tl;dr The Angstrum was perfectly balanced at the time of its release and should be restored to those base stats for ammo. The Prisma Angstrum can just have a larger magazine size and it wouldn't rock the boat at all. Just restore the original stats and stop messing with it. Also the incarnon requirement being headshots on a weapon absolutely designed to stop you from getting headshots without just standing directly in front of the enemy and pushing the gun barrel into their face is bizarre.
I liked the Angstrum when it came out. It was a fun little pocket rocket gun that was good at killing enemies and sometimes the little explosion would hit some people around it. It also had a good amount of ammo, and somebody added a secondary fire to it that would be extremely funny if you more or less made a meme build that sacrificed most of the damage to fire 20 rockets at once. In no way was this efficient or even a useful application of the weapon, it was just a cool thing you could do. In practice you could use this burst fire mode to increase your damage but be left reloading afterwards. Either way, the relatively small AoE meant that at the most you would be able to hit a couple more enemies, like Tombfinger's AoE (Tombfinger didn't exist at the time). Using the multifire function was just more or less super temoporary multishot that burned lots of ammo and took lots of reloading, so it was sort of wildly impractical compared to other options.
See, the charge shot fires the rockets in a circle pattern, so in order to get the maximum efficiency for this weapon, you'd have to be in a wide open area (uncommon at the time for DE's level design) and all of the enemies would have to be clumped up together while also being in the wide open area (also uncommon because enemy AI loves to spread out in wider areas). So half the time having a huge burst fire would waste a third to a half of the rockets fired, and in practice you would almost never have a use for this.
Then for some reason DE thought people holding two explosive weapons at the same time was too much, even though by far secondary explosive weapons were.....not really that explosive. So they more or less introduced a kind of nerf that encouraged people....never to use explosive secondaries, because nobody would ever waste primary ammo on a secondary weapon, or bring an explosive secondary over an explosive primary. Having both equipped wasn't really unbalanced either due to the fact that most regular human beings can only fire one weapon at a time so it didn't make sense as a design decision at its core either. Overall, it wasn't worth the hassle, but neither was dying on that hill for a handful of very average weapons, and they faded from public use overall.
Many patches later, DE decides that instead of this, they should just nerf ALL explosive weapons. While this has improved the spread of weapons in the game, it removed a fair number of weapons entirely from the game's consideration and they still haven't figured out how to actually have a practical balance here, but....
They also nerfed secondary explosive weapons even harder. They had also already seen a few reductions in their ammo capacity before (which, because nobody on the staff has actually used Angstrum for more than five minutes, didn't understand that this also entirely negated any kind of building towards the secondary fire) but now there was no point in even single firing the weapon more than five times during gameplay in general because swapping between this weapon and the primary was a damage decrease over just using two normal bullet firing weapons. Angstrum was never designed to be an AoE powerhouse. Not even the prisma version really changed that. So nobody's using it, still.
After so many rounds of this, DE decided that people weren't using it enough (????????????? memeofericandrebeingshot.png) and made an incarnon adapter for it. Fine. Okay.
It requires headshots for some reason???????????????????????? Hildryn's Balefire Launcher, which is a copy of this weapon minus the secondary fire function, uses body shots to activate its augment mod, and they wanted to require headshots on an explosive weapon that has at most medium range accuracy.
Also it still has all of the other drawbacks that have been added to it over the years.
DE, for whatever development reason we've never been privy to, is deathly afraid of this mildly above average on release weapon dominating the meta and just the mere mention of an AoE the size of a small fart cloud is enough to get them running for the nerf bats. The most anybody could use the AoE weapon for is to fire it at the ground and hope that it hits maybe three enemies on average if we're being generous here. And that would still not activate this incarnon if it was body shots so people wouldn't be using it that way anyway!
Who lives in fear of this weapon? Who complained? (My headcanon is Steve left behind a core design document that has a bunch of rules on it that were never really explained in practice but hewed to a design philosophy that was developed during the days of unreal tournament, but this is obviously not true and just comedic speculation on my part.) Where was the clamor to destroy this weapon's functionality? Just put it back to where it was before and it will be where it was before: a cool quirky weapon that will see some use but not a lot anyway.
In the many years since its introduction, numerous other secondaries have been introduced that would overshadow the original stats of Angstrum and yet these changes all remain. It's truly bizarre.
PS: Obviously if it were changed to body shots you would have to increase the incarnon activation requirement by a fair bit but that's just common sense design.
