suggestions to make gunplay more interesting

[MysticDragonMage]

melee gameplay has combo management, directional combos, air combos, two different slam attacks, heavy attacks, finishers etc. compared to melee, it seems like gunplay is lacking some unique qualities. while some may argue that gunplay can be nothing more than point and click, even melee evolved from simple quick melee spam to what we have today. one can also say that the quirks of each firearm presents a sort of quality to the gameplay, yet every firearm does not have a unique quirk and its not like some melee weapons dont have their own special quirks.

my entire point is that gunplay is in need for a gameplay update to keep it as interesting as the alternative melee gameplay.

here are a few suggestions.

• standing still should decrease reload time and crouching should decrease it even more so.
• strafing while aiming or shooting a weapon should be faster than moving forward or backward.
• dodging to the side while aiming should not restrict the player from reloading or firing their weapon.
• recoil and spread should be reduced while crouching and initially so while sliding (not with a mod).
• optional camera functions so that it changes third-person perspective automatically depending on either player movement or the direction the player moves their mouse.
• knocked down enemies should receive more damage and stay down longer if a player is standing nearby or on top of them.
• give players more ways to suppress enemies. each weapon would get a suppression chance and suppressing enemies would decrease their accuracy if they are either fired upon or if the projectile was close to hitting them. is great that we can make enemies flinch but they recover afterward like it was nothing and go back to having 100% accuracy while receiving thousands of more bullets.
• give players the ability to equip sugatras on their firearms (why is this not a thing yet?).
• similar to heavy ground slams raising enemies, sliding or crouching while shooting a nearby enemy will have a chance to raise them.

Edited January 2, 2020 by MysticDragonMage

[Mephane]

7 hours ago, MysticDragonMage said:

similar to heavy ground slams raising enemies, sliding or crouching while shooting a nearby enemy will have a chance to raise them.

That'll mess with when you or someone else is trying to land headshots. Same reason why blast procs are terrible - nice crowd control in theory, terrible in practice.

[MysticDragonMage]

56 minutes ago, Mephane said:

That'll mess with when you or someone else is trying to land headshots. Same reason why blast procs are terrible - nice crowd control in theory, terrible in practice.

i cant agree with this. 

for one thing, certain conditions must be met in order to apply this effect. the player has to essentially be right next to the enemy while crouching or sliding in order to raise them from the ground, but i guess i did not make that clear enough. it would be hard to find yourself unintentionally applying this effect.

secondly, its not likely that an ally player will be able to apply the effect on multiple targets with quick succession. even if they could while crouching, it would be a slow and risky process. if they could while sliding, it would be somewhat difficult to execute in the first place and reward skill.

thirdly, melee users are applying this effect like crazy already, and I've hardly seen anyone complain about it. not to mention there are multiple other ways to CC an enemy with simple abilities and status effects.

[Aadi880]

I would like to add, is to make gunplay "feel" more satisfying as well, such as things like a cornith's "click" sounds that happen when you reload.

Visually and audibly , I think guns need a bit more "oomph", something that the quellor's alt fire does very well. Such as having tracers that actually represent the power of the weapon. High damage = High impact bullet effects and louder ricochet and muzzle sounds.

This is something that already happen with bows when you fire a full charged shot. In case of guns, landing a final kill with a headshot will cause a "explosion" effect similar to the Dread's Day Of The Dead Arrow Skin, with the explosion taking the weapon's energy color (which currently serves no purpose ever since emissive colors were implemented). Note: the explosion is purely cosmetic, and for satisfactory reasons.

Edited January 1, 2020 by Aadi880

[Lone_Dude]

18 hours ago, MysticDragonMage said:

i cant agree with this. 

for one thing, certain conditions must be met in order to apply this effect. the player has to essentially be right next to the enemy while crouching or sliding in order to raise them from the ground, but i guess i did not make that clear enough. it would be hard to find yourself unintentionally applying this effect.

secondly, its not likely that an ally player will be able to apply the effect on multiple targets with quick succession. even if they could while crouching, it would be a slow and risky process. if they could while sliding, it would be somewhat difficult to execute in the first place and reward skill.

thirdly, melee users are applying this effect like crazy already, and I've hardly seen anyone complain about it. not to mention there are multiple other ways to CC an enemy with simple abilities and status effects.

