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[Suggestion] Ammo Multiplier


ReinAxefury
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I. Introduction

(if you only care about the suggestion, skip to points II and III).

I've been thinking this for a while, and the thing is some weapons really lack on the ammo economy department, and while is true that you can affect this by using ammo mutation mods, ammo case and even scavenger auras, those things are a really high price to pay to deal with a downside for a weapon (except for ammo case), specially the aura slot. This is why i thought "why on first place a bullet hose like supra gets the same ammo from ammo drops than an efficient weapon like ferrox? why a twin grakatas get the same ammo from drops than a semi auto weapon like Lex?", and i know there must be balance reasons, but i don't think that's a good way to deal with it, specially for high level missions since ammo economy plays a big role on what weapons are played. IMO if done well, this could be fixed and lead to high fire rate weapons like rifles to see  more use, same for weapons that spend a lot of ammo on single shots.

II. So, how this could work?

I have 2 ideas, both imply adding an "Ammo Multiplier" but in different ways:

II.A) Ammo Multiplier on weapons: Let primary and secondary weapons get a stat called "Ammo Multiplier" that could be seen along other stats on the arsenal and weapon description, this value will be a multiplier for the base value of each ammo drop, the same as scavenger auras, but directly on the weapons. The good thing about this is that it could be tweaked for each weapon, leading to a better handling for ammo economy overall. IE: right now, supra needs 15 rifle ammo drops to fill a single magazine, but if instead it had Ammo Multiplier of x3, it would take 5 drops (60 ammo per drop), if it was a Multiplier of x5 it would take 3 (100 ammo per drop). Note: Im not asking for those values in particular, they are just an example and nothing more.

II.B) Scaling Ammo Multiplier by Enemy level: If enemies require more ammo to die, what if they started to drop more ammo as well? Im not sure about the best multiplier for this to work, but still could be an improvement, not talking about anything crazy like 1000 ammo from one enemy 100, but maybe after every 50 levels or something add x0.5 extra ammo from enemies. If it worked like this as an example: a lvl 20 enemy would drop 20 rifle ammo, a lvl50 will drop 30, lvl100 will drop 40, and so on, a lvl500 would drop 120 rifle ammo.

III. How this will work with ammo mutations?

There are two ways, and im okay with any of them:

  1. Multiplier affects only the ammo type used by the weapon: this leads to get normal ammounts of ammo from other ammo drop types, like we currently do.
  2. Multiplier affects all ammo types: this will mean you get the result from ammo mutation multiplied too! This could be compensated with lower multipliers than option 1.

 

Lets be clear im not asking for weapons like Supra or Khom to have the best ammo economy, but i would be okay with any improvement to make bullet hose weapons a more viable choice for long runs.

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Then what is the point of the varying max ammos on different weapons if there would be no real difference in how you needed to manage ammo? This is purely a way to ignore different weapons having downsides relating to their ammo economy.

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I am afraid with the increased ammo pickup multiplier you are still ends up going to not have enough ammo
on long runs/ endless play.

One main issue with automatic rifles is that it is a point fire weapon, you shoot only one target at a time.
Then making things worse you take 3 - 5 shots to kill one enemy, pile that over a large quantity of enemies 
and you are going to run out of ammo.

My trick is to use Shred with punch through, this allow multiple enemies to be hit and killed with same number of shots, 
while Ammo Case and Vacuum helps keeping the ammo pool.

On heavier units I try to keep Lex Prime/ Aklex Prime as secondary because 
those are bullet sponges and could take half the ammo pool to kill if you are using automatics.



Again, it might have to go with planning, I usually swap out automatics with launchers 
for endless runs, unless it is quick run/ exterminate/ capture where you have short play duration, 
prolonged battle automatics is never going to cut it due to endless enemy scaling.

Though I bring ammo restores whenever I feel like spamming automatics without worrying about pick up.

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2 hours ago, Ada_Wong_SG said:

I am afraid with the increased ammo pickup multiplier you are still ends up going to not have enough ammo
on long runs/ endless play.

I agree and im okay with that, at some point any weapon is going to fall off to a point where ammo economy can't be sustained (unless they don't spend ammo ofc) and i don't pretend to change that, however, there are some weapons that spend ammo too fast (regardless of how much ammo they have), and as you said it's true that can be handled in many ways, including ammo restores, punch trough, mods, swapping weapons, etc. My suggestion is more into making it a bit less of an issue than it is now rather than a total "fix", as it's not my intention to make ammo economy trivial, just to make it less of a pain to bring certain weapons.

