Zoom

A Zoom is an effect of "seeing things bigger". This effect can be noticed when looking through a scope or iron sights, or even when just sighting a weapon.

Scopes
Each weapon (sub) category has it's own scope, with different shapes and optics. From a mechanical/stats point of view though, all the scopes share the same stats and effects. A Revolver with a will gain the same benefits than a Sniper Rifle with a. Any visible difference between the weapons will actually come from the weapon category, and not the scope itself.

The scopes are:
 * (sometimes spelled )
 * (sometimes spelled )
 * (sometimes spelled )

The only exception to this rule is Support Machine Guns: While their names are also, and , they have their own stats.

FOV
FOV (Field Of Vision), is defined as the angle of view represented on the screen. When the game wants to implement a Zoom, it takes a lower FOV, and then displays it on a surface of the same size as that of the orginal FOV (in this case, the monitor). The resulting effect is that everything appears bigger: a Zoom.

In this article, the metric "Zoom" is defined as the ratio of the old Zoom over the new Zoom. So for example, going from 85° to 28° will produce a 3.0&times; Zoom.

Base FOV
When standing still, the player has a natural FOV of 85°1. When aiming, each weapon category will have a "Base FOV", which is the FOV the player get from aiming with a scopeless weapon (or would be getting for weapons that always have scopes). These base zooms are:

Note: Sniper Rifles actually have a very powerful "no scope" zoom. Whitting's Elephant Gun has a unique scope with an FOV penalty: it does not represent what a Sniper Rifles' scopeless zoom would look like.

Scope Effect
Given the above "Base FOV", when sighting a weapon, the player will benefit from a percentage based bonus of that base FOV. Keep in mind that the formula uses the Borderlands "inverse opposite" formula: NewFov = BaseFov / (1 - BonusFOVEffect)

The actual bonuses are:

So for example, a with a sight2 will have an FOV of: 48° / (1 - 70%) = 28° This would be equivalent to a zoom of 3.0&times;.

Weapon Card Zoom
It is not clear how borderlands rates the Zooms on its weapon cards. Inside a same weapon family, a bigger multiplier is, of course, better. However, given two weapons with the same scope, the one with the biggest Zoom will actually have the lowest displayed multiplier!

Here Are two table recapitulating the data:
 * - : Zoom not displayed
 * N/A: Scope not available on this weapon