So, we have 4 machine gun weapons, Vulcan Chaingun, Boron Railgun, Hypergun and Riddler. Currently they have their kind of identity, Vulcan with its spread as heat increases, Boron with damage increase, Riddler with instantanous speed, but Hypergun? Satisfying pattern?
So, why Hypergun is called “hyper” in the first place while Vulcan has faster firing rate than Hypergun? Riddler also has faster travel speed than Hypergun? You might argue “Oh, that’s because we don’t have ‘traditional’ machine gun yet.” Hypergun’s crying noise in the background
So we recently got the feature that could make Hypergun “hyper”, which is overdrive.
I already tried it, and it feels fun! But since overdrive is currently unlimited, players would use it everytime and could break the balance of the game, especially in space race.
So, overdrive should have limited usage timer (and as far as I know, it would have it). For Hypergun, I suggest it to have 3 seconds of overdrive duration, and 5 seconds for cooldown. Imagine that when your dps isn’t enough, just use the overdrive! You get some damage boost to kill those running away chickens.
And by this way, Hypergun will be “hyper” once more (or maybe for the first time ).
It would be hyper until all other weapons got overdrive, which is the ideal scenario (and I’m pretty sure that’s the plan, eventually at least). Actually, it’s the only scenario, because weapons without it would be heavily handicapped.
Hypergun just needs to work. This means giving it a damage boost on mid power and increasing its overheat time. Mix that in with a DPS reduction on low power and you’ll have a pretty well balanced gun. (cough)
If this kind of limitation does make it into the game (as it should), it will likely be dependant on the reactor, and so the exact duration/cooldown will vary.
I don’t think every (formerly called) auto weapons should have overdrive, they are already sufficiently strong, and among the 4 machine gun weapons I mentioned + photon swarm, hypergun is the slowest firing among them, even with kinda weird RoF jump from 10 to 20 . So in my opinion, giving overdrive to the others is irrelevant. Just how fast do you want they shoot? Photon Swarm even does fps drop in potato PC.
So, I think Hypergun could make use of overdrive mechanic, not saying Hypergun isn’t strong, but I guess it has the lowest “attractiveness” among the 5, and this could fix that.
Maybe? It’s just the base number, just like how “time to overheat” works.
The whole point of overdrive was to replace manual fire so that the formerly manual weapons can be balanced along with the rest of the roster. We shouldn’t pick and choose which weapons get to have it. It’s either all of them, or it gets removed and Ion, Laser, Neutron, and Utensil get back their 6,66/s fire rate as we originally proposed to IA.
Hypergun deals less damage than Vulcan and Boron for a reason - it’s simpler and easier to use (or at least it’s supposed to be). Fixing the damage jump should be enough to make it viable (the main reason why Hyper feels so bad to use right now is because it’s too weak on 8-10). Lowering its damage per hit and increasing the fire rate like I suggested would make it easier to use still.
I don’t see this as a problem. Since overdrive is meant to be “manual firing” replacement, to make them not overpowered if you have healthy fingers or underpowered with slow clicks. They (manual weapons) already got it (of course with more tweaks, they would work perfectly).
So why weapons that are already considered “auto firing” should have overdrive if the basis is the auto-weapons?
But for Hypergun, I have a reason. It simply isn’t as attractive than the others. And giving overdrive is my choice to make it more interesting. It won’t be the main feature, it’s secondary. Think about like Plasma’s AoE, you just use it when you really need it.
I’m not averting from the fact that it has bad dps progression, it’s pretty strong at low fp but falls behind at higher fp. And this addition isn’t meant to fix that.
Because they can, unlike with manual fire. Which is why manual fire caused problems.
Because we want weapons to perform at the same level (literally the point of WBP).
If we give Hypergun overdrive, do we balance the other machine guns in relation to its base damage output (in which case Hypergun would be superior), or its output with overdrive (in which case Hypergun would be rubbish again)? This is the same dilemma we had with manual. This is why it’s “all or nothing”.
Define “attractive”. If the problem is that it’s simple (doesn’t have any additional mechanics), then that’s a non-issue. Not every weapon needs to be “advanced”. Remember that that was the reasoning behind the original WBP rework - Hypergun is the basic machine gun, Vulcan is intermediate, and Boron is advanced.
With manual fire removed, AoE essentially became Plasma’s primary mode. You don’t use it when there are cowards around, and that’s pretty much it.
I’m not convinced about this. A fundamental truth behind overdrive is that it confers no long-term benefit (if you find out that it does, then we’ll need to fix that). You’re exchanging DPS for faster overheat. If we had e.g. a DPM (damage per minute) measure, then that would remain the same whether overdrive was on or not.
From that perspective, it’s ok if some weapons have it and some don’t. I never intended all weapons to have overdrive – only those ones where it would have a significant visual difference (i.e. slow-firing “manual” weapons)
I don’t know why you keep putting it this way, but this is not correct at all.
