However in Dust the two are equivalent.....

Try the plasma cannon. That weapon is hard enough already. If you remove the splash that will be just one more reason to never use it. I think you are wrong that it doesn't take skill for splash.... in fact it takes a lot of skill to throw a grenade exactly where you want it or put your mass driver shots where you want them.

I think it makes more sense to keep splash high and perhaps reducing direct damage slightly resulting in a more even distribution of damage across the blast radius, What you're advocating is turning explosives into Assault Rifles with a different skin. Weapons should have variety, and AOEs are designed to punish people from clumping together. ARs should still have the advantage if you're a skilled player. Tactics are supposed to play a huge role in the game, it's not just pure twitch like HALO.

This is exactly how an area denial weapon is supposed to function. You're supposed to do light-to-moderate damage across an area. People can easily avoid it by moving out of the area. It's called a tactic--have one teammate soften up an area and then have your marksmen shoot them up when they leave cover. It prevents people from clustering together and forces teams to separate and spread out. It's more fun to play games where there's more thinking/planning/teamwork to it than just strafing, and bunny-hopping around with AR's.

Argument invalidated. Flaylocks are hard as f-¦ck to use effectively.
Oh, and yeah, the rest of your arguments is basically "I can get kills with this weapon" and "its not an AR nerf it!"

so because it isn't your favorite playstyle you want it nerfed? typical AR scrub thinking. go away or get good. none of the good players seem to complain about splash radius.

No

Weapons with puny weak explosives just feel like useless toys, and making a whole category of weapons feel extremely gamey and weak makes for a bad shooter.

Explosives are dangerous, they should hurt, and they should kill you. I don't give a crap about all of these people's "skillz" arguments. Modern and certainly futuristic weaponry isn't meant to be a show of skill, it is meant to do it's job efficiently. Skill has no merit in a weapons balance argument to begin with. Compare the numbers and the weapons applications and tactics, not your epeen to some other faceless avatar's epeen.

Have fun believing you skill matters when you get barraged by explosives.

Translation: Complaining

If you want to complain about something that is statistically, or technically broken, you might be bringing something to the table, If you don't want to deal with these factors then why are you playing such a game?

There are games that will constrict and limit the actions of everyone so they can play by a small set of parameters and freely compare skill/epeen.

At this point I'd like to give a friendly high five to all of the flaylock, MD, contact grenade wielding pyros out there. I'm not forgetting you mad bomber remote explosive guys either, and last but not least all of the murder taxi drivers out there!

Thank you, for extracting the tears and whines of those that just can't deal with it, for making children and man boys around the world throw temper tantrums at their televisions for not having the game go their way.

Thank you! Keep up the chaos of battle! Make fragile egos cry! Get blown to pieces against more organized forces!

Salute!

Have to say that using a mass driver at range takes a fair bit of skill as you have to range and evelate your weapon to start to get hits where as you just point and shoot with an AR. Short range MD's are easier to use but your not really doing much damage at all to shield tankers who is almost everyone at the moment. You have to use a flux, MD or grenade MD to get one on one kills with caldari's for example.

MD's are situational also so you have to think tactically regarding cover and high ground but that puts you at risk from snipers etc. So I would say that the MD is definitely a different play stile than using AR's. I would suggest you try using them to see how on some maps against spread out opponents how hard it is to use effectively.

They are also much much weaker than the were in last build imo.

Everyone before him said pretty much the same thing, but since he is in your corp he has sense?

Splash is fine on all weapons. MD is probably the most balanced and "skilled" weapon in the game now. I wreck at mid range, if I use cover to my advantage. Long range takes some serious skill. And anything with more splash than an EXO (which is all proto and assualt varients,) will usually kill the user before the target in CQC.

The flay needs a RoF decrease to cut down on its "LOL1200DPS" effect.

Contact grenades are BS, and the proto grenades are a bit heavy on splash, but CCP has ignored that for a while now.

Oh my god it's attack of the blueberries who want everything nerfed. Would you prefer that I have to hit you in the face with a mass driver to hurt you? If you cant dodge a slow grenade that you literally see coming at you, then you dont know what cover is and im not sure why you play this game.

