Diamond Back .357

The Diamond Back .357 is a weapon in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Background
The Diamond Back .357 is a .357 magnum revolver made by Mustang Arms Ad-Tech Ltd. This revolver is rather innovative, using a revolving cylinder magazine and a hybrid cartridge system to combine reloading speed with reliability and accommodate multiple ammo types.

Characteristics
It uses telescoped ammunition, in which the projectile is completely enveloped in the case by the propellant. This revolver can also use heavyweight .357 magnum special explosive rounds. It can accept 5, 6, or 7 round cylinders. The weapon uses a side break action rather than conventional swing-out cylinder for reloading.

The revolver is one of the most potent weapons in the game with the explosive rounds mod equipped; not only are the rounds highly damaging on impact, they also gain a significant splash damage radius. Powerful enemies such as heavy soldiers will be staggered by shots and forced to their knees, allowing the player to defeat them by "stunlocking" them. It is neccessary, however, to ensure an enemy shot with this weapon is actually dead before proceeding; this can easily be checked by seeing if experience has been awarded.

Even with the Dermal Armor Augmentation upgraded to maximum, enemies with revolvers can easily deal 50-60 damage per shot at close range on Normal difficulty, and should be considered a high priority.

Behind the scenes

 * The Diamond Back .357 uses the Dardick Tround concept.
 * A version of this weapon was ported into Team Fortress 2 as a promotion weapon for the Spy Class. It has the special ability to accumulate critical hits for every Engineer building sapped.
 * The Diamond Back is most likely a reference to Colt's revolvers named after snakes. The real-life Diamondback is not chambered in .357 magnum; however, an eBook in the game references "an old classic, the .357 Python," which is also a real gun that does fire the .357 magnum cartridge, as well as the .44 magnum cartridge (the real-life Diamondback is basically a Python chambered in .22LR and .38 Special cartridges).