Rampage and desperado are designed very backwards to me. Desperado, the shooty gun spam thing with little to no actual buff towards damage output, rewards players on a per-kill basis, while Rampage, the ability that allows you to reliably kill crushers in 3 swings with heavy sword, buffing cleave damage, rending, and causing a huge aoe stagger on end, is rewarded on a per-swing basis, which can also be buffed.
Rampage could definitely be nerfed in this regard, it’s already massively buffed by not having its downsides and its cooldown is not very long since you as scum have many ways to replenish it fast and by the time its over you’re probably taking time to go somewhere else anyway.
Desperado’s problem for me is that it doesn’t really reward much but it also doesn’t risk much. You take a fast shooting weapon and kill horde, it basically lasts forever. You take a weapon with long reload times, it just reloads the gun for you and you get your shots and that’s about it. Your only loss is that you don’t take rampage or stimm supply. Which last way longer, get more benefits, even replenish somewhat faster and are better placed on the talent tree to be honest.
I think rampage and desperado should both drain stamina overtime, but rampage restores stamina based on kills and increases stamina restored on taking damage, while desperado restores stamina based on where their shots land or how much damage dealt, i.e. landing a crit-headshot with a revolver on a crusher point-blank should restore more than blasting groaner legs 15 meters away with dual sub-machine guns.
Then, in addition to this change, Desperado should boost reload speed by two or three times, at the cost of stamina per reload. This would punish a spray and pray weapon like submachine guns plinking at carapace for no damage while giving a buff to weapons like revolver and shotgun that have notoriously long reloads but highly effective cleave and single target damage, and remain somewhat ineffective towards the in-between weapons, and ultimately kill a weapon like needle pistol in such a build, which does almost no damage per direct hit and has to reload very frequently.
Additional node ideas would have to be a tug of war between something extremely good for specific weapons, but you have to deal with stamina economy. An instant reload perk that drains even more stamina, like an additional 15-25%. Maybe a node where you can shoot at twice the speed, but you can’t ads and the recoil is increased while accuracy is decreased. An obvious reversal node you could pull out, just for fun, could make stamina no longer drain overtime, but drains on a per-shot/reload basis, and only giving you stamina back on kill.
This would, in theory, make infinite ammo builds more possible with more variety. I personally don’t care if there is a ramping drain on stamina or not, I feel like a player who is able to consistently hit headshots against approaching enemies from multiple directions at a very close distance should be able to keep this ability up as long as they can maintain that consistency. The only equilibrium I would want balance-wise is that revolvers and shotguns last much longer than submachine guns, but ultimately damage-wise both are relatively close together. This is most likely impossible, but nevertheless, make the guns that take the most effort last the longest.
They were also only interested in full ranged build of Hive Scum, and the devs nerfed it after 6 months when most players already bought DLC…
