VIIa is 2 rounds/shot VId is 3 rounds/shot
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Alright so the recon lasgun’s true ammo count is closer to being between 300 - 500 rounds or less?
For ammo that low it sounds like recon guns should be closer to infantry autos or brautos in damage than they are.
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Versatility has been the primary feature that dictates a weapon’s usefulness since at least VT2 (probably earlier, I didn’t play VT1).
The targets that matter are the ones that are most likely to mess up the team. There’s a lot of those that aren’t trash mob shooters that stand still all the time or put their heads in predictable places.
You’re not helping your case here…
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By the strict definition of the word viable? Yes. Literally all of them are. You can bring a 300 profane Recon Las into Auric Damnation and contribute.
By the more common usage in the context of game balance? Nope. They’re still low-mid tier at best, and a lot of other options are better in all situations. It has the same problem the headhunters do: a double weakness to maniacs and carapace. This automatically makes the Recon Las guns bad. Removing the Maniac weakness would immediately jump these bad boys up to A tier, maybe low S.
There is this.
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This is a perfect example of the argument @BFCInsomnia puts forward. This vet is on a team with 3 psykers using staves that cover for all of the recon lasgun’s major weaknesses. No comment on the player’s skill, but they weren’t ever really under a lot of pressure, and when things did get thick, they pulled out the power sword.
I will say that I was impressed by how well it dealt with shotgunners.
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That depends on your values and prefferences. I’d agree with this statement if we’re talking about entire builds but not individual weapons. You don’t just bring one weapon, you bring an entire build to a mission. Obviously a terrible, completely useless weapon won’t make a build better but that’s not what we’re talking about here. You can bring the recon las and a melee weapon that kills crushers, muties and hordes and you have all the versatility you could ask for in your build.
Again, it’s an important metric for a weapon but it’s not like you can’t shoot whatever you want and have it not work well in over 90% of cases. The only things you should not be shooting is crushers, muties and hordes and of these 3, only the crusher cannot actually be killed while the other two are a waste of ammo or time.
I can only repeat myself, I have no trouble hitting the shots that matter. Your point here essentially boils down to “skill issue” and I have no problem making it work. Not to insult you ofc. This observation of yours just seems to be of a problem that I simply do not have.
The recon lasgun deals with both those groups effectively and (for the most part) quickly. It doesn’t stagger them very much so there’s that but then again, why would you need to if you take care of them at longer ranges? It has the range and accuracy, the only thing holding someone back there is their aim.
This was to say that it’s definitely not a weapon that will make a bad player perform well. It’s a weapon that scales with ones individual skill level.
This is indeed a good showcase of what you’re supposed to do with the recon lasgun. You hang back, take advantge of your supperior accuracy and range. You don’t want to be in the thick of it like you would with a boltgun or shredder (imo anyways). From what I could tell, they took out their sword against hordes and muties which is exactly where you want to put the recon away and melee instead.
It’s also not to be understated that a good team will help “bad” weapons feel better than they actually are. The other side to the coin is obviously that if you have 3 lobotomites on your team, no weapon or build will save that mission.
I’d love to see a decent increase in the maniac numbers, like @XeroShinobi suggested but other than that, they are serviceable and by no means bad or even useless.
Tbh, this is not that recon gun are bad, the problem is that there are lot of better choices and that they cannot compete with these choices.
However, recon gun are really fun… except at high difficulties where you can see why they are seen as weak.
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Let me know. I actually prefer the VIIa over the Vld. At least with the limited testing I was able to do/compare (when I can’t make blessings and perks, and modifiers all exactly equal).
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Probably one of the few times I agree with Ralendil, this is pretty much the key issue with it IMO.
@BFCInsomnia @XeroShinobi @Tzcheese Honestly? I don’t think it even needs a maniac DMG buff. Weapons having a DMG niche balancing approach is ok. All of the ones with only one weak DMG point should be brought in line with those at two too IMO. FS just need to make sure that each weapon is both competitive at it’s niche, and can at least branch out to others with the right perk and blessing investments. It’s like this for alot of the “good” weapons currently. This is not the case for the Reccy Lasgun (and a bunch of others too) as far as I can tell. When it comes to stats what it does need is maybe a power buff or to its power blessings.
