So, pains me to say this, but sandspitter pistol. It’s the fastest option for physical (duh). And aether. And chaos. And pretty sure even pierce. And acid if it had good support.
Because passthrough is unbeatable, and makes the difference between sitting on the better side of meta times vs barely holding on or almost unplayable (hoping smite is enough basically). This covers both crucible and sr75-76 as packs just totally overwhelm you.
No idea what the answer is here at this point in the game. Without passthrough ranged can feel very frustrating.
Guess my thought/request would be consider more wps passthrough, either base or via mods. Prevents runaway scaling from full time passthrough but still helps with group clearing that feels real bad on most gun builds without passthrough.
@banana_peel has a bunch of testing runs if he wants to share for context