It’s nice to finally see some discussion on the Vraks VII Headhunter, especially in comparison to the Kantrael XII Lasgun. I’ve seen a lot of very good players disregarding it and I’m horribly confused as to why. It has decently high base damage, very manageable recoil, and can shoot about as fast as you can click your left mouse button. Combine this with near pinpoint accuracy on your first few shots when hip-firing, it has the ability to be a lot more mobile and deal with rapidly changing situations much easier than a Lasgun can.
That said, hitting breakpoints is just barely possible with needing (for body shots):
- on average both 78 in damage and stopping power, plus
- +25% to flak, to hit the breakpoint to 1 shot scab shooters with the Volley Fire out to 15m, plus
- at least a 10% boost to unarmoured damage to 2 shot a Dreg Shooter without it.
Opening Salvo can help with this, but I’d argue these are some pretty important breakpoints to make the weapon feel competitive, and that’s a mighty difficult weapon to roll. So perhaps most people just haven’t played around with a good one yet.
However, the weapon is unfortunately brought down (compared to the Kantrael XII especially) by two things:
- Frequently having to reload, and
- pitifully low Maniac Damage
Considering the most common damage type for specials is Maniac, it makes the weapon almost unusable on Hi-Intensity Damnation, especially when you have to dump half a clip just to kill a single Flamer. To be fair, these problems are innate to all Headhunter Autoguns. It’s pretty useable on anything below that, though.
However, it is a bit baffling when regular and braced Autoguns do MORE damage to Maniacs than other damage types. Damage consistency and logic in this game is pretty whack sometimes. Therefore, I’d strongly suggest buffing the Maniac damage of the weapon. It currently does about 1/5th what the Kantrael XIII does.
In general, I’d suggest:
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At least 50% more damage to maniac, allowing it to deal up to 330 damage per shot with Volley Fire. This is enough to comfortably 5 shot both Dreg Ragers (or 4 shot with Opening Salvo) and Flamers, and would be close to (but still slightly lower than) the Agripinaa VIII Braced’s damage.
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15% more damage to Unarmoured, allowing it to reach the breakpoint for 2-shotting damnation Dreg Stalkers without investing in Unarmoured Damage and 2-shotting Dreg Bruisers if you do.
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Maybe… 5% more damage to Flak to make reaching the requisite breakpoints slightly less RNG.
I also don’t think it would hurt too much to apply the same (or similar) changes across the board to all Headhunter Autoguns. I haven’t done the math on them, but I doubt it would break anything. Unfortunately, the Kantrael XII Lasgun dwarfs pretty much every other small arms, shooter focused guns in the game at the moment, and it would be nice to see more variety in strong weapons for this category when considering High Intensity Shock Troop Gauntlet Damnation runs.