Another thing that could be done to make it more powerful or at least have more build options for it is to either revert the Infernus nerf or rework it so it can be basically be used to convert Lasgun weapons into improvised flamethrowers with continuous burning beam type shenanigans maybe. This then would give Veteran access to a real anti-horde ranged option if they’re willing to give up anti-special DMG. It also would give Psykers and Zealots alternatives to Flamethrower and the Purgatus staff that also still allows them to retain an anti shooter option. Mind you that the DMG should be tuned so it can’t beat, but is still relatively competitive at the anti-horde niche relative to Purgatus and the Flamethrower.
They could also give it an ACOG while toning down the muzzle flash nonsense along with the above power buff, or at least a cleave or stagger buff. This one alone would bring it in line with autoguns and make it a competitive option for the anti-shooter niche.
One of the above could easily elevate it a tier, and all of them would make it a competitive option relative to Bolters and other specialist heavy weapons. If all are implemented, nerf its mobility and treat it as an Lasgun LMG option (this would be the ideal option IMO). Then we could have a heavy weapon trinity where the Bolter is your traditional anti armor, the plasma is your maniac/boss killer, and the recon lasgun is your anti-horde/anti-shooter mob killing LMG.
Right now, even after its DMG buff it just feels like an anemic Vraks3 to me. Although I’m still experimenting, maybe the Acc7a will change my mind.
Have you had the chance to test it with any of the power blessings, does it make a difference?
Usually I compared two profanes to limit the amount of differences between them, get things from brunts and see how they perform. Vld I could see infernus being more useful since with the torrent you’re more like a heat ray gun. The Vlla just seemed to be faster at killing specials and elites for me, although not having dum dum one match made it feel a lot worse.
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It doesn’t though. If you’ve got a ranged weapon that does 10% of jobs, you need a melee weapon that does the other 90% or you’re dead weight if a job comes up that you’re not equipped for. You’re also dead weight if a job comes up that only your melee weapon is equipped for, but the job is outside melee range. The more often you’re dead weight, the worse your build is. It’s always better to have both melee and ranged weapons be capable of handling as many jobs as possible.
And I can only do the same: It’s easy for a bad weapon to look capable if the rest of the team is carrying the weight of its weaknesses. Like, it’s not difficult to land these shots if the rest of the team is keeping all the heat off you, but that’s rarely something you can rely on unless you’re in a premade.
Take that video @brosgw posted: The player is getting propped up hard by his teammates. They had ample horde clear, anti-armour and CC from the psykers, so our recon player didn’t need to worry about trash or armoured enemies at all. They still run critically low on ammo at times, despite having zero competition for pickups. People still get grabbed and pinned and have elites in their faces, despite the map being one with tons of long sight lines and the player having almost no pressure on them that prevents them from killing these things at range.
This isn’t to say the guy is bad at the game, they’re clearly not, but the video does show that the recon (at least the variant they were using) just barely passes for “good enough” under ideal circumstances.
@overlord
Maniac damage is nice because a lot of people struggle with them in melee, but I don’t think it’s a strict requirement for a ranged weapon to be good. Maniacs in isolation can still be dealt with a ranged weapon that’s weak against them, so as long as the ranged weapon can do something about all the additional crap that makes them dangerous as part of a group, it’s probably fine. I’d rate the weak stagger as way more impactful than weak maniac damage, personally.
I also agree with your thoughts on visibility. Hitting the thing you’re looking at is easy, but the flash obscures a lot of what’s going on either side of it. A reflex sight or something would immediately make this weapon better.
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That’s fair enough and all but a 10/90 split does not apply to the recon las, not in my experience at least. But even if it did, that wouldn’t be bad if your ranged weapon is supposed to only deal with 10% of ranged enemies. That now begs the question, which ratio of work balance do you expect out of your ranged/melee weapons? I’d say that it depends on your two weapons and for my loadout of recon las, CAxe, I expect to be using my recon las over 65% of the time and my CAxe less than 35%. And even when it ends up being a 50/50 split, that’s still not bad because I can handle myself in melee and just because I am not using my gun as often as I expected/ wanted doesn’t have to mean that it’s bad. Those things are not correlated.
Sure but we’re not talking about what’s better, we’re talking about if the recon las is good enough for a certain level of challenge.
I am someone that outperforms the other 3 players in almost every single match with whatever I chose to bring to the mission. I usually bring high performance weaponry to fulfill that exact role and what I am saying is that the recon las CAN hang with that playstyle. It’s by no means the best pick for that choice and I never claimed that it was. I just cannot agree with anyone calling it bad because it’s simply not.
I can say that the margin by which I was ahead was smaller with the recon las than other builds that I’d bring otherwise but I was still the one killing most shooters and prevented my team from getting anahilated by overwhealming range damage. That doesn’t paint the picture of a bad weapon, this paints a picture of an outclassed weapon that still performs.
