The Helbore needs a slight Tune

[Pocket_Mammoth]

The Helbore

The game in general is evolving which is great, new difficulties are pushing general player skill and demanding they find solutions for intense problems. This is reinforcing a meta for the majority of the player base. All of the weapons could use a pass to some degree, right now I want to talk about the Helbore in the context of auric and havoc but mostly havoc where the group is needing to output millions of damage.

There are three components to the Helbore that need adjusting in my opinion.

1. Charge Mechanic

2. Base Cleave

3. Blessing options

Let’s first talk about some numbers relevant to the Helbore and some important guns to compare it with. All these weapons are power 500, white rarity and mobility being the dump stat, charge rate for plas. No perks, no blessings and no talents allocated. I’m doing it this way to create a baseline. I picked the Dreg Gunner for these tests because it is an enemy that is both common and incredibly dangerous in the higher difficulties - it also happens to be usually dealt with at range.

The plasgun is here as an outlier, the more important comparison is with the Stubber. Here are some observations to keep in mind.

• The helbore has a decently high weakspot multiplier such that missing a headshot is very punishing. You can see in the last column they do 55% less damage on body shots compared to weakspot.
  • As far as I can tell the weakspot multipliers are the following:
    • Helbore ~ 2.2x
    • Stubber ~ 1.8x
    • Plas ~ 1.38x
• Out of the three Helbores the Mk V seems the most performant for a number of reasons
  • Highest rate of fire; this is rewarded because of lack of cleave
  • Best ammo efficiency which means highest damage potential each reload
• Cleave: this stat is a damage instance multiplier, it is very important with high enemy density. It can effectively double, triple, quadruple, quintuple etc, your damage. With the caveat that each weapon has a maximum damage cleave limit. There are hard limits on cleave, some weapons reach it, some do not come close. Interestingly this does not apply to effects like bleed stagger or burns etc. It’s much easier to test this with melee weapons.
  • The Helbores have a base cleave such that it hits 1 Dreg Gunner (with Hot Shot its 2 and three with Marksman active)
  • The Heavy Stubber has a base cleave such that it hit 2 Dreg Gunners
  • The Plas has a base cleave such that it hits ~14 Dreg Gunners. The testing for this was challenging so I approximated it.
• Time between Ammo Consumed: I included this stat because rate of fire was not considering charge time difference. I fired to empty each gun, recorded it and then opened it in a video editing app to count the micro seconds between each ammo consumed time interval. This demonstrates a form of rate of fire that better compares between the Helbores and other weapons. The important takeaway here is that you are creating close to 4x as many instances of damage with the heavy stubber compared to the best Helbore. Rate of fire and the base cleave achieve this for the stubber.

Charge Mechanic

The charging mechanic is the underlying identity of the helbore so it’s important to make sure it’s incentivized. While I do think it is strong I feel it needs more such that it at least is as strong as the Heavy Stubber. Reinforcing the identity of the charge mechanic is the best place to reach that level. All the Helbores could use:

• Increased cleave on charged attacks
• Adjust the damage profile to ramp up faster
• Lower all the charge up time by ~20%
  • Mk V to ~ 00:00:36
  • Mk IV to ~ 00:01:00
  • Mk IIIa to ~ 00:00:48

On an individual level I think it’s also important to differentiate the Helbores from one another. One way to do that is for each to have a different property on fully charged shots an example of that could look like.

• Mk V Fully charged shots have increased suppression
• Mk IV Fully charged shots have increased stagger
• Mk IIIa Fully charged shots have increased cleave

Base Cleave

The game has evolved to have so much density which demands cleave more than ever. The Helbore is a great candidate as the Cleaving Archetype for the las weapons. Giving the helbore a few tools to build that archetype is the solution I’m recommending. I will note: There is a blessing (Hot Shot) that offers some cleave and there is one Strength node (Marksman) in the Vet tree. With both of those active the helbore cleaves into 3 Dreg Gunners. While this is great it’s not enough; the cleave ought to be baked into the Helbore itself and specifically baked into the fully charged shot.

Adjust Blessings

The Helbore can use some Blessings adjustments that lean into its identity and reinforce certain play styles that it already has. For example it could use some more sniping blessings

• Add Blessings that play into the Identity of the Helbore

  • Headhunter
  • Deadly Accurate

• Add Strength Blessings like:

  • Pinning Fire
  • Opening Salvo

• Buff certain Blessings like:

  • Hot shot should give some base amount and another increased amount on weakpot hits

Below are the blessings the Heavy Stubber has and the Helbore for reference.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately the helbore should feel more like the Heavy Stubber while also being able to approach the effectiveness of the Plasmagun, that's a really tall order but it is one of Vets Exclusive range weapons, it should be no slouch. I didnt mention the weapon swap time and the lack of optics because those have been said many times but it certainly is a pain point.

[lw88]

bro you typed all that when instead you could have just used the weakspot cleave and fast charge blessings on one of the faster charging variants and saved yourself all that time

[Gideon404]

Interesting analysis. It’s going to take a while to evaluate some of it.

Reducing charge time weakens the surgical blessing and the synergies that come from it.

Using the plasma gun as a comparator only ever proves that the plasma gun is a terrible comparator.

[CopperBack1]

I don’t know about your chart the damage loss from non headshot isn’t greater it just has range finesse which is greater headshot / weak spot damage.

The damage on snipers baseline could be boosted as… their not very good at sniping either.

The bayonet on the 2nd helbore is terrible should all stab. Plus the hold bayonet charge is so fun should have increased damage while doing it and sprinting.

Well written ideas though would like some kind of boost and more crit blessings… can sacrifice a lot and go full autocrit and body shot pretty much everything.

[Pocket_Mammoth]

The floor for the damage ought to be higher. Not by much though imo, ive seen people just spam 10%-20% charged shots and do ok damage. It works on the MK V because it shoots so much faster. Leaning into sniper gun being sniper gun is the better direction than the DMR play style. The DMR playstyle is where you should see the infantry lasgun shine.

Ill be honest, i love the Mk IV helbore, its my favorite. When picking between marks ill usually pick the option that hits the hardest at base.

The melee bayonet attack is not as good as the others but i do appreciate that its different. It just needs to be good enough to use. Like i was saying in the post leaning into the identity of each Mark is also important. The Mk IV could be the cleave Helbore, it has the cleave charged shot and it has the cleave bayonet attack.