Today's addition to the Halo 3 Weapons Guide is the Pistol, a dual-wieldable weapon of Human origin.
| Clip size: | 8 |
| Max capacity: | 48 |
| Rate of fire: | ~2 rounds per second |
| Rounds to kill(body): | 8 |
| Rounds to kill (head): | 5 |
| Rounds before melee kill: | 3 |
| (Same for head; no damage difference for headshots until shield is down.) | |
| Rounds after melee to kill (body): | 3 |
| Rounds after melee to kill (head): | 1 |
| Rounds before close frag nade kill (body): | 3 (same for head) |
| Rounds after close frag nade to kill (body): | 3 |
| Rounds after close frag nade to kill (head): | 1 |
| Rounds before far frag nade kill (body): | 4 |
| Rounds after far frag nade to kill (body): | 4 |
| Rounds after far frag nade to kill (head): | 1 |
Notes: This is a suprisingly fantastic weapon for use on it's own and dual wielding with other guns. The range is deceptively long, probably only moderately shorter then the BR and carbine. If you do miss with the gun, you do lose more damage per miss than with those other guns, however. Possibly the oddest behaving gun in my range tests, firing it past it's effective range yielded slot-machine like results. You could do anything from having to fire 12 shots to kill a person to getting a 5 shot kill as if you were right up next to them and aiming at their head. The randomness of the gun at past its effective range works mostly in your favor if you aim at the center of mass.
Also, despite it being a fantastic gun to dual wield, Bungie lowered it's per shot damage to roughly half normal when two pistols are wielded together. So you will get better results if dual wield a pistol in combination with any other weapon.
For demonstrations of the pistol's range and killing abilities, see the following short films:
Check slots 1 and 3 in Narcogen' Halo 3 fileshare; they will be posted to individual forum threads when possible but right now Bungie.net is giving an exception error.