I have been saying the exact same thing myself. You’re also looking at this the wrong way here imo. If you are the guy that kills all the ranged enemies, your teams job is it to keep the melee hordes off of you. All four players to not have to have an equal part in killing all kinds of enemies for the team to succeed. There are more successful permutations other than “everyone does everything” to win, suggesting something else is a bit silly.
You are also not accurately discribing what was unfolding in that example video. There were plenty of times in which there were less than 4 or even 3 players alive and they still managed to resolve the situation. They also had to deal with a few horde enemies and killed plenty of flak armor.
Proped up hard? For one, not as hard as you make it sound and for another, that’s just what it looks like to have decent teammates. His teammates having to deal with more than 0 elite enemies is a very interesting bar to set because when have you ever seen someone kill 100% of the elites? I certainly never have been able to do that and much less seen anyone else get even close to doing so and neither have you or anyone else for that matter. That is clearly an unrealistic bar for any weapon to overcome. Even when I take that as less of an absolute: yes you will see one player be the main contributing force in killing elites and like I have said before, I can be that player with my recon lasgun. I also find it interesting that you make it the vets resposibility to dodge a mutie for his single teammate that never even attempted to dodge them 
Oh ofc, they are clearly far better than 98% of the randies I find. Not the best but clearly decently ahead of the average.
You mention the variant used here. As in “this is the best one and it’s still not blowing me away” or as in “I think there’s a better one”?
“Good enough for Ideal circumstances…”
Not the way I’d have put it but I know what you mean.
Looked more like the team was missing a shooter killer and they filled that roll perfectly and did more than just that.
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DeathspitterI DumDum/ Firefrenzy on the Weapon are some of the best. You will feel it man!
Dont forget your Perks.
Unarmoured, Flak, Maniacs are the 3 best for the most part. So many Specials have Maniac or Flak.
Infernus its not worth it still i think.
When i did a Post about it after Testing many , many Moons ago, the conclusion was:
YOu needed 9-12 stacks of it to make it viable so you can aim at another target to let it melt on its own. IF you have Infernus it should die relatively fast, but it doesnt so its a wasted blessing other than on Bosses. The tick rate is not fast enough except what i wrote on top. Havent tried it in months, but im pretty sure it doesnt still…
Firefrenzy, Dum DUm and Deathspitter give you flat dmg and Power on hits. Deathspitter works on far targets aswell as long as the stack is up. But you need to shoot close range first of course.
Dont forget, Recon Guns are ment for Hordes not so much for Specials in General. But yeah, Skills amke a difference!
Youre better of with a MGXII for specials by far for the most part. You can ONe shot some or 2 shot most of them!
You need a trigger at close range, this should not be a problem at higher diff´s since there are enemies all the time!
Here are my Loadouts. I mostly have Unarmoured/ Flak and Maniac on either range or melee. Just have them on mixed, or dedicated. I mixed it so i dont get bored and have to melee somites.
Important note is that some Weapons are THAT MUCH BETTER for certain Types of Enemies. So i played the strenght of these specific Weapons. Sometimes they even have 2 really good DMG on certain Enemy type, soy ou can choose. Important is as it is in Vermintide that you have one Horde and one Special/ Elite Weapon in your Loadout. So you can efficiently kill both. But sometimes you just wanna “Larp” like i do and stay true to Lore!
Players hate certain Weapons but with the right Blessing and Perks it still amzingly fun, and thats what important. I like to do my Builds rather than Meta all the time. Its boring seeing PLayers with the same Loadout all the time!
I tried to Min Max all and have specific Loadouts also, casue i play with Friedns and i always ask or know their Builds so i play to their Weakness so to speak! So trying to cover all areas where others are weak. LIke Ogryn who is the Nr. 1 Hordeclear and i do Specials like i should as a Vet, casue thats my Job Primarly! Still you can go Bunkers and go Horde clear on Vet or Jack of all Trades!
I noticed that the ReconVId does more dmg so to speak on single Burst shot. The SBurst is atomatic after one click on shooting. When you hold the Button down it kinda does less dmg per second weirdly enough. Its like the Game is lokced on DMG per second as you can notice. AGAIN super weird… Should kill them much more faster. But again some do die very very quickly.
Sry for trying some stuff, but i posted in linked this Video to FS aswell, to see the weird dmg aswell. I didnt want to make another Video!
