So apparently somebody reported me for "trolling" when I was quite plainly pointing out that:

1. His maths are, at best, incomplete. The two examples he has given are biased to support his position, as he uses the definitive shield-tanked sentinel suit (Caldari Sentinel ck.0) as the MD target, and then an AmSent ak.0 as the ACR target.

2. The MD is a support weapon, and should not be usable as a general-purpose slayer weapon.

3. The MD is absolute murder to armor-tanked medframes and scouts in general- a fact which he has continued to ignore.

4. That another poster's point about MD scourges is that the MD will become the ultimate omni-gun of DUST (all hail Masshole 514!) if the sentinel splash resist bonus is removed.

But hey, hiding behind the mods? That's pretty classy too. /still sipping the distilled tears of KA24DERT

EDIT: after reviewing your fixes of math, I really don't see what the big deal about the TTK difference is. So a MD takes about 3 times longer to kill a dedicated shield suit than the ACR takes to kill a dedicated armor suit?

Yeah, when you try to compare those particular instances to prove your position, that's called bias, as in, the opposite of being objective.

That's cute that you think a sentinel can actually survive against a rifle user when out in the open. If this is a "CQB" related thing, then I'd argue there's more issue with the HMG being (stupidly) designed as a CQB dominance weapon than rifle effectiveness against heavies of any stripe.



........You're either delusional or stupid if you really believe that.



You generally picked bad examples, and moreover ignored the fact that the MD, much like the LR, is not a "slayer" weapon, but a "support" weapon. That's not to say that MD/LR user can't rack up the kills in rapid order and to great heights of murder-death-kill-ness, but rather that the intended role that the weapon is supposed to fulfill is much more complex than simply "kill stuff".

Do keep in mind that MDs are pretty nearly instadeath for scouts (which is nice) and very deadly against medframes of all stripes (also nice)... so the fact that you lose "DPS" against heavies is pretty much working as intended. Due to the idiotic decision to chain heavies to CQB conditions, if you try to wander into that with a MD and duel a heavy... then you pretty much deserve to die.

If, OTOH, you find a heavy in the open... you can outrun them, and you can outrange them, and the "ring around the rock" trick that can be used to try to get some amount of cover between yourself and your enemy no longer works, since you can pretty much punt the shells around and over said object that is being used as cover. If you can't kill a heavy in this case, then I'd say that the heavy is just hugging cover... in which case you basically have killed him, since he's stuck there and can be of no use to his team.

Finally, DPS is a poor measure of performance to use with the MD, given that it has a high(-ish) alpha and also has a generally large-to-obscene amount of splash area.

There's also the issue that back before heavies had a splash damage resist, it was quite common for somebody to run up, flux and then proceed to bunny hop around a heavy while killing them with MD splash. As someone who had to endure that... it was frustrating in the extreme because it was nearly impossible to fight back against and almost always resulted in my death. Even after the HP buff that heavies got (way back when the Amarr heavy was the only heavy), this is exactly the sort of thing that would happen... over, and over, and over again.

Of course, that's without going into the very long period of time when locus grenades were instablap murderballs to heavies, given that a heavy is too slow to try and run away from a grenade... or run away at all really.

There's also the slight issue that the bonus/tagging system simply wouldn't support the kind of granularity you seem to think it would. In layman's terms, this means that no, we cannot give a bonus that provides resists to only REs/grenades instead of the current splash damage bonus.

Of course, given the history of MDs and heavies, right now I think I am going to just sit back and drink your tears as the fine vintage that they are.

/sips wineglass of KA24DERT's tears

Refreshing... very refreshing.

Once again, some people simply do not know how to read. So I'll break it down for you:

MD are currently in a pretty good spot; if you know what you're doing, you can be incredibly dangerous and exert insane control over an area by making it a case of "if you decide to walk around this spot, you will die". In spambush this is obviously of very limited use... but hey, that's spambush.

The issue comes with the idea that the MD should be a viable "slayer" weapon... and it shouldn't. Because if it was, then it ultimately outclasses the rifles in that role. It's happened before in DUST's history. Let's not let it happen again. Moreover, do keep in mind that the MD fulfills a very different role to the racial rifles.

Now to clarify (because you are dumb)- the MD is in a good spot right now. If the OP's stupid idea were to be put into the game, then the MD suddenly becomes the omni-weapon, the gun that can do it all. It can blap scouts, it can massacre armor medframes and severely impair the ability of shield medframes to be useful, and you can kill heavies with it. Season with AV grenades and you suddenly have a fit that laughs off nearly everything- and the things it can't lolblap you can at least hurt badly enough to make them decide "hmm, I think I'm going to BUGGER OFF RIGHT NOW".

That's the point that is being made. The MD, somewhat like the HMG, is balanced very nearly on a knife edge. Just a little bit in either direction sends it plummeting into the depths of brokenness- whether said brokenness is of the UP or OP variety doesn't end up being particularly relevant, merely the fact that said position is just the slightest nudge away from either extreme.

Which is a niche support weapon that is fantastically effective in skilled hands, since it does something that the racial rifles really can't do (that's area denial, BTW).

