Tarquin Markel
The Synenose Accord
Celestial Imperative
85
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Posted - 2013.01.30 19:53:00 -
[1] - Quote
The first time I saw a nova knife in use was pure art. Three of us had huddled up to fast-hack an objective, me in a scout suit, plus an assault and a heavy. An odd buzzing noise, a fizzling crack, and the assault is down. The heavy and I swivel around, bringing our weapons to bear just as a lithe enemy scout leaps backwards, over the rail, and drops from sight. We never did find her.
Truly the stuff of promotional screenshots.
(Though she did fail to check for remote explosives before trying to counter-hack thirty seconds later. Artistry does not imply universal awesome, it seems.)
The second time, I found a lithe scout trying to sneak up behind me, and shot her in the face, a lot, with an SMG.
The third time, I found a scout trying to rush me from the front and shot him in the face, a lot, with an SMG.
That's also what happened the fourth time.
There hasn't been a fifth in my 800+ kills. The nova knife seems to be the single least-used weapon in the game, and there seem to be several very good reasons for that. As I understand it, these are:
1. Noise. For a stealth weapon, a nova knife certainly makes its presence known, at least when charged. This is decreasingly a problem: at this rate, nobody's going to remember what the hell that sound is.
2. Range. Pretty much everything has better range than the nova knife. It's a melee weapon, so you need to close to basically point-blank. ANYBODY who spots you and has a ranged weapon (that is to say, almost without exception, anybody at all but another nova knife-wielding fool/artist) will backpedal and burn you down in a second or two.
3. Clumsiness. Close range isn't too much of a problem if your target is (A) unaware of you and (B) holding still. Most combat in DUST, however, involves a whole lot of people moving around very quickly, and charging at somebody's back or flank with a charged blade is likely to put you not only directly past them as they dart away from something else, but squarely in their crosshairs as a result. The SMG does not suffer from this issue. Nor does pretty much anything else; even the shotgun lets you halt a few steps away and just start blasting.
4. Damage. My basic charge sniper rifle does more damage than a basic nova knife, and can do it essentially across the map. I do not score very many one-hit kills.
5. Weak in its own role. A nova knife is supposed to be a ninja-y stealth weapon. Okay, we get it. Even the sound thing can be justified in the "instant's fair warning" sense, assuming that the wielder is good enough to only charge the knife at the last possible moment. Thing is, most weapons work just as well for this, if not better. I can burn through an assault's shields and armor by unloading into the back of the head from behind in the time it would take me to charge a knife. A shotgun (I refuse to use them because of the "creaky gate" sound effect) can do it in a single shot.
A hacker or sniper caught off-guard is probably dead. Period. In fact, anybody caught motionless in a hostile's sights at close range from behind is probably dead. The only anti-infantry weapon I've tried that fails at this is the mass driver, and that's probably because I'm a terrible shot with it.
So, what to do? Well, the nova knife could serve fine as a rare, exotic, and, ah, "eccentric" weapon, if left as-is. There are two problems with this.
First, what's the point of having a weapon in an FPS that almost nobody uses, and for good reason? I mean, sure, an infiltrator squad with nova knives would be surprising, but the point of that surprise is lost if that squad's use of nova knives gives them no advantages at all over an equivalent squad with SMG's. It's not surprising, "OMG we're going to die," it's surprising, "ey, look at these suckers. Right, burn the stupid bastards down."
Second, it might be defensible to have a "stylish" weapon in the game, one that is used to add some pizzazz or humiliation value, one that leaves opponents going, "Gaaaah, I can't believe I lost to THAT!"
... except that you've lore-linked the nova knife to the freaking Caldari. You know-- the people so self-consciously utilitarian that they can't admit that anything about their form-follows-function-even-when-it-doesn't-need-to-or-benefit-from-it design is remotely artistic? I could see the Gallente designing a weapon for the style of the thing, but the Caldari would need a seriously compelling reason to literally bring knives to a gun fight.
Sorry, guys: unless I've missed something critical, the status quo isn't tenable.
So, a few thoughts to mix and match:
1. Noise. If you're going to make a loud stealth weapon, you need to make sure the payoff is worth it. If the payoff is modest, the noise needs to go away. If you want to EXPLICITLY make this a stealth weapon, it should be wholly silent; let the opposing team watch the kill messages if they want to know why their blue dots keep disappearing.
2. Range. If you're going to make a weapon ONLY usable at point-blank (not even the shotgun has this problem), you need to compensate for this. Making getting hit with a nova knife the equivalent of being run over with an LAV would do nicely.
3. Clumsiness. This is best just modified outright. An SMG, shotgun, etc., needs to aim with care. If one isn't already in place (it should be, but my limited experiments suggest not), an arc of fire would be appropriate-- a knife-swipe, rather than a thrust. This might be used to hit multiple enemies with a single stroke (as if you sneak up on multiple hostiles trying to hack one objective).
4. Damage. As noted, if I'm going to all the kittening trouble ... put simply, if you're removing the noise, a nova-wielder should consistently one-shot assault and scout suits. If you're leaving it, it should probably one-shot all infantry.
5. Role. Do the above, and the nova knife will still be a specialist's weapon: vulnerable, but, critically, effective. |