A Vehicle Wheel Separate From The Gear Wheel?

[Siubijeni]

I'm not really sure what category this best fits in, so I'll stick to general.
Basically, I don't think the way vehicle launchers are implemented as gear equips is as smooth or ideal as it could be. They take up space on your gear wheel, which isn't as big of a deal now that it's not limited to so few slots, but it's still not great for several reasons:

1. Using a hotkey is encouraged with vehicles, since it makes the launch more instantaneous. It speeds up runs, it means you have a better panic button to escape, etc.
2. You can only hotkey the first twelve slots. That's more than enough for a lot of people, but some run with a lot of gear items that they don't want to unequip or re-equip all the time.
3. The first slots are more easily accessible, which means you'd probably want the stuff you're not hotkeying to be there. So you can get to it faster with the full wheel.
4. This means your vehicle launchers, if you want to hotkey them (encouraged by the way they deploy), are kind of in the way of what seems to be the most intuitive and sensible layout.
5. Most of the keys on the left side of the keyboard, around WASD, are already used by the game anyway. So individually keybinding vehicles means moving existing binds further out of reach, or putting the vehicle binds on the right side of the keyboard. This may not be a big deal, but I find having to reach for binds or take a hand off the mouse for a bind is really only useful for stuff that isn't going to be used in combat (or at least in combat that could reasonably kill you... pulling out a synth scanner amongst low level enemies doesn't count, for example).

I think a great change would be another "gear" wheel for vehicle selection. The arsenal already groups vehicles together, now, with the K-Drive and Archwing together. Why not make a second wheel (currently it would only need two sections) for vehicle launchers? I propose the Z key for the default bind of this wheel. Z for zoom-zoom.

For example, hit Z and swipe the mouse up to equip your Archwing. Hit Z and swipe the mouse down to equip your K-Drive. Those directions seem pretty logical, chekchek? Even if many more vehicles are added, I have a hard time seeing you as needing to equip more than four at a time (if that, and four dedicated vehicle slots is better than those taking up four of your general gear slots and adding to the clutter) and diagonals aren't hard to manage, either. You can easily do up to four slots while staying both quick and accurate with your wheel, it's only once you get into higher numbers that you really need to worry about slowing down to make sure you hit the right section.

The option could always be added to add hotkeys to these slots, similarly to the first gear slots. That way the people who really want to have individual keybinds for each of their vehicles still get their way. Or I mentioned picking which vehicles you had on the wheel if it ever got to the point there were enough vehicles to need that... you could always make it so if you only have one vehicle equipped it doesn't even bring up the wheel, just acts like the hotkeys do now. It's a very flexible system.

TL;DR: I think that vehicle launchers should have their own dedicated gear wheel opened by the Z key, because even if (and in some ways, especially if) more vehicles are added that system removes a lot of clutter from your general gear wheels and hotkeys, while retaining nearly all of the speed and accuracy.

Edited November 14, 2018 by Siubijeni
Better title. Hopefully.