Hi, I am galbatorix and this is my CIU weapon balance program in which I talk about current issues with weapon balance and I propose solutions for them. More info about what my deal is you can find in my original post: CIU weapon balance program by galbatorix I strongly suggest checking it out, if you haven’t seen it yet, so you will fully understand what my goal is. Today I want to talk about Photon Swarm.
Photon Swarm isn’t a popular weapon amongst players. With 2,1% pick rate it is currently the least played gun in the entire game. This may be caused by the various reasons, but it’s no secret, that right now Photon Swarm is an underperforming weapon with wide variety of problems. As always, in my post i am going to present my thoughts on how it could be fixed. The issues with Photon Swarm are:
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Only thing that changes on 0-10 power levels of Photon Swarm is its automatic fire rate. This and lack of manual fire rate cap causes it to have the same performance on power levels 0-5. This causes it to be the most powerful weapon on level 0 and horribly bad one on level 5, where it has the lowest DPS amongst all weapons including Boron and Moron Railgun.
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Because of things listed in 1. Photon Swarm is a manual weapon on levels 0-5 and an automatic one on levels 6-10, which can be counterintuitive and misleading for new players.
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Photon Swarm uses two types of projectiles, but stronger one is exclusive for the max power volley, which seems weird and out of place.
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It has insane (50%) powerspike between power level 10 and max power dps.
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Just like majority of weapons currently, it is strongly underperforming on higher difficulties and because of that is not worth taking on hard+ missions.
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Photon Swarm obstructs a lot of vision, what makes it risky and hard-to-use weapon with nothing in return. This problem is visible especially on high difficulties. (Problem included to this list by “edit”, because of the community feedback.)
As you see, there is a lot wrong with this weapon, however I belive most of it can be fixed with relatively simple changes. In order to fix problems 1, 2 and 5 I would:
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Buff damage of strong projectile from 150 to 200.
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Change overheat time from 5s to 8s(on all power levels when automatically fired).
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Change automatic fire rate scaling on power levels levels 0-10. New automatic fire rate on level 0 would be 4 shots/s and would increase by 1,5 shots/s each level, to reach 19 shots/s on power level 10. Max power fire rate would remain unchanged (20 shots/s).
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Add manual fire rate cap for power levels 0-1. 3,5 and 5,0 shots/s respectively. For other power levels standard 6,5 shots/s manual fire rate cap.
Introducing special manual fire rate cap is neccesary to prevent this weapon from having the same DPS on different power levels. New, smoother automatic fire rate scaling should make Photon Swarm more reliable weapon on medium power levels and even out the DPS transitions, which are all over the place right now. Buff to strong projectile’s damage would make Photon Swarm deal 16000 DPS on max power. It is a bit lower than Utensil Poker’s and Neutron’s, but should be good enough for an auto-firing weapon that obstructs a lot of vision such as Photon Swarm.
With those problems solved, it’s time to talk about the absence of supercharged photons(strong orange projectiles) in earlier power levels of this weapon, and the insane DPS transition between 10 and max power levels. I suggest implementing supercharged photons in the following way:
- Photons in volleys on power levels 0-10 have a chance to spawn as a supercharged photons. The chance is calculated by a simple formula : 7,5% times the power level.(7,5%*lvl) For example level 2 would have 7,5%*2=15%. Actually it would make the strong projectile chance to scale 7,5% every power level, starting with 0% at level 0, finishing on 75% at level 10.
Such changes would elliminate the problem nr 4, which is insane DPS power spike between lvl 10 and max lvl. If on level 10 , 75% of projectiles are already strong, jump to the 100% wouldn’t be that devastating. Moreover, it would make Photon Swarm more interesting gun in general, because instead of current only-blue volleys on most power levels and out-of-place orange volley on the max power, it would have cool mosaic look with both blue and orange projectiles in various(randomized) patterns. I think, that the “random” element is actually quite important here. If Photon Swarm had strict repeating patterns for every power level, it wouldn’t be as interesting as having a fully randomized pattern with a tiny chance to have “full orange volley on level 1” and this sort of stuff. It wouldn’t affect the gameplay that much, but would definitelly make the gun much more fun to use. (As RNG aspect became very controversial aspect of this post, I decided to elaborate on that. You can see it here.)
