Railjack: Why the Pilot Doesn’t Want you on the Side Guns

[ZhurZhur]

With the changes to Railjack it has become significantly more enjoyable and increasingly easier to run missions faster. However this has resulted in the fastest way to play Railjack to be the least intuitive.

The Guns:

                The Railjack has three guns: one front gun and two side guns. The Railjack’s guns almost exclusively are only capable of hitting one enemy at a time. On average the side guns have significantly worse accuracy because of the pilot’s constant movement. In the best case with all three guns in use the ship can deal with enemy fighters three times as fast. So why as a crewmember is it actually better for you to do anything other than man a side gun.

Avionics:

                Avionics are able to kill swarms of fighters faster than all three guns. As long as someone regularly uses the forge and the pilot doesn’t use their Avionics with reckless abandon any fighters will be dead before the side gunners can even aim at them. In addition to this if you’re using Tether the fastest and most cost efficient method to deal with fighters the side gunners can blow it up early wasting time.

Forward Artillery:

                Boarding a crewship takes time and the reactor explosion timer is long. Shooting the crewships with the forward artillery is significantly faster. Crewships often of all the things during the mission take the longest.

Archwing:

                While in archwing an individual can not only shoot fighters being functionally identical to a side gun except now with greater control, but they can also loot far off Avionics that the pilot has missed, do objectives, and even board a crewship early in the mission when the explosion timer will not be as detrimental.

The Result:

                As a crewmember instead of being the go to when you have nothing else to do the side guns are in fact the worst. You are either wasting time by sitting there and doing nothing as the pilot’s Avionics blast every fighter out of the sky, or actively slowing down the mission by wasting the pilot’s Avionics. Forging Flux or Dome Charges is more helpful then sitting in the side guns. Sitting in the Forward Artillery is more helpful as the pilot knows to aim you at crewships. If the only thing you want to do is shoot fighters then you are better off in archwing because then you will hit more things, can grab loot, and do objectives.

The Problem:

                The issue is the least effective action which at times is even harmful is the one that is presented as the default. The side guns of the Railjack are so much worse in effectiveness than any other reasonable action even sitting in the Archwing slingshot (A different issue) is more helpful.

A Solution:

                I don’t have any good ones. The problem with the side guns is affected by so many things that most things I can think of end up making something else worse or don’t solve the issue. You would have to make just the side guns shoot rapid fire aoe missiles with the current state of Railjack and I don’t think that’s the intended direction.

[NoSpax]

I have no problems with people in my side guns. I don't use OP mass destruction avionics anyway.

[Traumtulpe]

11 minutes ago, ZhurZhur said:

A Solution

Very simple, have some enemies that actually require focus fire. DE could add a "miniboss" type enemy to each wave of fighters, while the small fry gets taken out by Avionics, the gunners can shoot down the mvp.

There just isn't anything to shoot atm. You have AoE for the small fry, and crewships are more mission objectives, rather than viable targets.

[(XBOX)Skippy575]

18 minutes ago, ZhurZhur said:

A Solution

Go solo.

[ZhurZhur]

19 minutes ago, NoSpax said:

I have no problems with people in my side guns. I don't use OP mass destruction avionics anyway.

But if you ever join someone else's Railjack and they are using their avionics, you just joined a mission where an enire section of the railjack has become almost usless. Something like that shouldn't be happening.

14 minutes ago, (XB1)Skippy575 said:

Go solo.

Not everyone has a fully operational Railjack and thus join public missions. People don't want to join missions and find out they are unhelpful, thats why frames like Ember where disliked before their changes.

17 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

Very simple, have some enemies that actually require focus fire. DE could add a "miniboss" type enemy to each wave of fighters, while the small fry gets taken out by Avionics, the gunners can shoot down the mvp.

There just isn't anything to shoot atm. You have AoE for the small fry, and crewships are more mission objectives, rather than viable targets.

Except jumping into archwing enables you to not only 'focus fire' but also do much more. More enemies in Railjack would be a welcome addition and make the game mode more interesting yes, but it wouldn't actually solve the issue.

Edited May 15, 2020 by ZhurZhur
Spelling

[Chrysdar]

I have been joining crews at many levels in just the week or so that I started actually doing RJ missions. On the first day I participated in every tier. From what I've seen, where you are needed varies from RJ to RJ, crew to crew, mission to mission, and even at stages within a mission.  I have been on a RJ where avionics made side gunners mostly useless (until they ran out of enough resources to forge) but so far that has been uncommon (admittedly ~1.5 wks isn't much experience but I'm at 6676 rank now and my RJ has mk3 armaments & shield from it).

