Cloaker and a more complex hit box?

[Xyntech]

Well the pistol should never be more powerful than some of the other options, so if you have a rifle with you I'm sure it will be as you say Jimmy, a low ammo contingency option.

Still, there will presumably be more options for it than that. If it can be suppressed, it could be a more stealthy option even for non cloakers. Conserving ammo could be useful sometimes even when you still have quite a bit of ammo left. And let's not forget the all important gloat kill, killing someone with a weaker weapon just to fuck with them or because it's fun.

Primarily I see the pistol mostly being used as a supplemental weapon to fill gaps in a players loadout. Maybe a player is carrying all AV or explosive weaponry, so they'd use a pistol as their only viable ranged option.

Obviously the cloaker will be the most obvious one to use a pistol frequently though, and I think this is appropriate. That just means that they will have even more fun taking advantage of all of the pistol customization options.

Being able to balance headshot bonus damage for each weapon should make overpowerdness pretty avoidable. If all classes share the same pistol, I would say they should primarily balance it against cloaked users. If each class gets its own pistol customization tree, the problem isn't even a problem at all.

Personally, I'd generally like to see head shot bonus be something along these lines:

Sniper Rifle > Pistol > Rifle

But everything should always be done with an eye towards optimal balance.