Shotguns exist. Punch through exists. Rapid fire weaponry exists. That makes this debuff extremely easy to apply. Sliding state is also applied when airborne and I use it constantly. As Mephane stated, that whole idea is disruptive to gunplay - I don't want to accidentally ragdoll enemies because I shot them while sliding. I WANT THEM DEAD not CCd. 

Staggers and flinches are okay, as long as they don't obscure enemy weakpoints, but ragdolls and knockdowns are trash. Melee can benefit from them to some extent, since you don't need to aim with melee and enemy wont shoot you while you attempt to stab it if it's CCd. But even then, ragdolls force you to CHASE the enemy and knockdowns lead to ground finishers that sometimes do not provide any benefit for the player or outright reduce the damage output and KPS since certain melee stances can get headshots.

Negatives are even worse when it comes to lifted status. It puts the enemy into that idiotic floating state and it flies away every time it's struck. Chasing it around with melee is not fun if the stance doesn't support it. Guess how well THAT will work with guns. Oh boy, cant wait to see some grunt flying 300m away from me because I shot it with my Corinth. Unless the damage multiplier against ragdolled enemies is equal to the headshot multiplier it's not beneficial at all.

I want guns to feel like guns. I don't want guns to deal less damage because of unreliable ragdoll. I don't want them to have some weird ass magical properties like melee weapons do. Keep that S#&$ away from my guns.

Aside from that - good ideas. Too bad DE won't implement them since they oppose gunplay depth because "it doesnt work well with the mobility" lmao

[Tyreaus]

On 2019-12-31 at 11:14 PM, MysticDragonMage said:

standing still should decrease reload time and crouching should decrease it even more so.

Standing still, yes. Crouching...that's more of an accuracy- and hitbox-related thing in shooters and I don't think it'd be terribly intuitive (also it's just one extra button press so not very engaging, gameplay-wise), so I'd rather see the bonus rely on stillness - that's the meat of the concept.

On 2019-12-31 at 11:14 PM, MysticDragonMage said:

strafing while aiming or shooting a weapon should be faster than moving forward or backward.

This seems kind of weird in principle: I don't see anything wrong with it, barring slower movement being meant to help aim, but why limit it to only strafing?

On 2019-12-31 at 11:14 PM, MysticDragonMage said:

dodging to the side while aiming should not restrict the player from reloading or firing their weapon.

This also seems kind of weird. For a little hop like Limbo, it's not that bad to the senses. But shooting while rolling on the ground? I could see pausing reload times in lieu of resetting them during that - it always did seem kind of weird that we could take out a magazine, flop to the ground, and tada the empty magazine is back in the gun - but it feels intuitively chaotic to be able to do all that while fish-flapping about.

On 2019-12-31 at 11:14 PM, MysticDragonMage said:

recoil and spread should be reduced while crouching and initially so while sliding (not with a mod).

Yep. See point 1.

On 2019-12-31 at 11:14 PM, MysticDragonMage said:

optional camera functions so that it changes third-person perspective automatically depending on either player movement or the direction the player moves their mouse.

I would rather retain manual control. I have particular situations where I want to have the camera positioned over one shoulder or another, and I don't trust the game to do that for me.

On 2019-12-31 at 11:14 PM, MysticDragonMage said:

knocked down enemies should receive more damage and stay down longer if a player is standing nearby or on top of them.

More damage, yes.

As far as keeping them down goes, I would personally rather see a "ground finisher" on downed enemies (able to be tied to the use key, as current melee finishers are). There's not that much interactivity with passively standing by and keeping them down and, thus, it's likely to go over most players's radars.

