update 3), and LMGs are all about massively stacking raw damage. Sitting far away and killing things while you and them are both hiding in cover makes for really slow clearing. I prefer to run through missions on hard or challenging only entering cover when absolutely necessary so I can clear most of them in 10-15 minutes tops. The LMG build excels at this. Don't really need accuracy since you get up close and the reticule tightens on its own anyway, so I just max the stability bar and call it good enough.
I'll have to play around with a vector. All SMGs seemed worse than ARs in every respect when I tried them (or just looking at the numbers), but perhaps I was using the bad ones.
My Vector is strictly set up for swapping to it then immediately dumping the entire mag in under a second. I can sometimes get a (red) kill with it, but that's not its purpose. It has Allegro on the gun, and reload speed mods on the sight and magazine. The reload is so fast that I can start the swap back to my LMG almost immediately after the bar starts to fill and I'll still have full ammo on the LMG when I change back, thanks to Fill'er Up. When I play my AR build, the only SMG I use with it is Chatterbox for the proc. I used tp carry a Vector and swap to it to kill enemies that got inside the 10m range where ARs cannot crit, but I would get killed due to emptying the mag without getting a kill just as often as I would get killed trying to use the AR without being able to heal with Clutch. Personally I think the >10m restriction is retarded and it's one of the main reasons I stopped playing my AR build.
I think part of the problem is that sharpshooter talents are so clearly superior to the others. I'd probably value the infinite ammo trick more or LMGs in general if I didn't have -30% reload speed and extra head damage. Although I'd probably argue that entire weapon classes shouldn't be balanced around that trick.
I use Sharpshooter with ARs because HSD + stability + reload speed is far better than just getting AR dmg from Survivalist. Don't need any of those things with a LMG build though, so Demo is the obvious choice. Especially since the grenade launcher is still miles ahead of the other two spec weapons.
