Flak damage. Laspistol has excellent Flak adms. In fact, it does more damage to Flak armoured enemies than Unarmoured. A Crit Weakspot shot on Flak does 600 damage on a green laspistol. Lasgun, meanwhile, has terrible Flak modifiers, doing almost half damage to enemies wearing Flak. Crit Weakspot to Flak on brown Lasgun does 481 damage. Combined with pretty much zero Carapace damage, you cry anytime you see a Mauler.
Damage in general. Laspistol has excellent Finesse modifiers and does amazing damage against anything not wearing Carapace. Lasgun has good crit modifiers, but struggles to accrue the crit chance necessary to make use of them.
Lasgun has bolter-levels of mobility. Laspistol is knife-levels of mobility.
Lasgun has terrible hipfire accuracy. Laspistol barely ever needs to aim down sights.
Lasgun has terrible recoil, while the Laspistol has almost none.
Laspistol has a better blessing pool. Both get Infernus (though pistol applies it better due to higher RoF), but Opening Salvo does not compare to Dumdum, and Headhunter (the only crit chance blessing on a crit-oriented weapon) has terrible uptime.
Laspistol has better crit. I think it has a 15% crit chance by default? And afaik Lasgun just has Vet’s default 5%.
Lasgun has more ammo, but with literally triple the critchance Laspistol will make much more use of the Shock Trooper talent, evening things out.
I can’t think of a single, actually meaningful feature that might compel someone to bring an infantry lasgun over the pistol. I don’t think any single buff will make the Infantry lasgun worth it. Buff its mobility and it will still be slower and do low Flak damage. Buff its damage and it’s still immobile, with massive recoil and unusable hipfire. I think it needs an almost complete, grounds-up rework in almost all of its stats before it even begins to approach the laspistol in effectiveness.
Helbore and Infantry Lasgun get a whole 5% extra crit while ads wowie zowie.
I was curious and checked past patch notes: Infantry Lasguns haven’t gotten a single balance change since patch 14. They’re weapons designed for an entirely different video game than the one we’re playing now. I’m also not sure what they should do with them but at the very least they shouldn’t have the worst mobility and hipfire in the game. They also still suffer horrendously from suppression which is a mechanic that should have been left in the dirt by now.
I don’t play much with Las gun or pistol but I really don’t like the sight on the Las pistol especially the way the characters hold it, probably just a me thing though
Yeah I don’t like that either (I don’t like the sights on any of the guns in this game) thankfully you can just hipfire the laspistol all day long.
I wish they would let us choose in the settings to turn off “true iron sight” like in New Vegas and let us aim all guns the way ogryns single stubber is aimed.
I don’t think this will happen, judging by how FS is reluctant on complete redesigns of the weapons they’d made. I mostly agree with your points, but power-level wise the weapon is between a hammer and an anvil, and if we want to keep the gun be somewhere between a laspistol and a Helbore - which is where it should be - here’s some things to consider:
Reverse fall-off helps but doesn’t help at distances where most of the combat takes place - sniping some shooters more consistently at range is situationally useful, but more often than not you will just want to engage these enemies through pacing forward, instead of slacking behind your team,
Despite having solid finesse damage, the gun has bad bodyshot damage against most things; super relevant for Flak-clad elites and specials, but shooting regular shooters or gunners with the ILG is especially bad,
What could be made better, though, is, I think:
Whatever is responsible for hit registration with guns like ILG’s needs an improvement, to not make the gun feel inconsistent with registering hits. This has been pestering DT since release and makes any las weapons feel awful whenever it happens,
Some blessings of ILGs could get some reworks - notably Efficiency and Between the Eyes,
Efficiency could be made to either apply every several shots instead of operating on a cooldown; or just straight up offer some free shots every reload, since that would reinforce its role a bit in terms of just being a gun with good sustain but mediocre firepower. I doubt anyone would use it still, but it would still beat the current version a lot.
