Another Attempt at a Stug Fix

[(PSN)VagueWisdom]

Stug is a very strange & busted weapon. It's one of the few weapons that had no buff, or an insignificant one, when the great roster rebalance came around early this year. It's meant to be an explosive weapon used on crowds. I believe Stug could be good, & I'd like to see the Nox gel launcher be introduced as well, but it's held back by faulty mechanics.

The traits of the Stug

1. The listed UI damage of 156 is false. It's actually 75 from the explosion, plus 8 damage from the 4dps DoT of 1s. One damage tick on impact, a second tick at 1s, then exploding at 1.5s. The DoT can be extended by creating stacks to reset the detonation time, but it's not effective as a source of damage.
2. The listed UI status chance of 0.0% is also false. It's actually 10% from the explosions, but not the DoT. This can be increased with mods.
3. 5% crit chance. 1.5x crit damage.
4. The fire-rate feels balanced given how the weapon is meant to be used. Using the charge shot to guarantee a stacked glob is slower than just using full-auto to conjure one. However, using full-auto to create a stacked glob is difficult.
5. The explosive range of globs multiplies with the stacks. The maximum stack is 10, which will have 10x the explosive range of a singular glob. The DoT also has an AoE, which has the same range as the explosion. There is no damage fall-off.
6. The damage of a glob is also multiplied by the stacks. A stack of 5 will deal two ticks of 20 with an explosion of 375.
7. A charged glob will have a stack of 6. So to get a stack of 10, the existing glob needs to be shot 4 more times. If the player has 2 shots left, a charge shot will fire a 2 stack glob while still going through a full charge cycle, though ammo will be spent at the same rate, allowing an aware user to stop short to save time.
8. The range is affected by projectile speed & arcing.
9. Perfectly accurate with no recoil.
10. The perfect accuracy interferes with multishot mods. Using a max Barrel Diffusion will cause Stug to automatically fire 2 stack globs, with 20% of the globs being 3 stack, & adding Lethal Torrent increases that to 80% of all globs being 3 stack. Doing a charge shot for 6 ammo will be an automatic 10 stack, though instances of multishot (& ammo) are wasted because of this.

Problems with these traits

1. The damage is very low.
2. For a status weapon, 10% status chance is pathetic.
3. If it were a proper status weapon, the low crit would be okay.
4. I don't see any issue with the fire-rate currently.
5. The explosive range of a fully 10 stacked glob is about as large as the Pox AoE. I also don't see issue with this.
6. The problem with this is that a fully stacked glob can continue to be shot, without benefit. The player is also discouraged from creating a stack because they lose potential status procs, as all globs of any stack have the same 10% status chance.
7. Going by the previous point, having to shoot a 6 stack glob 4 more times risks adding too many. The user having to eyeball their magazine when below 6 so that they don't waste time in a charge shot is terrible since that distraction will probably cause a miss (or a death).
8. The projectile speed is ever so slightly below moderate, & the arcing is heavy (perhaps the most arcing of any weapon aside from Exodia Contagion grenades).
9. The perfect accuracy might* make this weapon too good post buff. This is very unlikely.
10. Ironically, this exacerbates the point of both 6 & 7.

