I’ll be short. Currently the Needle Pistol is just yet another “content removal” tool like krak grenades, which does insane damage while requiring zero skill to apply it; effectively excluding most powerful foes from a match for the whole team. It doesn’t require precise aiming (just shoot at a silhouette and you’ll be fine), does tons of damage to armor and bosses and not even really that limited in ammo, as you still can regain it with Pickpocket by killing a single elite in melee.
Weapons like that must be heavily limited in their application or they’ll ruin the fun for the entire group, trivializing the game. Another option is to make it more skill-dependent, while not nerfing the maximum possible damage it can cause (just makes you to work for it). The latter is what I’m about to suggest.
Suggestion: change it so that only weakspot hits apply the current number of toxin stacks. Body hits apply only half of those stacks, and limbs hits apply just one toxin stack.
I had an idea about the needle gun a while back, the primary fire applying 6 stacks of chem toxin is crazy to me, bonkers even. I had the idea: what if the primary fire mode was just removed from the needle pistols entirely, and the alt fire mode is just how they function now.
here’s a professionally made diagram to explain:
hitting 30 stacks of chem toxin in 5 shots, with a 7 shot magazine is just crazy to me, and i feel like if they just got rid of the default mode it would mostly fix how strong it is. And then chem toxin itself could probably hit some stack limits similar to psykers inferno staff, it can only apply 15? stacks of soulblaze onto targets and then they use venting shriek and stuff to go higher, so what if the max stacks the needle pistol could apply was like ~15 or so and then if you wanted to apply more you’d have to use other talents like coated weaponry(+1 chem toxin on melee crit)
Infinite ammo is what makes this weapon unbalanced. And it’s most often used by HS with rampage (and shivs, ofc), who spend 90% of their tme in melee anyway. However, I wouldn’t call it a “content remover” like the psykers flamer, as this weapon isn’t so nasty that it can clear an entire screen/horde in seconds. Although I wouldn’t mind some tweaks. Let the heavier the armor (flak, carapace), the more it reduces poison (30%/60%), but max stack is same as now. The “infested” type should generally receive one stack and low cap, because they’re basically zombies—they shouldn’t care about poisons in their state. And there aren’t so many of these units that it would look like a “super-nerf”, just logic?
Cleaver is so bad for applying Chem Tox that people forget it actually exists. Needle Pistol stacks needs to be capped at much lower and the application speed nerfed while Cleaver’s need to be bumped up slightly so that it’s Scum’s premiere Chem Tox weapon instead of “Scum’s weird sticky cleave weapon that happens to apply Chem Tox.”
Fatshark has learnt nothing from very similar issues they hit with burn, bleed and Soulblaze stacks.
Personally I really dislike the secondary spread toxin everywhere mode. I have no idea why fatshark thought the damn thing should be able to do everything.
