The reason AOE weapons suck is because AOE damage does not damage limbs, it only hits the main body even if the projectile hits a weakspot. The reason automatic weapons could feel underwhelming in general is because enemy body parts have separate HP pools.
1. **AOE damage.**
Take PLAS-1 Scorcher on any bot mission, find a devastator and attempt to headshot him. Devastator head has around 125 HP with no armor, Scorcher on paper has 200 damage. It does not oneshot a devastator.
Now, PLAS-1 Scorcher just like any other projectile based AOE weapon has two parts to its damage. First is projectile or direct damage, which is 100 for Scorcher, and next is AOE damage, which is also 100. Enemy main body takes AOE damage, limbs take projectile damage and either 0% of AOE damage or at the very most under 25% (since a devastator head is left at 25 HP after a projectile hit in this example).
Eruptor was good not just because shrapnel could hit an enemy multiple times, it was good because shrapnels as projectiles could *damage limbs*, including heads. Its current iteration only does one instance of projectile damage to a weakspot and zero AOE damage to it after.
Crossbow sucks also because it was specifically redesigned to hit single targets more yet its exposive component cannot pinpoint weakspots.
It is both unrealistic and counter-intuitive. Therefore it's **bad game design**.
(btw, Spear/EAT/Recoilles/Quasar do massive direct projectile-based damage, which is why they could headshot in the first place)
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2. **Body parts have different HP pools and damaging a limb doesn't (noticably) damage the main body of vise versa.**
You could test it by taking any gun that doesn't oneshot on bugs and trying to kill brood commander or any other medium at head vs main body. You would notice that both take a nearly consistent number of bullets regardless of order (minus various HP pool, yes, that's a thing).
*Damaging head by 50% still means that the body requires 100% of the effort.*
Destroying limbs instead applies massive debuffs on enemies. Head kill = direct kill or massive bleed (some bugs), legs = slow to fast bleed depending on number of destroyed legs and type of enemy, movement speed penalty or kill, arms = loss of a weapon/shield, bleed.
That's truly a good system. However, the lack of direct damage to main body means that automatic weapons with relatively small damage per bullet could hit multiple body parts and have *completely unreasonable TTK* for a particular enemy.
This TTK changes are more noticable on bugs in general because bots are more prone to die from the loss of a single leg/engine for example and virtually all of them are very oneshottable in the head.
*Moreover, better player would notice this problem less*\*\*.\*\* They could consistently hit weakspots, they have better spray control. That's why opinions on, say, Liberator Penetrator or Abjucator sometimes differ drastically. Both sides are right in a sense.
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3. **How to fix it (examples).**
*Firstly*, aoe weapons should start dealing damage to limbs additionally to 100% damage to body. It shouldn't be 100% so they don't just oneshot every bot by grazing their heads, but it should be *something,* around 25-30% to be logically consistent\*.\* This damage should increase to something like 50-60% if the projectile actually hits a limb so it actually feels satisfying.
*Secondly*, damaging limbs should proportionally damage the main body, additionally to the current system. Say, 33%+ for legs/hands so destroying a leg by 100% of its max HP directly deals 33% max HP damage to main body and damaging it by 60% deals only 20% max HP of the main body.
Heads and similar weakspots should have like 50% to 66% transfer. For example, dealing 80% max HP damage to the head with a spray should also deal 40% max HP damage to the main body.
*Thirdly*, damaging the body should proportionally damage main weakspot at the very least like the head, so it could be finished off with a lucky shot from an automatic rifle.
*Why am I using max HP instead of damage dealt?* Because main HP pools of many enemies are massive compared to their limb HP pools, and could change drastically from enemy to enemy so using max HP % is streamlining it IMO.
Particular enemy-based changes to this new system should also be possible when logical, for example destroying Fabric Strider head turrets should deal 0% damage to its main body while destroying a rocker devastator rocket pod should deal 50%+ of main body max HP.
This would require a massive weapon rebalance, yes, but should put the whole system in a much better place, including the general feel of it.