Idea to Tone Down Ranged Meta

Nerf ammo regen overall (not 100% sure on what ways to do this), nerf scrounger or just remove it, bring back the scavenger trait for melee weapons from the first game. This would force people to conserve ammo more and to play a bit more melee focused. Scavenger would also bring up an alternative talent to use on melee weapons mainly for ranged careers. I feel like scavenger would allow for more variety to combat by having people switching between melee and ranged more often.

For those of you who don’t know what scavenger is, it was a talent for melee weapons that had a chance on kill to restore 5% of your ammo (was 10% earlier in the first game but had gotten nerfed).

7 Likes

Not without making melee safer and have more viable melee weapons per character.

Ranged spam is even easier in VT1, so I don’t get the problem.

4 Likes

I do agree more weapons need to be more viable. But when you talk about safety for melee, melee becomes more safe when you have everyone all on the frontline because of how much faster the enemies die with everyone attacking together. I think many people consider melee less safe right now because of how many people just sit back as ranged. (Though there are also the cheeky packmasters in hordes)

2 Likes

Melee is not safe because enemies have insane reach(and you cannot really predict it, because it’s not even close to actual attack animation). Fix that and melee is super viable, no need to nerf ranged at all.
Well, that and melee should get boss damage buffed(a lot).

9 Likes

Ranged meta could be fixed without touching any of the ranged stuff, simply by making melee more worthwhile in situations where ranged dominates without any reason. Like damage to specials and bosses.

1 Like

Attack range is partially because the game is built around such a low fov which makes the high attack ranges look even higher.

Melee should be better against bosses I agree, but I feel like ammo should be saved for specials anyways. Right now, ranged is almost always better to use because it is safer overall and you don’t ever run out of ammo. I think that melee is fine, some of the weapons just need to be more viable. With infinite ammo you can already just sit in a corner and delete an entire horde before it gets to you. As long as classes have infinite ammo, melee is almost never worthwhile if you have the option of ranged.

5 Likes

I kinda had the same general idea of nerfing ammo regen a month ago, and even got some likes.

Your suggestion in particular has a flaw though - it’s gonna make melee careers as strong in ranged combat as ranged classes, cause they will be able to regain as much armor if not more. This could be balanced out, but would require a complete rebalance of all ranged career talents.

There is a simpler solution of limiting party to 2 ranged careers, which could at least work as a temporary workaround. It has now flaws, except that community might not going to like that. :smile:

Any kind of ranged meta nerf that hits the ammo regen will undoubtably lead to ranged carreers becoming worthless. They kinda backed themselves into this corner when they gave every hero a dedicated ranged carreer. With ammo, they are able to deal out constant DPS, something that at almost any instance this game reminds you is absolutely necessary to overcome certain obstacles, especially bosses, clearing specials reliably or hitting blightstormers, ratlings or gas rats that you don’t even have LoS to. Without ammo, ranged carreers become just clunky melee characters.

2 Likes

That wouldn’t destroy ranged careers, it would just make them melee to get ammo back. It’s not like ammo becomes nonexistent when you lower regen, you just have to conserve it more. I don’t think you should be able to get all your kills without ever switching off ranged which is definitely possible because you never run out of ammo.

6 Likes

I would like for the game to be more melee centric. To me it just offers more fun during playing,
even though I do enjoy the ranged classes (albeit with not clicking every enemy away… Can’t break the habit).

My reasons for it kind of circle around these three things:

  • Ranged characters can melee just fine (not as good but it works), but the reverse can’t be said for melee orientated classes.
    Now obviously you can shoot :wink: , but just blasting away at enemies isn’t something you can do for long. And once you’re out of ammo that’s it.
    (Note that I don’t want ranged careers to be worse at melee than they currently are or nerfed into the ground)
  • Roaming enemies are quickly dispatched by shooting. In fact certain careers use it to restock.
    Meanwhile you feed of the scraps (Literally as the biggest targets also attract the most attention), which can become very boring very quickly when there is too many shooters.
    You have to be agressive and rush a bit to at least get something.
  • Ranged careers synergize well with each other. If you are in a corridor and a horde approaches and you’re in a group with three shooters… Well you can’t really do anything. Walking in front of the gunline seems stupid/counterproductive and blasting away with your own ammo is just a waste. If I had a ranged class as well, at least I’d have something to do without hampering myself.

No idea what the right solution would be.
Lowering ammo is a problem:

and this summarizes it pretty well why IMO.
Currently it seems necessary to give you the best chance at success and lowering the ammo
regeneration just quickly turns these careers into trash picks.

