Introduction
After hours of using this incredibly cool archgun, both in normal missions and archwing missions, I felt like improvements can be done to make this weapon more intuitive to use and maximize it's combat effectiveness on land and in space. The problems and the solutions will be listed in point forms:
*all range and distance in this post is measured in normal/atmospheric scale (archwing scale is 4x the normal/atmospheric scale)
**IPS in this post refers to Impact, Puncture and Slash, the 3 physical damage types. Just FYI
All information in this post comes form the WARFRAME wiki
Current Issues
it has a bit of punch-through. it's intended purpose is to prevent the user from blowing up when using the gun at close quarters. It does the job, but new problems also arise-- the gun now has problems dealing full damage when trying to hit air/space targets as it doesn't explode after hitting a target, effectively lowering the DPS by ~34-36%. To maximize DPS, user has to keep the target at the edge of this gun's range, which isn't always possible and is pretty hard to consistently achieve that.
it has very limited range and damage falloff*. This is true for all archguns with damage falloff starting at 25m and ends at 87.5m. HOWEVER, the Grattler suffers the most as it's projectiles self-destruct at 87.5m, making it practically useless in longer range engagements (by that I mean it can't even fire across some larger tilesets in normal missions, especially the new gas city maps). Meanwhile, normal guns like soma and other rifles have a max range of 300m and no damage falloff (true for hit-scan weapons). Snipers have even longer range.
Solutions
add 2 firing modes for Grattler: (naming is not finial)
Armor Piercing: (if you don't like this mode the current one will also suffice)
has 2m innate punch-through and all 100% damage of the weapon is dealt by the projectile itself (same IPS** damage spread as current one). It loses some crowd attack capability for impressive corridor performance, which will work great in normal missions.
Proximity Burst: (this is heavily inspired by WW2 anti-aircraft cannon designs (works very well with Grineer's crude/ballistic weapon theme), for more reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze)
The projectile will have some similarity to the air-burst rounds fired by Corinth, only able to detonate after it passed the safety distance (slighty larger than the projectile's explosion radius). After the safety distance is passed, the projectile will explode if an enemy is detected within a set radius of the projectile (I recommend around 50% of the explosion radius) or if it hits any obstacles. With this the Grattler will be an efficient anti-air weapon in the open world, space and an deadly crowd destroyer in spacious areas of some tilesets, able to hit enemies behind covers due to the proximity fuse feature.
5% damage comes from the projectile with same IPS spread as the current one, 95% damage comes from the explosion, again same IPS spread.
Increase the range and damage falloff distance of grattler (it could also be applied to other archguns, but this post is specifically aimed at Grattler). I recommend the maximum range to be extended to 300m, same as most rifles, with damage falloff starting at 200m and ends at 300m (or remove damage falloff all together)
With the fore mentioned changes, the Grattler's potential will be truly revealed with extra bells and whistles, making it a more viable weapons for the upcoming Empyrean update and other existing content. Thanks for reading.
