Man, if you’re trying to tell me you want blunderbuss to be a magical weapon with a boss nuking alt-fire then my response is no.
If people feel it’s overly effective in the super density that doesn’t exist in the regular game until like hordes+ cata chaos wastes or weaves and it needs a nerf there in order to justify a buff to feel like a viable pick for the QP the majority of the community is doing sure. Again only a small minority would even notice the change in effectiveness here. What makes it and guns like it see no play time is because having something that can deal with hordes well is fine and dandy but having potentially nothing for specials is not. Nor should this ever be part of the game design, it’s a co op game not a freeloading let’s dump the necessary tasks onto a couple players instead of tackling them evenly like should always be the intent. Divide and conquer style gameplay is part of the bigger issue in the balance right now and doubling down on it would only make it worse.
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I realize you’re a newer player. But no one wants to spam handgun or repeater because they’re single target weapons. Before WoM, blunderbuss bash returned ammo using scrounger for each enemy hit. Due to this interaction, any class that could run a shotgun (IB, FK, Merc) would just run around r-bashing and shooting the shotgun. That’s because the weapons are very strong if you can sustain ammo. Perhaps you just need someone to show you how to use the weapons correctly.
I did acknowledge the scrounger bash was a thing and I don’t remember advocating for it coming back. The repeater M2 was also only for mag dumping close range and not plinking cross the map and the handgun only had 12 rounds and no cleave. You can tell the rest of the story too. And there isn’t much to shotguns besides walking around and blasting them into hordes, which I point out the Griffon Foot also does while also providing his own ammo sustain (since any team support argument with a grudge Bardin taking all of his is to do the same is gone) and is better at the same targets I’m hearing the Blunder and Grudge are being picked for in the first place. Without giving any support with heavy armor or specials/bosses up either as BH. And then it just goes back around in a circle where those guns are not meant to be there and Fat Shark is ruining your vision of their game. I haven’t even seen anything else in the thread yet so I won’t bother quoting you so you can throw out more comments about skill and then at the same time disqualify my opinion for pointing out a better alternative. You’re not even arguing in good faith anymore and most people have admitted freely its a terribly lacking gun outside Huntsman which means its a badly designed weapon at present since it isn’t the range weapon exclusive to him and the other Krubers only get 3 choices period. The Griffon Foot also plays well on all Saltzpyres so how the better designed weapon is the problem is anyone’s guess.
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What’s so terribly lacking about it?
Range 
Not having the range that makes its increased damage relevant or the reload time/free shot every 2 hits after the first activation on Huntsman. If there were cause to bother with it on the others I wouldn’t care. Clearly increasing the ammo wouldn’t make it any more or less infinite on Huntsman. Engineer could run grudge with scavenged shot but it’s gone now.
So just a thought - according to a random warhammer wiki, the blunderbuss is noteworthy for using anything for shot - nails, rocks, etc.
How about letting people refill it with “R” similar in mechanic (but not animation) to hand axe? Don’t touch anything else, just make it so “R” refills, and see if the increased ammo sustain is enough to make it a more common pick on legend.
I don’t think this will be that big of a deal in pre-mades, nor will it change bluntsman much (who’s already built for sustain). It just makes it more viable on lower levels with the other two careers.
-Jeff
Infinite ammo would be too much. But nails and stuff makes me think that out of all the shotguns it seems the best candidate for having a bleed after-effect - having nails ripping through you seems pretty nasty. Might help it kill specials and Stormvermin better if the first blast didn’t do it.
Just throwing that out there; I rarely use blunder so I have no idea if it’s in a state where it needs a buff.
Honestly bashes generating THP might be a bit of a bigger deal than I’d originally thought. Unsurprisingly extremely potent with temp health on stagger, and allows HS to run a more single target anti armour melee weapon while still getting shield levels of thp from stagger. Give it a reliable centre pellet and I’d really struggle to fault it.
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I must agree i tried it yesterday blunsman and worked pretty well but i must say, maybe it was my inexperience with the weapon but it felt like i was getting less headshots than i should and it was puzzling. Ammo sustain really feels like it can be a problem for other careers if they don’t have a pocket RV but maybe more consistent spread could help. At the end of the day i still feel that grudge RV performs better but maybe is just my inexperience.
I agree with this.
The only thing I’d add is that Conservative Shooter is the best ammo generation, which means you have to intentionally miss half of your shots, or jump on every shot.
Huntsman can have unlimited ammo with it.
FK struggles, but your team can just take unlimited ammo builds and let you deal stupid damage with the Power = Cleave.
I want to add a detail here - after digging through the code I found a difference in the blunderbuss and grudge spread. The blunderbuss has two spread layers while the grudge has one. With the grudge you get like all the pellets spread in roughly a ring around the center pellet while the blunderbuss puts half it’s pellets into a tighter center cone. From a code perspective if a shotgun has two spread layers it puts half the pellets in like a 40% sized (forgot the actual number) cone from the second cone.
This means: blunderbuss has fewer pellets in the outer cone than grudge, and more pellets going center-ish but not center. Theoretically this would make the blunderbuss kill single targets better at a longer ranges but make it worse / less consistent at clearing large groups due to the smaller numbers of pellets going wide.
