Edit: It would appear from reading the replies and the vote results that nerfing Plasma Gun by increasing toughness or health damage is an unpopular idea.
Rather, reducing cleave on light attack and making light attack cause explosion at 100% Overheat seems to be the most favorable adjustment for balancing Plasma Gun.
Thank you everyone for your feedback.
Original Post:
Plasma currently has:
- Infinite Cleave Through Non Carapace
- 101 Light Shots Ammo Capacity (44% than Zarona)
- Ammo Regen From Survivalist, Mag Regen From Weapon Specialist
- Ability to kill Crusher in 2 Charged Crit Hits
Plasma Gun is extraordinarily powerful, and it should be if it is to be lore accurate. But how should it get balanced then?
Here’s a solution:
For every 25% Overheat, 25% Toughness will be taken on manual vent. At Critical Overheat (75%-99%) a maximum of 75% Toughness will be taken on manual vent.
The user would still be able to avoid manual vent and wait for heat to dissapate passively, the price being limitations to fire large volleys during that cooldown time.
This fits within the Plasma Gun’s trait as a highly volatile power weapon and creates more of a high risk to the high reward of using Plasma Gun. That said, if need be the rate of passive vent could be adjusted in the future if it is too high.
Granted, we don’t want to push players away from melee either so passively venting to avoid the increase in Toughness damage from venting should still exist - meaning this change would push players to Vent Plasma passively, use melee more during cooldown instead of just venting and lobbing off another volley of shots.
Reducing ammo doesn’t solve the problem, because the Vet will just consume more ammo packs and potentially make it harder for teammates to get ammo. Reducing mag size won’t be very effective either, because Weapon Specialist can regen ammo to the magazine passively.
Let me know below
- Yes, Increase Manual Vent Toughness Damage
- No, Nerf Plasma Another Way
If Yes:
- Yes, 25% Toughness Damage Per 25% Heat Vented Manually, Up To a Max Of 75% Toughness
- No, That’s Too Much Toughness Damage
1 Like
you still hope that they would nerf this gun?
Anyways, I think that the problem is the cleave for light shots.
But yes, the venting is also an other problem.
5 Likes
I think you should be able to blow up from light shots aswell.
11 Likes
Change it back to health damage on venting, even just 3-5 damage is fine. Reloading earlier, and health curios will matter more with it. Leave the rest of the gun as is.
5 Likes
I would actually propose different nerfs.
1.) light shots are the more ammo efficient right now. I would change the relationship so that light shots are less ammo efficient. Charged shots should be encouraged with more cleave and less ammo use (light shots maybe have very little cleave). Which means you’re using more heat and spending a lot more time between shots.
2.) Light shots at critical heat should blow you up instead of automatically venting to add more danger to it.
This could add more interesting blessings (no movement speed penalty while charging, faster charge, etc.)
8 Likes
I agree that it should bypass toughness
2 Likes
Those are all solid suggestions
1 Like
Interesting, having Vent damage health directly. Well, it would still contribute towards the goal of increasing cost associated with spamming Plasma to high Heat level, venting then lobbing off another volley, so I guess I’m indifferent on whether it’s health/toughness.
If my memory is correct, in the tests done in previous versions, it was only able to pass through about 8 normal enemies. If there are more now, it is obviously not mentioned in the version update log, it may be a bug.
As for the other mechanics, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, it’s going to make people not use it at all.
Damage health when dissipating heat,that’s how it used to work, and before there wouldn’t even be so many enemies in the game at the same time, and even then, almost no one likes it.
Yes, it can shoot 100 times, and yes, it can recover ammo with talents.
First of all, each of its attacks is charged, and there is a delay.
And it is one of the few weapons with the least efficiency of ammunition recovery, since ammunition recovery is calculated entirely on the basis of the amount of reserve ammo, not the magazine. As the weapon with the largest magazine ratio, it has the lowest pickup ammo.
And as a weapon, is there any problem with benefiting from talent?
As the heaviest weapon, it’s not a problem to kill a Crusher with two charged attacks, and a whole team of Crusher is now often generate in the game. That’s a charged attack, and if a charged attack can’t kill the Crusher with two attacks, what’s the point of its existence?
Stop asking for Nerf Plasma, the real problem is that no other weapon is close to the Bolt Gun and Plasma.
