I’ve prepared another batch of changes and suggestions. Excel sheet linked at the bottom.
Feedback regarding the Corn Shotgun spread change
After some testing, it seems to be kind of a mixed bag. While the change did help with reducing Corn’s overall randomness, it also causes the volleys to become overall too unfocused. Since it is no longer possible for a volley with several projectiles near the center to occur, the effectiveness of the weapon against small tanky targets (especially at range) and even some bosses has dropped, and it has trouble with punching through columns of enemies.
Otherwise, its general performance remains unchanged, but I and a few others reckon that it should be changed again. It could either be reverted to the old way it worked (cubic distribution), or the cone could be divided up into uneven slices in such a way that the volley is denser in the middle.
What to do about Corn Shotgun’s spread?
- Keep current
- Revert to cubic distribution
- Divide the spread cone into uneven slices to focus projectiles towards the middle (or some other solution that’d give a similar result)
Corn Shotgun overdrive
By now, Corn has pretty much solidified its position as the least popular weapon out of the entire roster. Probably the most significant factor that has been contributing to this is its complete incompatibility with overdrive. While this arguably will become less relevant with overdrive being moved to being a booster ability, I think it’s safe to say that Corn would still really benefit from being able to use it.
I’d like to suggest giving Corn the ability to use overdrive while below full heat. Entering popcorn mode would automatically disable overdrive and prevent it from being engaged again until the weapon has cooled down.
Laser Cannon adjustment
Damage: 250/500/750/1000 → 225/450/675/900
Interval: 0.270/0.245 → 0.243/0.220
Simply multiplying the damage and intervals by 0.9 to increase its rate of fire. Since it’s taking me so long to get around to continuing the rework post, I figured that it’s high time to give Laser a little something to help it out at least a bit.
Plasma Rifle’s effectiveness against feathers
@Recruit_75 has voiced a complaint about Plasma’s lackluster performance against feathers. After further discussion, I’d like to suggest slightly increasing the AoE’s knockback against them.
Adjustments to low power overheat boost
I have made some further adjustments to low power overheat values, keeping in mind the feedback I received last time. The primary objective was to make the boosts more consistent across the board. Some weapons do still get a reduction to the boost, but a less extreme one than suggested before. Several have their 0 value increased and/or have increased overheat time on more levels than before.
The logic behind the specific numbers is as follows:
- Weapons with a constant hitrate gain +0.5s for each level below 4 (+2s on 0)
- Weapons with either variable firerate or projectile count gain +0.5s for each level below 5 (+2.5s on 0)
- Weapons with both variable firerate and projectile count gain +0.6s for each level below 5 (+3s on 0)
Exceptions:
- Moron Railgun is treated as a weapon with constant firerate since it only gets increased on its last two power levels, and the damage per volley stops changing at that point.
- Lightning Fryer still does its own thing, since its hitrate gets doubled on 6. It gets +1.5s on 5 and +0.25s for each level under that. 6 takes the average value between 5 and 7 so that there’s no weird drop in damage until overheat.
- Laser Cannon’s overheat hasn’t been tweaked in this file, since I haven’t proposed the volley rework yet. Currently, it needs every little bit of extra overheat time it can get, so the values it has are fine.
- Absolver Beam doesn’t currently support per-level values for overheat, so it remains unchanged.
Overheat multipliers for Absolver Beam
Related to the above. Since Absolver’s row of overheat values in the excel sheet doesn’t currently do anything, I’d like to propose making these values work as per-level multipliers to the initial heat cost and heat drain rate. This would allow giving it a lower overheat rate on low power, as is the case with the rest of the weapons.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/702487693636010054/938892439551377488/CIU-WeaponData-v101.override.xls