Varoth Drac
Dead Man's Game
1
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Posted - 2015.10.09 15:19:00 -
[1] - Quote
I always thought it was a strange request to have a kick reduction as the Caldari assault bonus.
There are two cases to consider, hipfire and ADS.
1)
In ADS, as can be seen in Aeon's video, the rail rifle suffers very little kick. This makes the weapon very well suited to it's purpose as the ultimate long range battle rifle. However, this means that the kick bonus has very little effect on ADS rail rifle fire, as the kick is so low to begin with.
2)
When hip fired, the rail rifle suffers considerable kick. This was (relatively) recently introduced by Rattati to balance rail rifles, which were dominating rifle balance. Rail rifles had extremely good hip fire accuracy, as well as good ADS accuracy. In order to balance the rifle's CQC ability, without effecting it's long range capability, Rattati implemented the increased hip fire kick. This left the rail rifle perfectly capable of hipfire, without being superior to shorter range rifles. The new Cal assault bonus helps reduce this hipfire kick, making the rail rifle more effective at CQC, and partially undermining Rattati's prior CQC balancing move. Prior to hotfix foxfour, assault rail rifles were clearly the most popular rifle, though scrambler rifles were very effective on the Amarr assault.
In summary:
I think the new Cal assault bonus is strange, because it gives Caldari assaults a buff to close range combat. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. As an assault suit it will always be useful to have short range combat capability, despite being in a suit that specialises in long range combat. A rifle assault is meant to be a versatile combat unit. Most of the assault bonuses work to reduce the drawbacks of their racial rifle (heat reduction, clip increase). If you think of a drawback to the rail rifle to be it's close range ability, is it so bad that the bonus reduces this drawback? From the video it appears to be only a modest bonus. Certainly not enough to make the rail rifle amazing at close range combat.
Clearly the Gallente rof bonus is better than the Caldari kick bonus. However, you could argue that the Caldari reload bonus is better than the Gallente dispersion bonus. I don't see a fundamental flaw here. Number-wise, we may find that +15% rof is too much, but we will need to wait and see how it pans out. It's interesting to see that the Gal bonus reduces the accuracy a bit, perhaps balancing out the large dps increase. Though this is barely noticeable on the breach or burst, possibly a problem? |