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Tenet Diplos lock-on problems


(PSN)digitalgabeg

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The Tenet Diplos are an excellent weapon overall, powerful and fun to use. The only down-side to this weapon is the lock-on feature; it sounds fun in theory, but is actually a detriment to the weapon in practice because of the way it is implemented.

For context, when a player wielding the Diplos is aiming down sights, the weapon will lock onto any creatures that the player’s reticule passes over. When the player presses the trigger while the weapon is locked on, it fires two shots per locked-on target which home in on their targets, and then loses its target lock. It also loses all target locks if the player stops aiming down sights. The weapon will not lock-on while the player is firing.

The problems here are:

* The lock on indicators are shown on the targets’ heads, but the shots the weapon fires do not actually home in on their heads, they home in on their center of mass. Therefore the homing shots rarely get headshots.

* The homing shots consume twice as much ammo as normal shots, but do not appear to do any additional damage.

* The weapon’s trigger normally operates in full-auto, but when the weapon has a lock it switches to semi-automatic. That is, pressing and holding the trigger when you have a lock does not fire continuously, it fires the same two shots per target as it would if you simply tapped the trigger.

* Because the weapon loses its locks when you fire, you cannot tap the trigger to fire at the same targets repeatedly; if your first seeking shots do not kill the target, you must lock onto it again.

* Because the lock-on feature activates when we aim down sights, it often occurs when we do not intend it to. The only way to fire this weapon at full-auto while aiming is to aim _away_ from your target, hold the trigger to start firing, and then move your aim onto your intended target. This is needlessly cumbersome.

So, to summarize, the lock-on feature seems designed to get a bunch of one-shot kills all at once, but because it doesn’t do more damage and doesn’t target heads, it can’t accomplish this against high-level enemies. Because it doesn’t allow automatic firing while locked on, at high enemy levels the lock-on shots actually kill enemies more _slowly_ than the normal firing mode. And because the lock-on mode is activated by aiming, we often activate the lock-on mode unintentionally and it is difficulty to use the weapon for precise automatic fire.

To fix this, I suggest the following changes:

1) Alter the lock-on feature so that it is not activated by aiming and instead is toggled on and off with the alt-fire button, as it is with the Sepulcrum.

2) Either alter the weapon so that when it has a target lock, it still fires at full auto and does not lose its lock until the target dies or the player deactivates lock-on mode, or fix the homing so that it correctly homes in on the heads of its targets.

   * If you choose to let it fire at full auto, I also suggest that you move the lock-on indicators to the target’s center of mass, to correctly indicate to the player where the shots will be going.

   * If you choose to fix the homing so that it targets heads, I also suggest that you increase the amount of damage each homing shot deals. The weapon can fire almost 10 shots per second, but against a single target it usually takes more than a second to acquire a lock, fire, reacquire a lock, and fire again, which makes the per-target fire rate closer to 2 shots per second. Therefore, I think that doubling the damage dealt by the homing shots would make sense. Maybe double the ammo consumption of homing shots as well, to balance this benefit.

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Honestly I think the lock on mode needs different damage to the full auto one.

2 bullets from the Diplos (even with a high crit chance) isn't going to break the bank, especially with how slow the lock on feels compared to just unloading in full auto.

If those shots were charged and more powerful by a small degree then yeah I could understand it, but why would I shoot two lock on bullets for the price of 4 (which currently seem to hit walls from time to time) when 4 full auto bullets I can manually aim at the head would do twice as much damage?

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