As for the Flaylock... if the chosen benchmark of performance is "can it kill a heavy", then I suggest that you're using the wrong benchmarks. Heavies are, by design, intended to be extremely difficult to kill. Unfortunately, this means they should never have been placed into a sustained CQC dominance role, so there's a lot of issues that end up stemming from that.

Breakin Stuff has an excellent proposal on how that happened, why it's bad, and what we should do to fix it.

Finally, DPS is a poor measure of performance to use with the MD, given that it has a high(-ish) alpha and also has a generally large-to-obscene amount of splash area.

Our champion has cried FOUL! He demands a more even match, the Caldari Sentinel was too stacked.

Bring forth the Amarr Sentinel!
*snips maths*

Haven't we already been through this MD fear mongering? The bullshit has already been refuted. Day 1 of Aim Assist + hit confirm patch, and the MD was dropped like a hot potato, never to be used except by the dedicated, and it has stayed like that even with Aim Assist fixed. The MD hasn't received a single nerf, and this was long before the Heavy buff, and I don't recall any Heavy complaining about MDs then.

The problem was Aiming and not the MD.

Restoration of MD utility is simple.

Reduce heavy spam. Regardless of whether Rattati uses his way (scorching the HMG with heat) or my method (eviction of heavies from CQC) the mass driver is fixed by default.

The problem isn't that heavies resist them. The problem is that there is always eight of the jackasses clustered where you need to attack.

If the sentinel stops being the go-to murder gumby then the MD becomes a useful support tool again that requires a sentinel to engage and shut down rather than a tool simply negated by the sheer NUMBER of leadbutt lardasses constantly on the field.

Just noting that describing the MD as an alpha weapon is a bit of a gross simplification, since a RR user and I can open fire at the same time, and he can shoot me dead before my first round hits him. How about calling it a high Beta or Gamma weapon?

I agree that balancing the MD is tricky. However who is getting killed by MDs too often? Are MDs producing even 1/5th as many kills as shotguns? There is room for a tiny buff. Not jumping back on the buff/nerf rollercoaster, just something small, like increasing the base splash for the Exo5 from 4.0 to 4.2 or something similarly slight.

That might help me marginally increase my performance against scouts from horrible to just "disadvantaged." Heavies are easy to deal with, as an MD wielding logi, in comparison to scouts.

All the above is IMHO/experience of course. Better and worse players than me may have wildly different experiences.

I admit some surprise that the result is the same as the CalSent. However, you are still ignoring the fact that the MD is still delicious explodinating murder to all armor mediums and 90% of scouts.

If the MD is exploding armor mediums and 90% of scouts, then the Rifles are atomizing them, and then breaking those atoms down to subatomic particles.

And don't start with that "support weapon" nonsense. Mass Driver isn't a webber, damage enhancer, or any other type of status ailment. It's a weapon.

Mass Drivers are weak, empirically undeniably weak, and this 25% nerf should NOT apply to them.

Are you attempting (pardon my ignorance too much thread) that only Massdriver explosive resistance should be exempt from this or that all explosive resistance should be removed from sentinels?

Mass Driver should be exempt.

I think the RE and Grenade resistance is OK because they do 1750 and 600 splash damage.

But the Mass Driver does, at best, 229.03 splash damage.

My rifle, regardless of how good my aim is, can only ever shoot one target at a time.

I admit some surprise that the result is the same as the CalSent. However, you are still ignoring the fact that the MD is still delicious explodinating murder to all armor mediums and 90% of scouts.

Which is pretty meaningless when Rifles are downing up to 3 units faster than a MD could, especially if at least one of those units is a Heavy, which is standard conditions. Any more is a Merry Christmas scenario, since you are then facing bad players. And anything can kill bad players.

Actually even hitting 3 decent players at a time with the MD is pretty silly TBH.

The lack of strafe inertia is what allows many scouts and some shield-medframe users to strafe side-to-side (or any other pattern) ridiculously fast. It's not actually any kind of KB/M "A-D A-D" stupidity, as is often wrongly supposed, but a lack of strafe inertia. Incidentally, strafe inertia would also mean that any complete about KB/M super-strafers is instantly nullified, since it would be impossible to instantly change direction as is often (wrongly) implied of KB/M users.

For those of you against removing the explosive damage resistance, against RE's, and against shotguns.... how exactly am I supposed to kill proto logi train again?...... I'll wait....?

In light and medium suits we can't simply uproot the logi train, especially in PC, with rail rifles?! The mass driver is OBVIOUSLY useless in the OP's example above where the militia rail rifle is actually more useful??? Wtf???

Proto mass driver from above should easily be the go to for dropping heavies entrenched in areas, but they have this crazy resistance. The OP suggested that the bonus does not apply to mass drivers while still applying to grenades and other explosive damage. Is that so bad??

If so I'm all ears for a solution to heavy spam other than shotguns, remotes, and..... well that's all I got currently?!

*snipped fail quote and whining about KB/M strafe*

Well, I present you with two revolutionary ideas:

1. Shoot the bloody logi instead of the heavy.

Splash resistance on heavies is fine, hit them in the face and they go down.

This message is coming from your friendly neighbourhood Masshole!

HTFU

BTW, carpetbombing with an assault MD might not do the trick... and against Caldari Sents the MD is the wrong weapon!!!