I like being a gunner or pilot but I think it's great that the game requires flexibility, at least if you play with other crews.

[Traumtulpe]

8 minutes ago, ZhurZhur said:

Except jumping into archwing enables you to not only 'focus fire' but also do much more.

I consider side guns and Archwing to be the same. If you have invested in your Archwing and Archguns, great, you should be able to make good use of them. If not you can always man the turret.

Being able to independently collect drops is not exactly a selling point, in particular when the drops are grouped up by Tether/Void Hole anyway.

[BlackCat500]

I'm going to give this post a like, because that's precisely the problem the archwing buffs, enemy nerfs and piloting adjustments conjured up. It has always been very difficult to aim when someone was vodka piloting, but now the enemies die so fast without the help of anyone at all if you have a decked out RJ that the difficulty and need for teamwork is laughable at best. Yeah, sure, it wasn't perfect before because enemies were bullet sponges, but it wasn't as easy as it is now either.

 

A possible solution I can think of is to add more enemies that have weak points like protected crewships, but since they will be fighters they should be more of the size of an outrider. The key point here is, the weak points can not be hurt by archwings and should be bigger than the crewship ones, so they're much easier to hit but archwings won't dominate. Hate me for suggesting this if you want, but I despise how AW had been and now are even more so a solution to all remotely difficult enemies and objectives in railjack.

[Voltage]

I don't like the side guns because they detonate Tether too early. Other than that, I could care less. I do feel bad when you have only 3 jobs on a Railjack and 4 players.

[TastyTaro]

18 минут назад, Voltage сказал:

I do feel bad when you have only 3 jobs on a Railjack and 4 players.

the problem is, that there is no need in 3 more players for RJ missions. Pilot can do the killing, repairing and forging. Away missions kinda pain for solo play, but again it's subjective.

[GreyDeath789]

It really depends on the mission and the RJ build in my experience...

Void missions having someone on the cannon to destroy crew ships is faster than having a Tenno fly over and destroy the reactor. Also, those poor Tenno that want to go out and fly around killing fighters make it hard to group them which means the pilot may not want a Tenno to fly around.

Having a Tenno go to do an objective while the RJ is killing fighters / crew ships makes the mission go faster as well.

Still, for myself, I will let other players fly to the crew ships or do the objectives for the codex scans...the side guns are fine when this is going on even if it unnecessary.

Just learn why someone wants things done a certain way...and if you want to do scans say something so they understand your intent.

 

[(PSN)FriendSharkey]

Those side guns should be mining lasers that feed materials back to the forge if they really wanted them to be useful...

Edited May 16, 2020 by (PS4)FriendSharkey

[(PSN)deathwolfclaw666]

Have side gun projectiles home into ships that come into a certain range of the projectiles and add a small shield boost or directional shield when a player is using a side gun.

I've just been hijacking Crewships and using it to destroy ships as well as trying to take some hits for the RJ opposed to using the side guns.  

[Hobie-wan]

23 hours ago, BlackCat500 said:

It has always been very difficult to aim when someone was vodka piloting

It definitely is hard to hit stuff at times from the side guns when the ship isn't just flying straight on. But as the pilot in my own ship, if I'm trying to shoot fighters, ramsleds, or avoid crewship shots, it's just what happens unfortunately. Been on both sides. Sometimes you want to fly, sometimes you want to be on the boarding party.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2020-05-15 at 11:08 PM, ZhurZhur said:

A Solution:

                I don’t have any good ones. The problem with the side guns is affected by so many things that most things I can think of end up making something else worse or don’t solve the issue. You would have to make just the side guns shoot rapid fire aoe missiles with the current state of Railjack and I don’t think that’s the intended direction.

Your implied solution appears to be for people to idle while you solo the mission. I don't know if you intended this, but you just listed damn near everything a player can do in a Railjack mission and lumped it all in "worst thing you could do." As others have said, it seems like the best solution to your issues is to play solo.

And while this might sound facetious, it's only because I strongly disagree on your central assertion that people on the side guns is a bad thing. I deliberately picked side guns which are more forgiving for the gunners - Carcinox with bonus damage rather than rate of fire, which gives them a lot of heat capacity. I want people on my side guns as often as possible simply because it gives me three sets of eyes and extra firepower without constantly docking us energy points. I don't believe there is a game design issue there TO solve. The Side Guns as there for when people don't have anything else to do, and they do a fine job for it if you build your ship around it.