Down below you can see the visualisation of how it would look like. This simplified image should give you the idea what I am talking about. Of course paths of photons would bend and cross just like they do now in game, picture only shows how randomized volleys could look like for power level 10 (75% chance for a photon to be orange).
Also, with those changes Photon Swarm’s present should get recolored a bit. I could see something like this:
With most problems solved, there is only one left. Issue nr6, that was pointed out to me by the community. Currently projectiles of Photon Swarm cover large area and thus obstruct a lot of player’s vision. This becomes the serious problem on higher difficulties, where eggs and other projectiles tend to fly very fast. On such missions having a gun that obstructs so much vision and gives nothing in return is a clear disadvantage for everyone who uses that weapon. This may also be one of the reasons for why Photon Swarm is so unpopular right now. Solving this problem may be accomplished in few different ways. I see at least two ways to fix/improve it. One would be to lower opacity of the Photon’s tails, other would be to remove bright flares that are on the tip of the projectiles(basically it is what happens in CIU if you set the graphics to the lowest level). Here you can see how it would look:
(Special thanks to @GgWw1175 for making this and previous Photon Swarm images for me.)
As you can see, both changes would improve the visibility of enemy projectiles, but for me it seems that the main source of the vision obstruction are the flares, not tails of the photons. Removing the flares, or strongly decreasing their size should fix the problem. However making the tails more transparent should also be concidered. It is somewhere in between current and non-flare options in case of visibility.(However I think that having flares removed AND making tails less opaque would be too much)
Results of the changes proposed by me you can see here:
To summarize, I think that Photon Swarm could be improved by:
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Increasing damage of strong projectile from 150 to 200.
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Increasing time to overheat from 5s to 8s.
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Changing automatic fire rate on level 0 to 4 shots/s and changing the scaling of the automatic fire rate on levels 0-10 to +1,5 shots/s every power increase. (Leaving 20 shots/s on max power as it is right now)
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Introducing a manual fire rate cap for levels 0-1. Value of the cap would equal 3,5 shots/s for level 0 and 5 shots/s for level 1
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Adding supercharged photons to the lower power levels. Each projectile spawned has a chance to spawn as a strong projectile. On power levels 0-10, possibility is calculated by 7,5% times power lvl number. (7,5%*lvl). On max power all projectiles are supercharged photons (100% strong).
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Changing Photon Swarm’s present to the blue box with orange ribbon.
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Making Photon Swarm obstruct less vision by lowering opacity of Photon tails, or by removing/decreasing size of flares that are on the tip of projectiles.
Such changes would:
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Make Photon Swarm’s DPS increase smooth and remove its useless power upgrades on levels 0-5. (Problems nr 1 & 4 solved)
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Make Photon Swarm an automatic weapon on all power levels. (Problem nr 2 solved)
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Increase dps of Photon Swarm to the viable level. (Problem nr 5 solved)
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Make Photon Swarm more interesting visually and gameplay-wise. (Problem nr 3 solved)
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Make Photon Swarm block less player’s vision. (Problem nr 6 solved)
So yea, that’s it for now. Remember to share your thoughts in the comments below. If you think, that I forgot about something, or you have a different idea, feel free to tell me. I am interested in all kinds of feedback. Soon I will make a post about next weapon, so stay tuned. You can also check out my previous posts:
- CIU weapon balance program - Part 1: Ion Blaster
- CIU weapon balance program - Part 2: Neutron Gun & Utensil Poker
- CIU weapon balance program - Part 3: Plasma Rifle & Positron Stream
PS: I really appreciate the feedback from the community. I also want to apologize fot the fact, how long it takes me to make a new post. Making calculations for WBP(weapon balanced program) and writing the posts itself, is very time consuming. Lately I was working on Hypergun and Boron Railgun, and I had to make some nasty calculations that took me like… ages. That’s why you had to wait whole week for the next part. I will try to upload more frequently from now on, but I can’t promise.
i guess the changes galbatorix proposed are fine. but i only dont like ion blaster change.