Storm Needler is awful, always has been.
For 10 OPs more than competitors that do more real damage to armor, plus using up a Large Ballistic slot, it should be considerably more effective.
Spoiler
Current stat-line for the weapon in Rebal:
Storm Needler,multineedler,3,,15000,800,,750,,20,15,28,,,,KINETIC,250,,0,3,3,0.05,6.8,6.8,,,,800,,,20,,,,kinetic19, remnant, base_bp,,,,Anti Shield,,,,,,,,,,50,####,,1.014675531
Note: this weapon fires a burst of shotgun-type projectiles that do equivalent total damage (i.e., 750 total Kinetic, but each small shot actually does 50, and the pattern spreads quite a lot). So its armor-killing potential is quite a lot lower than other things, and it's somewhat lousy against small, fast targets, but it does what it says on the tin against big things, rather than being too weak for most uses, let alone letting the AI use one.
The long windup, uninterruptable burst fire, mediocre accuracy and relatively-slow turning speed largely balance with the high Flux-to-DPS ratio.
At 800 range, users must generally get closer than is safe, which has always been one of the reasons why the current version is balanced incorrectly; it can't kite and stay even moderately efficient, even mounted on a Conquest that's doing a broadside while using Maneuvering Jets, unless the opponent is equipped very poorly for range, so the Conquest is taking return fire.
At the very least, Vanilla's version should have a much better efficiency, since it misses quite a lot, or be bumped to 1000 range, where it'd make a credible kiting weapon but be relatively inefficient because of misses- probably not a whole lot better than a Beam, vs. an opponent with Shield Mastery. For everybody who's going to go "1500 vs. shields for 250 Flux is OP"... nah, this thing's still not great at anything but its job, which is shield-killing. 50 Kinetic barely polishes the surface of anything with real armor, but it makes the weapon capable of bursting down a Paragon if the opponent is lucky enough to survive long enough to get into range.
Anyhow, that's my take. It's one of those weapons where it's so obviously bad I'm always kind of amused when I see attempts to make it work anywhere but very selective Sim runs, lol.
