Hello! I am a starfinder society GM and regular buildcrafter. My home group is about halfway through our VTM game and I pitched Tales from the Vast as our next adventure path. One of my players wants to play a dual wielding operative, and in looking over the dual wielding support, I found it lackluster. Operative has an action compression feat at 4 allowing you to draw two weapons and aim, as well as a progression feat at 8 that gives dual wielded *simple* firearms agile.
Mechanically, I don't think these are enough to justify running two pistols over a single pistol with a free hand for interact actions + grenade tossing. I was considering adding the level 4 Gunslinger feat Paired Shot to the operative feat list, but that could 1. Create a very boring rotation of Aim + Paired Shot every round, and 2. Be unbalanced with the Operative having access to magazine weapons and the Aim action that the Gunslinger does not.
I proposed a simple level 1 feat to add some versatility to the Operative's combat abilities while maintaining niche protection for the Soldier.
Guns Akimbo - Level 1 Operative Feat You have a great deal of experience operating in a target-rich environment. While you are wielding two one-handed ranged weapons, you may make an area fire attack using your class DC in a cone at half the distance of the shortest range increment between them. This cone has all damage types of both weapons while using the smaller damage die between them. This attack expends one round from each weapon per target.
Mechanically, this imparts the same action cost as holding one pistol and drawing + throwing a grenade, while negating the item tax of purchasing the grenades. It gains no benefit from the aim action, making it less valuable than soldier's area fire, which has primary target and the supressed condition. The main benefit I can see comes online at later levels, when the operative can wield a cryo gun with a shock mod, and a laser pistol with a corrosive mod to almost guarantee an elemental weakness trigger; however, because the damage is not split between die, it also applies any resistances in equal measure to the area fire attack. I think it fills the conceptual niche of two-gun fighting without being overpowered, but I'd like community feedback on it. What do you think needs to be changed about it, if anything? Would you run a character built with this feat in mind?