Just a possible suggestion for 'balancing' all Assault Rifle Variants across the board.

First... All Assault Rifles should do the same damage.
Yes I know their fire plasma projectiles rather than bullets, but a bullet fired from the barrel should be the same damage.

Secondly, set all clip sizes to 24... Most Modern Day Assault Rifles have clips between 24 and 32... Light Machine Guns may have 50 to 100, but that's a different story.
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NO NO NO

This is just silly, you don't even present a reason why rebalancing is needed, and just throw some radical changes you want to see happen. The ARs are pretty well balanced, they're ok for most ranges, but they don't particularly excel in any range compared to more specialized weapons.

Once again you fail to mention WHY, as in why the bullets need to do the same damage.

"But in real life..." is not a good argument in matters of balance because in real life guns are not balanced for fairness, this isn't military simulator. In real life people die from one or 2 shots, but in Dust people can take a dozen shots because of our dropsuits, so 60 rounds make sense for an assault rifle. New Eden is 20,000 years in the future where human civilization has collapsed and restarted almost from scratch, so what qualifies as an assault rifle in real life has no bearing on here. If it makes you feel any better, just pretend the ARs are called LMGs.

Dozen Shots is < 24 - 36... so look, you can still kill people and even multiple with a single clip.

The 'reason' to do this is to allow future 'customization'... imagine.

A Single Assault Rifle, you switch the scope, giving you more accurate vision at longer range, you slap in an extended mag, gaining 36 per magazine instead of 24... you switch out the semi-automatic trigger assembly for a Full Assault one.

Now, you customize a Tactical Rifle (at current stage) and switch it to Fully Automatic Fire... Drop the Scope, and add a reflex scope to bring it to normal AR levels... slap in an extended Mag (say 9 extra shots in 50% extra Mag Size). You have an Assault Rifle with 27 Shot Mag, doing 70+ Damage per shot, being Fully Automatic...

Apply the same mechanic in reverse to the Assault Rifle, you get a semi-automatic long-range weapon that does the same damage as your base Assault Rifle....

It's a prepatory step to getting full weapon customization in, without having to rebalance the base frames to bring them to being the same no matter how you customize them. (Ie. AR with Laser Sight = better hip fire... imagine a Breach Rifle with laser Scope...l = Epic CQC Rifle... no need to scope at all.)

Assault rifles shouldn't do the same damage, tactical should to the most, burst the second most, breach third, and automatic fourth. This is a common FPS mechanic to balance out rifles of different fire rates, in every FPS the assault rifles with the lowest DPS have the highest damage per shot and your suggestion breaks this balance. The reason for a big clip is because this is a strafe shooter, the point of the shooting is to pray-and-spray not maintaining accuracy, if you want to nerf the clip then the strafing should be nerfed to. CCP has mentioned way in the past they have the weapon customization system built the only problem is implementation, and nerfing weapons to **** just so you can drag them out of **** with weapon mods is definately not the way to go, the assault rifle isnt even performing at the range it is meant to, its supposed to excel st short ranges.

NO NO NO

This is just silly, you don't even present a reason why rebalancing is needed, and just throw some radical changes you want to see happen. The ARs are pretty well balanced, they're ok for most ranges, but they don't particularly excel in any range compared to more specialized weapons.

Once again you fail to mention WHY, as in why the bullets need to do the same damage.

"But in real life..." is not a good argument in matters of balance because in real life guns are not balanced for fairness, this isn't military simulator. In real life people die from one or 2 shots, but in Dust people can take a dozen shots because of our dropsuits, so 60 rounds make sense for an assault rifle. New Eden is 20,000 years in the future where human civilization has collapsed and restarted almost from scratch, so what qualifies as an assault rifle in real life has no bearing on here. If it makes you feel any better, just pretend the ARs are called LMGs.

No, considering the steep damage drop off the AR receives, I do not feel the ammo count or base damage should be changed. The Breach needs to be reworked though, just a full auto TAR right now (they both have the same RPM and similar recoil).

The idea behind this is to allow full customization of weapons.

Why customize an Assault Rifle, when you can make the same mods to a Tactical and have a stronger, better weapon.

Equalizing the Assault Rifles, and defining them by accuracy and role, not by damage, will bring the ARs bak into line with practically every FPS that allows customizable weapons.

It's a prepatory step. Not an end product.

The End Product would be Gallente, Caldari, Minmatar and Amarr Rifles (currently we have 2 of the 4... each a 'base'

You can then proceed to add better scopes, or more apt scopes for the ranges, forward grips (reduce horizontal recoil) compensators (reduce vertical recoil) and possible put in an extended mag....

The damage output does actually change, but the utility of the weapon does at whichever range you 'design' the weapon for.

Planetside 2 does this, Battlefield 3 Does this, Tom Clancy's Future Soldier does this awesomely (some of the best customization I've seen with the ability to change trigger assemblies, barrels etc.) The base weapon, whatever it is, doesn't change damage, based on what scope you put on it... or whether it's more or less accurate off the hip...

A solid idea, but I would make the following tweaks.

Have the changes you suggest made. The base stats improve as the weapon's tier goes up (24 rounds per magazine for militia, 27 for standard, 33 for advanced, etc.)

Then, have the variants make changes based off of the base model of that tier. Therefore, a proto Tac AR would be better in all ways over an advanced one.

Then implement variants for all tiers, including militia. This gives new people cool new toys to try, and doesn't force them to spend a lot of sp for a weapon they may end up not liking (needing level 4 to get the first variant of the scrambler rifle is upsetting) But it still gives proto it's advantages, in the base and its variants being better than the tiers below. Longer optimals, better damage, etc. But now everyone has the particular toy they want, at whatever sp investment they are willing to give.