“Fundamental truth” about not providing no long-term benefits is just a lie. Heat per shot stays the same, DPS increases. This is a straight buff without any actual and practical downsides, unless someone holds a firing button without any thought whatsoever. We could talk “exchanging” DPS for faster overheat, if heat/shot was actually being incresed, but as long as it stays the same, talking about exchanging anything is just inapropriate. Damage dealt before overheating stays the same, but the DPS increases, so the weapon on overdrive is just better, period.
Let’s say we have a Fist-Person-Shooter game, player has 2 guns.
Gun 1 has 60 round magazine, X damage per shot and shoots 5 bullets per second.
Gun 2 also has 60 round magazine, X damage per shot and shoots 10 bullets per second.
Gun 2 is obviously stronger, right? (Even assuming that player has only one magazine to their disposal.)
Well, yes and every FPS player will confirm, but according to the “overdrive logic”, they are equal. Gun 1 has lower DPS, but Gun 2 runs out of ammo twice as fast, so it means both have their advantages and disadvantages.
What kind of logic is that? Every bullet deals the same amount of damage, so both guns will deal the same amount of damage, before the magazine is empty. Everything is the same, except Gun 2 will kill every opponent twice as fast, without any drawbacks whatsoever. “Overdrive” is equivalent of Gun 2 in this scenario.
Not only this is painfully obvious in theory, but it also shows in practice. I am really invested in balance of various multiplayer games, and I can recall at least couple of situations, when character was buffed, by giving it the “does the same amount of damage/healing, but faster” treatment. Heck, one of those buffs is literally going to be in next update in game Paladins. They are increasing one support’s healing per second, without increasing healing per minute (heals the same amount, but faster), as a buff, because she is underperforming.
So please, stop claiming that “overdrive doesn’t provide long-term benefits”. This is completely false and can give people bad idea about the whole thing. Doing the same thing (total damage), but faster is a huge benefit in actual gameplay.
^ This statement sums up the problem pretty well. Because “overdrive” is an advantage without any downsides, if some weapons don’t have it, and others do, we will get back to the beggining, but this time, the “good weapons” would be ones that have access to overdrive. If overdrive is going to become a thing, it needs to work the same way with every single weapon.
Let’s say you are provided a 60-round magazine per minute, and enemies continue to spawn for hours. Given a bullet can one-shot an enemy and you have 100% shot accuracy, as time goes longer both guns will yield almost the same amount of kills on a given time. Perhaps this is why Overdrive doesn’t provide long-term benefits.
Overdrive has more advantage when coolant canisters are involved.
Edit: Results are the same regardless of accuracy provided they don’t differ in accuracy.
A bullet one-shotting is a huge assumption which doesn’t correspond to CIU at all. The whole problem is that overdrive increases burst potential and and decreases time you need to spend to deal with individual enemies. It just makes a weapon better, it’s how basic game mechanics work.
One thing: bosses. Some of them have a period of time when they are kind of invincible (or you are better to just dodge them for a while instead of firing at them)
So if you have a weapon that can shoot 2x faster then well, you can kill the boss twice as fast. Because you just use it as fast when you can damage the boss and when it overheats then probably you are already dodging the boss attack so you don’t need to use it.
It’s true that higher dps, even though will result same total damage still gives benefit. Since higher dps → kill faster → less enemies bother you.
That’s why
These numbers come to play. They will limit your usage to suppress your long term benefit. Mind that you don’t have 100% accuracy and 100% response time. Faster firing rate could lead to more missed shots.
Maybe it would excel in fighting bosses, but every weapon is already good at it. So why a problem?
This is actually what’s happening behind the scenes, to keep the overdrive and non-overdrive DPMs (damage per minute) in line with each other. This is because the cooling time on its own is not enough to offset the difference. So e.g. a 25% overdrive might actually have closer to 35% more heat.
You’re overlooking the “long-term” aspect. This is a more appropriate analogy:
Gun 1 has 60 round magazine, X damage per shot and shoots 5 bullets per second (so it can fire continuously for 12 seconds). Magazine reload time is 4 seconds.
Gun 2 also has 60 round magazine, X damage per shot and shoots 10 bullets per second (so it can fire continuously for 6 seconds). Magazine reload time is 10 seconds.
Both guns fire 60 bullets over 12+4=6+10 seconds.
If there’s any advantage to overdrive, then it’s the degree to which a particular wave can be played with short intense bursts rather than long continuous stretches of fire. Which is really an alternative perspective on this:
I’d rather not have overdrive on all weapons. If there really is a benefit to overdrive, then there is no reason not to use it all the time. I’d prefer it if all manual weapons reverted back to their old (slow) firing rates, and overdrive would bring them back to their current (non-overdrive) values. So you’re balancing “automatic weapons without overdrive” against “manual weapons + overdrive”. This means that for someone who can’t use overdrive effectively (e.g. newcomers), the manual weapons would clearly be a worse choice. But I can live with that.