As you can see the Recon VIIa is my Fav. its the only one that can penetrate Infested and there are only 3 Guns as far as i know who can do it. The revolver/ VIIa/ Plasma.
Also the VIID is the most accurate since it has less Firerate, but has most dmg.
The MGXII i love to have the “NO Respite” but i dont have it yet and not sure if you can get it. If you can its i would swithc it out for maybe switch it out. But with Deadly Accurate for more Crit DMG its fine as it is.
Most Peopz will tell you that Crit based DMG is not really worth it and thats true for the most part. But if you add the SKills is good enough aint it XD ^^!
Kantrael Heavy Pistol is by far the Weapon you wanna have Crit Chance since its i think triple or even quadruple the normal DMG on certain Enemies. And that thing is excellent for Maniacs. I find Maniacs some of the toughest to kill. Especially the Berserkers! But with the Pistol its super nice! I may Upload it later aswell, although i dont have a really good Pistol sadly!
Shotgun also rocks man. Even if you dont do much dmg sometimes, it can give you some breather for you and your Team inbetween from Elites and specials. Shoot all of thgem and let them topple to the Ground to reposition, get time to kill chaff enemies or whatever!
Sometimes you dont even need Unarmoured or Maniac etc. I have Stamina f.ex. just to get some extra shots with the Deadshot Skill. Its worth it iMO!
AS you can see i made some little mistakes sometimes, but whatever you get it im sure!
All of it is T5 difficulty!
i put in some Melee Weapons aswell in the beginning so you can see that some underused ones are still worth it and super Fun like the Chainaxe. Even the Chainsword is lots of fun and a bit better for hordes but hasnt as much dmg as the Chainaxe. but still i love it and have it with my Boltgun all the time. Chainsword and Axe are super duper good for Bosses on Assination Missions. They chew through the Energyshield like nothing when you do heavy Special attacks. Especially the axe since it has Brittle and Headtakeer. Its crazy good. Brittle lets the whole team do 20% more dmg to the same ttarget you chew!
When this POst Launches its still 50 min until you can watch all of them in HD 1440p!
Lasguns
Shotgun
Revolver
If you want some more nice setups for other Classes let me know man i can do some more Vids, since i love to play all classes!
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The point was that unless you can have your caxe can kill something that’s 30m away, you’re dead weight if a job comes up that your recon can’t do. And that happens a lot, because there’s a lot that recon lasguns are bad at.
As I said in the beginning, I’m looking at this in the frame of a pug setting.
The key word in my statement was “worry”. As in; There was no pressure on the recon player to deal with these things outside of when their teammates were dead (which incidentally, probably could’ve been avoided if our recon player was using a more versatile ranged weapon).
Also, yes, if we’re going to be absolute about it, bolter and plasma users regularly kill all of the elites in high-pressure scenarios, especially where there are sightlines like the ones in that video.
I’ve got no idea what you even mean to say here.
Incidentally, these “decent teammates” get grabbed/downed an awful lot, many times even after the disabler tanked a bunch of recon fire.
This branch of the discussion stated with my statement that versatility is what dictates a weapon’s strength and it looked to me like we both went down that more general path for a while. That’s the frame that the statement you’re replying to was made in.
In terms of it being good enough for T5 STG and higher, I maintain that this is only true if you’re lucky enough to have a team that covers your weakness.
I assume he’s using what he thinks is the best one, otherwise he wouldn’t be making a video about how it’s good enough. Incidentally, no, if it’s the best one it still isn’t blowing me away.
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You can run w/e and win, honestly. Some stuff will be harder but that’s half the fun.
Recon Lasguns aren’t the “best” weapons but can totally work. I do recommend avoiding the Recon II tho 
If I run one, I run High Damage & Collateral + Maniac / Crit + Infernus / Headhunter. Your job will be anti-shooters and specials. Get a feel for letting the burn finish off enemies to conserve ammo and remember it does dope damage on Unyielding (Ogryns minus Crushers, Bosses). I like running 3-2-2-1-3-2 for max uptime on shooting. Have a melee weapon that can bonk armor. Don’t get too split up and regroup when you hear special waves incoming. Have good time 
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It’s not that I didn’t understand what the point was supposed to be, it’s that it’s nonsensical but I didn’t say it that way before.
