words

aaaagh nested quote madness!

Caldari assault bonus: Honestly, I will be greedy and biased and say that I would like both the reload bonus and the kick reduction but being forced to choose one - probably the kick reduction. That said it would likely require some massive re-tooling of rail rifles as I feel that rattati had a kneejerk response when he changed rail rifle kick from linear to exponential as well as quadrupling (0.05->0.20) it, which has since been changed to simply doubling it.

Gal assault bonus: Honestly, I think this is a case of it just being undervalued due to people not understanding game mechanics, or it being 'invisible'. Riot games did an article about game design stuffs where they talked about anti-patterns and visibility of things, something being powerful but not necessarily identifiable can be severely undervalued unless it's dramatically overpowered. In effect lets say there is a 'command' module out there, that when fit to a dropsuit gave everyone on the team +20 armor and +1 reps per second but only one could be active across a team, this is an incredibly powerful module but it wouldn't be nearly as valued as a reactive plate. So I really think that there's a perceptional bias going on here it's a bonus that's very hard to notice and because of that is severely undervalued.

The gallente assault bonus is a redundant bonus, it provides very little benefit.

But that is factually wrong. Whether or not you value the benefit it provides is up to you, but the benefit is both meaningful and powerful. Lets not bring opinions and emotions into discussion of facts.

Lets not bring opinions and emotions into discussion of facts.

Now, now. That seems a silly thing to say ...

Is it a fact or an opinion that Rattati "over-did" the RR nerf?
Is it a fact or an opinion that the GA Assault bonus is "fine"?
Is it a fact or an opinion that the CA Assault should have 2 weapon bonuses and other Assaults 1?

The difference here being that you asked for my opinions.

As someone who isn't a full time Gallente your opinion that its powerful holds little weight.

I just find it extremely hypocritical that you go about saying the Caldari Assault bonus needs a buff while the Gallente one is A-ok because you played with the suit and rifles a few times and calculated your numbers (that's sounds like old CCP tactics) Especially when the Caldari and Gallente assault bonus are damn near in the same boat of lacklusterness.

As someone who isn't a full time Gallente your opinion that its powerful holds little weight ...
There's next to no difference in performance for the weapons outside of the TACAR and IP, which even those are minimal.

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But that is factually wrong. Whether or not you value the benefit it provides is up to you, but the benefit is both meaningful and powerful. Lets not bring opinions and emotions into discussion of facts.

Meaningful and powerful? Don't make me laugh. The only 2 weapons it actually helps is the Tac AR and Ion pistol and even then it doesnt help much. The majority of the guns that get the bonus to them already have low kick and dispersion is low with sharpshooter 5.

The downside to these weapons is not kick or dispersion, therefore it should be changed.

I'm no Team Gallente All-Star, so feel free dismiss my opinions/observations as well, but I find the GalAssault bonus to be noticeable and useful with Shotguns, Vanilla ARs and Burst ARs. I run all three of these weapons on various races and frames; I feel a difference when I run them on my Assault gk.0. Nonetheless, I'd personally prefer to see the dispersion bonus swapped out with an arguably more potent RoF bonus (assuming, of course, Assault and Logi movement speeds are swapped).

A RoF bonus seems too potent in my opinion. It's a 10% DPS increase. Kinda marginalizes the benefit of the Gallente commando except for using the PLC.

So, what do you suggest?

Keep in mind it should be combat oriented. What do the other bonuses actually do? They let the user use their weapons for periods of time. This, in turn, allows them to deal more damage over time.

The Assault rifle doesn't have a heat up mechanic and increasing the magazine is for the Minmatar.

The Caldari will receive a kick bonus which is our current one on a weapon that doesn't necessarily NEED it.

A RoF bonus seems too potent in my opinion. It's a 10% DPS increase. Kinda marginalizes the benefit of the Gallente commando except for using the PLC.

I do see the potential problem with Gal Commando overlap, but I don't see a problem with RoF potency. I might be being naive, so correct my thinking where it is wrong ...

It makes sense to me that GalAssault with an AR fighting at short range should be at an advantage similar to that of a CalAssault + RR fighting at long range. At the moment, our close-quarter GalAssault + AR is arguably no better in CQC than a GalAssault + ARR or CR or ACR. A +RoF bonus fixes that, and gives our the Assault CQC specialist an actual edge in his area of expertise.

