Proposed Multishot Change Mentioned In Devstream 59 [Megathread]

[Mesyra]

not a fan, weapons that aren't ammo efficient will get hurt really bad by this. if they're doing this to make multishot not mandatory then they should boost all weapon's damage by 90-120% to replace it or something. this is going to hit stuff like the amprex and synapse hard as hell, which isnt cool at all.

[Acidulant]

Exactly. No one knows how this is all going to play out. Yet people are pretending that they know everything and that their opinions and speculations are fact.

Fact: they said theyre thinking about making multishot consume more ammo

If you can't build a theory around that then IDK

Edited September 4, 2015 by Acidulant

[Ryme]

I'm hoping the extra ammo consumed will come out of the ammo pool and not the magazine. Otherwise it will seriously mess with the balance of weapons overall, instead of just nerfing their sustainability.  Even if you still have to use Multi-shot to sustain TTK, it is essentially a less controllable fire rate mod, which will force you into overkill for most enemies; ie. all the non-heavy gunner/bombard enemies that you would only spend 1 bullet on, but will now be forced to spend 2x to 3x times as much ammo on.

Edited September 4, 2015 by Ryme

[MJ12]

How about everyone takes a chill pill and we wait and see how this plays out instead of being preemptively butt hurt and on each others throats.

Since no one knows EXACTLY what DE has planned you can troll and ship toast all you want, it is a wasted effort. Save your trolling and ship toasting for the time when this goes live, at least then you have a reason for it.

 

People are less likely to change something once it's already happened than they are to fix something before it's implemented. This is a proven fact, and it's why the best way to get people to agree with something is to do it. Furthermore, complaining takes effort, while leaving takes less effort.

 

Therefore, it's best to preemptively analyze and comment on proposed changes (which you dismiss as "trolling") so DE can fix things and make a better game, rather than wait for them to go live and see what happens then.

[EetNotErn]

Fact: they said theyre thinking about making multishot consume more ammo

If you can't build a theory around that then IDK

 

 

Making assumptions on ONE factor in a vacuum is always a bad idea. 

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

Then they may as well remove the mods and replace them with Fusion Cores. 

[Cubewano]

 "My opinion is fact while yours isn't!" 

"My logic is logical but yours isn't!"

 

 

Yeah great arguments.

so...no clarification or points as to why is should think anything to the contrary? great, i thought as much.

[Mac2492]

How about everyone takes a chill pill and we wait and see how this plays out instead of being preemptively butt hurt and on each others throats.

Since no one knows EXACTLY what DE has planned you can troll and ship toast all you want, it is a wasted effort. Save your trolling and ship toasting for the time when this goes live, at least then you have a reason for it.

Exactly this. The changes can go horribly wrong, but they haven't yet.

 

Let's look at the case where 100% multishot means 100% increased ammo usage. Your damage per magazine is halved, but this isn't taking into account the weapon balancing that will also take place. If they doubled the damage of every primary, tripled the damage of every secondary, and doubled the damage of shotguns then damage per clip remains exactly the same. That's an atrocious way to balance, but it illustrates that you can phase multishot out of "mandatory" status without making all weapons weaker as a result.

[ThePrimarchSystem]

I'm telling you.

 

EA.
Insiders.

In.
DE.

Edited September 4, 2015 by ThePrimarchSystem

[jinsaotomex4]

What this feels like, to me, is the change from Borderlands to Borderlands 2. In Borderlands, there was a type of weapon called "Double Anarchy" which functions exactly like multi-shot currently does. The issue, is that if a weapon was able to use Double Anarchy, it was considered the only 'real' viable version of the weapon. It was the most sought after (pre-modding) because it had the best damage possible.

 

In Borderlands 2, they changed this. Weapons that increased the number of shots fired per trigger pull (like multishot), also consumed ammo. This was especially potent on shotguns as shotguns had a base number of pellets. Any shotgun that fired more than the base, consumed additional ammo, and the larger the increase in pellets, the larger the increase in ammo consumption.

