Change How Ammunition Works

[MJ12]

Here's a question. Why is it that when I load a magic space bullet into my Furis it does 14 damage, but when I load it into a Lex it does 80? The answer is, obviously, "it's magic I ain't gotta explain s**t". The problem with this is that it creates a significant problem with ammunition. That is to say, the Furis runs out of ammo instantly and the Lex will literally never run out of ammunition. Your Tenno could break his leg and have to sprawl on top of a box shooting Grineer and Corpus until he dies.

 

One day a century later, his friends will finally come back to find him. He'll be surrounded by a billion corpses.He will have singlehandedly killed more people than live on Earth today. And he'll still have 20 shots left. More than enough to kill anything that moves.

 

Meanwhile, the unfortunate Tenno who chose to use an Afuris will run out of ammunition instantly against the first dude, its tiny plinky bullets bouncing off of a Level 1 Grineer Lancer, failing to do any damage until the Lancer trips on all the bullets surrounding him, face-plants, and breaks his neck.

 

I exaggerate slightly but only slightly.

 

Ideally all weapons would have unique ammunition reserve sizes and you'd have just primary/secondary ammunition, but if that's not possible it might be easier to just rename and shuffle around the ammunition types.

 

So instead of Rifle/Handgun/Shotgun/Sniper, you'd have Light/Medium/Heavy/Special ammunition, respectively. Weapons would then use those ammunition counts. A more detailed explanation is below:

 

Light Ammunition: 540 rounds base. Used by high-rate-of-fire weapons. Examples: Furis, Afuris, Viper, Twin Viper, Braton, Gorgon.

 

Medium Ammunition: 210 rounds base. Used by larger, heavier weapons. Examples: Boar, Latron, Lato, Aklatos

 

Heavy Ammunition: 120 rounds base. Used by the big guns, like the Strun, Bronco, Kraken, and the like.

 

Special Ammo: 72 rounds base. Used by the biggest, beefiest man-portable artillery, like the Hek, Snipetron, Paris, Lex, and similar huge murder weapons.

 

Increase/decrease ammunition reserves to taste. If you carry two weapons that use the same type of ammunition, you should double your ammo reserve (at the obvious cost of running out of ammo for both weapons if you run out of ammo for one...).

Edited April 22, 2013 by MJ12

[Bitfly]

Funny xd and I agree on some points. I definitely think the ammo system needs a rework. All pistols having same ammo reserve? mmm

[Retroperspect]

Honestly a relook at the ammo count would be really helpful to fix the imbalance in supplies of ammo

 

even though the Snipetron got buffed to outperform the Lex in dmg per shot the Lex still have 4-5 times more ammo and get even 5 times more ammo drops than the snipetron gets so balancing out those modifiers would be great

 

this would also help guns that suffers early level in performance like the new dakka gun (graka something something can't remmeber) since that gun is highly ammo inefficient in all cases

 

can't believe people actually downvoted this unless they are rampent Lex users (I have a lex too since it's bloody OP imho)

 

+1

[Strac_CRO]

NO! bescause it's stupid suggestion

 

and btw.

"ammo problem" is just one of the things that make things great at choosing the right combination of primary+secondary+melee + GEAR pack

 

@ VincentNacon  you have 8 gear inventory slots = use them

Edited April 22, 2013 by Strac_CRO

[VincentNacon]

It's not stupid.   It's stupid to see bunch of ammos all over the place and it's not what you really need.

 

Being Snipetron-user sucks.

[Kerrus]

NO! bescause it's stupid suggestion

 

[Kitzun]

I thought so about the ammo size of the Lex, but it won't solve the problem, only part of it.

In the end, ammo drops will still let it be at max ammo before the first magazine is even empty.

The solution would be for the ammo drops to give an amount of bullets proportionnal to your weapon mag, you use a Lato it gives you 15 bullets, you use a Lex it gives you 6, and so on.

[Retrikaethan]

i agree! well that ammo piles should be changed, not sure if this is what needs to happen but things like the vipers/afuris/grakata all spew ammo as a forte, whats the point of that if they dont have a lot of ammo? even with the ammo boxes they chew through ammo like no tomorrow. the boxes can only last as long as the initial ammo count each, which in the case of the vipers is not long at all. the afuris seemed to be worse for that. my own thought would be that having ammo counts specific to each weapon would be best, with ammo drops giving a percentage of that amount rather than just a baseline number. (20 pistol ammo is a fart in the wind for the vipers)

 

well, regardless of whatever ideas there are, can we agree that ammo needs a change?

[antimab-EGT-]

yeah ammo system needs rework!

 

But i think different amounts of base max ammo would solve this too. 

 

Or different amounts of ammo on pickup.

[Shinnyshin]

Honestly, this feels like a design decision that was made casually and without much thought back when the developers had a less defined idea about where the game would go...and had no idea it would get so big.  This sort of thing happens a lot when something small and less formal gets big fast with a lot of momentum; old things that people hadn't really thought about or addressed with a "we'll get to it later"...well...

 

It's kinda like how somewhat arbitrary polarities on weapons are a far, far, far bigger deal than they were probably intended to be.  Hopefully, DE addresses the problem before they start heavily using ammo efficiency as a balancing factor between weapons.  If it's left as is for a while, I could see it becoming a well-rooted part of the system that's just painful to dig out.