Her Memory can be obtained from the Challenge of Elders.
Pros: Recoil is predictable and easily managed; good base reload speed doesn’t need specced; stability can be increased dramatically with perks.
Cons: Low damage may not justify reduce fire rate; time-to-kill on Majors and other players is dismal without consistent headshots.
Her Memory features a chroma slot that provides a significant boost to its popularity among players with a glow fetish. When activated, the chroma lights up contour lines along the sides of the weapon. As always, the color will not affect the way the weapon operates, but will affect how other players feel about you as a human being (Fact: yellow is for terrible people who want to watch the world burn).
Her Memory belongs to the high impact/low rate of fire class of auto rifles that your mother warned you about. A controversial class of weapon, it is hotly debated on the Bungie forum (between the two players who bothered to reply to my eloquent request for feedback) whether the higher impact justifies the lower rate of fire. One side of the debate opines that impact on slower auto rifles creates a negligible effect on overall damage compared to high RoF rifles and therefore offers no advantage over rifles that shoot faster and longer. The other side of the argument puts forth that, “I got one with red chroma the other day and it’s awesome. I love it!”
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Stats
Range starts out at a lousy 16 and stability at 31, but unlike your career prospects, both of these can be greatly improved. The rate of fire is pretty decent; not as confusingly slow as Anguish of Drystan, but not quite Soulstealer’s Claw (No weapon is quite Soulstealer’s Claw. The Claw stands as a god among insects. I should be reviewing it. It’s too late; I’m like a third of the way through already. Why did I pick this gun? I’ve made a terrible mistake!)
I could talk about optics, aim assist, etc. but those are all hidden stats, and for good reason: to weed out players who were too weak to find them. So let’s move on.
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Perks
Okay, time for some honesty. Because Variks’s idea of friendship is ripping a wet fart onto your sandwich bag and then resealing it, your opportunity to obtain this weapon is a bit limited. Unless you’re running multiple accounts (Nerd!), you have a maximum of three chances per week to snag it. I only managed to get two for this review and one of them had the Icarus perk on it, so… no. My more useful version had Rangefinder on it as the first perk, which gave me a bit more… uh, range (not a hard perk to figure out). Equipping Fitted Stock and Counterbalance from the second and final rows, respectively, gave a Red Bull enema to my stability stat, making headshots so much easier. At one point I thought maybe there is such a thing as too much stability, and went with High Caliber Rounds to try and eek out some extra damage per round. I didn’t see a noticeable difference in damage, because I was distracted by my random teammates screaming in my headset about “grenade challenge” and “stop shooting everything, you ****!” I swear, some people have no appreciation for what I’m trying to do here.
According to some other reviews that are about to become obsolete, Persistence, Glass Half Full and Spray and Play are all useful perks that RNGsus vengefully withheld from me. Crowd Control is available as a very situational perk that’s only useful if killing more than one enemy is your goal; otherwise skip it for something that rolls off the tongue a little better (“Speed Reload.” Say it out loud. It just feels right, doesn’t it?).
As for scopes, if you don’t have a range-enhancing perk like I do (Haha!) then you might hope for a good scope, like the OEG Riflescope. Or you could hope for both to really drill that distant Acolyte in spectacular HD. Just be warned, auto rifles really excel in short to mid-range battles and Her Memory is no different, so if you’re running a high-zoom scope, you’ll wind up firing from the hip a lot in your ideal range. Lucky for you, hip firing works well with Her Memory’s fire rate and target acquisition and is totally metal. If range isn’t your thing, go with a Red Dot scope or something that won’t obscure your peripheral vision, because that’s how they get you.
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PvP
I didn’t really see Her Memory pop up a lot while I was dying in Iron Banner and for good reason. Her Memory isn’t the worst weapon you can bring into the Crucible; Techeun’s Rage is. Okay, now that I’ve thrown some random shade at a completely unrelated weapon (totally deserved it, though; that weapon is garbage!) let’s talk about my experience with this weapon against other players.
With a weapon like Her Memory, you really get a wonderful feel for what a nightmare this game would be if the Hive moved like your fellow Guardians do. As I’ve mentioned before, this weapon does not shine with body shots and I am a filthy casual when it comes to headshots. My natural reaction when unexpectedly meeting an opposing Guardian is to kneecap them, which is why I normally use Universal Remote, the closest I’ll get to an actual cheat code in this game. The problem I mostly ran into in the Crucible was reloading when there was just a sliver of life left on my opponent. I unloaded on one guy and almost killed him and I swear his Titan shook his head at me in disappointment before nonchalantly ending my embarrassment with Hawkmoon.
In the right hands, this weapon could do well, I imagine. Alas, those hands were not mine and as usual I got to hear a lot of Lord Shaxx’s snarky, patronizing “advice” while using this weapon (freakin’ Shaxx, man). Side note: We need to buff the limit of Iron Medallions a player can hold on to.
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Cosmetics
If Her Memory looks familiar, it’s basically a Questing Beat or Antipodal Hindsight with a different paint job (perhaps it should have been named Her Unoriginality). It’s a sleek, sci-fi design with little circle thingies at the front that look like someone glued bottle caps onto the sides of the frame. The weapon has been painted in the standard purple/gold/white of the Awoken Queen with the Queen’s Emblem stamped on the side, to make absolutely sure no one can see the lime green underneath. The rails also light up when chroma is installed (remember what I said up top about chroma selection).
Her Memory sounds like every other gun in the game when your roommate is a humorless ogre who demands all games be played on mute because the noise is distracting (go to the library already, Carl!). When the game is played as intended, by plugging into Carl’s surround sound system while he’s at work, the staccato of reports is eerily reminiscent of Stravinsky’s early material, before he got big. Her Memory sounds like an auto rifle should, unlike An Answering Chord, which sounds like the “tricked out Toyota Tercel” version of an auto rifle.
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Conclusion
“Practical.” Mowing down trash mobs in PVE will not be difficult with this weapon and with the lower rate of fire, you shouldn’t worry about running low on ammo unless you’re bouncing around the map flinging shots like it’s an interstellar space-rave (put on Hard Light or get out!). I have used it a lot on my Warlock when a secondary or heavy weapon was tying up my exotic slot because it handles well and works in a lot of varied situations. The rate of fire and overall performance remind me of Dealbreaker, but with better aim, stability and much faster reload. Dealbreaker, on the other hand has some higher base stats and isn’t named after a rejected Nicholas Sparks novel, so there’s some trade-off.
In PVP, the weapon is dangerous. A skilled player can score plenty of kills with it, making use of its ability to tackle diverse ranges, but using Her Memory in the Crucible is going to feel like handicapping yourself. The hits won’t cause a lot of flinch and the time-to-kill on it is very low, so taking down two players with one magazine will be a challenge. A Challenge of the Elders, you ask? Probably not. Bonus points for killing two enemies with one magazine? That’s the dumbest idea for a challenge I’ve ever heard. Why would you think of that?