As title says. Honestly, a radical buff like increasing their ammo to ridiculous levels might be the way to take these things from garbage to usable. They’re made to be spammed, and no matter what they will have the downside of not being good against very distant enemies or armor.
Many people from here would disagree with this. I remember my passionate fights with some people over autoguns and braced autoguns viability that happened over 6 months ago. While I don’t think they’re “unusable”, they were previously very underpowered and had no niche, especially pre-Exe Stance buff.
I think they’re vastly outperformed by all sidearms in every situation, other than dealing with basic shooters (so not even Gunners). Not to mention true meta picks, like plasma, bolter, heavy stubber etc etc. Even knives and rock are better ranged “weapons” than autoguns, in my opinion.
At this point I only truly want one thing– I want a new mission modifier that’s based around buffed shooter enemies and some mechanics that improve bullet guns and lasguns specifically. Something similar to ranged maelstorm that you actually see more than once per month.
I’ll be even happy if that modifier completely depowered all plasma-based and rocket-based weapons (Bolters), just so lasguns and bullet weapons have a mission where they can absolutely shine.
No matter how you balance the game, some weapons just will be better full stop. To create true build diversity, mission design and certain mission modifiers should favor underused weapons that have some niche mechanic that works better in that one specific situation.
I think having braced autoguns work more like LMGs would make them more viable and unique.
Still won’t really be a ‘viable’ option because of carapace though, which is the main issue when it comes to weapons balance imo.
People probably wouldn’t like it as they’ve adjusted to the new faster pacing for awhile now, but some integrating some combination of the Shooters’ faster firing rate from “Emperor’s Fading Light” and these prior Shooter balance changes, which had been made and then removed around July last year, is probably the only way to make anti-rifleman guns as important as they were when the game released. I wouldn’t mind some change, as I miss when tougher rifleman slowed the pace & made things like suppression & moving between cover more important than just slide spam towards the ranged.
back in the days when survivalist aura wasnt taken behind a barn and put to rest, and damnation was the “highest” difficulty accessible(Hi-Int shock troop) other than Auric Maelstrom(which wasn’t in the diff slider), the 1st talent tree rework with vet made them viable with rending strikes and onslaught. specifically the agrippina ver, which we lovingly call Space AK.
In today’s time, I say bring back the aura, or make vet’s 25%+ max ammo return to its former glory of 40%+ max ammo or 50%+
I think what I want most for brautos is a mechanics rework. On Agrip “bracing” seems to serve literally no purpose, I’ve heard people even say the accuracy is better hipfiring and I mean like why? Graia at least bracing increases fire rate but still manages to feel dubiously useful. I don’t think I’ve ever even run Columbus so no idea if you ever want to brace that one.
Please let us do something more useful with right click, I don’t know what exactly, I just know it would be easy to top what we have.
And I’m not convinced the Agrip is exactly bad, but letting you shoot brautos more definitely couldn’t hurt. Aforementioned bracing rework and finally making the marks properly distinct and feel like worthwhile alternatives are probably avenues I’d rather see taken first though.
Yeah, just buff their ammo and make each mark have its own niche when braced is probably the way here.
Better than using it as an excuse to buff Vet anyway.
Braced autogun suffers from auto pistol existing. That has a huge maniac and unyielding spike to justify existing, run n gun built in, faster move speed when running/shooting, 2 more dodges, much faster reload, far less spread when shooting full auto and better blessings. Them fixing close range damage back to 12m is about as much love as BAGs ever got. It can be extremely gimmicky and decent with an agile engagement build with both close range damage blessings, since you keep stacks on swap. In general cleaving bullets should be a feature of all braced autogun marks and the heavy should have cleave like a stubber.
Yeah cannot agree strongly enough with the cleave comment. It’s funny to shoot a thousand bullets with graia brauto but when they’re low damage, low armour pen bullets AND can’t even penetrate the lowest of trash mobs really you’re not doing much more than hosing out your team’s ammo supply.
Vraks: the spray n’ pray model, increase the RoF and recoil, you should be able to hose down hordes with this or quickly dispatch lightly armored enemy in frint of you. Unbraced fire should quickly become so inaccurate that you couldn’t hit the broadside of a Titan. Braced should make it controllable.
Agri: slow and high damage/impact per shot and high cleave. You should be looking at the sky if you mag dump it unbraced. Bracing should take some time similar to Ripper Gun.
Columnus: the hybrid controllabe model. Basically what it is now with a bit more damage/cleave/ammo. Braced fire should become more accurate over time.
And give Brautos access to the Dumdum blessing
I was around for these shooter changes, the problem was that they affected the entirety of the game, rather than one specific mission condition.
Overbuffed shooters had no place in a game where almost every single enemy is already a priority target. It’s stupid when you have pox walkers, and then every other enemy should be killed as fast as possible as soon as they appear on the screen.
Shooters in normal gamemodes should be dangerous only in groups if left unchecked.
Creating more unique mission conditions with different enemy compositions would increase build variety, especially if devs came up with unique ways to spice up existing enemies. I wouldn’t even mind this version of shooter enemies, if they only appeared in a specific mission that also gets less armored elites or less disablers to balance it out.
Ah, yeah, the current cleave bonus does wonders for them, too.
Another option, instead of increasing their ammo total, could be just to tweak so that they get a lot more ammo from pickups than other weapons.
All weapons get the same 15% of max reserve from small tins and 50% from big bags.
Changing ammo reserve capacity is how you change ammo from pickups.
(* the %s are smaller in havoc)
Don’t just bring it back.
Make it - and all the other originals - baseline and have them affect ONLY the character. Then if the player wants to extend that to the group they can take the aura in the talent tree. A talent which is adjusted to take into account how it will affect other classes without changing how if affects the class taking the ability.
So much of the issue with the original wasn’t the aura itself. It was both the utter stupidity & laziness of having EACH aura tick on a kill when you had two, three, or even 4 veterans in a group. Then trying balance for that without shafting the groups that only had one veteran. Guess what? It was the lone-veteran-in-group players that got kicked in the balls by those changes.
Typical ObeseGuppy, but also typical software developer in general. Screw something up and instead of fixing the root cause they slap a quick change to the code at the first place they can find and call it good. Then when that doesn’t work make another change somewhere else, and another, and another - all while completely missing the source of the issue. All to avoid saying “oops, did a dumb at the start”.
I know it’s the same across weapons, but it seems possible to adjust the amount on a per-weapon basis. Perhaps it’d be quite difficult to do in the code, tho.
true and real. Make it happen FatShark
Its really a shame its only going to be fun during the Event and only when it actually is the Starvation Riot Modifier which now and it looks tomorrow isn’t even available to be played.
Had actually fun playing Veteran and some ranged Weapons for the first time since loooong. But during the Angry Ogryn Modifier many are immediately mediocre at best and during the whole Ogryn Spam absolute trash. The Ogryn Spam just makes many Weapons not viable to be played in that Modifier.