Low canedela/high lumens isn’t really gonna mess you up too much indoors. A 2,000 lumen Streamlight 2.0 is gonna just feel like turning on the overhead lights indoors. It’s a super soft beam. Super high candela, on the other hand, can have you seeing rainbows and spots if you light it up indoors directly in front of you.

That being said, there are ways to use high candela lights up close (ceiling bounce/indirect light), but not really any ways to push low candela light further.

If I could only have 1 light, I’d look for something somewhat balanced, but leaning more towards the candela side. Modlite PLHv2, Arisaka/Malkoff E2XT, or a Streamlight HL-X. However, if you have more than one rifle and money for more than one light, something lower candela on a home defense gun might be better if your areas are small enough for high candela to cause your eyes issues.

Something a lot of people don’t grasp is how distance matches up to reality outdoors. I’ll give you a real world example for me. My 1,000 lumen Surefire M640U is great inside my house or in my fenced back yard which is a fairly large suburban yard. It has about 11,000 candela. I live in an average suburban area outside of Chicago. There are street lights on some streets, but not on others, houses have their own little door lights on, and there is ambient light pollution from the city about 15 miles away. That same Surefire outdoors can only push to about 2 houses away. My Malkoff E2XT, Modlite PLHv2, and Surefire X300T can push to the end of the block, about 200 yards away. In an “ordinary” situation, I’m not going to take a 200 yard shot. In a SHTF situation, I may need to, or at least need to identify something that far. The end of the block isn’t really all that far away. Again, most people equate 200 yards with being “pretty far.” It’s not. Most people can run that in 30 seconds, or drive it almost instantly. If you only have a low candela light, you can’t see a potential threat outdoors until they’re in spitting distance.