Best traits for each ranged weapon?

[Sergeant_Braken]

From what I can see, there are more potentially useful trait options for ranged weapons than there are for melee weapons.

Is there a general consensus on what traits are best/good for each ranged weapon?

[Deja Vu]

Conservative Shooter: Optimal for anything the relies on headshots, like handgun and longbow.
Scrounger: Optimal for builds that have lots of crit, or very large ammo supplies.
Hunter: Useful in niche builds, like Bolt Pyro.
Barrage: Optimal on flamethrowers and hagbane.
Inspirational: Comically useless.
Heat Sink: Optimal on Pyromancer, if you can tolerate the unpredictability. Otherwise use Thermal. Useless for everyone else.
Thermal Equalizer: Default pick on all heat generating weapons that don't need Barrage.
Resourceful: Useful on niche builds that are built around their Ult, like Burning Head spammers.

[Kaelus Von Sestiaf]

The one where you get back 1 ammo for every headshot (Conservative Shooter) is very good and also can pretty much go well with any weapon. You can kind of take it as a baseline.
After that, you can start looking at individual weapons and thinking "would I rather have something else instead of Conservative Shooter?" and you work up from there.
Bounty Hunter probably wants Scrounger or Hunter, for example.

Mercenary, Waystalker and WHC can maybe take better advantage of Resourceful Sharpshooter. Etc.

[Moffin Bovin]

I prefer conservative shooter on the hagbane. +25% power is nice and all, but you can get more damage just by firing more arrows.

[Sergeant_Braken]

Okay, so if I'm understanding this right:

Thermal Equalizer is a safe choice for most overload weapons.

Barrage is for the flamestorm staff, drakegun, and hagbane bow. Though it should work okay for almost any ranged weapon, right?

Conservative Shooter is for accurate, single-shot weapons (normal crossbows, longbows, normal handguns).

Scrounger for shortbow, repeater handgun, and repeater pistol. Would it be good for the volley crossbows, as well? Or Victor's brace of pistols?

What about throwing axes or the grudge-raker?

[Deja Vu]

Generally speaking, the limiting factor on ranged weapons is ammo. This makes Conservative or Scrounger basically the default picks, unless you are building for something special. An example is Victors dual pistols, when you don't use them often to save ammo but unload on a boss, Barrage adds quite a lot of boss killing power. Barrage builds stacks very fast (almost instant) on the Flamethrowers and Hagbane, so it's a big damage boost for those weapons, easily outclassing other mods.

Hunter is only useful on high crit builds but has the advantage of lasting a full 10 seconds, which gives you time to swap to melee and still get the bonus damage. This makes it very powerful on a small number of builds, and mediocre to everyone else.

Shotgun+Grudge can use Barrage to buff their rt-click attack, making it almost good enough to replace your melee weapon (Try axe for armor + grudge for hordes, it's a fun gimmick build). Otherwise one of the ammo sustain talents is the way to go, probably Conservative shooter, since you can occasionally get more then 1 shot by making several headshots with one blast.

[Xaphnir]

Originally posted by Deja Vu:

Conservative Shooter: Optimal for anything the relies on headshots, like handgun and longbow.
Scrounger: Optimal for builds that have lots of crit, or very large ammo supplies.
Hunter: Useful in niche builds, like Bolt Pyro.
Barrage: Optimal on flamethrowers and hagbane.
Inspirational: Comically useless.
Heat Sink: Optimal on Pyromancer, if you can tolerate the unpredictability. Otherwise use Thermal. Useless for everyone else.
Thermal Equalizer: Default pick on all heat generating weapons that don't need Barrage.
Resourceful: Useful on niche builds that are built around their Ult, like Burning Head spammers.

I'd say barrage is good on swiftbow, too, if you're playing Waystalker. Not going to need the ammo from scrounger if you pick the 30% ammo refund level 35 talent.

Of course this is assuming you would for some reason use swiftbow over hagbane and longbow.