The Diamond Back .357 is a weapon in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Background
The Diamond Back .357 is a .357 magnum revolver made by Mustang Arms Ad-Tech Ltd. This revolver is rather innovative, using a revolving cylinder magazine and a hybrid cartridge system to combine reloading speed with reliability and accommodate multiple ammo types.
Characteristics
The Diamond Back uses telescopic ammunition, in which the projectile is completely enveloped in the case by the propellant. This revolver can also use heavyweight .357 magnum special explosive rounds. It can accept 5, 6 or 7 round cylinders. The weapon uses a side break action rather than conventional swing-out cylinder for reloading. Prior to speed upgrades, the Diamond Back reloads rather slowly, but once adequately invested in, an entire cylinder can be changed within mere moments.
Unupgraded, the Diamond Back offers great stopping power and a tremendous bullet damage, capable of dropping heavy troops and bots in a single shot. When modified with the explosive round modification, it becomes even more powerful, killing all non-boss enemies with minimal effort.
A major drawback to using this weapon is its somewhat low accuracy. Firing the Diamond Back without aiming will almost always cause the bullet to hit off-target, unless a Laser Aiming Module is attached, after which it becomes greatly more accurate. Its heavy recoil also contributes to its high miss rate, but can be circumvented with the right augmentations.
Ammunition is very rare at the start of the game, but after locating Sandoval becomes vastly more common.
Pieter Burke owns a custom model with a golden finish. Dispite its discription of having a "full suite" of modifications and appearing to have the explosive round system, this model is completely unmodified and unable to be modified besides adding a laser sight.
Behind the scenes
- The Diamond Back .357 uses the Dardick Tround concept.
- A version of this weapon was ported into Team Fortress 2 as a promotion weapon for the Spy Class. It has the special ability to accumulate critical hits for every Engineer building sapped or succesfull "Backstab" attempt.
- The Diamond Back is most likely a reference to Colt's revolvers named after snakes. The real-life Diamondback is not chambered in .357 magnum; however, an eBook in the game references "an old classic, the .357 Python," which is also a real gun that does fire the .357 magnum cartridge, (the real-life Diamondback is basically a Python chambered in .22LR and .38 Special cartridges).
- The revolver is misaligned when aiming down sights, pointed slightly to the left. Aiming, and continually turning the camera to the right will shift it to it's "correct" position.
- Despite concept art depicting an 8-round magazine upgrade, the maximum capacity in game is 7 rounds. This reduction was likely for balancing purposes.
Gallery
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