 

This essentially made certain versions of weapons, practically, unwieldable. Now, granted, Borderlands also lets you fire a shot as long as you have only a single bullet in the magazine, regardless of how much ammo it consumes, and you don't have to pay the additional ammo cost i.e. your shotgun consumes 4 ammo per shot, but you only have 1 shot left, you still fire the shot and deal full damage.

 

The problem is, this change drastically increased the rate at which you needed to reload your weapon, and drastically increased your ammo consumption.

 

Let's use a hypothetical weapon of Assault Rifle. Say it has an 80 round clip, firing 8 shots per second and empties it's clip in 10 seconds. Currently, with multishot, you would actually be firing, on average, 152 bullets instead of 80 and reloading every 10 seconds (during sustained fire). After this change, you will only ever fire 80 shots, but your rate of fire jumps to about 15 shots a second, so you will be emptying you clip about every 5 seconds.

 

What this does, is make any sort of automatic weapon practically unuseable with multishot. This will, effectively, cut the damage of all weapons in half, minimum.

 

Rifles will have their DPS cut in half (90% multishot is close enough to 100 to not be all that significant a difference) unless they are extremely ammo efficient (like bows). Shotguns will face a similar reduction, but the Hek is a special one. It currently has 320% multishot, so it will consume 3 shots per trigger pull 100% of the time, and 4 shots per trigger pull, 20% of the time. This, effectively, cuts the damage of the Hek into 1/3 of it's current.

 

You just buffed the Hek, and now it's going to be nerfed.

 

Pistols are in a similar place to the Hek. With 180% of multishot, that means they are guaranteed to burn their ammo twice as quickly, minimum, or nearly 3 times as fast if they use both Barrel Diffusion and Lethal Torrent.

Honestly? There is no amount of weapon rebalancing that can fix this. This change will, effectively, make it so going bast 40 minutes in a survival, or 40 waves of defense with anything other than top-tier weapoins, and lots of ammo restores, a practical impossibility. In order to use a high DPS weapon like the Boltor, it will require bringing an incredibly ammo efficient weapon as a secondary, like the Vaykor Marelok or Lex Prime, or, conversely, you need to bring an ammo efficient primary (basically, a Bow), in order to use an ammo inefficient secondary.

If the purpose of this change is to make it so that you have more choices in your mod slots, technically, it works, because you simplly cannot use multishot on a large swaths of weapons. This means an even larger number of weapons are rendered unuseable outside of low-level content. At the same time, it also makes the problem worse than it was before, because Ammo Mutation becomes a necessary fact of life if you ever want to use multishot on any weapon other than the extremely ammo efficient weapons.

Either way, this change is going to drastically lower the over-all damage of all weapons. No amount of weapon rebalancing is going to fix this.

 

Just some clarification on the specifics written below, I agree with your overall post though. 

 

1) Double Anarchy weapons consume 2 ammo per shot in BL1 for 4 bullets, and they drain your ammo fast because the good varieties have insanely high fire rate and garbage accuracy (hello balance, actually most weapons with lots of pellets regardless of weapon type have REALLY, REALLY terrible accuracy in both games) so they were short range SMGs.  BL1 has ammo incredibly potent ammo regen and ammo drops are generous so this wasn't really an issue. Reload skills and class mods make reloading trivial so it isn't like in Warframe where many guns you already spend more than 50% of the time reloading. Ammo restore alleviates this but eh. 

 

2) In BL2 pellet count has nothing to do with ammo consumption on shotguns, it's tied to the number of barrels.  1 barrel = 1 ammo, up to quads which were 4 ammo per shot more barrels usually meant more pellets but there's also the vertical grip accessory that increases the number of pellets which is a straight up free DPS boost (and the best one!). 

 

3) If you had 1 shot in your magazine left and the shot consumed 4 ammo, it was just removed from your total ammo for that weapon type. Number of pellets is based on the combination of the manufacturer's body and manufacturer's barrel (before accessories) IIRC but I'm iffy on this one. 

