On-foot weaponry needs a rebalance patch. Here's my proposal.

[skyeyemx]

The recent CG with ground CZs has made the bad FPS balancing exceedingly obvious. We need some changes, because right now there's a couple of issues:

1) The double L-6 + Stowed Reloading method is immensely overpowered compared to any other loadout option.

2) The Tormentor and Intimidator are by far more effective than their kinetic or thermal equivalents, leaving the kinetic/thermal guns all but worthless.

I propose a set of changes that aim to fix these issues.

• All Kinetic guns: Raw damage increased by 25%. Damage penalty when shooting at shields reduced by 50%.
  • Kinetic guns suffer from a lot of disadvantages compared to equivalent Thermal guns, due to poor shield damage and limited muzzle velocity. The fact that they suffer a penalty when damaging shields (a regenerating health pool) means Kinetic guns must have more raw damage than thermals to compensate. This will help bring their performance up to par with the top Plasma guns.
• All Thermal guns: 2x damage when hitting a headshot on an unshielded enemy.
  • Thermal guns do poor damage to bodies as a game design decision. This is fine. However, skilled players should be able to augment this by going for headshots once the enemy shield is down. This will help bring their performance up to par with the top Plasma guns.
• L-6: Stowed Reloading removed from this gun.
  • The Double L-6 + Stowed Reloading method makes combat a complete cheese. The ability to put Stowed Reloading on the L-6 should be removed entirely, and retroactively removed from older commanders' L-6s.
• Tormentor: Muzzle velocity reduced by 25%.
• Executioner: Muzzle velocity increased by 50%.
  • The above two changes are to give the two guns a more defined purpose. As it stands, the Executioner is effectively a worse Tormentor, having effectively the same two-shot kill potential and effectively the same muzzle velocity, despite having much worse rate of fire and magazine capacity. Giving the two guns noticeably different velocities gives the Tormentor a dedicated short-range role and the Executioner a long-range role.
• Oppressor: Damage increased by 50%.
  • The Oppressor suffers from the same issue all automatic slow-velocity weapons have to deal with (Advanced Plasma Accelerator, Plasma Chargers, etc): very poor effective DPS due to the combination of low velocity and low per-shot damage. It's by far the worst gun in the entire game, so it deserves a raw 50% damage increase.

As a fun bit of head thought, I also came up with a couple cool weapon types that'd help spice up the gameplay loop a bit:

• Kinetic sniper. A kinetic sniper that has extremely high kill potential against unshielded targets, but is worthless against shields, would be an incredible gun for stealth missions. You must remain stealthy with it, as if a target turns their shield on, your damage becomes minimal.
• Sci-fi melee weapon. Like a lightsaber or Halo sword. With the huge time-to-kill in this game, there's plenty of potential for a high-damage, high-risk melee weapon in on-foot combat. Karma has the L-6, Manticore has the Intimidator; why doesn't TK have a similarly unique weapon?

 

[DemiserofD]

TBH the L-6 wouldn't be such a big deal if NPCs didn't spawn in a helpless grid. Or if they had a bit more brains.

You could definitely improve things a bit, but at the heart of it, the problem is deeper than just stats. It's the fundamental design philosophy. You can only really get away with dumb NPCs if you have counterstrike-style gameplay where you die in just a few hits. If you have bullet sponges like Elite, you need to have complex and interlinked enemy behaviors. Like Mass Effect.

 

[PilotB]

Here's my suggestion. Use all the tape and epoxy and make all the primary weapons combi weapons.

Kinetic rifle has secondary laser SMG.
Laser rifle has secondary Grenade.
Laser SMG has secondary kinetic shotgun.
Kinetic SMG has secondary laser pistol.

Pistols remain the same.
Plasma weapons get a charge mode.

The grenade launcher gets nothing it's already epic.

In a world where they know 100% that between shield and armour mechanics you want mixed damage types it's stupid that we don't have those rolled into one weapon. Weapon swapping feels bad. Accept that and just roll them into one gun. The differing damage types work on ships because we can fire one or the other as required without any delay. On foot every swap is a delay. You can in theory engineer some of that delay out but it's still an interruption to the flow that has no good reason to exist.

Add new weapons that fill the existing gaps.

 

[aRJay]

I don’t do enough on foot combat to know how unbalanced things are however I am against the proposal as the majority of the rebalance is identical to power creep.

Perhaps a better approach for balance and avoidance of power creep would be to reduce the strength of the overpowered weapons instead, which would increase the time before the inevitable claims that armour and shields are too week and need buffing.

 

[Morbad]

In a world where they know 100% that between shield and armour mechanics you want mixed damage types it's stupid that we don't have those rolled into one weapon. Weapon swapping feels bad.

Frontier wants people swapping weapons. The absurdity is completely intentional. They doubled down on the worst parts of the ship mechanisms and shoehorned it into a first person infantry shooter.

Perhaps a better approach for balance and avoidance of power creep would be to reduce the strength of the overpowered weapons instead, which would increase the time before the inevitable claims that armour and shields are too week and need buffing.

I don't really think the OP's solution addresses the underlying issues with NPC combat, but I don't think there are any overpowered weapons either. TTKs are too long.

 

[PilotB]

Frontier wants people swapping weapons. The absurdity is completely intentional. They doubled down on the worst parts of the ship mechanisms and shoehorned it into a first person infantry shooter.

Oh I know it's intentional and it's by far the biggest weakness of a very weak shooter element. There's a very easy and fun fix to it but you'd need a full weapon rework which you need anyway as the current system doesn't really work out as intended and everyone just works on getting to a point they can ignore it.

 

[BackToTheMud]

I'm not saying there couldn't/shouldn't be some adjustment and additions, but the reason the L-6 is so good in conflict zones is that the bots are really dumb. They move in straig lines at low speed and they don't jump.

You also have to remember that while PvP effectively isn't a thing on foot, they still have to take PvP into account.
With that in mind, and not touching anything else you said: the kinetic sniper and "light saber" is a really bad idea. I'm not saying I don't want it, but in a open world PvP RPG it would be terrible.

 

[metatheurgist]

Frontier wants people swapping weapons. The absurdity is completely intentional. They doubled down on the worst parts of the ship mechanisms and shoehorned it into a first person infantry shooter.

Except you don't need to swap if you're using plasma.

I think it'd be better if they gave the weapons out of combat uses.

 

[DemiserofD]

Give weapons a size and discreetness level, would be an interesting option. Plasma weapons are always less discreet than the kinetic or laser options.

 

[g0oglyeyes]

I'm not saying there couldn't/shouldn't be some adjustment and additions, but the reason the L-6 is so good in conflict zones is that the bots are really dumb. They move in straig lines at low speed and they don't jump.

Yep, pretty much this. It really frustrates me that nobody cares to acknowledge they're wearing jetpacks and can't seem to negotiate an elevation change of 1 meter on a planet with less gravity than the Moon. Really, that the ground NPC AI is challenged by this is just... I'm not gonna look for it, but mentally picture Picard facepalming.