Here we go again. I’ve spent a lot of my time already bringing up this issue, but it seems it’s somehow not on Fatshark’s list of priorities still.
The Brace of Pistols is absolutely, completely not viable on Legend on any of the three classes. It’s not only bad on its own, it’s also horrible when compared to any of the alternatives. The change that Fatshark made to this weapon has transformed it from a powerful skill-based weapon in VT1 to a gimmick in VT2.
The number of targets hit, the damage dropoff, the ridiculous ammo count, the amount of visual clutter after shooting, the higher numbers of enemies and bad synergy with passive abilities and even traits. This cannot continue. It takes 3-4 bullets to kill an elite on Legend with these things at 600 power, which is, on non-BH, around 20% of the entire ammo pool. For one enemy.
So, what do we have then? It’s bad at range, it’s bad vs hordes, it’s bad vs bosses (the mythical “large burst damage” is just that: a myth), it’s bad vs elites. It can deal with specials at close-mid range rather well, but literally any alternative does that better, faster and more reliably.
I’ve heard the opinion that the repeater pistol is supposed to replace BoP’s VT1 role, but that hasn’t happened. Instead, it’s still what it was in VT1: an instant low-risk high-threat enemy killer, and that’s fine, but this goes to show that BoP needs another rework.
For how long will this continue? Fatshark, you’ve had your fun trying out the new concept, and I find it wanting. It’s time to step your game up and finally fix this iconic weapon.
It definitely needs more ammo if nothing else. I’m constantly running out of ammo even when reserving the shots for specials. Using it against elites is a complete waste.
Yeah, ammo management is a nightmare even with +2 ammo on crits on BH. Even when you line up two enemies and get 4 ammo back for the price of 0 (Blessed Shot), it’s still a game of attrition: even in these best case circumstances you are bound to run out at one point if you use it any active kind of way.
And on WHC that level 5 trait for more ammo basically forces you to take it and not consider the alternatives if you want to use BoP at all, and even that it’s barely any better.
Which reminds me: the alt fire is a joke: there’s not enough ammo to offset the risks and do any kind of a difference. In VT1, it was good against hordes, patrols and bosses: here, it’s good for depleting your ammo meter faster.
Define “viable”. I’m running BoP on WHC successfully on legend. I find its always ready, good sustained damage against most (non chaos armor) targets appealing. The alternative I would consider (to suit the playstyle) currently is the repeater pistol, which I find under-performs at range.
I have not ran any indepth analysis, so I can’t say if it should be buffed or not, but it definitely does seem to have a niche.
the mythical “large burst damage” is just that: a myth
I think it’s very much a reality. Or rather the damage is large and sustained (but ends short due to finite amount of ammunition) Try finding a weapon that can compete with BoP on a training dummy. Volley (both Saltz’s and Keri’s) can probably do it while the clip lasts and you’re close enough (for Saltz), but I am fairly confident BoP is up there as far as damage goes.
It can deal with specials at close-mid range rather well, but literally any alternative does that better, faster and more reliably.
I also don’t think misusing the term “literally” serves your argument. It can easily be shown to be wrong and as such weaken your argument. Eg. how does crossbow delete multiple specials at close range better than BoP? Also repeater pistol cannot delete two leeches with one clip (unless you headshot majority of the hits, but that’s not always possible).
EDIT: IMO if they were to buff BoP damage vs. bosses would be a good start so they could have more of a role versus them as currently it is a tad lacking.
It would be fun if they could add some gun-kata stuff in the game to make BoP more viable and fun. E. g. give witch hunter captain ability to auto-aim with RMB, so that you shoot twice with LMB: where you are aiming and into the closest enemy. Or you aim at the enemy and lock on him first, then one of you shots aims in his direction. This way you can double shot distant specials too.
Or ability to lock onto 3-5 enemies and then just auto aim and shoot them on the go for BH.
With cool animations of course. That’s some wishful thinking, but… a man can dream
Kinda like in the VT1 intro, eh?
Something like:
While “aiming” you are locked in place and your crosshair vanishes. (Camera moves to third person view?) The shots will aim for the bodies in a 180° cone in front of you with a chance of going to the head (maybe a talent for WHC?). You still can turn around.
Okay, enough wishlisting/daydreaming.
BoP felt in VT1 pretty well balanced and I wonder why they don’t look at something that worked well. I know, trying out new things, be innovative, copying old work is no fun but after all the hassle with balancing VT1 I thought it would be kinda work as failsafe:
“Okay guys, we ****ed this up. Let’s take VT1 stats and work from there.”
Btw, it’s not the BoP alone. Enemy health and armour feel off too. In VT1 the BoP had a niche between being a sniping weapon, boss killer, narrow wave clearer and weapon of simple coolness.
(For every part there was a better weapon but BoP was like a hybrid or multi-tool which gave Saltzpyre much versatility which I wished WHC in VT2 had.)
In VT2 I don’t see how BoP may come back into this niche by balancing the weapon alone without changing any enemies and their stats. I look at you laughable stormvermin patrols (once they striked fear) or insta-shield-raising enemies to block headshots.
It took 2 shots for BoP to bodyshot a clan rat in VT1 Cata. In VT2 a single shot packs enough damage to overkill it by about 23 damage (clanrats have 15 hp in legend). Do you want to go back to requiring two shots to kill a measly clan rat or what aspect you are talking about?
Sure VT1 BoP had a lot more ammo, but I found two shotting (headshots aside) tedious.
Kinda, yeah because high difficulty should not reward easy bodyshots into masses.
But even if you want to there were workarounds in VT1 like piercing bullets or chance to auto-headshot.
Firing at hordes you may still have a 1:1 bullet/clanrat ratio.
