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@InterAction_studios @anon27929001 @Sophodot
Since the topic of weapon balance has popped up recently in the discussions, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the matter, some observations and perhaps a possible solution.
♪Look at this graph♪
This graph contains all weapons in RotY and compares their damage per second based on their automatic fire rate.
So as you can see the weapon with the highest DPS is Utensil Poker, and the weapon with the lowest DPS is Ion Blaster. The difference between them is 3890,5 DPS. Utensil Poker is the only weapon to exceed 9000 DPS.
Then we look at manual fire rate and OH MY GOD
Yeah. The difference between the strongest and the weakest weapon has more than tripled.
Utensil Poker reigns supreme with Neutron Gun trailing behind it closely. The two weapons are significantly more powerful than the rest. Laser Cannon’s in the middle, Vulcan Chaingun is now the weakest weapon being a whole 12150 DPS weaker than Utensil Poker. The other weapons are just sort of… there.
Ultimate Omelette and Cluck of the Dark Side introduced several new weapons which, stat-wise and apart from the Corn Shotgun, are pretty much just filler. Vulcan Chaingun was also nerfed in Ultimate Omelette so the DPS gap is now 12405.
Some of those weapons (Hypergun, Photon Swarm, Corn Shotgun) also break the balance with automatic fire, as they are significantly stronger than Utensil Poker.
Now, regarding IA’s plans about redesigning Vulcan Chaingun: I’m not going to comment on this until I try it for myself. But even if this does work well, it still doesn’t fix the issue. The only thing it changes is that we’ll have a new worst weapon: Positron Stream.
So in my opinion something should be done to reduce the DPS gap to/close to what it was in RotY (basically keeping it under 4000). There are multiple ways to achieve this, but I think this is the easiest (apart from just buffing all weak weapons):
The best way, in my opinion, would be to simply remove manual fire, rebalance all newer weapons which would be deemed too strong (Vulcan Chaingun should also be changed to what it was back in RotY imo) and then to reduce certain enemies’ health and number of enemies in certain waves as/if needed.
To complement this change, you could implement weapon pod upgrades (just like different engine/heat sink types that we have right now) which would increase automatic fire rate for each weapon (and lower the heat output, to keep weapon overheat at the same pace). A uniform multiplier across the entire arsenal wouldn’t work (stronger weapons would be more affected by it and the gap would continue growing), so each weapon would have to be regulated separately.
There is a major issue with this, and it’s that this goes completely against the mechanics in the original game and in The Next Wave, where automatic fire wasn’t even a thing. You could also argue that manual fire is more fun than automatic.
It does, however, seem like this would be the easiest way to fix weapon balance.
It would also make balancing new weapons easier since all you have to worry about is keeping them under 9000 DPS and keeping them at around the same level as Ion Blaster.
We would still have weaker and stronger weapons but the difference would be low enough that they would all be usable.
This is a (rather poorly thought out, I’ll admit) graph that shows all weapons sorted by automatic fire rate after I’ve done some tweaking. It’s just to maybe give you a slightly better idea of what i’m thinking about.
Most weapons are now much closer together, and since we don’t have to worry about two different firing modes now, shaping the hierarchy should be way easier now.
Here’s the list of changes I made that I think might not be complete rubbish:
- Photon Swarm: lowered the damage values of the normal and supercharged photons to 85 and 110 respectively. On power levels 0-3 it now fires 3 photons instead of 4.
- Hypergun: lowered the strong projectile’s damage to 120.
- Riddler: lowered damage per hit to 70 (its low overheat rate makes up for this well enough imo).
Not sure about Corn Shotgun, all I did was I lowered damage per hit to 200 (so I basically halved it). I think it works well enough (slighlty weaker than Neutron Gun which is counterbalanced by it’s slow overheat) but i’m not 100% sure if I like that setup.
I rushed through Positron Stream because I just wanted to be done with this.
I’d also like to mention that yesterday I played through the whole weekly challenge using only automatic fire and, apart from a few missed clean sweeps (several of which I could blame on RNG, anyway) and the fact that it took longer, it actually went pretty smoothly.
Since the game is currently in early access, I see no problem with implementing something like this for testing (assuming the community’s reaction to this idea isn’t overwhelmingly negative).
Even if it’s decided that this is a terrible idea, I still think that having this much difference in weapon DPS is not a good thing.
Please vote on what you’d like to see be done about this.
- Balance the weapons based on automatic fire rate.
- Balance the weapons, but by simply buffing the weak ones.
- Don’t change anything, it’s fine as it is.
- All options you gave me are rubbish, so I’ll pick this one.
0 voters