I didn’t mean that it a copy of Laser Cannon. My point was, it’s firing pattern would be like Laser Cannon’s. Right now, if you hold a button for auto-firing, plasma rifle will simply be a animated beam that fires continously. After change it would fire like Laser Cannon. Zap, Zap, Zap. It would still be pink auto-aiming beam and it would basically work like a real life lightning.
Imagine a collumn that gets struck by lightnings(real life lightnings) over and over again. And now change the collumn for the CIU spaceship and imagine that chickens are in the clouds. Zap, Zap, Zap. Now I think you should get an idea how it would look like.
PS: Didn’t you accidentally cut second quote in your post? It seems kinda out of context.
Laser Cannon, this weapon doesn’t have enough damage to match its risk, it has high heat rate, obstructs sight at higher level, limited range, and instantanous straight attack actually more dangerous than projectile based straight attacks (like neutron gun) as you must be in face to face position. Simply buff damage could work, but I want to add damage boost as the heat increases, I think it would be interesting mechanic.
Riddler, the weirdest way to upgrade weapons, increasing accuracy seems not helping, as we have spread widener (i forgot its name) and condenser. Just make it in same spread-width at all level, if you like wider or narrower, you know what you should buy. And make it shoot same number of projectile at all level, for leveling, you can adjust its firing speed. Also long term auto fire just doesn’t work in this game, those chickens will flee before you even finish killing them.
Photon Swarm, I don’t like that max power level, it brokes its consistency of way of leveling up. It should follow increasing firing speed. Even though its name is “swarm”, I think it’s too swarmy, so decrease its projectile to 3 per shot. Then, where will the charged photons go? When the heat increases, it will start firing charged photons.
Lightning Fryer, I think this weapon belongs to auto fire. Very low damage at level 0-10 should be increased, but 50% increase from 10 to 20 is ridiculous and must be toned down.
Corn Shotgun, A little damage adjustment could work, make it more smoothly increase. And what about it shoots popcorns when near overheat? That will be hilarious.
Vulcan Chaingun, Boron Railgun, Hypergun.
These three are similar, so I want something to distinguish among them.
Vulcan Chaingun, after the change became spread based, but still needs slight buff for its damage, it’s still underperforming.
Hypergun will be number based and speed based because its name is “hyper”.
Boron Railgun will be damage based and accuracy based. This weapon will have the highest damage among the three.
The Vulcan Chaingun was reworked in version 5.1. Its good as is it now(and my favorite weapon now), why do you mentioned it with the Boron Railgun and the Hypergun? There’s nothing wrong with the damage.
Laser Cannon is indeed very hard-to-use gun. Even if it had the same stats as Neutron Gun, it still wouldn’t be worth taking instead of Neutron. So it has to be slightly stronger than it. Damage boost depending on the overheat bar sounds good, but I have already chosen to give it to Boron Railgun(it would make a lot of sense for that weapon, I don’t want to elaborate on that right now, but I have a BIG reason for why exactly Boron) And I think this mechanic is too unique to have it on more than one weapon.
Well, Riddler is an example of the horrible game design. Your suggestion would probably work really well, but I have a bit different idea for what could be done with that weapon and its spread. Besides, I am trying to avoid “rate of fire increase per level”, because it makes calculations significantly more difficult. Especially when it comes to overheat times.
Right now I am trying to figure out what to do with its “swarminess”. I definitelly agree with what you said about its max power. I also have an idea how to implement charged photons to the earlier power levels, but it’s a bit different from what you have proposed. As I said previously, I decided to reserve damage boost depending on the overheat bar for Boron Railgun.
It belongs to auto fire for sure, but sadly it aint the only thing that is wrong with Lightning Fryer. This weapon is so inconsistent and broken right now, that I decided to rework it from a scratch. And yes, 50% dmg increase on levels 10->max is bullshit.
In case of those weapons your idea is quite similar to mine. We have 3 machine guns, so one of them can be the “generic machine gun”. Hypergun seems to fit that role good enough. Vulcan will have more damage for an exchange of losing the acuraccy and Boron will have unique mechanic of damage scaling based of overheat meter and would have the most damage in hands of skilled player.
I never thought about that popcorn thing… It’s genius dude! And I think I have an idea how to implement it to the game. It could actually be a cool gameplay mechanic if added with right statistics. So far I couldn’t figure out what to do with Corn Shotgun, now thanks to you I finally know Thanks m8, your post is exactly the type of reply I wanted to see in those threads.
@1galbatorix1 Very good work on your series. I’m not expressing an opinion until the series is complete, but rest assured I’m following everything very closely.
Indeed. What if the corn shotgun could fire even when overheat (i.e., while it’s cooling down), except it shoots popcorn (=reduced damage)?
That sounds damn good. What if it was firing normally when below 50% of overheat bar, and then slowly as the heat level rises, more and more corn would turn into popcorn. When reaching 100% overheat, instead of cooling down, it would still be able to fire, but 100% of projectiles would be popcorn.
Add to this that popcorn has lower damage, but much larger hitbox, and it would not only be insanely fun to play, but also pretty useful. Player could keep corn shotgun at 100% overheat to get easier hits for exchange of some dps. Especially on easy-intermediate missions, where high damage is not as important as on the harder difficulties.
No change here because (i) the algorithm to detect hits has been improved since original post and (ii) Positron mechanics have changed, making these two weapons different. Let’s revisit this in a couple of weeks.
Done.
2400, actually
Not sure what this is about. Plasma overheats in about 3 seconds. No change here.
Firing manually doubles its push effectiveness. No change.
I haven’t made any other changes, because the mechanic has been changed as follows:
The stream will now (instantly) split in two if it hits an enemy dead-on. Each sub-stream can also split in two. The more you hit the center, the less the sub-streams will be deflected (i.e. hitting exactly-head on will make the stream penetrate deeper, but to 7 enemies deep).
Streams can also ‘jump’ from invulnerable targets (e.g., UCO tentacles, Yolk-Star ray-guns) to the main body of the enemy, inflicting damage where no other weapons can penetrate. Generally speaking, however, bosses can only be hit once.
This makes maximum damage 1 x 100% + 2 x 50% + 4 x 25% = 300%. However, there’s no way to theoretically calculate how much of that boost can be utilized in a typical mission. Play with it and we can nerf/buff it appropriately.
The weapon has a higher manual rate of fire (6.5/s) compared to automatic (5/s). This means that firing it manually gives a higher damage output, on top of overheating slower. The overheat time of 15s that @1galbatorix1 gave (and the one listed on the wiki) is for manual fire, which is how the weapon is used. This is also what he meant by “visual design of Plasma Rifle doesn’t match its gameplay”.
This only further encourages using manual fire over automatic.
I gotta be honest, I have no idea how you managed to miss this.
Plasma was designed as continuous fire weapon, not manual (single-shot). Given the numbers, there is indeed a damage advantage to firing manually (originally unintentional, but tolerated the justification behind this is that manual firing requires more effort, so advantages like lower overhearing or feather pushing are a reasonable trade-off. I’m aware that the whole “requires more effort” argument is nullified by auto-clickers, but steps will be taken to limit their use).
If any change is going to be made at all, it will be to reduce the manual firing rate – it will not be to make the weapon function better as single-shot.
In that case, may I suggest simply swapping the manual and automatic firerates and turning the overheat down a bit to compensate for the additional 1.5/s?
Thanks m8, your post is exactly the type of reply I wanted to see in those threads.
Idea