On 2019-12-31 at 11:14 PM, MysticDragonMage said:

give players more ways to suppress enemies. each weapon would get a suppression chance and suppressing enemies would decrease their accuracy if they are either fired upon or if the projectile was close to hitting them. is great that we can make enemies flinch but they recover afterward like it was nothing and go back to having 100% accuracy while receiving thousands of more bullets.

Decrease accuracy and increase incentive to find / use cover, I would say. I think the latter is more important, since the enemy AI feels kind of mindless when it just keeps pulling the trigger while being shot or being shot at no matter the situation. If they book it or duck when they're shot at, and only start shooting back in that scenario when there's no cover nearby, there's a sense of self-preservation—and probably a better sense of empowerment to the player, since we're actively scaring enemies. It's much more tangible than enemies happening to miss shots more often, especially with hitscan weapons where players don't really see them miss.

Talking on average, of course. Noxes are lunatics, they're not likely to care for cover.

On 2019-12-31 at 11:14 PM, MysticDragonMage said:

give players the ability to equip sugatras on their firearms (why is this not a thing yet?).

This would be nice, but this probably isn't a thing yet because firearm models are kind of all over the place. Aksomati, e.g., has a long lower clip hang that, IIRC, animates. Do you put the sugatra at the end of the barrel, then? Well, a Tombfinger kitgun has a really long barrel. It isn't quite like polearms, e.g., where no matter the polearm, a sugatra can—conceptually—be attached a few screen-inches from the grip and everything looks fine because no polearm weapon is shorter than that. Just about every firearm would need a "sugatra point" on its model, which could differ wildly from weapon to weapon in ways it doesn't with melee.

Not that it isn't doable, but it's probably a fair bit of work, especially when you want it to look nice (where does a sugatra go on throwing knives, e.g.?).

On 2019-12-31 at 11:14 PM, MysticDragonMage said:

similar to heavy ground slams raising enemies, sliding or crouching while shooting a nearby enemy will have a chance to raise them.

If I don't want to apply a lift status effect to an enemy, I have to forgo the accuracy benefit of crouching? That sucks, to be quite frank. It sucks more when counting that it ragdolls enemies, thereby moving the head hitbox around a fair bit. It sucks even more when certain weapons, e.g. Tombfinger kitguns, throw enemies about wildly and make it hard to hit them anywhere. If it's tied to crouching, even if it's just for nearby enemies, then it's likely to encourage people to avoid crouching and, thereby, negate the whole "crouch for more accuracy" shtick. Melee weapons can get away with it because their attacks A: don't always throw enemies about wildly and B: don't require the same level of precision, so the ragdoll effect has little drawback on them.

If the lifted status locked enemies in place in mid-air, that'd work much better. But it'd probably need a different status effect altogether, since the melee ragdoll, as mentioned, works with the forward momentum of many melee swings. Generally speaking, at least.

 

Personally, while most of the suggestions are just fine (some tweaks notwithstanding), I feel like—speaking in terms of Warframe—gunplay is a bit flat compared to melee, even with these changes. One points, clicks, hits the target, a number pops out, maybe sometimes gets a headshot and gets a number twice the size. There aren't combos, forced procs, alternate weakpoints, progressive damage (see, e.g., Noxes for an example that a sort of "armour stripping"), combo counters (barring snipers). Of course, that can only go so far—how does one implement "stance" combos in gunplay?—but there's still unused potential, especially when I've found melee works so much better at dealing with Veil Proxima troopers than just about anything else in my arsenal.

[MysticDragonMage]

Getting a lot of comments concerning the lifted enemies effect.

I'd like to point out that when I say that it will only effect enemies "nearby," I really mean within hugging distance. Not by a meter or two.

[peterc3]

On 2020-01-01 at 2:14 AM, MysticDragonMage said:

• standing still should decrease reload time and crouching should decrease it even more so.

Meanwhile you are being shot. This isn't the game to encourage just standing there.

