Grineer Emplaced/support Weapons: A Mechanics Suggestion

[MJ12]

 

This concept art from the old Warframe is great. A Grineer carrying a gun easily twice their size, probably shooting lovely explosive death at you. Grineer should have some of that in their mechanics. Both "fixed" emplacements, manned by Lancers/Troopers/Seekers, which project forcefields (like Volt's Electric Shield but not all-covering) with a small slit you can fire through, or used by heavy Grineer.

 

If we replaced all three heavy Grineer weapons with big support weapons like this, that would mean there'd need to be three "types" of weapons:

 

1. A heavy automatic gun of some sort (for the Grineer Heavy Gunner). My instinct would be to give them an actual autocannon with high-damage physical rounds + a moderate-damage explosion.

 

2. Some kind of missile launcher (for the Bombard). My thought here would be to go for some kind of multiple missile launcher. Launch six or eight missiles at the same time. Each missile can deal about 50% of the damage of the current Grineer Bombard's weapon.

 

3. A napalm rocket/grenade launcher (for the Napalm). Huge splash radius, good initial damage, and a vicious DoT effect if you stay in the fire.

 

Make the Grineer Heavies bigger, tougher, and give them some ridiculously overpowered weapons. Make these fixed weapons turrets (or even semi-mobile weapons turrets: What if the Grineer used, say, jet-propelled armored platforms to use these weapons? You could then either shoot down the platform or kill the pilot) or heavy units hard to kill. Heavies should soak up at least a magazine or two of fire to the head after their shields go down. Taking them on head-on should be a difficult game of hit-and-run.

 

But when you kill them, they drop their gun. Or when you kill the user of a fixed Grineer gun turret, you can walk up to it and press "X" to pick it up and rip it out of its moorings. Unlike the Grineer, who are way more primitive, Warframes are advanced enough that even though they're tiny they can wield these 200+kg weapons. Of course, while doing so you move at a walk-heavier Warframes, like Frost and Rhino, would be penalized relatively less, while light and fast Warframes like Ash and Loki would be penalized the most relatively speaking. You can't reload the gun, it only has the ammo it comes with-no reloads, and you can't do any fancy parkour while wielding them. You also can't ADS, which means they won't be that accurate. But who cares?

 

It'd be a tactical choice between firepower and mobility. These weapons would scale their damage dependent on the level of the enemy who used them (or the average level of the mission in general) and would generally be very much overpowered compared to "regular" guns due to their drawbacks and temporary nature. Furthermore, on certain Infested maps you may be able to recover abandoned Grineer support weapons, giving you the ability to use these heavy guns on the Infested (imagine hosing down a carpet of Chargers with an autocannon?)

 

Example weapons below:

 

BASILISK-Grineer Heavy Autocannon

Description: Used by Grineer Heavy Gunners, the 250 kilogram BASILISK is a heavy drum-fed autocannon with an obscene stopping power and excellent fire rate. Firing high-velocity explosive shells the Basilisk is excellent against single hardened targets and swarms alike.

Base Damage: 35 shell + 35 explosion (scales upwards with level). Blast radius 1.5m

Fire Rate: 8.0

Starting Ammunition: 150

Recoil: High

Accuracy: Low, equivalent to the Gorgon

 

FAFNIR-Grineer Swarm Launcher

Description: A fire-and-forget multiple missile launcher used by Grineer Bombards. The FAFNIR launches multiple high-explosive seeking missiles to eliminate enemies at long range.

Base Damage: 100 per missile x up to 8 missiles per salvo, Blast Radius 3.0m

Fire Rate: 0.8

Starting Ammunition: 48 missiles

Accuracy: Initially low, but the missiles home in on random targets in the user's field of view.

Special: Will fire up to 8 missiles, depending on the number of enemies in the Tenno's field of view-one missile  per enemy up to 8. Missiles home in on targets. Missiles can be shot down by enemy fire, although they have semi-decent HP totals to prevent this.

 

NIDHOGG-Grineer Incendiary Rocket Launcher

Description: A heavy rocket launcher excellent against all targets. Has a powerful initial damage effect and its incendiary fuel creates a devastating field of fire that provides excellent area denial.

Base Damage: 180, Blast Radius 4.0m

Damage over Time: 30 per second for 10 seconds in a 5.0m radius around impact.

Fire Rate: 1.0

Starting Ammunition: 10 Rockets

Accuracy: High

Special: Damage over time field. Rockets can be shot down.

Edited May 7, 2013 by MJ12

[Limekim]

Brilliant! I would definantly want to see this published into the actuall game

[iotimoline]

I think the best use of these would be in some sort of revamped boss encounter where you gotta take out Grineer guardposts to get their giant guns which you then turn on an armored column of tanks and APCs, whereupon you finally get General Slaughter to crawl out of his burning command track and fight you one on one.

[dragonboss]

Brilliant! I would definantly want to see this published into the actuall game

You took the words right out of my brain.

 

I think the best use of these would be in some sort of revamped boss encounter where you gotta take out Grineer guardposts to get their giant guns which you then turn on an armored column of tanks and APCs, whereupon you finally get General Slaughter to crawl out of his burning command track and fight you one on one.

How about a mission where in order to do damage to the Giant boss or Ultra armoured and sheilded boss, you are required to obtain 4 of these heavy heavy guns to kill the boss(no. would scale according to no. of players), or the boss could be vulnerable to only those weapons. That I would like to see, bosses that require strategy instead of a steady hail of bullets.

Edited May 7, 2013 by dragonboss

[PaperAlien]

I would only go for the machine gun. Leave the rocket launcher/flamer on mobile troopers. I would also prefer to have the option to sprint while holding the weapon, but have either really low accelaration or speed, or massively increase stamina drain.

[Jaon]

I wouldnt remove the old ones, but it would be cool if there was something to slow down the rushers and actually take some teamwork to advance upon. 

[MJ12]

I wouldnt remove the old ones, but it would be cool if there was something to slow down the rushers and actually take some teamwork to advance upon. 

 

The current Heavy Grineer are kind of (very) underwhelming, I'd remove them as a 'thing' and make them move and act like larger standard soldiers. Maybe actually make them squad-leader types, spawned one per every 5-6 regular Grineer.