My attempt to fix the issues

1. Changing the explosion damage to 156 so that the UI is correct would give a fair damage boost. Since the DoT is so insignificant & short, I recommend removing it entirely & replacing it with reduced movement speed, which could start at 15% & increase that 15%, by 20%, based on the total number of globs & their stacks. 1 glob is 15%. 2 separate globs are 18%. 3 separate globs are 21.6%. 4 separate globs are 25.92%. A single 10 stack glob is 64.5% (<rounded).
2. I recommend a base status chance of 32% for singular globs, bringing Stug into parity with Tysis & Pox.
3. I don't think the crit stats need to change.
4. Fire-rate is okay. The price of guaranteeing a 6 stack glob is slightly lower single target DPS, so the user better be sure that it will get a crowd to offset that downside.
5. The explosion range is comparable to many AoE weapons. If it should go up, it would be by 30-50%.
6. Any easy way to incentivise creating stacks would be increasing status chance for each stack. Each consecutive stack will increase status chance by 2%. With 10 being the largest allowed stack, that's a maximum 50% status chance. This scaling status chance can still increase with mods.
7. To prevent players from wasting ammo, all globs that reach 10 stacks automatically detonate. The charge cycle could be changed to how the charge of Angstrum works. Where the Angstrum has a maximum charge of 3 shots (I know it's actually whatever the mag size is, but bear with me & assume 3), having only 2 shots left will charge in 2/3rd of the time it would take to charge all 3. Though unlike Angstrum, Stug should maintain the ability to hold a charge.
8. Changes to this will require some experimenting. I might be biased against weapons with poor ranged capabilities.
9. I don't believe anyone seriously cares about this possibility. Stug has been so bad for as long as we can all remember.
10. Assuming that Barrel Diffusion & Lethal Torrent are both equipped, for every single ammo that charges in, multishot is preemptively added to the charge pool. Example: while partially through a charge, 2 ammo is spent. The first triggers dual-shot for a 2 stack, the second triggers triple-shot. That totals a stack of 5, so if the user chose to fire right there, that is what the glob would be. These have not yet been fired, but the game would already have them calculated in the charge. The next ammo that is spent will result in a full charge that costs 3 ammo which can be held as normal. This situation would result in 1-2 multishot instances being wasted within any given full-charge shot, so to prevent that, an 'overcharge' of 8 is allowed but no more, as the max should be 6 normally. The charge meter would reflect this process by skipping upward for each triggered instance of multishot.

Possible glitch that could arise from this change

If point 7 gets implemented, but point 10 is not, the resulting 10 stack globs need to be coded to explode on impact. Otherwise, they'll blow up in the user's face at the muzzle.

Edited December 9, 2018 by (PS4)VagueWisdom

[NinjaZeku]

All of my yes.

Stug was my first taste of AoE funzies in this game back when I started, and I loves me some ballistic arcs,
so it getting ignored in the big balance change (as some, including myself, brought up in the feedback topic to no avail)
was just so very sad and disappointing.

[No to mention the recent buff to Staticor, which just pretty much invalidates any reason to use Stug if you have the MR.]

This poor lil' glob gun needs all the love you can spare for it. DE pls.

[Xzorn]

Stug was amazing before Parkour 2.0

You could shoot other players making their screen shake violently as you laugh watching them run into walls trying to escape you.

It was pretty much never a good weapon but I wouldn't mind if it was. Esp since the gun it's copied from could one-shot players.

[(PSN)gta4biosmka]

Fun weapon with trash stats. It's like DE prefers to make new weapons instead of fixing old ones.

[(PSN)VagueWisdom]

13 hours ago, Xzorn said:

Stug was amazing before Parkour 2.0

You could shoot other players making their screen shake violently as you laugh watching them run into walls trying to escape you.

It was pretty much never a good weapon but I wouldn't mind if it was. Esp since the gun it's copied from could one-shot players.

I'm curious now. What weapon is Stug copied from?

[Xzorn]

33 minutes ago, (PS4)VagueWisdom said:

I'm curious now. What weapon is Stug copied from?

 

The Bio Rifle from the original Unreal game which DE played a part in Developing. It was their first big hit mainstream shooter.

https://unreal.wikia.com/wiki/GES_BioRifle

The Bio Rifle is notorious in the Unreal / Unreal Tournament series for being very short range but easily capable of one-shots.

The Drakgoon was likely modeled off the Flak Cannon. Also an Unreal classic. Years back that was one of the first weapons I went for being a huge fan of the Flak Cannon but Oh, was I disappointed.

Edited December 9, 2018 by Xzorn

[(PSN)VagueWisdom]

13 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

The Bio Rifle from the original Unreal game which DE played a part in Developing. It was their first big hit mainstream shooter.

https://unreal.wikia.com/wiki/GES_BioRifle

The Drakgoon was likely modeled off the Flak Cannon. Also an Unreal classic.

Nice. The Nox goober gun must be a continuation of that.

[Doomsknightmare]

HELL YEAH ! 

DE forgot this babe in the last weapon balance pass !

[(PSN)VagueWisdom]

6 hours ago, Doomsknight said:

HELL YEAH ! 

DE forgot this babe in the last weapon balance pass !

Glad to see the influx of forum goers is getting this attention. I'm kinda worried it'll just fall by the wayside & won't get fixed.