The Veteran cocks the Bolter every time anew, when switching to it from melee. The weapon gets cocks on the first time he switches to it. Every other time, it is just wrong. Not to mention, that it would normally kick out the chambered bullet every time.
BUT the main cause of trouble on that is the fact that the cocking animation on the Bolter is extreme slow. This leads to situations where the animation straight gets you downed.
Having it be cocked on every weapon switch is just lazy game design, to not have the game to check if the weapon is loaded already when switching to it. And it hinders the game flow.
This is intended - the gun is very powerful and needs to be balanced that it is heavy and cumbersome - so hard to switch to mid engagement, and your dodge with it is limited.
I agree that they should replace racking the slide with an animation that makes it look very heavy and hard to just whip out like they do with the zealot flamethrower. Flamethrower makes sense because I can see my character struggling to just whip it out - so I go “okay it’s a heavy weapon that’s hard to control. Makes sense” - racking the slide every time with the boltgun doesn’t make sense…but it’s intended to behave the same way.
Yeah - the issue here is they’re balancing the weapon being “heavy” to use by using an animation that doesn’t make sense.
You don’t need to rack the slide every time you touch the gun. That’s not how guns work. So it makes it feel like artificial difficulty for no reason - jank.
If they swapped it so you can see your character heave it out, and clearly have a bit of trouble moving it around to give it that sense of weight, then yeah it makes more sense that if you swap out to throw a grenade, it’s hard to pull the gun back out since it’s so heavy.