Buffing Starter Weapons (Post U14 Edit)

[Shion963]

Starter 'frames get really good once properly modded. Excal and Mag are pretty good once modded well, and Loki... well Loki is self-explanatory Volt was what I started out with, and he rocks. But the starter weapons are all pretty much still terrible even fully modded no matter which ways.

 

Mk-1 is stupidly accurate, and has a decently large magazine, Lato is accurate, and has a good rate of fire and decent reload, Skana staggers with every hit. But they have no other stat that would make them good, nothing that would scale well with the mods an older player has. 

 

Mk-1 Braton and Lato currently has a whopping 1% status chance. That won't scale meaningfully at all, no matter what you mod them with. Procs are practically non-existent with these. Why can't my Mk-1 Braton, Lato and Skana be good once modded out the wazoo?

 

I propose to have their Status chance buffed to at least 20%. So it won't be a buff to straight damage, but rather indirect damage. This will also benefit new players, albeit to a lesser degree. 

 

For a totally new player:-

With 20%,they can still stay at their low direct damage level, but also benefit from a lot more procs- giving new players more opportunities to continue to chip down an enemy while they're staggered, bleeding, or give them a bit more leeway when enemies are weakened by puncture.

 

and once they've acquired at least one elemental mod:-

They can still continue using their starter weapons, since now they have something that reliably sets enemies on fire, even with its paltry damage. And in a team setting, even if they can't deal outright damage they'll still be able to wreak havoc and provide openings. At the very least it would make levelling it to 30 less monotonous, since now it's practically a rainbow gun.

 

And most importantly: for people like me who likes how the weapon handles, but is disappointed at how badly it scales:-

It'll bring these weapons closer to Damage1.0 style of proccing. Because lord knows that slapping a freeze mod was the only way I could get the Mk-1 Braton to be useful when I was levelling it. WIth all the new elemental combinations that Damage2.0 brought, and the array of mods available to veteran players this could make it scale better later in the game. It won't be a Soma, but it also won't be... well, a Mk-1 Braton.

 

 

EDIT:

Update 14's tutorial/prologue introduced more Mk-1 weapons, and I really really really hope they make it into the store.Poor Braton Mk-1 is the lone member of the club.

 

Something it also introduced are Damaged Mods: basically Prologue enemies have altered drop tables, and it's pretty easy to get a rifle fire and poison mod. So there's the "are new players gonna get a status mod quick enough to make the increased status chance useful?" worry out of the way!

Edited July 21, 2014 by Shion963

[VKhaun]

I disagree with most of this. We need people to move on from the noobie weapons and care about getting slots/mastery. If we like how weapons handle then we should put in advanced versions like primes, wraiths, vandals etc.

 

Kind of have to agree on status chance though. I feel like noobie weapons should be versatile and intro a person to all the game's mechanics. I'd be fine with them being buffed towards having high base proc and crit chances so that new players without full mod collections still notice crits and procs.

[Volume]

I feel that the starter weaponry should be better, but I'm not sure that buffing the status chance is the way to do this.

I think status should be like 5%, not 1%, but buffing raw damage is probably the way to go, or re-balancing the Mk-1 Braton so the damage distribution is more even among slash/puncture/impact instead of being mostly slash damage.

I mean, even if the status is like 50%, how long until a new player even gets an elemental mod? I think they'd rather have a higher base damage that will always improve the weapon's effectiveness regardless of mods (or lack thereof, in the case of a new player).

Regardless, I agree that they should scale better.

[Shion963]

Kind of have to agree on status chance though. I feel like noobie weapons should be versatile and intro a person to all the game's mechanics. I'd be fine with them being buffed towards having high base proc and crit chances so that new players without full mod collections still notice crits and procs.

I understand the "Ever Onwards" attitude. I did not mean it as a way to keep these weapons viable for the whole game, as new players will sell them off anyways since they will do less damage than a Strun, Burston or Braton with the mods they have on hand, and for the slot that they undoubtedly don't have loads of. This is for people who likes them enough to want to keep it, or are going to go back to it later. Or someone who messed up and catalysed their starting weapon with starting plat. 

 

 

Kind of have to agree on status chance though. I feel like noobie weapons should be versatile and intro a person to all the game's mechanics. I'd be fine with them being buffed towards having high base proc and crit chances so that new players without full mod collections still notice crits and procs.

That's the one thing I noticed when levelling my Lato recently: It just plain doesn't proc, or crit. The only thing I could do is build them for straight damage, and even then with multishot+damage+elemental I had to get it to Rank 20 (uncatalysed) for it to do meaningful damage.

[Arabaxus]

Anyone without patience will find the starter weapons really boring. That being said, the problem with the current system for new players I think is the lack of weapons in shop that can be purchased with just credits. Farming the materials required to move up a step, such as the materials for the Karak or Latron or whatnot is quite mundane and isn't exactly easy, even with full access to weapons like AKLato, Lex, AKLex and the standard Braton.

 

If I were to change anything, I would make most of the mastery rank zero weapons purchasable with credits, such as the Vasto and Magnus.

 

However, if we were to not change this, I would make mods such as Serration and Hornet Strike more easily accessible by beginners since one of the main problems with buffing my weapons I had when I started was I couldn't get my hands on these fundamental, pretty much mandatory mods for any weapon. I feel like if I had access to these earlier, I would have felt that the MK-1 Braton and Lato would have been useable past Mercury. I mean this as it took me until rank 3 or 4 before I had access to a Serration, and a friend of mine had to give me one of his spare Hornet Strikes. Of course now at a later stage, these mods become commonplace enough, but when they really matter, at the beginning, where player interest tweaks on whether or not this game is fun to them, some of the most important, basic stuff is actually incredibly annoying to acquire.

[Shion963]

Edited for post-U14, now that Damaged Mods makes acquisition of elemental mods easier into consideration.