I agree the Flaylock needs to be buffed, but I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel on this one. Just like the MD, the flaylock became OP when splash hit detection finally got fixed and hitscan hit detection was still crap. The MD was rebalanced by lowering each tier by one. (The current Freedom has near identical stats to Chromosome's EXO-5) Revert the Flaylock back to 1.0-1.2 but do the same by making the ADV proto, the STD the ADV and make a much weaker standard.

Slowing the RoF could help as well to make it a true high risk, high reward alpha damage weapon. Also, raise the CPU on the normal variants to slightly higher than other sidearms to prevent it from being the go to when you can squeeze out a little CPU in a fitting while making the specialist variants cost the current CPU values with sufficiently less ammo like the shotgun.

I don't see why people have a problem with others running a sidearm as their primary means of defence.

I've done it with the SMG for months. I've done it with Nova Knives for a short while before CCP introduced the biggest blows to the scout class. I've even done it with the Scrambler Pistol. All three make effective weapons by themselves. The flaylock is the outlier. And people seem to want to keep it that way, for some reason.

With that being said, missile speed needs to improve if the weapon is to encourage direct hits over reliance on splash. A small increase in clip size would also be nice. Six seems like too many, but four or five would be nice. In addition, the weapon needs more than just two variants (being the 'regular' and 'breach'), like the 'assault' and the 'tactical.'

Honestly, the same damage stats with a missile speed increase and a small bump in clip size would probably be enough for me to dust of the flaylock, and begin putting more SP into it.