Most people will have encountered plasma gunners by now, and encounter I mean getting shot from across the map and toughness stripped with absolutely zero warning. God forbid there’s multiple in a group because then they all hit you back to back and instantly down you from full.
Each individual component of the plasma gunners seems fine on paper, but when added together it becomes overpowered. Here’s all that they can do (that I can fit in a reasonable list at least):
- Perfect aim
- Full toughness strip on hit (regardless of gold toughness or damage reduction)
- Mauler armor pattern (carapace head, flak body)
- Gunner movement while firing
- Shotgunner fire rate
- Shotgunner style lack of suppression
- Small and easily missable visual model
- Inconsistent firing pattern (sometimes they charge their shots over a couple seconds, and sometimes in less than half a second)
- Technically has a melee weapon and so doesn’t have gunner damage resist apply to it
- High health damage
- High health pool
- Shotgunner spawn rates
- Zero spawn sound queues or passive sound queues
- No friendly fire damage and enemies can’t block a plasmagunners shots (unlike with other gunner type enemies)
- Knockback and stun on hitting the player
This is just simply too much for an elite enemy to do. Every other enemy has some unique thing they are good at, but then has weaknesses that the player can exploit. For example:
- Snipers are great at holding angles and denying comfortable pushes from a team, but their low health and very obvious laser make it very possible to find and counter snipe them.
- Trappers can instantly cause a down on a player if they are caught off guard and alone, but have distinct spawn queues (most of the time) and can mostly be mitigated by playing with your team
- Reapers are big hp blocks that can do high damage, but are tuned to do uniquely low toughness damage and a slow firing startup, so they are only threatening if you give them time to strip your toughness first (and other enemies can get in the way of their bullets)
I could go on and on, but the point of this post is plasma gunners. I genuinely can’t think of a negative that plasma gunners have, or were intended to have, to make them balanced. So, I propose a few ideas for giving them a unique place in the roster while balancing them down to a much more expected power level:
- This first idea would give them a place almost opposite reapers. Where reapers do fairly low toughness but absolutely shred your health, plasma gunners will do very high toughness damage but do almost nothing to health. First of all, decrease the spawn rate to be closer to that of reapers. Secondly lower the health damage dealt By a lot (as in no more than 20 damage base. Third, remove the stun on hit. Fourth, let them be affected by gunner damage resist. This isn’t my favorite idea as it still leaves them with the problem of endlessly firing shots at you from narnia and constantly stripping your toughness with little counter play.
- The second idea is to keep most of their potency, but weaken them through suppression. First, turn them into a specialist enemy meaning lowering their spawn rate, giving them distinct spawn and sound queues, and have them take up slots in the special cap. Next, make them be susceptible to very suppression, as in a single shredder auto pistol shot in their general direction is enough to either drastically throw off their aim so they aren’t a pinpoint shot, or will cause them to cower and hide behind cover. This is my personal favorite idea. It keeps their individual threat if they are completely ignored but solves but solves many of the main problems with them. Them being a specialist removes the chance of more than a few being active at once. Them having sound queues would lower you being unaware of their existence until they hit you and strip your toughness through a horde. Them being easily and heavily suppressed would give them a form of counter play where you aren’t necessarily killing them, but can “disable” them for several seconds at a time without having to be accurate (note they would still take up special slots while suppressed which means less of other specials being spammed). And, a generous suppression radius would mean that their missable model and strafing aren’t as impactful as you don’t have to be accurate to get the suppress.
- The last idea is moreso just a statement, the plasma gunner needs to have at least a few of the first list I made on this post either neutered or completely removed. They simply aren’t fun or fair to fight, and single handedly have forced bubble psyker back into being a required class at higher difficulties, which forcing any one class into any one build is simply just annoying. Having an enemy who’s only counter play is to have one or two people on your team spam bubbles is just annoying and boring
Please leave your own ideas for how you think they should change plasma gunners, my opinions and ideas aren’t by any means guaranteed to be what’s best nor are they guaranteed to be what fatshark is willing to implement, the more ideas we can throw around, the better.
My people are tagging these things quietly and the plasma scav is walking around politely before suddenly ruining my life!
by enforcing “meta” holdout spots that can’t get ganked instantly by their random spawns. If that was the goal, turning a boring mode even more boring, then FS nailed it.