Throwing weapon buff.

[Khold90]

Throwing knives/stars have languished as single target very low damage low crit/status "stealth weapon" for years now despite being an absolute mood with good aesthetics.

Why not lean into that but with a bit more focus on the stealth aspect with something like "increased headshot multiplier on an unaware enemy". That way the non-existant crit/status doesn't matter as much as enemies still pop from raw damage.

If not headshot multiplier then forced critical damage on unaware enemy. It would still favour either spira prime or the base form incarnon kunai/despair due to not horrible sub-stats but it's much more than they have currently.

[Fred_Avant_2019]

Average Fusilai Gigachads be like :

...

Oh wait, they do not exist. No one uses that.

All jokes aside, I never got why throwing weapons got the short hand of the stick, aside from the Aegrit and maybe Spira Prime, they all have crippling weaknesses. Though to be fair, all of them have glaring issues :

• Aegrit has awful ammo economy.
• Sancti Castanas has poor radius.
• Talons deal less damage if exploded prematurely but have lower status chance when attached to a surface and throw enemies into the stratosphere.
• Despair are unbelievably slow and aren't even that good in Incarnon.
• Hikou Prime fires too fast for its own good, you end up running out of ammo before actually killing anything because it relies exclusively on its status chance to do anything.
• Kunai basically don't exist without the Incarnon, it's acceptable with it but the homing projectiles are janky.
• Pox is kind of dead, between ammo issues, low damage and how slow it does its stuff, the lingering gas cloud only lasts 4 seconds and it only affects a 3.6m radius, 5.2m with primed fulmination.
• Spira Prime doesn't have enough status chance to be relevant.
• Fusilai's alt fire is basically useless.

I'm not gonna mention the Staticor, since it's not really throwing knives, it's kind of its own thing (though to be fair, it's not even good at what it's trying to do due to all the subsequent nerfs).

 

 

Quite frankly, the least garbage one of them all would be the Fusilai, if it did get a prime, because it's hybrid and slash focused. All other knives have this stupid high Puncture weighting that is wonderful for low level trash and scales so poorly for anything that matters.

I'd rather use any sniper over any throwing knives.

[Tiltskillet]

I'll mention what I always do when this topic comes up:  Back in 2019 DE released the following update for bows:

Bow Stat Changes:

When tracking down a bug why Paris Bows were doing less Damage than their Arsenal stats indicated, internal stats were reporting all Bows doing more damage than they actually were. Below is a review of all Bows (with the exception of the Lenz) and increased stats where appropriate: ...

I would  bet a little money something similar is still going on with the conventional throwing weapons.  If nothing else, their difficulty in use isn't accounted for at all in DE's calculations. 

I mean, compare these two old MR 10 sidearms

A. Burst DPS 570; Sustained DPS  285; Procs per sec 6.6; MR 9

B. Burst DPS 320; Sustained DPS 265; Procs per sec 0.46; MR 10

"A" is a hitscan base weapon: Twin Grakata  "B" is an arcing projectile advanced variant: Spira Prime.  The "best" conventional throwing weapon. It's also a little newer and slightly higher MR.  It's an extreme example, because Twin Graks are monsters, but there are plenty of others.

6 hours ago, Khold90 said:

Why not lean into that but with a bit more focus on the stealth aspect with something like "increased headshot multiplier on an unaware enemy". That way the non-existant crit/status doesn't matter as much as enemies still pop from raw damage.

If not headshot multiplier then forced critical damage on unaware enemy. It would still favour either spira prime or the base form incarnon kunai/despair due to not horrible sub-stats but it's much more than they have currently.

I like the concept, but I think it doesn't address the basic issues with these weapons.  Spira Prime only has a crit adjusted average shot of 96.  So one opportunity per enemy to get a more damaging shot that may not kill it instantly isn't going to be that impactful.   And to really get something out of it, there's a commitment to stealth play  Which is dear to my heart, but I just can't imagine is a major part of the game's experience for most players.

1 hour ago, Fred_Avant_2019 said:

Talons ... throw enemies into the stratosphere.

This is not a weakness, it's the one great thing Talons have going for them. :P

[Pakaku]

Stealth isn't worth balancing for considering it's impossible to attempt stealth if your squad is playing loud, which leads to a situational buff that almost never activates

It's not like they're bad weapons, in the end they're just a different style of projectile secondary. There are lots of good options for guns, it's just throwing knives never got any good entries. That's changed somewhat recently, the Aegrit is great besides having virtually no ammo, and the incarnon Despair is great (I presume Kunai also got a good incarnon) So it's like any weapon archetype, the stats are what matter, and we just need options that aren't total garbage for once.

Though for some reason I also find aiming them to be much harder compared to a projectile secondary gun... Maybe it's because they're almost impossible to see when thrown, or they arc in a weird way or have a terribly slow projectile speed. Maybe the arm-flailing animations are distracting. I never really figured out what my problem with them were, even though I'm already a good shot with projectile guns and bows.

Edited March 8 by Pakaku

[voltocitygel]

I’m gonna agree that the arm flailing might be part of the issue. I’d rather if throwing weapons were changed to either have a lower rate of fire, or to be semi auto, and have damage / stats buffed to compensate. (Or just redo the animations- they could be so much better. There was one trailer I saw released where excal threw a kunai the way you’d actually throw knives and it looked fantastic, but it’s not at all how they’re animated in game.) They arc a tiny bit differently than most projectile weapons, but the arc is less consistent from what I’ve noticed. I’ve always wanted to like them (I dabble in dagger throwing IRL), but the animations and lackluster performance mean I just run other weapons most of the time. 
the whole category could use a rework, honestly. If you’re going for stealth gameplay for a secondary, you’re far better off just silencing a normal secondary with hush. 
the incarnon for kunai (I don’t have the despair one yet) is solid, but I don’t think a whole weapon category should live or die because it has a couple incarnon forms that perform alright. (Plus the projectile speed is low enough that by the time one group of daggers has homed in on someone, you’ve already thrown several more that will auto target the same guy and be wasted) 

Edited March 8 by voltocitygel

[Tiltskillet]

20 hours ago, Pakaku said:

Though for some reason I also find aiming them to be much harder compared to a projectile secondary gun... Maybe it's because they're almost impossible to see when thrown, or they arc in a weird way or have a terribly slow projectile speed. Maybe the arm-flailing animations are distracting. I never really figured out what my problem with them were, even though I'm already a good shot with projectile guns and bows.

A few of the  throws have far more radical arcing than any of the bows, although I think the classic ones like Kunai, Spira, Hikou are pretty comparable.  Are you in the habit of fully charging bows when you use them? This drastically reduces the projectile drop, almost eliminating it except at very long ranges. 

Most conventional projectile weapons have no drop, so one just has to compensate for travel time, rather than both arcing and travel time.  Like, Aeolak is far easier to make accurate long range shots with than Spira Prime, even though they have 100 accuracy and Aeolak seems to have a little less projectile speed.

The throwing animations bothering you is an interesting theory.  I definitely notice it and not in a positive way with Pox and all its dangle-y bits.