Personally, I find these attempts to micromanage what other players on the team do for the sake of pointless "efficiency" to be highly offputting, to the point of citing them as one of the primary reasons I tend to avoid playing with pubbies. Rather than people playing badly, I tend to be put off far more so than people trying to sacrifice as much fun and theme as possible for the sake of shaving a few seconds off a speed run.

[ZhurZhur]

On 2020-05-16 at 7:09 PM, Steel_Rook said:

Your implied solution appears to be for people to idle while you solo the mission. I don't know if you intended this, but you just listed damn near everything a player can do in a Railjack mission and lumped it all in "worst thing you could do." As others have said, it seems like the best solution to your issues is to play solo.

And while this might sound facetious, it's only because I strongly disagree on your central assertion that people on the side guns is a bad thing. I deliberately picked side guns which are more forgiving for the gunners - Carcinox with bonus damage rather than rate of fire, which gives them a lot of heat capacity. I want people on my side guns as often as possible simply because it gives me three sets of eyes and extra firepower without constantly docking us energy points. I don't believe there is a game design issue there TO solve. The Side Guns as there for when people don't have anything else to do, and they do a fine job for it if you build your ship around it.

Personally, I find these attempts to micromanage what other players on the team do for the sake of pointless "efficiency" to be highly offputting, to the point of citing them as one of the primary reasons I tend to avoid playing with pubbies. Rather than people playing badly, I tend to be put off far more so than people trying to sacrifice as much fun and theme as possible for the sake of shaving a few seconds off a speed run.

The solution is definitly not to have the most effective strategy to be for your crewmembers to do nothing. That would only replace one issue with a different one. As long as its possible to do things faster people are going to do everything in their power to speed things up. Sure you and some other people go about things in a casual manner and every thing looks fine but if you ever join a ship that is attempting to maximize speed the side guns are usless.

When you join a mission the obvious thing to do should not be usless half the time.

Also some people enjoy going zoom zoom.

[Ham_Grenabe]

Solution is a single gunners seat who controls all weaponry. You want to drive, you drive. You want to shoot, you shoot. You want to cosplay a fire extinguisher, you do that.

if you’re solo, that’s the only time the pilot can control a weapon system. 

Edited May 20, 2020 by Ham_Grenabe

[MysticDragonMage]

it is convenient how as soon as archwing received buffs in railjack that only now we are seeing that most players dont want to play on the railjack.

chances are, a player already has a decent archwing after gaining access to railjack content. so why bother spending hundreds of hours farming for better side guns or risk encountering trash side guns that the host neglects to upgrade?

i cant stress this enough:

players need the ability to carry their own railjack guns with them; so that when a player interacts with either the pilot seat or side guns, they would be using the railjack gun they prefer to use rather than the host's.

and, there needs to be limitations on how often a player can use their archwing at full power in railjack missions. the unlimited use of archwing defeats the original purpose of railjack as aco-op game mode, because deep down everyone wants to be the lone-gundum-strikersuitzero-insertmechafantasy-wolf. they cant take that away, so might as well give everyone a FAIR chance to play this role rather than one or two players forcing the role upon themselves and thus leaving at least two other players to care for the ship.

[KochDerFrettchen]

I have no problem with this, I would rather fly around in my archwing than sit on a side cannon. The side-guns being better than using archwing would incentivize me to play less railjack, not use the side-guns more.

Edited May 20, 2020 by KochDerFrettchen

[Educated_Beast]

On 2020-05-16 at 6:09 PM, Steel_Rook said:

 

Personally, I find these attempts to micromanage what other players on the team do for the sake of pointless "efficiency" to be highly offputting, to the point of citing them as one of the primary reasons I tend to avoid playing with pubbies. Rather than people playing badly, I tend to be put off far more so than people trying to sacrifice as much fun and theme as possible for the sake of shaving a few seconds off a speed run.

Agreed. 

If you really want people off your side guns, leave the base weapon there.  We cannot get rid of it from inventory anyway so may as well put them there.  

I think DE needs to remove the ability for side gunners to use battle avionics and give them thier own munition pool (would require an extra column on forge).  Then it would be beneficial to have them casting on the side firing thier own missiles.  Independent alt fire would be nice to, I like galvarc as pilot, but it sucks in side gun position.   Would be nice to give side gunners mistakes separately.  

 

[UUDDLRLRBA_START]

On 2020-05-15 at 5:59 PM, (PS4)FriendSharkey said:

Those side guns should be mining lasers that feed materials back to the forge if they really wanted them to be useful...

Those side guns should instead, allow the turret player to pop off the Railjack in their own mini-fighter and pilot/shoot enemies like a mini-Railjack (or Mini-Jack), with perhaps a fraction of the main RJ's HP and shields.