Back after a long absence, looking for advice (Mk 4 Shooter).

I used to hang around here and snark at people before, many months ago. I ended up coming back to see that some things seem a bit different. My current understanding is that new players are not flocking to BattleBay in droves - as a result people grind and stay in place infamy-wise. I am generally out-leveled in everything pretty much every match, but I don't mind a challenge. I end up floating up and down mostly between 1100-1300 typically in a sea of Mk 4 and 5s with level 20, 30, and 40 rares and epics. A lot of people seem to have picked up Bandages and heal 30-70 health in-between skirmishes, while I obviously ignored mine before.

What I need help with is picking a more efficient loadout for a shooter in terms of both red and blue items since I am clearly behind the curve by a LOT. I experiment a lot with different loadouts of weapons, but they all feel pretty situational to me. I'm completely ok with learning to use "newer" items and level them up playing the long game, even my strongest weapons tend to be outdamaged in any actual trade. Frankly, I have no idea what items are considered "strong" anymore. My current modus operandi is to buy up as many useful perks as I can fit and blue/red item pieces, to allow me to uncover more duplicates. I'm also looking at buying some parts so I can upgrade my items.... I scrapped my yellow/green parts so I could focus on Shooters and Defenders before.

Spoiler: This screenie shows all the immediately useful stuff I have.

The most common items I end up using are Big Torpedo (big on the hit or miss), Sniper, Cannon, Explosive Cannon, and Big Bertha, but thats mostly because they seemed stronger. I heard somewhere that Firebomb is better than Bertha all else equal.

The items I can upgrades based on duplicates:
Turbo (I have another 4 rares)
Missile Launchers (I have 2 copies, 1 is visible)
Rail gun: 1 duplicate rare
Standard Mortar: (1 epic duplicate)
Grenade Launcher: (1 rare duplicate)
Rare Standard Shield: (2 rare duplicates)

So in other words, those are the useful items I have now (nobody seems to use epic Gear Lube), and I don't know what to use/focus on, what items I should fish for duplicates of. Like I said earlier, I'm open to playing the long game so long as I'm not upgrading trash tier items. It looks to me like most people upgraded their items instead of trying to find more item pieces and now want duplicates, so I am optimistic that i might have more freedom in this regard.

 

I will get those asap, thx

 

Here is my current load out. I will on occasion switch things out but this load out seems to give me best results. Anyone got ideas for how I can improve?

 

all i can say is that as a shooter shoots 5 weapons, there is no point in standard cannon as u will just waste the cooldown. However if u are comfortable with it, keep one standard cannon and swap out the other one

 

Thank you for the advice.