An idea to make land archguns worthwhile: let them ignore innate damage resistance

[DoomFruit]

Land-based archguns. Only available at the end of a long quest chain, the ability to use them requires killing an end-game boss multiple times, they take a long time to deploy once you activate the item, ammo for them is very scarce and you can't use melee when you have one equipped.

In short, they suck

(warning: wall of text, scroll down for the TL;DR)

 

So, let's compare a pair of big hitters - the velocitus and the opticor vandal.

The Velocitus does 1200 base damage (magnetic), with 30% crit chance and 3x crit multiplier. It takes 1 second to charge up, and leaves you staggered for a further second after firing before you can do anything again. The Opticor Vandal does 500 base damage (mostly puncture, some impact and slash alongside it), has 24% crit chance with 2.6x crit multiplier. It charges to full in 0.6s and there is no recoil period before you can fire again.

On the surface, the Velocitus has more in its favour, but rifle mods are a whole different matter. Point Strike is +150% crit chance, Vital Sense is +120% crit damage. The AW equivalents, Parallax Scope and Hollowed Bullets give you +100% crit chance and +80% crit damage.

Velocitus: 60% crit chance, 5.4x multiplier. Optivandal: 60% crit chance, 5.72x multiplier.

Now we'll add on damage and multishot mods. Serration = 165% damage, (I prefer amalgam serration for its run speed bonus, we'll pick that instead for +155% damage) and Split Chamber = +90% multishot. AW guns get Rubedo-Lined Barrel for +100% damage and Dual Rounds, for +60% multishot.

Velocitus: 3840 damage inclusive of multishot, 60% crit chance, 5.4x multiplier. Optivandal: 2517.5 damage inclusive of multishot, 60% crit chance, 5.72x multiplier.

Now let's add 3x elemental mods, going for radiation + cold. Rifle mods are 90% for heat & electric, and 165% for primed cryo rounds, for a total of 345% added damage. All archgun single element mods are +120%, so that's +360% added damage.

Velocitus: 17664 damage inclusive of multishot and elementals, 60% crit chance, 5.4x multiplier. Optivandal: 11202 damage inclusive of multishot and elementals, 60% crit chance, 5.72x multiplier.

There's one mod slot left. While I have a riven on my opticor, I don't have one for the velocitus and they're highly variable anyway - so we'll ignore that. For the final velocitus slot, let's give it Shell Rush, which brings the charge time down from 1 second to 0.67s. The Optivandal charges plenty fast enough, so let's add more multishot: Vigilante Armaments, for another +60% and a final multishot counter of +150%.

Our final stats are:

Velocitus: 17664 damage inclusive of multishot and elementals, 60% crit chance, 5.4x multiplier. Average damage per shot is 64297, with a charge time of 0.67s and a recoil time of 1s.

Optivandal: 14739 damage inclusive of multishot and elementals, 60% crit chance, 5.72x multiplier. Average damage per shot is 56482, with a charge time of 0.6s.

Velocitus DPS: 38501. Optivandal DPS: 94137. That's nearly 3x.

Taking reloads into account, the velocitus needs 2 seconds and the optivandal needs 1.4 seconds. 10 shots for the velocitus, 7 for the optivandal. A full cycle will be 1.67x10 + 2 = 18.7 seconds for the velocitus, and 0.6x10 + 1.4 = 7.4 seconds for the optivandal. Sustained DPS is therefore 34383 for the velocitus and 53429 for the optivandal. This favours the archgun a bit more, but it's still dealing only 2/3 the sustained DPS of the optivandal.

Rifle ammo is also much MUCH easier to come by than archgun ammo. And don't forget that you can still use melee with an optivandal, or switch quickly to your pistol if need be.

 

(wall of text over)

With all of this in mind, why would anyone even bother with an archgun in the first place? Unless you're explicitly going to need it for a profit taker fight, it's not even worth the slot on your gear wheel.

So why not give them an actual niche in gameplay. There are plenty of enemies which for some reason have innate damage resistance which gets applied to everything. Usually, these are pretty big things - tusk thumpers, lephantis, hek, but some of them are smaller; like noxes.

I assume that the justification for this damage resistance is that they are large objects and you're using "small" (debatable, in the case of stuff like an opticor) guns against them. It stands to reason that using an equally large gun, built for space combat against armoured targets, would negate this advantage.

