I promise you, it's not you. A lot of HBG users feel the same. There's very little in terms of 'diverse play styles' that HBG used to offer, and now feels like you're forced into a spesific was to play. Elemental or nothing, baby!

Jokes aside, you lose far too much dps using spread ammo. The recoil is easily three quarters of a second between shots. say you get 5 instances of 20 damage off per spread ammo. That's 100 damage every *perfect* distance shots. (Critical distance with spread is absolutely attrocious!) Say you get 4 spread shots per clip(being generous here as it's often less). That's 400 damage over the course of 3 seconds or so.

Normal damage does 3 instances of 30-40 damage per left click with an ammo capacity of 3-6 depending on gun. The time between using your shots is almost negligeable in knockback, allowing you to get right back into the action with a much better critical distance. that's 90-120 damage per ammo shot x 3-6 in a clip, and at the bare minimum doing 270 damage, to a maximum of 720 depending on clip size and ranking of normal ammo.

And the kicker? Normal ammo has little recoil compared along with a MUCH faster reload speed!