1. To put it this way, none of the other assaults do more damage with their respective weapons (the only outlier is amarr lasers because specialist weapon), they just make them handle better. RoF bonus on the gal assault makes it have a lower ttk than other suits, which is commando territory

2. furthermore it doesn't apply equally to all plasma variants, mostly just the fully auto ones.

If not DPS, then what?

1. Shouldn't the GalAssault + AR stand out as the go-to CQC slayer loadout, much like the CalAssault + RR and AM Assault + ScR stand out as the go-to ranged slayer loadouts? If yes, then it needs to be better in close quarter combat than available alternatives; DPS gets us there. If not DPS, then what?

2. +10% RoF = +10% RoF. The Shotgun has an extremely low rate of fire; its old proficiency bonus was +3% per level. Believe it or not, the difference between Proficiency(0) and Proficiency(3) could absolutely be felt.

(Spitballing)

Could nerf short-range performance of all non-plasma weaponry to help the GalAssault + AR stand out in his specialty.

(Spitballing)

Could nerf short-range performance of all non-plasma weaponry to help the GalAssault + AR stand out in his specialty.

This is pretty much what I want.

I dont want to increase TTK of any weapon anymore than what we have now but if people were going to go that route RoF is the most prefered, least prefered choice.

As people have gone to lengths trying to explain to you before what you want is blatantly harmful to the way that people play dust. It does not create new and exciting things it removes functionality and gameplay, simply because someone drew a line in the sand and said "I want to be the best at close quarters and to achieve that all other things should have their knees broken at close quarters so I can dominate them".

Removal of functionality / arbitrary poor performance is the last thing that should ever happen.

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1. Dps buffs create an imbalance. Plain and simple. They also throw rattati's damage/range table out of whack.

2. There are problems with the shotgun beyond its old proficiency bonus though and I've talked about this before, but in short its current design is broken / unbalanced - on the few suits that have the combination of footspeed and stealth required to make it useable it's pretty overpowered due to its incredibly, incredibly high alpha (yay 3 shots in less than 1.5 seconds! eat 1200+ damage!) on any suit that doesn't have that the shotgun is useless. I'd much rather have a lower alpha, longer range, sustained dps weapon (320 dmg shot @ 20m with a RoF of 100 or so, been a while since I've checked my numbers)

3. Lets not rob peter to pay paul. The current and appropriate tradeoff for range is DPS. No it isn't working perfectly as 50 dps loss is not an acceptable trade for 96% extra range, that gain of range is way too good. If we balance the range/dps trade things should fix themselves... with that said though, every mainline service rifle should have the ability to perform throughout their entire optimal, though they may not necessarily be the 'best' at it.

Whether or not well agree on how to fix it the agreed statement is that what the AR sacrifices in range doesn't make up for what it gains.

I've actually had a shotgun thread somewhere discussing usefulness.

I'll dig it up when I get off work.

I'd love for the shotgun to be somewhat useful on something besides a scout but the process in doing the requires a lot of delicate tuning.

I'll just respond to the bad parts :-)

1. Nonsense. AScR DPS was altered and weapon balance improved as a result.

2. I've read your thoughts/proposals on the shotgun. I think it a bad idea to try to turn the shotgun into a bad rifle. I say this as a career shotgunner. If the shotgun actually hits hard down range, it'll be OP. If it doesn't hit hard at any range, it won't be worth running.

3. A scale out-of-equilibrium makes for a better analogy here; we can add to one side or subtract from the other to get where we want to be. We have a supposed CQC weapon/unit pair which are no better than their competition in within their specialty. That's a problem. To fix the problem, we can make weapon/unit pair better, or we can make the competition worse.

4. Fine Rifles, eh? My all-time least favorite concept! Whooping butt from the hip at 5m, then smashing faces down range at 85m.

Your support of wanting to make a ton of weapons perform worse just so that a few can shine in comparison is causing me to quickly lose respect for you. Harming the vast majority of the playerbase to content a much smaller faction is bad and wrong. The correct solution to this is a functioning dps <--> range scale.

I proposed this as a spitball alternative to changing GalAssault bonus and/or tuning the AR, because I can't think of any other tenable solutions to the specialization problem. "Spitballing" doesn't qualify as "support" ... we're brainstorming here.