Secondary fire modes for personal weapons

[Edwe]

On-foot combat gets pretty stale after a while. I can't help feeling that it plays a bit like Unreal Tournament 99, but with all the interesting and fun mechanics stripped away.

The comparison to UT made me think that Elite could really take a specific bit of inspiration from that game: alternate fire modes for the guns.

Maybe if the feature needs to meet a grind quota in order to be added, the secondary fire could be unlocked/upgraded via a new engineering path, separate from the existing mod slots. But I digress.

Some dual fire mode ideas:

• Executioner plasma rifle has a slow, powerful ball round on primary fire, and a weaker, fast bolt round on secondary.
• Karma AR has accurate but slow semi-auto fire on primary, and rapid but inaccurate full-auto on secondary.
• Aphelion laser rifle has pulse fire on primary, and beam fire (more powerful initially, but with more aggressive damage fall-off) on secondary

You could take the idea even further (dual-fire engineering G2, if you will): the ability to combine the two fire modes to perform a special attack. For example, plasma rifle's primary-fire ball rounds explode energetically when struck by the fast secondary-fire bolt, dealing explosive damage (think Unreal Tournament's shock rifle).

Anyone else agree that this would add a bit of variety and fun to on-foot combat?