Baal Omniscient wrote:Damage mods in general are an issue in this game and my reasoning is below. I am using the Duvolle AR as an example here, but the same issues hold true through any weapon category you choose to look at with the exception of weapons that can already ohk without damage mods. Just to be clear, this thread is in no way anti-AR, this thread is only to show that the damage mods need to be rethought as they are making it far too easy to kill even the best of suits in less than a couple seconds.
Or, to put it another way, the weapons aren't severely unbalanced in Dust. The weapons are mildly unbalanced, damage mods make them severely unbalanced. The higher damage you can do per shot with a weapon, the more damage is added with a damage mod. Also, the more rapidly a weapon fires, the more effect the damage mod has on a firefight. This may not appear bad on paper, but in practice it is completely unbalancing the game.
3 complex damage mods on a Duvolle AR with proficiency 5 gives you almost 54 damage per bullet. With a bonus to shields and a slight penalty to armor. With 60 bullets in a clip. Forget the 4, let's call it 50 so those bad at math can do the math easily. 60 bullets times fifty damage per bullet is 3000 damage per clip.
The best heavy suits in the game average around 1300 HP. If you were to get no head shots at all, land all body shots on this heavy, it would take you only 26 rounds to kill the strongest suit in the game. At 750RPM, that's 12.5 bullets per second. Which means, with no head shots whatsoever, that heavy is dead in 2.08 seconds.
How about those scouts? They have a hard enough time as it is. Scouts vary in health greatly since they are always built for various things. You will almost never see two scout suits built the same way in the same match. But let's just say you are running a moderate amount of health because you want to keep your speed up. Let's say a proto shield tanked gallente scout eh?
We'll toss on a basic reactive plate for good measure. Health-wise, with armor and shield upgrades at 5, you are looking at one complex shield extender and one reactive plate, which takes the total health up to 365 total HP. 6 bullets from this weapon and you are crawling away, 7 and you are a stain on the floor. 7 bullets from a gun that fires 12.5 bullets per second.
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My proposed rebalance would have an effect on every infantry class that runs damage mods, and that goes for everything from HMGs to Forge Guns, Swarms to Lasers, SMG's to Nova Knives. Just keep that in mind.
Damage mods need the % that they adjust the damage output changed. For a basic damage mod, the damage output needs to be dropped to 2%, the enhanced to 4%, and the proto to 6% and the stacking penalties need to stay in place. Why?
A) This will hurt the damage mod stackers of the higher damage output weapons the hardest (snipers, AVers{I am AV, no bias against them}, mass drivers, forge guns, shotguns, scrambler rifles, etc), thus helping bring those weapons back in line with the rest of the weapons we have.
B) This will hurt the damage mod stackers of full auto weapons the second hardest (ARs, lasers, AScRs, SMG's, etc.). bringing THEM back down to level as well
C) This will slow the rate at which most gunfights are over, thus adding a little more tracking back into the gameplay. That drew a lot of people to Dust back in closed beta, myself included.
D) This will make damage mods more on the level of usefulness of shield extenders instead of being a far better choice.
I've hated to see the gradual loss of a tracking shooter over the course of Uprising as hit detection and aiming got better, I hope it doesn't disappear completely.