Mass Driver was not in the weekly updates. I am disappoint

Mass Driver was not in the weekly updates. I am disappoint

To be perfectly honest, I'm a little baffled at what's happened with the Mass Driver. The reason for the splash and blast range nerf was that in playtests we found the MD to be so effective that at one point almost half the people in the office were using it in battles. Clearly, that's not been the case with Uprising and after getting the engineers to go elbow deep into the code it appears there may be a few reasons beyond dry numbers that are contributing to the MDs underwhelming performance.

One, there appears to be a de-sync between client and server so that (more often than it should) the server and client think the projectile exploded in different places. They're not far off, but enough so that shots you *think* are spot on are off the mark enough to do only minor splash damage. And two, I'm told splash occlusion is getting blocked by a single player character more than it should, contributing to the "randomness" of the damage dealt and the sometimes smudgy feeling of the weapon.

I'm hesitant to rebalance the weapon until we get these issues looked at (which is happening right now).

Hello guys, sorry to be terribly absent as of late but I hit a little bit of a rough patch with my mass driver love affair and was internally raging, so instead of raging here I just took a hiatus. Here I bring the usual; stat changes, the weekly update and weekly update link, and a bit of my personal opinions. I hope this thread stays Alive and healthy. Fingers crossed that CCP will fix this aberration.

Cheers CCP on an awesome game but a horrible choice.


WEEKLY UPDATE SECTION

Can't believe mass drivers are yet to be included in the weekly updates section. To add insult to injury "not recovering stamina while falling" has become such an issue that they felt the need to make a post and include that they where looking into it. God forbid your stamina gets you killed out of all the other things. I guess they need that stamina to run away from militia assault rifles weekly updates

PERTINENT QUOTE SECTION

For those of you new or fairly new to this thread this quote is an outright acceptance of how unnecessarily the mass driver was nerfed. This quote shows puzzlement over it being nerfed in the first place and acknowledgment that it was nerfed due to internal testing. This has a angered the mass driver community simply because months of beta testing were not taken into account, instead internal play testing was used, which did not reflect how the mass driver was used nor the very small number of people that used it.

** The quote below is linked in red letters as the pertinent quote section title




NEW SECTION: OLD VERSUS NEW STATS

In this section I will post only the changed stats of the weapons which are area of effect and damage. Please note that I am not aware if the page rearranges text if viewed on devices such as tablets of phones so if it does the following pseudo table will not view correctly.

ODD = Old direct damage
NDD = New direct damage

OSD = Old Splash damage
NSD = New Splash damage

OSR = Old Splash radius
NSR = New Splash Radius


STATS--MASSDRVR--"TSUNAMI"--BREACH---EXO-5---"CYCONE"---EC-3---EK-A2---FReeDOM---BOUNDLESS--CORE

ODD-------- 225 ------------ 247.5 -------- 315 -------- 247.5 ------ 270 ------- 148.5 ---- 346.5 ------ 270 -------- 162 -------- 378
NDD-------- 242 ------------ 242.0 -------- 338 --------- 254 -------- 254 ------- 152.5 ----- 355 -------- 266 -------- 159 -------- 372

OSD-------- 115 ------------ 126.0 -------- 80.5 ------- 126.5 ------ 138 --------- 75 ------ 88.6 ------- 138.0 ------- 82.8 ------- 96.6
NSD-------- 116 ------------ 116.0 -------- 81.0 ------- 121.8 ----- 121.8 ------- 73.1 ----- 85.3 ------- 127.6 ------- 76.6 ------- 89.3

OSR--------- 4 --------------- 4.4 ---------- 3.0 ---------- 4.4 --------- 4.8 --------- 6.6 ------ 3.3 --------- 4.8 ---------- 7.2 --------- 3.6
NSR--------- 3 --------------- 3.0 ---------- 2.2 ---------- 3.1 --------- 3.1 --------- 4.7 ------ 2.4 --------- 3.3 ----------- 5 ----------- 2.5

As we can see by the information above, the nerf of up to 39% splash radius of some of these, the reduction to splash damage of all but the original MASS DRIVER, the shield buff to most dropsiuts and the reduced efficiency this weapon has against shields has made it obsolete for the battlefield.

About the contact nades:

Splash damage on all 6 shells of the Exo-5 (1 complex damage mod, prof 3) = 870 with a blast radius of 3.88.

Splash damage on all 6 shells of the Freedom (1 complex damage mod, prof 3) = 912 with a blast radius of 4.13.

Splash damage on all 3 contact grenades = 1200 with a blast radius of 6.00

Now I just need to figure out if I can pump out the 3 grenades faster than I can pump out the shells of my MD.

I know I don't have to go into skill requirements or fitting requirements for the above analysis, but needless to say, it's lopsided in favor of the nades.