P.S. Alternatively, we could increase the overdrive to something ridiculous e.g. +100%, but make heat increase disproportionately so that you could only use it for 1-2 seconds at most (and afterwards you’d have to suffer extended downtime). That would make it appropriate only for certain situations (e.g. stopping player-homing enemies, or preventing an enemy from leaving the screen, or getting to a key drop faster) rather than a general-purpose crutch.
Wouldn’t scrapping overdrive altogether and just increasing “former manual weapons’” fire rate, be an easier and more ellegant way to accomplish the same thing?
I have a question. Why couldn’t you have lived with that when manual was still a thing?
If you balanced weapons by max fire rate, you would have the same issue as you describe here but with manual fire instead: for someone who can’t use manual effectively, the manual weapons would clearly be a worse choice. This is something that you really wanted to avoid (hence the initial idea of auto to auto balancing), so what about this? Why is this suddenly okay?
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’ve gone full circle here. You found a solution to a problem, then managed to twist it into causing that same exact problem again.
I’m going to restate this again: the point of WBP was to make all weapons equally useful. Even if overdrive doesn’t necessarily give you a long term benefit (and disregarding the fact that the short term benefit is massive in some situations e.g. allowing you to completely cheese Hend Game), it still allows for more flexibility. Which is an advantage.
The nice thing about overdrive right now is that it gives the player a choice how to use their weapon based on the situation. And I see absolutely no reason to keep it exclusive to just a few weapons or to balance it away (at this point you may as well remove it). Other than doing it “because yes”. Which, to me, appears to quite well explain your dedication for doing exactly what we proposed not to do.
If you knew overdrive would cause this problem why didn’t you just do as galbatorix proposed: give Ion/Laser/Nautron/Utensil their manual fire rates (6,67 / 0,150) as their automatic fire rates?
Or you could just implement the reactor-based duration/cooldown that we’ve been yapping on about for a good while now. Give reactors more of a use and diminish the consequences of giving overdrive to weapons like Corn and Boron without making overdrive completely OTT like you’re proposing here.
For some reason I have a feeling that you didn’t actually extensively playtest every weapon with overdrive. Maybe that’s why you have some kind of weird preconceived notion that it should only apply to former manuals? I don’t know, I’m just speculating.
Anyway, I’m going to log out of this forum for a few days, because I keep getting tempted to continue this despite the fact that I should’ve ditched this nonsense when WBP 2.0 officially died. I already finished my part of the job, anyway. Whether or not it ultimately ends up amounting to anything is up to you.
It would. It’s just that an “alterate firing mode” (whether that’s manual vs automatic clicking, or overdrive) would give a little bit more depth to the gameplay. This is why I want to exhaust all possibilities of making it work before scrapping it.
The reason manual was a problem was due to autoclickers – because they give you the performance boost without requiring the corresponding skill (not to mention boosting beyond human capability). Autoclickers are no longer relevant, since it’s only single-tap vs double-tap now.
This is because your assumption is that overdrive must confer a benefit. And maybe it does, currently. But we can try to negate its benefits enough so that it becomes an alternate style of play, instead of a better style of play.
I see your point.
It would help diversify the weapons roster a bit more.
That’s still on the table.
I haven’t even looked at it yet. I’m sure all weapons function fine, with or without overdrive. That’s not the issue I’m addressing here, however. To me, assigning overdrive to all weapons is saying: well, you can fire at 100%, or you can fire at 150% – which do you prefer? Not much of a dilemma. Instead, it could be saying: you can choose between this weapon (which has overdrive), or that weapon (which doesn’t have overdrive, but – crucially – makes up for it in some other way).
A related issue is that I think weapons (taken as a whole) are currently causing too much damage . This would partly explain why people are finding SSH easy. My inclination would be to reduce DPS across the board, rather that exacerbating the problem by adding +50% to it (or at least split the difference, so -25% DPS + 50% overdrive = +25% net gain)
Even as it is now, I don’t feel like it’s nearly as deep as it was. I ſtill think it would be beſt juſt to accept that if you want depth then you have to allow different play ſtyles to work differently.
Although moſt players could click at the 6,5 Hz neceſſary to maintain the maximum firing ſpeed with moſt weapons. How was there ſtill a problem? And if the anſwer is “but riddler…” then fix the weapon in queſtion, don’t juſt remove manuäl fire.
Really, it’s not different enough to conſider a different ſtyle of play.
).
to 20 
8-10). Lowering its damage per hit and increasing the fire rate like I suggested would make it easier to use still.