Primary/Secondary Balance is a great idea that needs work

[Modus-Pwnens]

I really love the idea of the new system - primary ammo is your "big gun", you use it for moments of power, and your secondary is your bread-and-butter.

For years and years, the difference between primaries and secondaries has been kind of meaningless. If I have a gun that isn't good enough, having a second gun won't help. If I have a gun that is good enough, why do I need a second gun? It's fantastic to see some actual attempts at differentiation, to actually plan a loadout and expect to swap weapons in most missions.

But the changes don't really make that happen.

A huge number of the primaries don't fit this mold - they're just regular weapons. And a bunch of the secondaries do fit it - they're fantastically strong AoE weapons. And the weapons caught in the middle get probably the worst outcome: their ammo pool and pickups were reduced just enough to be annoying, but not enough to be meaningful most of the time.

In the huge majority of content, ammo pads just make it pointless.

In low-level content, you can barely use the big, flashy AoE weapons at all because the enemy density is so low that every shot only kills a couple of enemies, so it doesn't generate much ammo at all, and using it feels like a waste. In Steel Path, the enemy density is so high that, especially with ammo mutation, you can sustain fire of all of the problematic weapons anyway. The hardest content, where the ability of these weapons to trivialize the content was the biggest problem, is exactly the content where the changes had no effect at all.

And all of the bosses and heavy enemies have so much damage attenuation that there's little differentiation between light and heavy weapons anyway.

Some guns just feel straight-up bad. The Acceltra always suffered from being a gun that was rapid-fire, and fun to shoot, but punished you for actually firing it rapid-fire with its extremely small max ammo pool. Now a lot more guns have this same problem: they're made to spray, they're fun to spray, but you're punished for spraying - punished for doing the thing that the gun was designed to make fun.

So TL;DR feedback is: I really like the direction of this change, I think the stated aim would be really cool, but this did not achieve it, and it mostly feels pretty bad. It created problems where problems didn't exist before, and didn't really solve most of the problems it set out to fix.

I'm not sure if it's possible to retrofit that intended balancing into an arsenal of hundreds of weapons that wasn't designed for it, in game modes and with spawning that wasn't designed for it, but I do hope this isn't the end of attempts to make loadout choices more meaningful and give more of a reason to care about primary and secondary and to swap. But this feels like it really missed the mark.

[(NSW)HedEmpTy]

I see what DE was trying to do but the execution of it dropped like a lead balloon.

19 minutes ago, Modus-Pwnens said:

Now a lot more guns have this same problem: they're made to spray, they're fun to spray, but you're punished for spraying - punished for doing the thing that the gun was designed to make fun.

Absolutely THIS.

I think a lot of the problem comes from DE trying to put a blanket solution on a non-blanket problem.

EDIT: And tying into the "made to spray but punished for it" thing, continuous weapons feel like they got punished really badly, because these were never ammo-efficient guns in the first place, with the way they ramp up and are made for holding the trigger down, and usually do low damage per tick.