Spent the week actually using the rifle in every activity of every sort trying to complete the catalyst, which ended up pitting me against a wide variety of enemies throughout the game - and after finally getting the catalyst done, it’s gone into the Vault. I got tired of using it, once I hit around 80% catalyst complete I went to the Grasp opening and did the rest (hive wizards covered below), I burnt out on it.
When you can land those 4 rapid precision hits to proc creeping attrition, it will really slow up or freeze a powerful enemy - but you run into two problems; those enemies move a lot (those overloads who short-teleport, those hive wizards who go all zig-zag, those other ones that do the spinning dodge, etc.) and for a lot of enemies you can kill then in less than 4 shots. Honestly it felt harder to proc this perk than, say, kinetic tremors on a scout just due to these problems. It’s also not really that good at popping shields, it takes like 3 or 4 shots to pop the Grasp orange hive wizard shield to just get to killing, and due to how they zig-zag you end up missing a lot of the precisions unless you’re super careful and sit on the roof and shoot real slow.
Is it a bad gun? nah, it’s fine - has great stability and does the damage of a 180 scout and is very easy to use. It’s not any sort of stat monster compared to other 180s, but you get the 40% red bar damage buff. Moving up the ladder to orange/yellow, it’s no better than any other 180 scout due to how hard getting that perk to proc is in real life and the catalyst is complete meh. It does fine in the Crucible, I got a fair number of Guardian kills in Iron Banner and it’s OK in Gambit but too slow for that type of match. I generated far less tangles (subclass fragment buff) on precision kills than I did when using Randy’s when running PvE activities.
Interestingly, it did do a good job against Savathun and 3x Ogres in the opening of Vow of Disciple (doing the first secret chest run), not as good as Wish-Ender but not bad; they just sort of sit there and are easy to shoot though - once I loaded up DSC to get the first secret chest, it was really hard to use against those boss Captains in each bubble and I had to switch off it or I’d die.
dream catalyst: Iceflare Bolts. the 4x rapid precision hits from creeping attrition generate bolt energy with a countdown timer (5s?); the next shot while timer is active which shatters a frozen enemy triggers the bolt, which can be chained ss long as the timer is active (maybe? too powerful?). timer refeshes on 4 more rapid precision hits, deactivates on reload. (spirit: it aligns with creeping attrition but can’t be too easy to use, and would pair with any stasis class like if you froze them with a grenade) - basically, a form of destabilizing/ incandescent/ voltshot/ hatching but stasis oriented.
I know they’ll never do this, but they could at least give the catalyst Headstone if nothing else. simple, probably easy to code in.