2 Likes
Funny thing about Plasma Vet. Hardly see any in match making. Mostly autogun vets shooting crusher armour in despair.
One unintentional bug the game has already been patched to fix I actually though it was by design. For about 1-2 weeks plasma shots were 100% blocked by bulwark shields…then they patch fixed it because it was a bug. Thought it was good design.
A weapon that is pinpoint accurate without requiring ADS and fast followup shots too. Full movement and no cost to accuracy.
Even hellore/las require ADS for accurate shot. So for plasma light mouse hold could be charged shot, short click is light and right mouse button could be the ADS.
You don’t see many Vets using plasma. But you see many Vets using DS.
2 Likes
I don’t think the Plasma Gun really needs a nerf.
In the actual normal game difficulties, Sedition-Damnation, it’s not particularly powerful, I don’t think it has a real advantage over most other weapons at these levels. The game just doesn’t present players with the opportunity to blap a dozen Shotgunners at once on Damnation, nor is ammo utilization so stressed that its cleave and potential ammo efficiency can stand out.
For the “harder than hard” modes like Auric and Havoc, the PG’s utility scales immensely due to the way FS designed those modes to just throw enemies at players in huge numbers in clumps and conga lines, and the PG can be put to dramatically more powerful use as a result.
However, I think those are pecularities to those “harder than hard” modes, not something to make balance decisions for the larger metagame around. I’d suggest finding alternate ways to make these modes harder (such as additional spawn vectors, improved AI and movesets, etc) that will improve the overall experience (and address things like CDR at the same time) rather than nerfing the PG.
5 Likes
Yes, note how I didn’t propose nerfs to these three aspects. I do agree, the Plasma Gun should provide very high damage, but it does need to have a higher cost for providing that much damage.
Only when directly venting heat, not passively venting while using melee.
Light attacks being unable to trigger detonation at critical heat, having the cleave they currently do and just being able to smack the vent button for a few seconds at 99% heat, then going back to another volley of those light attacks is too strong.
More Toughness/Health damage for not taking a break between vollies that can wipe entire groups of non-carapace Elites out in a few seconds is not unreasonable. Like I said, the damage would be avoided by switching to melee until Heat is low enough to use Plasma again.
Uncharged shots need to be nerfed and should not have nearly as much penetration and cleave as they currently have
7 Likes
I assume you’re exaggerating for effect, it’s 50(52.5) to 100 penetration depending on charge level, but it may as well be infinite.
I’ve come around a bit in the past and will say again you can probably just halve the penetration (min charge-max charge) to [25 to 50] or even [20 to 40] and be done with it.
3 Likes
I try not to exaggerate, I don’t think I am in this particular example:
Infinite Cleave
i think PG deserves his own rework where the splash effect actually does damage instead of being just a visual effect
1 Like
Venting doesn’t really “nerf” PG when you’re getting way more than 25% toughness per 25% overheat in the first place. VoC is a full restore, and assuming tdr still works, you’re probably going to still be yellow after one vent, not to mention that with psykers and chorus being omnipresent, this really does not do anything in its place in the meta, maybe make non-meta runs more interesting assuming VoC isn’t brought.
Just reduce the ammo so much that it does deprive the team of resources. That’s what ranged weapons should do, they’re a burst of dps or to cover for laziness/lack of range on targets, not to be just pure mag dumps as you walk through a level. Bring it down by 25-30% ammo and mag reserve and now you’re bringing a powerful burst dps weapon for mass elite spam.
A lot of weapons have far too much ammo and plasma gun is definitely one of them.
I would recommend the damage on vent be based on the vet’s base toughness, not max toughness. Players should be able to take additional toughness perks to help mitigate the damage. A higher amount of damage is a good idea though.
Also on Cleave. I think we should get rid of all infinite cleaves and replace them with really high cleaves. Can a plasma gun go through 3 crushers? Yeah, 6? sure, 12? maybe… 50? Nope. I don’t know what it should be, but infinite is just wrong.
2 Likes
I will add another option in the survey:
: none nerf needed. Plasmagun is well balanced. When compared with others meta weapons, like Lasers, Revolver, Boltgun has clear pro and cons
3 Likes
Crazy suggestion, but maybe revert the buff to plasma gun that made it only deal Toughness damage - and force venting to deal health damage instead. This way, spamming it would cost health.
4 Likes