Another idea I would suggest is to make the “efficient shots” just apply on crits; give it a more solid shooting uptime, and make Vets consider not taking Shock Trooper to make the gun have a good uptime to begin with (+ synergy with any Crit skills basically all the classes have),
Between the Eyes for ILGs, Vigil Autoguns and Laspistols could be remade into “make bodyshots with the gun not feel terrible”; say hitting a body with a critical strike applies X% of Weakspot finesse boost to the shot, and could passively grant an increase of 2-5% crit chance, depending on level,
Give the finesse-based gun some more base crit chance; it is supposed to be a mid-ground between laspistol and a helbro, and the former has a massive crit boon of 15%, whereas the latter has at least some crit-enabling support (Surgical) but is otherwise slower to boot by long draw time; and on that note, ILGs could likely use slightly faster draw speeds, especially the 2b variant (the blue/fast one),
Hip-fire should be made to not have garbage accuracy, I concur with that thoroughly,
Durandal’s suggestion would be grand for improving the base functionality of the gun - I can’t stand the sight and its bumpiness and would rather rely on crosshairs if I could help it. The sight feels like a relic of the scrapped attachment system and most guns don’t have it, so I don’t know why the ILGs have to suffer from having a bad RMB “reticle”; at least make the sight optional.
With a specific build, green and blue lasguns usable,though worse than las pistol,but heavy one is abysmal dogshit. They really only win in their ability to aim.
The fact that lasguns have recoil at all is very strange to me. If they made lasers more realistic by removing recoil (pretty sure the NPC enemies don’t have recoiling lasguns) that would help differentiate laser and bullet weapons enormously since you just need to account for weapon sway rather than the weapon bucking in your hands
The guns having recoil has more to do with making the weapon have a certain feeling while it’s being used - if the lasguns didn’t have any recoil at all, they likely wouldn’t feel fun to use, and FS do be liking weapons that feel good to use. Also we do have “recoil-less” las weapons, being Recons and Laspistols - the roster wouldn’t be differentiated enough had all las weapons not had recoil.
Too bad the weapon hasn’t aged well, with no balance changes to support it being crept out of the role ILGs used to have, which was premium shooter disposal pre-Patch 13.
And enemies naturally do not have recoil - because why would they - they are not playing the Tide game.
Vastly larger ammo pool overall and 2x-4x the magazine capacity so you don’t need to reload very often.
Increase damage profiles across the board to be ahead of the laspistol - especially vs more armored target types.
Increase potential rate of fire, still keeping in semi-auto
Increase accuracy/reduce recoil, especially on ADS, to give it more long range utility.
Vastly increase it’s melee special attack power
If you do this, laspistol still remains just as strong as high mobility weapon that falls into that close range run & gun playstyle. Lasgun on the other hand gets much more sustained uptime, is less reliant on crits for shocktrooper and ammo economy, and put down more DPS at longer ranges. Give it a nice melee attack so you can knock enemies back and make space without having to switch off the lasgun (as much).
The fact the laspistol and Accatran-pattern do not have recoil is exactly my point. What’s the real difference between the Vigilant Autoguns and the Infantry Lasguns? They perform practically identically with barely any differences beyond optics and stat numbers.
Is this specific to the infantry lasgun (Kantrael)? Because the mention of melee attack is throwing me off and the other suggestions don’t make full sense on recon or helbore lasguns.
Edit: I should add that this isn’t a challenge to your other suggestions because the infantry lasgun could do with some love.
Although I do hope that FS maintain its paradoxical identity of a useless “Emperor’s flashlight” in the hands of poorly trained conscripts and completely deadly in the hands of masters like the Tanith First who only hit headshots and cook their cells for ammo sustainability.
The “flashlight” lasgun has always been a meme though. Lasguns have generally been described as just as deadly or deadlier than projectile weapons in the background and novels and their stats in the tabletop games are nearly identical for the most part. They have many advantages over projectile weapons (no recoil, no round travel time, rechargeable magazines, simple operation and maintenance, mostly standardised Adeptus Munitorum logistics train - depending on the theatre, as the Tanith found out once).
The joke is just born out of most things players put on the board being super- or trans-human so a T3 human wielding a S3 0AP 1D lasgun is going to have a hard time killing a Space Marine or Ork.