- It was way too free for such a strong effect
- You can achieve the same thing (better actually) for guns with onslaught it’s just gonna take a more reasonable point cost for the power it gives
- New exploit is a noticeable buff for melee weapons and more distinct from onslaught which is better talent design IMO.
2 Likes
Then we quickly run into the issue of the recon laser post-class update where it is a gun that easily deals with absolutely anything with infinite ammo, with the sole exception of not being good against horde. With how it currently is with most 2 shots only requiring one of the 2 to be a headshot and how you can shoot forever without even picking up ammo packs, it feels perfectly fine. It is the best gun for killing shooting plebs and still easily and quickly kills elites outside of ult.
Things like Crusher should in no way be killed by a lasgun cost effectively aside from Hellborne, as that really should be the domain of more dedicated anti-armor weapons. I don’t know how effective the Hellborne is at this right now as I never liked the weapon (How long it takes to switch too makes me never use it), but making the Mg XII be that good against crushers would be too much power creep in a game that just recieved massive power creep. Same should go with Maulers(Which you can already just bodyshot the flak armor chest of). Carapice armor should be really difficult for non-AP weapons to deal with.
Also, Reapers already die consistently in 3-4 headshots without utl and my XII doesn’t even have bonus damage against Unyielding perk and only a tier III Deadly Accurate. What MGXII are you using that can’t even kill one in 5 hits non-ult?
If any lasgun needs a buff it is the Kantael MG IV. With it losing the ability to 1 headshot then 1 bodyshot kill all shooters without crit really made it lose it’s point of existence as now it is faster to kill large groups of shooters by 1 shotting them with the MGXII. Maybe with a crit build and deadshot it is good, but I hate deadshott as I really value having high stamina to switch between melee and range combat frequently even on my ranged headshotting builds, as often that is what prevents you from taking chip damage from enemies T̶e̶l̶e̶p̶o̶r̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶p̶ ̶o̶f̶ successfully and skillfully sneaking up on you without using magical teleport doors or traversing 10 foot height gaps whatsoever.
1 Like
Before, it contributed to the same debuff stacks as Onslaught making taking both of them redundant. I suppose that making it stack even on ranged crits would make it too powerful for crit ranged builds but only melee will still let it be useful alongside Onslaught.
On the other hand, Autoguns slap really hard right now and come with decent armor penetration to boot.
Man I wish I had whatever infini-ammo VId Recon lasguns some of y’all found. Where I can sit on my Kantrael XII and run through an entire magazine and down two dozen foes without reloading, even with a 540something VId, Infernus IV, +flak and Maniac, I’m reloading about every 3 kills. That weapon is constantly starved for ammo. Killing a Crusher with a full rending build was faster than with most other weapons, but required staying on a target for a period of time landing repeated hits, and would still generally drain the bulk of a magazine.
Yeah, Shocktrooper helps (if you’re playing a Vet, and not say, a Gunpsyker), but it’s hardly infinite ammo, especially if you’re not facing stationary compliant foes.
Recon lasguns needed help, and now they need help again. I’ll totally grant that perhaps the Rending mechanics were not played out as intended, Recon Lasguns shouldn’t be great at killing heavily armored foes, but the Recon lasguns need more attention.
All you need is a high crit rate. You get it mostly from talents and the +5% crit perk. Another 5% comes from your hidden passive as Veteran. 20% - 25% base crit are super easy to achieve.
Bonus: Helbore Lasgun with Surgical is actual inf ammo build. 100% crit chance if you wait 2 seconds for every charge.
That’s not a thing anymore dude, that +5% in the tree IS the old passive.
But yeah Recon has extremely good crit strings, taking headhunter blessings and +5% crit chance perk on the gun should give you huge sustain.
It actually doesn’t matter if the enemy is stationary or not, shocktrooper doesn’t require you to actually hit an enemy to proc, if you crit empty air the shot is still free.
3 Likes
Infantry las requires magnitudes of order more skill to use properly than the Recon Las. There is no reason the Recon Las should have wider enemy type coverage than a weapon that is harder to use than it.
The vast majority of players in Darktide, even the really good ones, can’t crack 15% ranged weakspot rates with any gun. My proposed build would not break the game, it would allow proficient, accurate shooters to shine.
The Recon Las is also not ammo efficient at all if you can actually acquire targets quickly.
1 Like
…
Doesn’t matter. 20-25% base crit is still easy to reach.
Yes I said as much. Wasn’t countering your argument just correcting wrong information 
1 Like
I understand your point but veteran shouldn’t go for a melee build and no team would ever need such a vet for high-level difficulty. Besides, veterans, even with the “op” VId (which it wasn’t op), veteran is still a weak class compared to the other three.
1 Like
At long range, Reapers have reasonable breakpoints. The only change I’m proposing in regards to that enemy is that range should not be a factor with Infantry Lasgun weakspot hits.
Trappers also die in a single non-ult weakspot hit, but it has to be at max range. Again, range should not matter.
Oh, and Mark III Helbore can one-shot ult headshot Crushers with the right setup. 5 ult headshots on an MGXII is totally fair.
I actually don’t think the lighter variants of the Infantry Las, or any other weapon, should even exist, but I know they’d never be removed in a million years. Their inclusion made Fatshark’s balancing workload many times worse than it needed to be.