That situation where you see an enemy 30m away and you have to deal with them the moment you see them, simply does not exist for a recon lasgun! There is exactly only one type of enemy you cannot kill with the recon las and that’s crushers. A crusher is no “job to be done” at 30m away, they won’t be aggroed at that range. In that scenario, you have two choices (most likely) which are: aggro them intentionally so they walk over and you kill them when there’s nothing else around which would make them no real threat, or you avoid them entirely and then they are no problem either. For every single other enemy type, your scenario does simply not apply. I have already outlined that every other type of enemy can be killed at that range so it can’t apply to them.
I get the point that you’d ideally want to kill the crushers outside of melee range as that’s where they’re dangerous so “why let them close the gap?”. The reality is that most ranged weapons cannot kill one or several crushers at 30m away so if that’s something that if you (the team in this case) want to be capable of doing, you likely have to make that your job. (which would mean “not pick the recon lasguns”)
The other reason why I see it as a non-issue is because you chose the recon lasgun intentionally for when you see the team lacking in shooter killing ability. If you bring the recon lasgun to a team that can already kill shooters easily but cannot handle crushers, that’s on you! Your point essentially boils down to having made a false decision before loading into the mission and that cannot be the weapons fault and doesn’t paint a weapons donwsides as something that needs to change, that makes your decision to bring it, an incorrect one.
The only situation in which you have no control over what the rest of the team brings, is when you get qued into an ongoing mission. Then you’re flipping a coin but that applies to every single loadout as well.
I have already made all these points indirectly by saying that you only bring the recon lasgun to a team in which it is useful. It’s not the kind of weapon that is always useful (aka a specialized weapon). You’re not arguing against this point, you’re confirming it without realizing. If your argument is supposed to be that the recon lasgun should become a weapon which is always useful then you’re asking for it to deal siginificantly higher damage against muties and any decent carapace damage at all. That would be a substantionally different discussion from what was set in motion by the OP, you or me.
Besids the fact that I am not sure what that actually means, your points do not counter what I am saying.
I see the use cases for the recon lasguns in which you pick them to fill a role and the rest of the team has the theoretical capabilities to do “what you can’t”. It’s not a weapon you bring into solo-que quickplay auric missions. That’s what I assume you mean by “pug setting” so if I got that wrong, please elaborate. ^^
but he did have to deal with them… and half the time the other 3 were alive…
The point of them likely not ending up dead, if he used a better weapon, is kinda mute. There are 50 other arbitrary things that would lead to the same outcome but don’t require the vet to run something else.
Sorry but that’s not what I was saying, I was being very literal with my point. Yes, absolutely, boltguns and plasma will kill a very high percentage of elites but every single last one of them? No, absolutely not. You cannot actually want to tell me that you expect your boltgun/plasma vets to get 100% of all elite kills / have the other 3 end up with 0 elites killed.
That’s a scoreboard I need to see first to believe it.
As soon as anyone else had to get even a single elite killed, their build needed to have been capable of doing that. There is just absolutely no way you expect others to have that kind of faith in a random vet players abilities and neither should they.
I just found it interesting that you were essentially saying that the veteran has any influence on the other players ability to dodge. The vet can bring whatever he wants, he can never play the game for someone else. That was my point.
Killing the special before they get grabbed, sure. Expecting a vet to have to compensate for someone else not even trying to dodge muties is however very very silly.
There is no level of skill that makes you immune to disablers. And it was mostly a single player that never even attempted to dodge the muties that got grabbed over and over. The 3 teammates were absolutely not on equal skill levels but overall they were better than what I expect random teammates to be. So instead of having to clarify each time that two of them are decent and one average, I just said “decent teammates” and was done with it.
On this we agree. I am only adding that this isn’t a matter of luck in most cases.
Fair enough, makes sense then.
As far as I could tell, that was the VId which is the best recon las imo.
Wrapped up testing these 3:
In order of best to worst. I’m pronouncing all Recon Lasguns not viable for anything above vanilla Auric T5s. They need a substantial Power (the stat) buff if not an outright rework. The sad thing is that the 542 feels how all recon lasguns should feel like as a BASELINE across all Mks. Also, the Acc7a is the only one with enough cleave to actually be viable against hordes or to snipe specials/shooters behind hordes. Problem is it’s ammo efficiency is still ass.
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While I mostly agree, problem is that whatever makes things harder for you also does so for the team. Which is my biggest gripe with these and other underperformers.
IDM if there’s a meme gun (fun but otherwise underpowered without a viable niche) or two in a game’s catalogue, but right now this entire class is pretty much that, a set of meme guns. There’s not much reason to bring one to a run other than to attempt to dab on any other vets if you’re a John Wick type or to meme on autogun Fudds.
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