On 2020-01-01 at 2:14 AM, MysticDragonMage said:

• dodging to the side while aiming should not restrict the player from reloading or firing their weapon.

Then it will lose DR. You won't maintain the DR and be able to damage during it.

On 2020-01-01 at 2:14 AM, MysticDragonMage said:

• knocked down enemies should receive more damage and stay down longer if a player is standing nearby or on top of them.

They do, from melee. How does this factor into gun play?

On 2020-01-01 at 2:14 AM, MysticDragonMage said:

• give players the ability to equip sugatras on their firearms (why is this not a thing yet?).

It's not a thing because you would literally never see it outside the Arsenal.

[Tyreaus]

6 hours ago, MysticDragonMage said:

Getting a lot of comments concerning the lifted enemies effect.

I'd like to point out that when I say that it will only effect enemies "nearby," I really mean within hugging distance. Not by a meter or two.

The core problem is that, with how the lifted status works with throwing targets around at the moment, it's a vanishingly small sweet spot between "too situational to be useful" and "too overbearing to be desired". In another fashion: when am I ever going to want to apply a lifted status? If the answer is "practically never" and the odds of triggering it are, likewise, "practically never", then no harm, no foul. But that also means the feature kind of...exists, with little actual benefit to gameplay, but with time still spent getting it in there. Would it not be better to tweak the feature into something more players would want, rather than starting with something less desired and adding circumstances to its use so players don't have to worry about it existing? Put a filet mignon in front of us rather than dusty burnt fish sticks on the other side of some security glass.

[Miyabi-sama]

1. Changeable crosshairs.

2. Making crosshairs represent actual accuracy on rapid fire.

[SpringRocker]

On 2020-01-02 at 3:49 PM, Tyreaus said:

The core problem is that, with how the lifted status works with throwing targets around at the moment, it's a vanishingly small sweet spot between "too situational to be useful" and "too overbearing to be desired". In another fashion: when am I ever going to want to apply a lifted status? If the answer is "practically never" and the odds of triggering it are, likewise, "practically never", then no harm, no foul. But that also means the feature kind of...exists, with little actual benefit to gameplay, but with time still spent getting it in there. Would it not be better to tweak the feature into something more players would want, rather than starting with something less desired and adding circumstances to its use so players don't have to worry about it existing? Put a filet mignon in front of us rather than dusty burnt fish sticks on the other side of some security glass.

Not to mention that even for melee weapons already, this can get REALLY annoying really quick. I've spent more time chasing and striking an enemy that was "lifted" via melee than I spent delivering a hit.

I agree, I'd rather shoot the enemy if I'm shooting them rather than follow a body flying up and away with my gun.

[Antris]

Some interesting ideas here!

 

[Andele3025]

On 2020-01-01 at 8:14 AM, MysticDragonMage said:

 

• strafing while aiming or shooting a weapon should be faster than moving forward or backward.
• give players the ability to equip sugatras on their firearms (why is this not a thing yet?).

Only 2 actually interesting parts. And even then the starfing/zoomed movement part should just be a buff to the mod that already does it instead (in general the while aiming mods do x/y/z non-damage thing need massive buffs).

One part that would be nice is make recoil decay standardized based on fire rate (or lock recoil from camera fully like in yee old shooters) thus reducing the high fire rate spazzes with seasick camera shake levels and as miyabi said:

On 2020-01-04 at 5:08 PM, Miyabi-sama said:

2. Making crosshairs represent actual accuracy on rapid fire.

/the outer rim of the crosshair spread out.

But then again DE still need to fix melee stances from being butchered AND make melee hitboxes actually be respected by enemies/enemies with weakspots take damage if the melee weapon hits them in the weakspot (instead of the game always being "no derp 0, i dont understand that melee weapons arent single dots thus count the swing start as a hit no matter the fact that the hitbox ripped right through the weakspot").

Edited January 6, 2020 by Andele3025

[Miyabi-sama]

15 часов назад, Andele3025 сказал:

the outer rim of the crosshair spread out.

This is bullS#&$.