Enough is enough. I love guns, I went through beta trying bombs and swords through 4* before discovering my love of shooting Gremlins in the face. Still, as much as I love them even I know that guns are seriously underpowered any way you look at it. There are a combination of problems that need to be addressed.
Problem 1) Most gun's currently don't gain enough going from 4* to 5*. Compare it to any other weapon or weapon type, and aside from the silversix/peacemaker and blackhawk/sentenza there is very little reason to upgrade a gun. Swords typically get exciting new abilities. Bombs get much larger radii. Most guns get... about 5 more damage a shot.
Problem 2) Our armor is weak. Guns already deal significantly lower damage than swords and bombs. There is no reason for our armor to be objectively inferior to the specialty armor of bombers/sword users. Volcanic Demo, Vog Cub, and Nameless all provide the exact same bonuses in most areas. Same normal and elemental resist. Same offensive bonus (more on this later). The difference? They both get a ton of fire resist, we get 0. The armor is perfectly mirrored aside from this, but we get no Fire Resist.
Problem 3) Our armor bonuses don't work. Attack speed on a gun does almost nothing because it does not effect the reload. I personally tested and confirmed this. There is no change in reload rate going from 0 bonus on an alchemer to "Maximum!" on the same gun. Since reloading is the largest part of our attack cycle this means that our bonus is massively inferior. We aren't sword users. We don't have a combo to get out that knocks the enemy back; this means that attacking faster by itself doesn't do us much good. It's starting the next cycle of shots that matters. If attack speed effected reload time it would be wonderful and useful. As it stands, it's a joke.
Problem 4) No way to poison. Both sword users and bombers have the option to poison. It's important. It's virtually impossible to kill a group of three gremlin healers solo without it no matter how geared you are or how good you are. You simply can't get through their heals. Even two is extremely difficult.
Please address these problems so that gunners are on something closer to an even footing with the sword and bomb users.
At least in the first half of tier 2, using 2* gear (I haven't personally gotten farther than that), it's entirely possible to punch through the healing on any number of healers as a sword wielder even without poison, because you can deal enough damage to knock one out entirely in a single combo. I have no idea if bombs are the same. Of course, this doesn't help guns, which both seem to have lower burst damage and can't get damage from their armor in the same way.