The Plasma gun in the game at the moment has many gameplay disadvantages that I believe should be changed or altered in order to make the weapon feel more powerful and useful when compared to the other weapons available. Thermal Venting the Plasma gun between the overheat ranges from 36-100% results in chip damage to your health bar, which is quite annoying and a huge disadvantage when playing at higher difficulties where managing health is crucial to surviving and contributing to the Team. This results most veteran players I as well as myself completely ignoring the overheat ability unless your on top of a med kit in the middle of combat, in which case you probably have a horde of other problems. Instead rather, its more optimal to pick the right combination of perks to increase the reload speed to cool down and not have to deal with the health loss Venting has as reloading the Plasma gun completely cools the overheat. This then results in very frequent unnecessary reloads which adds to the frustration of using the weapon.
The cooldown rate of the overheat is also considerably slow and frustratingly inconsistent, as in the drain rate will increase and decrease at certain percentages which has an arbitrary effect when already managing the abysmal rate of fire and complete lack of ADS. The average amount of shots you can get is around 6 normal charged shots and 4 overcharged to overheat and when comparing this to the damage output a Bolt gun or Autolasgun on Volleyfire the Plasma gun’s firepower feels completely lackluster. Along with the poor damage potential the penetration of only 2 Poxwalkers with no splash damage decreases the total usefulness of the weapon overall and at the higher difficulties a one shot isn’t guaranteed to kill a single shooter at which point you only have 4 shots left to deal with the 9 or 10 shooters about to gun you down. Game mechanically speaking playing with the Plasma gun is like playing with a (glowing) six-shooter with no ADS and can blow you up and kill you all while damaging you for using its Alt Ability with a super long reload and inconsistent cooldown.
I’ve thought of a few possible solutions to help mitigate the problems this gun feels to have at the moment. For the Thermal Venting and Overheat mechanic I would change the Venting’s health damage to instead a combination of Health and Toughness damage at certain overheat thresholds. Lets say overheating from 100-85% would incur the regular health chip damage but after Venting from 84%-37% it would chip damage Toughness instead of health and below 36% it would just stay the same at no damage whatsoever. Adding some small splash damage and a little extra penetration to the regular charged shots would help add some “power” to the weapon and help with its crowd control capabilities which its lacking without busting it too bad. Adding 2 regular charge shots in the overheat capacity would go a long way in helping its rate of fire problem while not stepping on the Bolt guns magazine. Also taking the Plasma gun out on the Power Outage missions could do with some attention as the coils on the Plasma gun itself glow quite brightly and even intensely when overheated but this had absolutely no effect on the lighting environment, which is completely understandable as I’m sure this would result in some performance impact but would be nice to see.
All in all, the Plasma gun feels like a disappointment to use because of a combination of how the gun functions currently in the Pre-Order Beta. The gun itself looks absolutely stunning, and to say a work of art is an understatement as the attention to detail and effort involved in its creation is very much apparent the gun is absolutely beautiful and a joy to listen to, not to undermine the other amazingly crafted weapons I just have a love for 40k Plasma guns. I hope my post didn’t feel like a ramble its my first time posting on a forum with some amount of effort involved and I hope I provided useful feedback with the solutions I provided however I am by no means knowledgeable on the interworking of the balancing of the game. Any feedback to my feedback would be much appreciated in the comments.
Thank you Fatshark and the Developers for this amazingly crafted Warhammer 40k game, it truly is a rarity and an honour to receive a good 40k game in this day.
Edit: please forgive my formatting I don’t use forums often but tried to space the paragraphs as evenly as possible but the post looks different then the edit for some reason 