So how about this: let archgun weapon fire ignore innate mob damage resistances (note that this is not armour and flesh types - slash damage from a big gun would still not be very effective against ferrite or alloy plate; and puncture archgun fire would still be terrible against shields). This way, when we see some large angry thumper coming at us, it makes sense to pull out an equally large and angry two-handed underslung cannon instead of just blazing away at it with junky street pieces made in a corpus back alley. Just make sure that your bringing radiation damage, because even a very large magnet is going to be pathetically weak against a thumper's alloy armour.

Edited September 26, 2019 by DoomFruit

[Walkampf]

I thought of this idea as well.

But in this case DE whould have to drastically reduce the Ammopool of Archweapons, because this change whould make them really strong. Most archguns whould be enough to clear a mission without anything else.

 

[TylerFreeman]

1 minute ago, Walkampf said:

I thought of this idea as well.

But in this case DE whould have to drastically reduce the Ammopool of Archweapons, because this change whould make them really strong. Most archguns whould be enough to clear a mission without anything else.

 

In a sense, yeah that'd probably be the con to this suggestion like reducing the chance of archgun ammo dropping.

Even when archgun rivens had circulated into the system, I do think they should have more unique advantages to our normal gear besides 'Hey check me out, I got a gattling gun'

The fact that you're locked out of primary, secondary and melee (Including exalted abilities) really hampers their usefulness down a lot and I do wish they could tweak some adjustments here and there.

[Walkampf]

vor 42 Minuten schrieb TylerFreeman:

yeah that'd probably be the con to this suggestion like reducing the chance of archgun ammo dropping.

I dislike this approach.

I'd prefer having shorter but more frequent powerspikes compared to long but rare Powerspikes.

[DoomFruit]

1 hour ago, Walkampf said:

I thought of this idea as well.

But in this case DE whould have to drastically reduce the Ammopool of Archweapons, because this change whould make them really strong. Most archguns whould be enough to clear a mission without anything else.

The thing is that most primaries, secondaries and melee weapons are also enough to clear a mission on their own, and that they're already stronger than these gigantic anti-vehicle weapons. There's no real reason to pick an archgun.

[Urlan]

I think that is a good idea DoomFruit, since these are archguns intended for punching through space vehicles, it would stand to reason that infantry and atmosphere vehicles or bots wouldn't have the same durability (innate cheating damage resistance ala the Eidolon or Wolf of Saturn Six for example) against such firepower compared to our smaller infantry weaponry.

[Walkampf]

vor 15 Minuten schrieb DoomFruit:

and that they're already stronger than these gigantic anti-vehicle weapons.

That is the issue and the reason behind your thoughts and this thought is right.

BUT if Archweapons get such a significant buff, than there needs to be a downside, otherwise you'd simply switch around the issue without solving anything.

[DoomFruit]

3 hours ago, Walkampf said:

That is the issue and the reason behind your thoughts and this thought is right.

BUT if Archweapons get such a significant buff, than there needs to be a downside, otherwise you'd simply switch around the issue without solving anything.

The downside is that you have limited ammo, can't melee or switch to your secondary and, to a lesser extent, need to suffer through a long deploy time (this can obviously be bypassed if you ready the gun in advance).

I wouldn't change the damage of archguns in any way. They would still be statistically worse than your normal weapons, or perhaps a sidegrade at best if your normal weapons haven't been fully modded and your archgun has. They would still have the problem of being unable to melee or pistol with one out. The only thing I would alter is to let them ignore heavy mob innate damage resist. They wouldn't do any more damage against ordinary mobs, where "ordinary" here is anything from level 2 trash on Earth to level 100 (and beyond) third sortie creatures.

If this means that when people encounter a tusk thumper on the plains, they immediately pull out their archguns as a first resort, then I do not see that as a bad thing. It's a huge mob, the logical thing would be to pull out a huge gun.

If it still needs to be further counterbalanced even after that, then your idea of dropping the ammo capacity sounds fine. Just not so much that you're then unable to kill this giant enemy due to running out of bullets.

Edited September 26, 2019 by DoomFruit

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

DE was supposed to buff the mods. Maybe those changes are planned for Empyrean.