This is the type of comments that make me question if people even played with the weapons they have opinions about. The Grudgeraker has a much tighter spread from the start. The whole “theory” would only make sense if that wouldn’t be the case. In reality both weapons do equally well on mid+ range, with the difference that the grudge pull the trigger twice, which in alot of cases will kill the leech/stormer you are aiming at.
Conservative Shooter is wonky as hell on Blunder. If you don’t have infinite density, or are shooting in melee range you are not guaranteed to get a bullet back, even if you shoot at head hight and hear the headshot noise. Its great on Huntsman, since he gets two bullets back when it works and him not needing ammo during Prowl, but just unreliable on FK and Merc. Conservative on Shotguns is just weird and everything but easy infinite ammo.
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Okay so first of all, I don’t just come into discussions about the things and lie about them for laughs and chuckles so please have some respect. You can try to understand what I’m saying and disagree or say you don’t understand without these kinds of comments.
The grudge has a guaranteed center pellet but if you shoot at a wall you’ll see they have very similar spread radii. From the code it looks like it’s the exact same radial spread modifier but in practice it seems to have some additional variance.
At long range the grudge performance can be much more consistent because if you take a piece of paper and draw a center dot and a circle, and then draw 8 random dots on the circle, you’ll generally land at least 3 on target. That’s the grudge spread pattern. And that’ll work as long as your targets head and feet touch the outer cone as they likely do in your video.
If you take out the blunderbuss you’re spreading your shots around two circles with no guaranteed center pellet. Theoretically this would make it perform better a longer ranges, but at most longer ranges in the video the variance gets significantly outweighed by the guaranteed center pellet (called a bulls eye pellet in the code) which represents a third or even half the pellets hitting targets at long range with the grudge.
The blunderbuss suffers from significant statistical variance issues because 12 pellets around two spread cones gives poorer wide cone coverage without really making up for it in extreme long range situations with the inner cone, due to having lots of noise and basically what usually manifests as a bald spot in the center of mass, which is exactly where the grudge center pellet always lands. (The bald spot on the blunder is smaller than the grudge but on practice this doesn’t make it much better)
If you think I’m misreading the lua files or am not understanding the holes in the keep main door, that’s fine. Correct me. But that’s what I’ve been able to figure out in my testing and research, which was meant to be helpful to make the discussion productive.
EDIT: so to demonstrate what I’m talking about I have screenshots of the patterns:
Interestingly, you’ll notice that the blunderbuss has more pellets going closer to the center (tighter inner radius), but also seems to stray outside the cone that the grudge has (larger outer radius). I actually can’t account for the outer variance from the code since neither weapon seems to define a different spread cone, as far as I can tell they both use the default 0.8 but the inner variance is because BB has two cones (a 50% size cone within the normal one) while the grudge has just the one.
You’ll also notice there seems to be some kind of moire pattern where the grudge has a bias to verticals, horizontals, and 45 degrees. You see eight distinct pellet spread locations where the blunderbuss is more random.
EDIT 2: Also the way pellets distribute in the code seems to be an even circular distribution. So for the blunderbuss’ two layers of 6 pellets you get hexagons (with random noise) while with grudge you get octagons (with random noise). The octagon shape obviously lends itself well to landing multiple pellets on a vertical target at medium to long ranges irrespective of spread cone diameter, as you can imagine looking at the screenshot above.
Edit3:
I drew the spread patterns as I understand them from the code. Probably not perfect. My hexagon is definitely too wide on the BB but you get the idea.
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Interesting find and information. It certainly feels like the Grudge fires closer to the center of the screen in game even without the proof. Blunder feels like you’d expect a smooth bore cannon to feel like in game spread wise but without the oomf from Huntsman I don’t use it. And I literally only play it on Huntsman when I want to Kruber and not deal with his horrible slow paced range selection forcing you to slow down to aim accurately. I won’t even mention the longbow which is still ruined for the sake of quick close range shots.
Literally just left click deals 50 damage on infantry with great accuracy and fire rate ; 100 on a crit, 80 on a headshot and 130 on crit headshot…
Against armoured it is 10, 25 crit, 30 hs and 45 crit hs, roughly.
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I was referring to aiming, since it still doesn’t center up until it zooms. Making it hard to make good on his headshots or the lack of movement penalty when initially pulling the string vs the elf longbow. Yet another change that happened to satisfy a small minority of players.
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Sorry if I’m derailing the thread a little (my post is a bit verbose).
I’ve linked it to a close range quick shot. I wouldn’t say it’s ruined for the task. It can get a shot in a reasonable time-frame. It’s not the best accuracy-wise, and Huntsman would benefit from some accuracy or less range spread talent or passive, but otherwise at close range it works. Every other close range shot I miss is my own fault in this run.
I’d also be a fan of fully charged shot having slightly more cleave, not a lot more but enough to cleave one more horde chaff enemy (minor nitpick of mine, just feels odd that it has the same cleave as the partially charged shot).
I ran a max movement speed build in this (15%) to take advantage of the 0 movespeed slowdown the partially charged shots have. It performed decently I think. Though to be honest I think I get hard-carried by Mace & Sword. I wish the 1h Sword had a better movement curve and one extra dodge to make it actually be Kruber’s most mobile weapon, more useful heavies and that Huntsman had thp on cleave, for a fully finesse style Huntsman build.
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Amen to that. Heavy linesman on heavys and one extra dodge could make it a fine wapon.
Back to BB, i feel like maybe a 30%ish increase in ammo could make the weapon more accessible to other kruber careers.