And “buff the bad weapons” thou shall get.
First, allow me to be a conservative and say that manual fire should not be removed under any circumstance. I don’t know if it might be more balanced, but I know I’d hate shooting the Neutron Gun at less than half the rate it can be fired now.
Then, let’s take a good look at the charts and go over every weapon and try to see if it’s good enough, and if not, what can we do to improve it, while also giving them a distinctive "personality". Damage won’t tell you everything, though; it is the most important factor, but you also need to consider overheat, fire rate, shots per volley, projectile speed and spread. The ones that are probably the easiest to modify and most influential to performance though, are damage and overheat, so those will be my focus. I will consider that the other factors are signatures of the weapons and need not be changed. While I will also consider low power levels, ↯10 and higher is where the real competition takes place, so that’s where I’ll pay most attention to.
Ion Blaster – This is one of the weakest weapons, but for some reasons it gets a lot less mockery from people compared to other options. That said, its overheat is one of the best, its spread second to none, but what it lacks is a punch for those tough to kill enemies. I think a buff to 150% of its current damage is in order. It will still be spread over a large area, thus reducing overall power.
Neutron Gun – You love this and you know it. No other weapon delivers more firepower in such a concentrated package and that’s what everyone wants it to be.
Laser Cannon – This weapon is always just below the Neutron Gun in terms of damage, and can fulfill pretty much the same role, but it has one major problem: it overheats way faster. If its overheat rate was reduced to something below that of Neutrons by a significant margin, then it could serve as a decent alternative, with less damage, but allowing for longer bursts of fire.
Vulcan Chaingun – We need to wait and see how it will be changed in the next update. Simply doubling the damage might just do the trick, though.
Lightning Fryer – I have always called this weapon a jack-of-all-trades. It never overheats when fired manually, which also increases its damage output, and the auto-lock gives it excellent accuracy. If anything, its damage at lower power levels should be increased significantly, but having one weapon that’s only effective at max power is okay.
Plasma Rifle – This weapon also requires manual fire to perform adequately in terms of damage and heat, but simply said, it’s reliable at any power level, and most effective against small numbers of resilient enemies. Also functions great for softening targets in multiplayer, where it is my weapon of choice.
Utensil Poker – I think we can all agree that this needs to remain the best weapon available. Can it be slightly nerfed, so it’s no longer as overpowered? Oh, wait, that already happened, and I doubt it will be reverted to its former glory.
Boron Railgun – It’s really hard to make this weapon distinctive since it’s so similar to Vulcan Chaingun at the moment. The one feature it has is that it has different damage at ↯10 and ↯11, but that’s only known to very experienced players. (Note: this isn’t reflected in my graph, it just goes straight to ↯11 instead of ↯10). To make it stand a chance against other weapons without any other changes, its damage would probably need to be doubled, as well.
Photon Swarm – This weapon’s characteristic is its increasing fire rate without any change to its projectiles until ↯20 when the photons become supercharged. At ↯0 it’s one of the best, and at ↯20 its damage isn’t one of the worst, but it has poor accuracy and fast overheat. In the power levels in-between it stays near the bottom of the pack. I think it would be cool if we made these differences even more extreme, boosting its damage by 130% makes it top notch at ↯0, while putting it close to Neutron Gun at ↯20 for the short time before it overheats.
Positron Stream – This weapon’s special feature is its linear increase in power, and it should also be better than other weapons in the low power levels. At the moment it feels like an underpowered Plasma Rifle, though, so a power increase of 150% should be in order. Remember that this is also an automatic weapon, so the Plasma Rifle will be able to fire much longer than it, thus requiring Positron Stream’s damage to be significantly higher to balance the need for more downtime to let the weapon cool down.
Hypergun – This weapon combines two problems, the one from the Boron Railgun of it being a variation of the Vulcan Chaingun, and the one from the Photon Swarm, of it overheating too fast at max power. I’m thinking we can turn this into a much more powerful weapon but with a fast overheat by increasing damage to 150% of its current value.
Riddler – Fire it manually 20 times per second is all I can say. It really is that simple. It’s amazing how the fix for turning this weapon from bad to good was already in the game, waiting to be found. It’s not cheating, it’s not overpowered, it’s just right.
Corn Shotgun – This is a generally balanced weapon. Not to be used at low power because of very slow fire rate. Cannot be overheated, large spread, for me it’s a weapon for those who like to stay at the back and slowly clear their way through a wave from a safe distance. I’m also using a lower value for the purposes of damage calculation, regular chickens tend to take 500 damage per kernel, but using 400 makes more sense.
Moron Railgun – laughs in Chickenese
So, to summarize, here are the weapons at ↯20, in descending order, along with damage per second for Rookie, changes, and their roles.
18525 – Utensil Poker – no change – undisputed best weapon
16250 – Neutron Gun – no change – high damage, medium overheat, no spread, slow projectiles
16025 – Hypergun – +150% damage – high damage, fast overheat, slight spread, fast projectiles
15600 – Photon Swarm – +130% damage – high damage, fast overheat, low accuracy, high projectile count and spread
15300 – Boron Railgun – +200% damage – medium-high damage, medium-high overheat, no spread, fast projectiles
14400 – Riddler – no change, 20/s manual fire rate – medium damage, slow overheat, slight spread, instant hits, small projectiles reduce accuracy
13650 – Ion Cannon – +150% damage – medium damage, slow overheat, large spread, low accuracy
13000 – Laser Cannon – no change in damage, but overheat reduced by 200% – medium damage, medium-slow overheat, slight spread, instant hits
12320 – Corn Shotgun – no change – no overheat, low fire rate, significant spread and medium accuracy
12240 – Vulcan Chaingun – +200% damage – same roles as Boron Railgun, but better than it at lower power levels, even dangerously close to Utensil Poker at ↯3
10400 – Plasma Rifle – no change – low but very concentrated per hit damage, high accuracy, slow overheat
9945 – Positron Stream – +150% damage – same as Plasma Rifle but better than it at low power levels, higher rate of fire with lower damage per hit, faster overheat
9750 – Lightning Fryer – no change – also low damage but high accuracy, no overheat, 3 tracked targets instead of one
3876 – Moron Railgun – no change – bwak bwak bwak
This significantly reduces the power gap between Utensil Poker and the weakest weapon, as well as leaving the auto-lock most accurate weapons at the bottom of the pack and pushing some of those with faster overheats near the top.
Here are the tables and graph before and after the changes: