Bullet Weapon Balance

[Dizzy721]

The bleed is primarily to take advantage of minimum pellet count + the bleed damage to kill things at distance. In my last game with running the double barrel, bleed was <5% of my overall damage. There’s obvious synergy with Vet because of serrated blade and uncanny but I use neither of those things and still output insane damage with it.

[Hammer_hold]

@BizarreSalp

Double Barrel - Garbage.
This felt worse to me than the Shredder Autopistol, which I’ve heard many call the worst weapon in the game.
I was running as optimized a build as I could, triple barrel on Vet, and I still just was not impressed. It performed just barely adequately at the things I would expect it to perform well at, such as one-shotting charging mutants - though only with the double shot, as without some extremely high boosts it seems impossible to one-shot a Mutant with one barrel. One-shotting a Trapper at the ranges they shoot from doesn’t feel comfortably consistent, and as a result the weapon feels anemic. It’s also not that great at killing dogs unless you get a perfect bracketing at very close range.

I disagree that the double barrel is bad. You can very much optimize it to be good.

(Based on what melee weapon you’re going to be using, you can either use Kraks or Frags. I suggest downloading the “Talent Tree UX” mod so you can switch between talents without reseting the whole tree")

This build centers around never reloading you gun. The moment you kill at least one enemy with your melee, when you switch to your double barrel you have one reload-free shot. It is way more dynamic and fun than the triple barrel shotgun build.

Also, when you kill at least three enemies you already have a 99% critical chance the moment you swap to the double barrel and with these blessings it is nasty powerful, even from afar. It can literally snipe Snipers (that then bleed out if they don’t die immediately).

You can just kill one trash enemy with your melee, take out your shotgun, shoot into the horde, switch back to your melee and repeat, and you can do that without ever reloading.

Side note: As to the topic of buffing the bullets, I say make them do extra dmg to armor and normal dmg to flesh while the laser weapons should do extra dmg to flesh and normal dmg to armor, simple as.

[Cujo]

For killing one mutant per reload is a joke, what world do you live in?

[silentbob515]

@BizarreSalp

It’s interesting, I’ve tried to love this thing, I want to love this thing, but it just feels awful.

Well that’s okay, however if you decide to test it go with the build from Hammer_hold instead of the jank that was linked yesterday

[brosgw]

@Ensrick

A good team has your back and doesn’t drop into the next area past the point of no return while people are grabbing ammo. The problem is, high intensity areas and maelstrom incentivize rapid progression. In many cases, if you have to linger too long, you’re taking a bigger risk. As specials are spammed, the more you risk being in a scenario where you’re caught with your pants down.

This means that most teams on Aurics aren’t going to wait for you to grab ammo. Some builds rely on ammo pickups more than others, so it unfairly disadvantages those.

Not to digress too much but I pretty much only do auric quick plays, unless I am helping people with penances. I got all the havoc penances and then never touched it again really. Requires too much coordination and I don’t have a good group that plays at that level.

For Auric shock troop gauntlet specifically, I am pretty often breaking coherency with the team to pick up stuff. Even plasteel and diamantine. SOMETIMES I even get a quick and easy martyr skull opened up for those that need it, though most don’t at that difficulty. Sometimes I break off pretty far away to do the objective. Grab a battery while everyone is still fighting at the bridge. Sometimes it does bite me in the ass and I mess up against a trapper or dog, but it’s not that common. I just get a sense of when the specials and hordes have spawned, how long I have, how far away things are. And I mostly play agile/mobile builds. I also tend to avoid ammo hungry builds and tend to do melee oriented builds. Explosive Ogyrn is the only exception.

I think “points of no returns” it makes sense to wait. Experienced player I see wait at drop downs or announce “dropping”.

But I don’t think it’s THAT dangerous to break off from the group. Sometimes doing two teams of two.

[Ralendil]

@Downer

I have no words.

and sadly, he is right.
The weapon has only 2 shells… and can’t kill big stuff (crusher, bulwark).
When you face a wave of 15 dreg ragers, using this weapon means you will die.
This weapon has everything… a very limited amount of ammo per reload (2), a big weakness (crushers and also bulwark but this one is clearly manageable), a slow reload time… Perfect weapon to get chain killed.

[BizarreSalp]

It certainly does not fulfill the power fantasy.

[BizarreSalp]

Upon trying some of those builds (and for the record I wasn’t running just meme builds the whole time, I was changing it up every run) suggested above, for the bleed build, it did feel better. Much more important than the bleed is the guaranteed crit on several shots, which makes the DBS feel a lot better.

I still feel that this thing should just be good without needing to crit farm, though. But since crit farm exists, I suppose that they can’t buff it too much. Still; I think that it needs some buffs.

[eatingsand]

@BizarreSalp

I still feel that this thing should just be good without needing to crit farm, though. But since crit farm exists, I suppose that they can’t buff it too much.

I think this is a general design problem in Darktide. Talents and blessings are too high power. Weap specialist making some weapons obsolete without it is one of the big issues with it, but there’s others. Ogryns melee weapon arsenal is entirely balanced around applying 4 stacks of bleed per heavy, but thats a talent you have to invest into and some builds don’t.

I think they should probably rethink how weap specialist works then make the weapon actually good baseline

[MarxistDictator]

I thought when they buffed recon lasgun there would be similar overhauls to automatics since most suck, but they didn’t do anything. So now the slow firing recon lasgun that has cleave is the best braced autogun and can ADS doing more damage over distance, and has like no shot bloom when spraying from the hip even without executioner stance.

Though they did make shredder ‘ok’ mostly by just lazily buffing numbers (and one of the largest buffs was finesse related) so maybe some numbers tossed at autoguns will make them better even though it doesn’t address anything about their issues in role overall lack of versatility and redundancy. After all that’s enough to make double barrel shotgun ‘good’. The mauler and 1 type of rager or horde master, look at those numbers man forget the other targets and ranges in the game. Or question why you would use ranged on vet to horde clear and manage the weakest elites when you could kill specialists (plural) and provide boss damage like a normal person. Shhh!

[BizarreSalp]

Yeah, I honestly do not see how these weapons can be made relevant outside of some niche build - or perhaps on Hive Scum, dunno. But they just are just a hindrance at this point, largely because they are completely useless against distant and armored targets and you don’t even have enough ammo to rely on them as your main horde clear. They need at least the last. I don’t want to see these things meta, just able to do what they are meant to do reasonably well. These are weapons where I almost don’t think it would be a problem if they had INFINITE ammo, given their other severe limitations (not seriously suggesting that, that’s hyperbole).