I do like the idea that BH “reloads” his passive by doing melee,
so that idea appeals to me @OP. But I guess more has to be done than that.
Looking at you Legend.

Still leaves certain careers that are destined to have infinite ammo, so what to do with those?
Make their shooting so bad it doesn’t matter that it’s infinite? Yeah, that sounds like fun… not. :wink:

Another thing that comes to mind would be to lower the ammo regen so it isn’t infinite (but enough to sustain you for a while)
and place guaranteed ammo boxes in the levels in regular intervals.
But I guess that would just make shooting even more common… Agh I don’t know.
I guess I’m just throwing out ideas randomly at this point…

I just hope that Fatshark or someone can figure something out that makes both playstyles balanced with each other
without making the game soul crushingly difficult, if that’s possible.
For example the old Huntsman that could delete a boss in a very short amount of time sounds bad, but when you were caught in the dark area of the mines by a chaos spawn and a horde, you suddenly were very glad it existed. :wink: It shouldn’t need to exist though.

I’m not saying to remove ammo from the game, literally just saying to tone down ammo regen and give a way to generate ammo through melee. You don’t need infinite ammo for the classes to do well, they can melee just fine. And if you actually acknowledge that they can melee just fine, you are able to tie in ranged with scavenger to give enough ammo alongside the ranged classes built in regen, they’ll have enough to sustain and fulfill their role as ranged. It seems like most of the people here are saying that I want to remove ammo regen. It just needs to be a bit weaker so melee actually has a chance to shine. Ranged would be fine with this change, you just need to manage ammo.

5 Likes

So a combination of both? Interesting (albeit I didn’t think you wanted it gone completely).
As longs as other careers don’t have ways of getting it. That would be a problem IMO?

Well considering melee careers don’t benefit as much from ammo with ranged drop off and lower capacity, scavenger would not be as useful for them. Scrounger feels way too strong atm, and all the ranged careers have near infinite ammo. Without scrounger, scavenger would force the classes to melee more often for ammo but they would also have their built in ammo regen alongside it to give them more sustain. Doing this would simply help encourage melee combat while not destroying ammo generation for ranged careers.

5 Likes

Or just make melee more fun and appealing. Nerfing half the game when it’s been out for months is marketing suicide and a surefire way to drive away half the playerbase forever.

Instead of toning down ranged, tune up melee.

4 Likes

Melee is fine as is imo. I find it quite fun. The only problem I have is how many of the melee weapons are in need of buffs.

3 Likes

So the answer is to make ranged, which people play because they don’t find forced melee fun, boring? Again, that’s suicide for the game.

2 Likes

Why would encouraging melee gameplay make it not fun? I said I don’t want ammo regen to be gone completely, I just have an idea to make it still consistent enough to satisfy those who like to use ranged, while also giving melee careers a chance to shine. I very much enjoy ranged careers, but I also enjoy melee in a similar manner. Would it kill you guys to put down your ranged weapons for a bit? Seems like everyone has a problem when they can’t use ranged weapons 100% of the time.

Edit: Not trying to come off as toxic here, just getting a little annoyed with some of these responses

1 Like

Have thought for a while now that scrounger is the problem. My solution was to move the trait to melee weapons, maybe tweak it to only 1 ammo (or a %), and have it only activate once per melee crit. Then it competes with swift slaying and resourceful combatant.

The counterbalance of most ranged should be ammo right? But currently you just shoot into hordes and are back to full ammo. You aren’t punished by wasting ammo in the slightest because it’s so easy to get back. The gameplay loop of shoot to get ammo to shoot doesn’t make sense to me.

Not sure about heat weapons (no ammo is their thing, sienna has terrible melee weapons), but the same logic with ranged crits reducing heat would seem to directly apply there as well.

Of course this idea shouldn’t be made in isolation. You would need to simultaneously tweak ammo amounts, tweak ranged damage/cleave/boss damage, fix slot issues, fix overhead attacks going through blocking teammates to hit those behind, etc. I don’t know what all that would entail honestly.

3 Likes

Because fundamentally changing the way the game plays for a huge chunk of the player base, in any game, guarantees a large percentage of those players aren’t going to be happy with it and probably aren’t going to stick around.

What’s the problem with ranged, exactly? I’ve seen melee careers perform nominally when combined with ranged careers since release. The general complaint I see is in regards to some players feeling they need to turtle around the ranged players, but that’s really not the case.

Did you guys play V1? Relative to the number of enemies, there’s technically way more ranged there by virtue of every character having great ranged options and access to Haste + HoD

1 Like