Let me tell you how to not get killed by a mass driver, you shield tanked ******: get in hard cover and dont stop moving in a circle like im shooting an AR at you. Also, it's six shots, at roughly 1 shot per second and you cant dodge a single shot? Your controller is obviously defective.

I play with some of the best people in the game and they have never complained about the mass driver because theyre good. If you want CCP to cater to the lowest common denominator, please say that right here:


"I _______, am an awful player and my controller is broken; please nerf splash damage to 1m on everything except my core locus grenades because I use those."

https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=92678

You muppet, read your own title and OP of your own self serving thread, and tell me why anyone looking to do anything other than to troll it would apply the dignity of thoughtfully trying to speak to you in the first place, oh ye of grand judgement, and decider of skill.

Some other guy said it best, "stupid thread is stupid"

Been here since closed beta. I've seen some really OP things. (Dumbfire swarms, indestructible heavies, ect.)

Also played several PC matches a day for over a month. I was one of the only people using a mass driver in PC at the time. Been using a MD since early chromosome, this is the most balanced it has ever been.

I visit these forums near daily. I know who is bad, decent, and good for the most part, and the general concensus from decent-good players is that the MD is one of the most balanced weapons in the game.

Go play PC. Then laugh at the contact grenades and flaylocks as they destroy you. Splash isn't the issues. Its good players abusing broken mechanics.

(^^ Don't take the above as a dig at you. I've never seen you play. I'm just speaking for what I've seen from the more established members of the community.)

Maybe I could add my opinion on "what skill is" or agree with everyone who thinks the same as me like you have. This just sounds like a bunch of backpeddaling and rewording on your part just to have an argument over a rant thread.

I quoted your OP. All there is to this thread is right there.

Maybe I could add my opinion on "what skill is" or agree with everyone who thinks the same as me like you have. This just sounds like a bunch of backpeddaling and rewording on your part just to have an argument over a rant thread.

I quoted your OP. All there is to this thread is right there.

Oh man, I feel like this has been the only topic of discussion on the forums since 1.2 dropped. I guess I'll continue to partake, but I'll try a little harder this time, because I think mostly people are talking past each other and not explaining their side of the argument thoroughly enough.

To whoever asked, the AR always comes up in these threads because there has been a recent rash of AR elitism since the splash damage fix. I'm not accusing OP of committing this, but I have seen AR users claiming their gun takes the most skill to use and 'gun game' (a phrase that keeps cropping up in these discussions), while talking down on the Mass Driver and other explosives, calling them skill-less noob tubes.

I want to spell out for these people the type of skill it takes to effectively use the Mass Driver. I think that it's a weapon that you can learn the basic uses of in a day or two, but to perform the more complicated maneuvers require months and months of practice. I've used it now for over 5 months, and I certainly would not call myself a master.

Here are a few situations you run into using the Mass Driver, and the skill to be successful at them. When I use the term 'hit' I refer to a splash hit, because as anyone who uses the Mass Driver will testify, direct hits happen rarely and cannot be counted on consistently. That said:

Hitting an enemy that is stationary or moving 5-20 meters away, you are on either level ground or you have the high ground:
Takes relatively little skill, players who just picked up the MD should have no trouble.

Hitting an enemy that is stationary at 30+ meters away:
Takes a moderate amount of skill/practice, will take new users multiple shots to correctly calibrate the distance

Hitting an enemy that is moving at 30+ meters away:
Take a large amount of skill to do, even the experienced tend to misjudge

Hitting an enemy that is moving at 30+ meters away, repeatedly, enough times to kill them from full health to zero:
Nearly impossible. I am always extremely proud of myself when I can pull this off.

Notice that I didn't mention situations where the target is above you. I didn't mention it because it's mostly a wash, and the MD user will be forced to either disengage completely or look for another avenue of attack.

Sorry this was a little long winded. TL;DR: Think what it actually takes to use a Mass Driver before calling it a 'noob tube'.

Run with a squad who uses uplinks (and by "uses" I mean "places in tactically viable locations").

The OP basically says "I don't want anything except my preferred type of weapon in the game", decreasing diversity and player choice cannot breed the longevity CCP craves.

Translation: