First and foremost, I know you guys get enough mindless claimants screaming that X is game breakingly OP and Y is useless without actually providing feedback. But, as a beta tester I still believe it’s part of my role to improve the game I thoroughly enjoy any way possible even after its released.
Which is why I have actually taken it upon myself to sit down and do some testing. I have compared the brace of pistols and the repeater pistol- the latter being the fan favourite which seems in a really balanced state currently. The reason I did this is because I want to enjoy using the brace of pistols, but I feel it always lets me and my teammates down.
I’ll try to keep it short and sweet and only include things I believe are relevant or useful to reference:
Testing was done on champion with neutral or unnaffecting talents and the inclusion of the Blessed shots buff.
Both test pistols have similar power ratings.
Brace of pistols is sitting at 266
Repeater pistol is sitting at 265
Now there are obvious issues between their ease of use or functionality, the repeater pistol quite clearly wins on this side of things. As its design makes it easier to manage when tackling hordes and when focusing a special. A higher rate of fire, higher ammo count, less recoil, less movement hindrance, the need to only aim once when right clicking and not continuously like brace of pistols all lend a hand in this.
Yet still, what I have found is that when both of them output the same value over time, or in a burst, there are considerable discrepancies.
When it comes down to the numbers that are there when you need them, the brace of pistols is simply lacking.
In order for the brace of pistols to equal the the strength of a repeater pistol’s alt fire under the influence of blessed shots you would need to fire 5 bullets and use 16.7% of its total ammo count whilst maintaining on target chest shots for the duration of those shots.
However, as stated the repeater pistol does this much quicker and it only needs to fire once on target, then we calculate that it will only use 10.7% of its total ammo count.
Now, taking the Prize bounty talent throws this even further out of whack. As a repeater pistol gets a free right click and can immediately right click again for some incredible burst using half the normal ammunition cost.
On the other side of the coin… the Bop saves one ammunition.
Now this is the same if you were to calculate realistic boss fights, the brace of pistols has less total damage with full ammunition than the repeater does. Even killing a chaos warrior is hard work with the brace of pistols, You can literally spool every bullet you have into it and it will still walk on like nothing happened. Where-as a reasonably placed right click with the repeater pistol will leave it hanging by a thread and a well placed right click will destroy it.
_In hordes most of the brace of pistols damage is wasted as it is overkill. Thus it is considerably less effective there, also. _
The long and short of it being that the brace of pistols simply doesn’t matter where it needs to and thus needs some compensation to boost it into viability.
How do we go about that? A slight rework.
20% ammo capacity increase.
Reduce the damage fall off slightly to adjust its effective range.
I in no means want the Bop to be overpowered, which is why I think it should still have a more close to mid range focus to allow other weapons to shine still. But as a comment mentioned I feel in those distances the damage falloff should be adjusted, with greater falloff toward the long range side.
Proper bullet penetration scaling with the new range falloff.
Something seems off about it as it is. To the point it’s almost not noticeable. I actually wrote this post assuming it didn’t exist and was instead locked in his class ability.
So up close it desperately needs more penetration, and that penetration should be reduced to be almost non existent after the mid range.
Adjusted chance to knockback enemies scaling with range if hit anywhere substantial if the damage isn’t enough to kill.
-Swap the primary and secondary- Reducing the movement speed penalty by about half in the process.
-Then alter the secondary fire: Victor still raises a second pistol when it is held, only now the crosshair is more accurate and damage fall-off is reduced. When you left click he fires them both simultaneously. Doubling the ammo cost, damage and penetration of a single shot whilst also scaling fully with Blessed Shots. After which he proceeds to pull out two more weapons if right click is still held, or one weapon if it was let go, with obvious timed delays accordingly.
Stylistic gratification - if the damage it is enough to kill, I would like to see more ragdolling to let us know that it was us. I want to see the severed little rat and chaos bodies fly and the bigger variants get knocked over as their arm or heads get blown off into the distance.
Sorted! All of the mechanics and animations are currently in the game and it should be straightforward to implement.
You will have successfully given the brace of pistols its identity back whilst improving what it lacked, as the left click will be costly and still require great micromanagement, awareness and positioning, but it will be considerably better than the left click of the repeater pistol in horde management. And the right click will now scale better with blessed shots and other effects, and improve its usability against specials and bosses. It will be quicker and cost less, but will still be nothing compared to the repeaters right click. Polar opposites.
(As a note, none of these changes affect the rapier’s tertiary fire.)
Thanks for reading. Hope you consider this as an option, as I would definitely go back to being a Victor main like I was in V1!
