I noticed in the recent patch (1.0.30, blessings of the omnissiah) that among the plethora of positive weapon balance changes, there was absolutely nothing for the recon lasguns. Given that the guns have been in a subpar state since the massive infernus nerfs, and then were subsequently ignored in a large scale balance patch, I decided to make a post to try and get that addressed.
What happened to infernus?
For those who weren’t playing at the time, infernus was changed from a potentially infinite stacking DOT to one that is hard capped at either 6 or 9 stacks depending on your blessing tier. While a necessary change to keep from trivializing hardier targets (including bosses), the stabilization of the overwhelming power of pre-nerf infernus exposed the recons as being fairly weak in its absence.
Wouldn’t this affect other guns that could roll infernus too?
Recons are the pre-eminent infernus users, and the most clearly reliant on it due to their power without it. Having a high fire rate and low damage per shot allows you to stack it quickly and have it do noticeable damage before the target dies.
Low fire rate/high damage guns like the infantry lasguns (notably xii) and helbores are, for obvious reasons, substantially less effective users due to targets either dying in 1-2 shots, often not even applying stacks at all. These guns were clearly not balanced around relying on infernus, to the point where it’s widely considered a waste of a blessing slot on them.
What’s wrong with recons specifically?
-Recons suffer from comparatively high ttk (low dps) and also high ammo inefficiency (low damage per shot relative to total ammo). Unfortunately this a common issue with low damage/high fire rate guns and variants, and not limited to recons.
-That means not only do you take longer to kill things compared to popular alternatives (XII, agri braced, agri IAG, the newly popular vraks III), you also need to take considerably more ammo pickups from your team to do it.
-This leads to the weapons having a steep fall off in effectiveness in higher (heresy+) difficulties, most notably in damnation. Having to hoover all the ammo from your team in damnation to do your job properly isn’t a good time. If someone else is running another ammo hungry gun, now you both have a problem.
-Infernus is necessary on recons to soften this fall off and make them “competitive” with other options, but doesn’t remove it entirely, and the guns are still weaker than their meta alternatives even with t4 infernus and a 5% crit perk to support it.
-Requiring a weapon to give up a blessing/perk slot just to make up for how weak it is baseline is poor balancing. Especially if that blessing is extremely hard to get, as infernus is now (it was stealth nerfed to basically have no chance of appearing in the normal shop months ago). You could make some argument for it if the blessing is just so good that the gun is superbly amazing with it, but that’s not the case here.
But I used a recon and it felt fine!
It’s functional, just very underwhelming by comparison to strong alternatives. You won’t have any problem using them up to malice, but after that a fall off is quite noticeable. If you’re using it and felt impressed with it in higher difficulties, then I invite you to use a comparably rolled version of any of the other guns I mentioned previously. You will be blown away by the difference in killing power.
Suggestions for improvements:
-A simple increase in damage per shot would help alleviate both the ttk and ammo inefficiency issues.
-Addition of certain blessings to the recon pool (Crucian roulette, blaze away perhaps?) to make the lasgun bullet hose fantasy more supported.
-Make it so that infernus stacks will “detonate” once the total remaining damage of the burn exceeds a targets remaining health, dealing the damage instantly and executing the target. Solves the problem of infernus having a ton of wasted damage potential and improves ammo economy by removing the need to continuously shoot at it when it would have died to the burn anyway. No longer incentivizes leaving burning enemies alive (and attacking) for ammo efficiency.
-Adjust the infernus blessing to be more worth the investment/effort it takes to get if it’s really so necessary to have the gun be so reliant on it.
And more general suggestions that would also benefit a large swathe of other guns:
-Adjustments to deadshot that lets it better support high fire rate guns (works even at zero stamina? Sitting at zero stam constantly is already a big risk.) without needing to forfeit strong talents (unwavering focus, camo expert) to take a significantly less useful one (duck and dive) and then be forced to have the goofiest and most unenjoyable playstyle ever (constantly dodging back and forth while firing to maintain stamina while also making it harder to aim).
-Adjustment of crit strings to not be salvo based, therefore removing the incentive to burst fire your bullet hoses instead of full autoing them as the Emperor intended. For more info on crit strings and hidden crit mechanics, see this: Steam Community :: Guide :: Weapon Perks, Blessings and All-You-Need-To-Know