Weapon traits from VT1 could have been interesting talents in VT2 like only BH and WHC only have access to piercing shots while only Zealot and BH have access to shrapnels. Same for melee traits but anyway.
I really wish I could simply import the BoP (and Rapier companying pistol) from VT1. Far better balanced than in VT2 (In my opinion).
If they imlemented BoP from VT1 using clan rat hp as reference between the two titles, the game would work the following:
It would take:
2 shots to kill a clan rat instead of the current 1
4 shots to kill a gutter runner instead of the current 1
7 shots to kill a leech instead of the current 2
7 shots to kill a globadier instead of the current 2
10 shots to kill a mauler instead of the current 3
EDIT:
If I recall correctly VT1 BoP had 56 ammo and VT2 BoP has 20. Let’s list previous values as percentages of their respective ammo pools:
3.6% to kill a clan rat instead of the current 5%
7.1% to kill a gutter runner instead of the current 5%
12.5% shots to kill a leech instead of the current 10%
12.5% shots to kill a globadier instead of the current 10%
17.9% shots to kill a mauler instead of the current 15%
So it does not seem like you actually waste any ammo efficiency for the increased kill speed (for tougher enemies you actually get a non-trivial boost).
The # hit to kill for some enemies enemies from the 1st game that are also in VT2 don’t match (for example globadier would take 7 now instead of the previous 4 from VT1). This is because in VT2 some specials are a lot tougher in comparison (still 4 hits for gutter runner in both games though, so the translation is not that off). They all still share a common armor type, so it is impossible to do a direct translation using the current system, but I think clan rat hp is a good reference.
Kinda, yeah because high difficulty should not reward easy bodyshots into masses.
Does this mean that all weapons should have different number of hits to kill enemies for body & head (for all enemy types no less), or does this “not rewarding” just apply to a subset of weapons, which includes the BoP? If so, what other weapons belong to that subset?
Eg. do you think a fully drawn longbow arrow or handgun should kill a clan rat on body shot Y/N? If yes, why is it allowed for longbow/handgun to reward “body shots on high difficulty” but not BoP?
Agreed. In its current state, the BoP is worthless compared to his alternatives. I would raise the base ammo to 30, and make the alt fire a double shot instead of rapid fire. It solves any issues with them being too spammable with the extra ammo, while also making them more useful on BH with the double shot.
Yeah I agree in comparison to either Volley Crossbow or Repeater Pistol they are not as good.
They only work as Special Killers and only at close range, and the Range Dropoff in damage is way too steep, so anything more than 15 Yards and you’re only doing like 9.00 damage with them rather than the 62.00.
If they have those kinds of limitations… they need a lot more ammo.
You’re not wrong that the attack on dummies allows you to witness very high damage output. There are a couple of caveats here: most of the time, the dummies show you recruit-level damage profiles. Have you set the game up by starting a higher-difficulty lobby and canceling it to display higher-difficulty numbers?
The other caveat is the enemy-type damage. The bursts are, in theory, most useful against bosses. By testing it out on Legend against bosses, I was underwhelmed, to say the least. The entire ammo pool at non-penalty attack range against a rat ogre did very little damage.
A translation/communication error, then. In my native language, the phrase would work perfectly. Honestly, I don’t see how critiquing one word in my reasoning would detract from its overall value, but, moving on. Here’s what I tried to relay: the crossbow’s reload speed is high enough to achieve nigh-comparable results to the BoP with the additional benefit of higher horde penetration and no range constraints. The repeater pistol can achieve two or even three-special deletion with the charged attack and allows for much looser aim. The repeater thoughts apply to the volley crossbow too.
Interesting, after a while I got so used to headshotting that it stopped being a problem. Given their good aim and range, and the ability to roll either Skullcracker or Targeteer to make it easier, I never really found that to be a problem.
Other than that, thanks for the great analysis on how much ammo, percentage-wise, it takes to kill things in VT1 BoP versus VT2 BoP.
I’m glad that the new patch added more ammo to them and I’ll be sure to try them out in this state, but I remain doubtful that 5-10 (Zealot vs BH with WHC with the ammo trait in the middle) ammo buff is going to suffice to fix the problem. I think you’re on to something with boss damage buffs.
You know (@Ilex ), I’m actually warming up to them (and to WHC in general). They still have their problems, but yeah, if you stack crit chance and get the ammo on crit trait, it’s very much enjoyable to use BoP. Or, maybe it’s the fact that that small ammo buff was actually a lot better than I anticipated. Still, I believe there needs to be more target penetration and damage vs bosses. Right now you can empty everything under a strength/speed pot, active ability and various passive bonuses from your team, and the damage to a boss barely surpasses around 10% of his HP.
Also, the repeater nerf really helped see things in perspective. I still think that the repeater xbow is a bit too good at everything, but now BoP has a level playing field otherwise.
I used to have increased pot duration, and increased animosity duration, but tbh I never found a good opportunity to nuke the boss with pot/animosity and BoP for 10 seconds.
So I changed it to all pot effects, which lasts 5 seconds, along with animosity that lasts 6 seconds (with 30% cd reduction talent). The pot lasts for exactly the duration to run out of ammo with the BoP. You can deal quite a bit of damage to the boss alone, about 40% of it’s health, if you have good aim probably even more, and you also don’t care which pot you pick up because they all give you the same thing.
The last thing you HAVE to try out if you like WHC and BoP is having a ranger bardin with increased ammo drops on specials kills. You basically never run out of ammo. Not you, and neither your whole group. It’s really an amazing hidden gem and gives the opportunity for the BoP to shine, because you can really destroy any special with them. I’ve asked people on pugs to change to ranger if they are fine with it and they usually do.
Yeah, I’ve pretty much come around to them, except for boss damage. Even Hunter/+10% monster damage doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference for me.
(In my opinion).