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5 hours ago, ReinAxefury said:

I agree and im okay with that, at some point any weapon is going to fall off to a point where ammo economy can't be sustained (unless they don't spend ammo ofc) and i don't pretend to change that, however, there are some weapons that spend ammo too fast (regardless of how much ammo they have), and as you said it's true that can be handled in many ways, including ammo restores, punch trough, mods, swapping weapons, etc. My suggestion is more into making it a bit less of an issue than it is now rather than a total "fix", as it's not my intention to make ammo economy trivial, just to make it less of a pain to bring certain weapons.

I suppose it make sense to make lighter units drop the current ammo, but enemies like Gunner and Crewman who is suppose to be a "machine gunner"
should drop a bigger ammo/ drop more ammo. Also as reward for killing heavier units. 

Since the usual case is heavy units are harder to kill and burn more ammo.

The thing is with magazine capacity of 40 - 100 rounds, rifle ammo drop is 20, 
it might be good if ammo drop is scaled to "50% of the rifle's  original capacity"
and capped at 20 rounds (anything under 40 rounds capacity will be hard capped)

Using capacity mods will not increase the ammo pick up, but weapons like Soma Prime where the base capacity is 200 rounds
will be getting 100 rifle rounds instead of 20 for the drop.

 

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12 hours ago, Ada_Wong_SG said:

I suppose it make sense to make lighter units drop the current ammo, but enemies like Gunner and Crewman who is suppose to be a "machine gunner"
should drop a bigger ammo/ drop more ammo. Also as reward for killing heavier units. 

Since the usual case is heavy units are harder to kill and burn more ammo.

The thing is with magazine capacity of 40 - 100 rounds, rifle ammo drop is 20, 
it might be good if ammo drop is scaled to "50% of the rifle's  original capacity"
and capped at 20 rounds (anything under 40 rounds capacity will be hard capped)

Using capacity mods will not increase the ammo pick up, but weapons like Soma Prime where the base capacity is 200 rounds
will be getting 100 rifle rounds instead of 20 for the drop.

 

I like those ideas too, making ammo drop dependant on base magazine size could work really well.

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1 hour ago, Julian_Skies said:

The thing, however, is that your suggestion isn't going to alleviate your problems. Why? Because DE is likely to give the Supra Vandal a x1 ammo modifier, while giving the Tiberon Prime a x3 modifier, because the point of those weapons is having bad ammo economy.

Well, it's not a point, it's a downside but you are right on that, supra and the vandal variant have that as a downside and i don't expect DE to change this. However, the main point of this thread is more in the lines of making that downside more manageable to deal with (i think i should have been a bit more clear regarding this), as removing it entirely would be really broken IMO. Now, about your assumptions, i agree that DE has took some "weird" design decisions, some of them leading to high power creep weapons. But they are not stupid, they know why they do those things, even when the community doesn't get it at first. IMO i would expect a low modifier on the Supra, but not as low as x1. And anything above x1 is better than nothing.

Also, i like @Ada_Wong_SG suggestion too (maybe a little bit more than mine), i think many weapons could benefit from it.

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@ReinAxefury Numbers I used were only hyperbolic exaggerations to show what I meant. My point being that you would still have to, ultimately, mod for ammo efficiency. Even if the Supra came with a x2 ammo modifier, it would so take five pickups to deal the same amount of damage (in that case it'd have higher fire rate and magazine to compensate)

The drawback of low ammo efficiency weapons is that you have to mod for it. Would your suggestion help then fine tune better how ammo efficient a weapon is? Hell yes. Would DE allow us to have an easier time managing that downside? I seriously doubt it.

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1 hour ago, Julian_Skies said:

Would DE allow us to have an easier time managing that downside? I seriously doubt it.

Im not sure about that, at some points DE has tried to do things to make people go back to some weapons, good examples are recent weapon reworks and beam weapon changes, even if right now they may not be interested in doing something like this, we don't know if on the future they will. Hah, or even they could take this idea and make it a gimmick for a future weapon/arcane/skill, who knows.

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