How many times do I have to repeat that all it does is increase damage and slightly decrease the time it takes for the reticule to shrink after you fired a bullet?
The difference isn't slight (it's very noticeable actually), neither in time it takes reticule to shrink nor in damage increase, if you actually played the game through with a gunslinger you'd know that.
No it isn't. You can use a gun with any skill. Having less skill than the requirement only results in having a number subtracted from the lethality, as mentioned in the thing I just quoted. You can and should kill any endgame boss using the steyr aug and a flamethrower regardless of your skill because trying to whittle down Ming Xiao through melee would be absurd and wear out your mouse even with your unarmed or melee feats maxed.
You're forgetting about weapons with zoom, Jaime Sue does a lot more damage when zoomed in, without investing in firearms/perception (to boost your ranged combat feat) it's very shaky.
Also Ming Xiao is very beatable with a melee build, as long as you have the right attribute/skill and potence discipline (it's possible to beat her even with clans who don't have it but potence makes it a lot easier) maxed.
When people are given a choice to put points into ranged combat-skills at character creation, they expect to be rewarded. But no, investing 10 xp to meet the ranged requirements of the starter pistol results in something that sometimes does 14 damage at best whenever a bullet is gracious enough to hit the target. Meanwhile, your fists reliably do 16 damage per hit without any additional investment whatsoever. With blood buff, which everyone gets, you can temporarily increase that to 24 per hit. You'd have to be some kind of masochist to even want to bother with guns in Santa Monica or Downtown.
Please, thirtyeight and shotgun are more than enough to deal with enemies in Santa Monica if you invested in firearms/perception, and braddock and brock are a nice step up from those.
Sure melee is more powerful at the beginning (and you don't have to buy ammo for it) but guns take over from about the middle of the game and are noticeably more powerful in the end, it's a trade off (not to mention the advantage of picking enemies off even from a moderate distance compared to having to wade into the crowd).
And really, stop with this "if the bullet is gracious enough to hit the target", if you even moderately invest in ranged you'll rarely miss, saying that the guns behave in such a way that you can't hit the broad side of a barn (or that you can hit a wall several feet away from the garbage can you're aiming at point blank, or whatever garbage Josh said) is the statement of someone who either only played tutorial, didn't invest in necessary skills/attributes for ranged weapons or is outright lying.
Games shouldn't be a simulation of reality because that's a stupid goal. The guns that are available starting in Hollywood have a decent base spread value.
In most FPS games (whether run of the mill or FPS/RPG hybrids) guns don't have perfect spread but regardless what Bloodlines succeeds at is satisfying character/skill development when it comes to guns which is the goal, you start out having trouble hitting shit and when you max the skill you're a killing machine.
