Now i understand that this gun does a lot of damage and needs to be balanced somehow, but it feels like im trying to shoot an anvil covered in lard.
It is very slow to swap to, and your character racks the slide every time, so compared to the shotgun, you cant make space and quick swap to the gun to snipe out a special without eating a ton of damage if you can even get the shot off.
Even when you activate volley fire your character needs to fiddle with the gun for a bit before you can fire, and thats even when you have the gun in your hands, it is very clunky.
This might just be a me problem, but when i play the game i like guns that allows you to quickly swap between ranged and melee, and this gun just aint it. The shotgun is way more smooth and allows for more fluid game play, which is a shame, because i was really looking forward to the bolter.
Maybe there is a pattern that does not handle like a rock with sights on it.
All in all, its not just the boltgun that suffers from this whole “racking the slide” thing, a lot of the other guns seems to have this as well, and it feels really clunky and dont really make any sense in terms of realistic gun handling and kills the fluidity of the combat.
If you have a problem with the gun taking a long time to switch to, just use a different gun that has a quicker switch time. I like this way of balancing guns, personally. It lets the devs make powerhouses like the Boltgun, which otherwise would be quite hard to balance.
Or you could just… have animations that make sense, and don’t feel really jarring and out of place? The length of the animations can be identical, it is very easy to decouple this from any sort of balancing issue.
Ah I see OP also wants faster swap - I agree with you on this, the slower swap is an integral part of the balance design and I see no reason to change this.
I just wish it didn’t look so silly when you equip these weapons.
Well, i do want faster weapon swap simply because it feels better to use. The fact that you even fiddle with your gun when activating volley fire while the gun is already in your hands is mind numbing to me at least.
But that might just be my play style, as an example, if im engaged in melee but i have one or two ranged enemies shredding me, i like to have the option to create some space between me and the melee enemies, quick swap to my gun, drop the ranged mobs and then swap go back to my melee weapon.
The shotgun and the stub gun is great for this, bolter, not so much.
And yes, this slow animation/racking your slide thing is most likely a balance feature, but surely there must be other ways to balance a gun without making it feel horrible to use, it already has garbage tier dodge range, kicks like a mule, takes up way to much screen real estate and has obstructive sights.
It’s supposed to be “hybrid combat”. Hard to be hybrid when one thing works against another. If I fight in melee and game makes it harder for me to switch to range when I need it - it’s not Hybrid combat, it’s Slugginsh combat at best. Why try to change what was working well in V2. Nobody ever in V2 complained that you could smoothly change between range and melee. Nobody. Ever.
This is particularly annoying (and senseless) when you left the weapon with an empty clip… so you switch back to it, you rack the slide, put in a new mag, then rack it again, then “Welcome to the 51st millenia, you can now shoot your bolter”.
EDIT: to add to the matter, the character cocks the bolt every time it gets off a ladder. WHYYYY!?