Yes. This weapon’s perk choices are highly dependent on how you use it. If you’re the type to shoot and then immediately charge in for melee, you won’t get much benefit from damage perks.
By the way, this gun has a very serious bug introduced by an update in February. Before that, the blue mode of this gun, on hit, not only applied 2 stacks of chem toxin to the primary target, but also applied 1 stack of chem toxin to enemies in a small area nearby. If you hit several enemies at close range in succession, you could apply four or five stacks of chem toxin to all enemies in that small cluster. That was already very strong, and it could also trigger the explosion effect after those targets died more quickly. However, after the February update, this on-hit AoE disappeared. Strictly speaking, it still exists, but only 1 damage remains, without that important area toxin effect.
I’ve reported this bug to FS several times, and it still hasn’t been fixed. I don’t know whether they just haven’t gotten around to it, or whether they secretly nerfed this weapon without saying anything—just like how, after the latest update, the Arbite’s Judicial Force can no longer stagger bosses (honestly, I really don’t know whether that’s a bug or a stealth nerf). The early version of blue mode was indeed a bit too strong, but if you wanted to nerf it, you could have lowered the toxin’s damage ratio against Infested/Unarmored enemies. Just making blue mode half-disappear is way too lazy. After this bug appeared, the usage rate of the Needle Pistol’s blue mode is probably less than 1/20 of the primary mode—not much different from deleting this mode.