Francois Sanchez
Prima Gallicus
570
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Posted - 2015.10.13 10:59:00 -
[1] - Quote
Hey guys
Hotfix Foxfour has brought (well, it's my opinion) a huge amount of changes that are all nice. Except one.
That poor BMD, even with its buff, is still one of the worst if not the worst weapon in this game.
It just sucks against infantry for several reasons and it's not even good against tanks, it can sometimes does a difference if other guys are attacking the same target but that's it. So what's the problem?
While the direct damage seems good, the probability you hit the guy is actually close to zero if you're not shooting at a static target or a heavy at shotgun range. So during the rest of this post, I'll consider you don't get direct hits against infantry.
So the only damage you can deal to infantry is the splash damage... 112HP, which means a ridiculous DPS of 85 at proto level 
What do you wanna do with a weapon that needs 13 seconds to kill an assault suit (10 seconds of shooting+reload)?
Even on the Minmando, you'd do better with a PLC (even with the relaod). If the PLC fires every 3 seconds, it has a splash DPS of 104, whereas Minmando with BMD can achieve a terrible 94DPS. Add to that a much greater effectiveness against vehicles and a more frequent direct hit that will kill any infantry for sure and you have a PLC 10 times better than the poor BMD.
So just in terms of damage this gun already sucks, but moreover its handling is quite complicated too. It has smaller splash radius (perfectly normal) and it suffers from an hard to reach RoF. This is due to the animation not matching the RoF. If you look at other semi-auto weapons, either you can spam the trigger as fast as you can (ScR, TAC AR) or you can fire again when the gun is back to its original position (MD, shotgun, CR,...). Here the animation is the same as the vanilla MD, leaving you with no visual intel. Moreover while pressing the trigger once per second is pretty natural, having to shoot every 1.3 seconds is really a pain without any visual intel.
This was just to describe the BMD situation, now, how could we balance it?
Adapting the animation to the RoF would be great, but that may not be possible or require more investment.
However reaching a certain effectiveness in terms of stats is pretty easy once we know where we want the gun to be.
As it has a better effectiveness against vehicles than the other MDs, it should be less effective at taking down infantry. To me the smaller spash radius and the slower RoF are already enough. So the splash DPS should be brought to the same level as the freedom MD, which means a dramatic damage buff. It would also be logical compared to grenades as the packed version hits harder but on a much smaller area.
So the BMD should deal :
- 188 HP at STD level
- 198 HP at ADV level
- 208 HP at proto level
So basically, this would mean that the BMD would have the same effectiveness against lone targets as the Freedom, but it would be harder to hit with it and less effective against groups, which seems enough to compensate the extra damage agaisnt vehicles. Btw I find it a bit too weak against vehicles so slight direct damage buff may also be needed, but bringing it to the other MDs level would already be a huge step forward.
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