The Ripper Gun for the Ogryn has a few drawbacks which are well designed.
One is that you cannot quickly aim it, you have to wait for the handle flicking animation, and when you are aiming it, you move very slowly. These mean that you have to pick your spots to let loose with it very intentionally, you can’t simply raise it and lower it as needed.
Two, ammo management. It has very limited ammunition, and ammo pickups give you very little. At the time of writing, I’m using a Ripper Gun with a 15 shell drum, and an ammo pickup only gives 12 shells.
Three, range. The gun is only effective at short range, and sometimes mid range with enough recoil control.
I think the design of these drawbacks is fine and provide a pretty cerebral playstyle for the weapon compared to other weapons, but I would suggest the following tweaks.
- Please add the ability to use melee attacks while aiming with the handle. One of the main use cases of aiming over the burst fire is to mow down hordes, and being able to weave in melee stabs without having to go through the flick-the-handle-back-stab-flick-the-handle-out animation would improve the flow and QoL of the weapon so much
- Please make ammo tins give at least one full drum of ammo (whatever the drum size of your individual ripper gun is.) Being out of ammo, going to pick up an ammo tin, and not even getting one full drum feel pretty bad. It’s also a very ammo hungry weapon, and as a result, I feel that to keep the ammo managed, I have to either take the lion’s share of the ammo, or I have to go through levels without using the weapon much, which also feels bad. Even a small tweak would help to offset this a lot.
- Please make everyone else hear the cool thudding sound of the gun firing, rather than the pak pak pak. What’s the point of firing a badass sounding gun if nobody else can hear how cool I am? (joke)