Special Weapon Effects

Eye certain. Finger Lightning. Aim Death. – +420% critical hit damage, -50% base damage. Increased weapon zoom, fire rate, reload speed, and magazine size. Slightly reduced accuracy.

Usage & Description

Like all Jakobs sniper rifles, the Hawk Eye also gains an additional +160% critical damage, for +580% minimum. However, the -50% base damage is actually somewhat misleading, as the Jakobs barrel it replaces also has a +15% damage bonus if attached to a Jakobs sniper body, and an additional weapon damage grade bonus, so the net is actually -60.6% damage.

Due to this extreme critical hit damage bonus, the Hawk Eye can be effective as a "one shot, one kill" weapon. It should only be used in long-range combat unless the user is particularly skilled with snipers or can slow their target down enough to get a clear shot, as it is ineffective with non-critical hits and the increased scope magnification can impede close-quarters aim.

Due to the reduced base damage, the critical damage done by the Hawk Eye is the same as a standard Very Rare Jakobs sniper rifle (ie. a Muckamuck) with +167% critical damage. As a standard Muckamuck normally has +160% critical damage, before any bonuses from accessories, the Hawk Eye only deals about a 3% more critical hit damage than an equivalent Muckamuck, and 60.6%% less damage for non-critical hits. In addition, since critical hit bonuses are additive, this also drastically reduces the benefit of other sources of critical hit damage. For example, Zero's Killer skill provides +50% crit for a short time after making a kill. On a standard sniper rifle of any other manufacturer (+100% critical damage), this skill would increase the damage of critical hits by 25%, versus critical hits made without the bonus being active. On a standard Muckamuck (+160% critical damage), the skill would instead provide only 19.2% additional damage. On the Hawk Eye, that same +50% bonus would only increase the damage of critical hits by a mere 7.4%.

The result is that the Hawk Eye is noticeably less beneficial when used by Zer0, resulting in weaker-than-expected damage even on critical hits, and extremely ineffective damage on body shots, especially when used in Decepti0n. With only +13% additional critical damage bonus from skills and other gear, the Hawk Eye will actually deal less critical damage than the equivalent Muckamuck. Technically, Hawk Eye can offer a decent high critical damage to classes that lack other critical damage bonuses and would not often use sniper rifles, such as Gaige or Axton, but even without any other bonuses, the weapon is only barely superior to an equivalent Muckamuck on critical hits, and substantially inferior on body shots, strongly limiting its usefulness.

Notes

• On critical hits, a Hawk Eye will deal slightly more damage than a Muckamuck, but with substantially higher rate of fire.
  • This is not the case with Critical Ascensi0n or other boosts to critical damage, as a Muckamuck will out-damage a Hawk Eye with a sufficient stack.
• Mathematically, a 100% critical hit bonus on a Hawk Eye will provide a mere 14.7% damage bonus. By contrast, the same 100% bonus on a normal Jakobs sniper rifle will provide a 38% damage bonus, and for a non-Jakobs sniper, a 50% damage bonus.
• Initially, the Hawk Eye was bugged and would have always have "1.0x zoom". This was fixed in an unknown patch, which gave the Hawk Eye increased zoom compared to other sniper rifles.
• With a Hyperion scope, the Hawk Eye will have a zoom magnification of 11.6x, the highest for any sniper rifle, surpassing the 11.4x of the Fremington's Edge.

Trivia

• The name and red flavor text are references to The Deerslayer, a novel by James Fenimore Cooper. The line is: "eye sartain -finger lightning - aim, death- great warrior soon. No Deerslayer - Hawkeye -Hawkeye - Hawkeye. Shake hand."