2 Likes
You’re right. Being wrong is really annoying though… I need sleep.
You’d be surprised how good a Veteran full dedication melee build is right now. Couple it with a really good Clawsword and if you do things right, you can out-DPS your team’s Zealot.
1 Like
I outright don’t believe this. It is exceptionally easy to get over 15% weakspot hit even in melee. If you are using an accurate headshot oriented weapon such as a Mk XII lasgun, you should easily be having a 80% headshot rate against most enemies aside from chargers and some of the bosses depending on their current attack animation and where you are standing in relation to them.
The Recon laser is infinite ammo from survivalist + Shock trooper + Crit perk + Crit talent in node +Opening Salvo and Headhunter. You are talking about a base 20% crit chance with the first 10 shots being 30% base along with headhunter increasing the crit chance per weakspothit by 5% per hit meaning that beginning shooting you are rocking a 35-50% crit rate with when salvo drops off decreasing to a 25-40% hit rate. Ignoring Salvo, you are getting back about 33% of ammuntion used with this.
So this is one trial of testing it quickly
Ammo Needed to Kill | Ammo losts after recovery (Mine returning 8)
Flamers: ~10|2
Ragers: ~21|13
Shotgunners: 7|Gain 1 Ammo
Sniper:5|Gain 3 Ammo
Trapper: 8|0
Grenadier:5|Gained 3
Dog:8|0
Reaper:24|16
Crusher: 43|35
Gunner:6|Gain 2
Mauler:38|30
When the recon laser can easily have a total ammo pool of 866 shots, these are obscenely low amounts of ammo needed to use to kill enemies with a proper build. Just looking at just difficulty V missions, you will have atleast ~150 elites and specials spawn when the run is over, allowing survivor to give you in total (Including the starting ammo) 2,165 shot without any ammo pickups if you remain in coherency. When you aren’t even going to be killing all of the elites and specials, this leaves plenty of room for you to even spend ammo killing waves even after factoring in we aren’t going to have perfect aim in hitting weakspots.
The Recon Laser right now even using it against crushers is exceptionally ammo effecient, as are all lasguns right now. You can maybe spend enough ammo to take an ammo pack or 2 with recon laser if you are really aggressive with shooting plebs instead of just using a Catachan Mrk 1 Sword, but you can easily go without doing such and leaving all pickups to your team. If you are running out of ammo on the recon, then that means you are not taking the proper time to make sure you hit the weakspot as a VET, or you are massively overkilling your targets without realizing it and dumping most of your ammo into a corpse, or you just have a shitty build for the gun you are using.
It’s outright easy to get 60% weakspot hit rates in melee. Melee is easy. I’m talking about ranged, and specifically ranged with guns. Staffs and Assail don’t count.
Another caveat, if you bring a gun and barely shoot it, high weak spot rates stop being indicative of anything. You need to be actually firing for this matter.
I think I’ve seen ranged weakspot rates with guns higher than 25% from players other than myself twice
Mate, in just difficulty V you will get 2.1k Ammo. You can use ammo very aggressively and not run out of ammo on the Recon. I am also certain whatever tracker you are using is probably not discriminating between melee and range, and I have to imagine doesn’t understand context such as when you will bodyshot a large crowd of plebs with the recon laser to better benifet from the Piercing aspect, which will not even use up that much ammo…Buuuut from the piercing effect, definetly ruin the ratio. I run this gun a lot on Auric and V, and I never have ammo issues and only rarely pick up ammo packs. If you are running out of ammo on the Recon, you didn’t build it to be ammo efficient. If you don’t attempt to make the gun ammo efficient, that doesn’t mean it isn’t ammo efficient.
My most recent MGXII run. Nothing special, I’m normally higher on the weakspot percent. The scoreboard clearly differentiates between melee and ranged, bro.
I’m quite sure that’s the case based on running a lot of revolver lately.
You are using a different scoreboard than me then. Regardless, you can look at yourself in the video and easily see you are not going for high accuracy as so much just for speed, as there are plenty of shots you miss that if you just were a fraction of a second more patient, you would’ve gotten a headshot.
This is not a insult by the by, there are many times where it is better to do this due to how ammo effecient lasguns are in general now. Most of the time it doesn’t really matter when shooting plebs to invest the extra time and effort making each thing a headshot. However when one is going for kills on specials or elites, that is when one should be slowing down to make sure each hit is a headshot, which then in itself ends up being the best TTK. That is funnily exactly what I meant about your tracker fundamentally not being able to understand context. I bet if you even look at your own video throughly you will see your headshot rate for specials is substantially higher than when you are just loosing random shots at plebs.
That is why the claim of a 35% headshot rate is BS. If there is a gunner, and you can only hit them in the head 35% of the time, there is no way one would be on Difficulty V with such shitty aim on a percision weapon. When you include the times you were missing 4 shots at 2 infested plebs climbing a train into your ratio, you aren’t going to get an actual realistic “What can I hit” statistic.
Feel free to post a video, my dude. I’ve never seen anyone else with the MGXII do much of anything on this game.
If you need to take forever to line up headshots and barely fire, sorry to say, you’re bad at shooters. Speed is absolutely a factor.
Also note on that video that I outscored and out ranged weak spot hit a psyker using Assail.
3 Likes