 

4) It's actually really hard to run dry on ammo in Borderlands in general even if you use high ammo consumption weapons (except in digi peak) because the game gave you tools to always increase your damage one way or another. BL1 had corrosive, BL2 had slag, TPS has Cryo. 

 

5) The scaling curve in BL2 is not as bad as it is in Warframe (even though it is terrible in its own right), where the enemy scaling somehow got WORSE with damage 2.0. At least there was a cap in Damage 1.0. Enemy scaling has been an issue for 2 years now and DE hasn't touched it except to make it worse.  They really need to fix that before messing with weapon damage in general.

 

6) Enemy density is very different in both games, and constantly reloading in BL is not a big issue in general since most areas

don't throw a massive number of enemies at you and the spawns can be controlled more or less so you always dictate the flow of battle, in Warframe the spawns can get silly later on so if you spend most of your time reloading, you will die on a lot of frames. 

 

7) The sustained DPS nerf might be more than half actually, a flat 50% damage nerf that doesn't affect magazine size in any way will give you your numbers but in this scenario you're also increasing the amount of time spent reloading and emptying your magazine faster with very few ways to speed it up without further crippling the damage.

 

You're absolutely right that there needs to be a better solution. 

Edited September 4, 2015 by jinsaotomex4

[Xiusa]

How about being unable to use your weapons because THEY HAVE NO AMMO!?

 

 

If fun is killing your targets quickly and efficiently (for me it is), then "your gun either kills half as quickly because no multishot" or "your gun reloads twice as much and you need to spam ammo restores" reduces fun for me, because it increases the time it takes me to kill my enemies.

There are more than just guns in this game. Melee weapons and abilities exist. Companions do not require ammo and they can also hurt your enemies. Learn to conserve your ammo and play smart.

[ThePrimarchSystem]

There are more than just guns in this game. Melee weapons and abilities exist. Companions do not require ammo and they can also hurt your enemies. Learn to conserve your ammo and play smart.

 

Tell me 1 melee weapon that can kill a Level 100 enemy.

[Lord_Xenon]

Well, "Babe", look at corrupted mods that have drawbacks attached to them. You don't see the pitchforks and angry mobs screaming and whining about how those have drawbacks, do you? It's basic human psychology.  If you give something and take it away people get far angrier than if you didn't give it to them in the first place.

 

I rest my case.

 

Because those drawbacks can either be ignored or are helpful. Or they are TRASH. Because they are vault related content, nobody will cry seriously about a trash mod from it. I don't think, that all mods from the vault are useful?

[DelialFallen]

So they're converting into a corrupted mod, but it's still one of those 'required' mods, especially with pistols. We're effectively getting punished for complaining.

 

I'm not sure that's their intention at all.  They simply worked out a way to solve several issues with a simple change.  That is, fewer mods are mandatory (as was being persistently asked), not interfere too much with the trading market (maxed Serration regularly fetching a pretty penny), and not increasing the Creep of Power's power creep.

 

If you do insist on the punishment comparison, it's more like you're getting punished for being greedy and/or power hungry.  I don't think, however, that you are in fact getting punished for wanting a change.

[Xiusa]

Tell me 1 melee weapon that can kill a Level 100 enemy.

Literally any melee weapon can. This can be done a lot faster if you perform a parry/stealth finisher

[(PSN)Onyxflamegod]

I love this. There's nothing better than My Hikou P or my Aksomati/Dex Furis running out of ammo EVEN FASTER. It's going to be my new favorite change of the game. I am sincerely looking forward to not being able to use most secondaries without blatantly stopping to stand on an ammo pad for longer than it takes to empty my entire ammo pool. Top notch change, DE. Keep it going. More grind. More camping. More RNG. You guys know what's up.

Oh. But wait. You don't want us staying still as proven by this campaign against survival, excavation, and interception. Still waiting for this "year of quality" to start shining through, all we've gotten so far are nerfs to the weakest things in the game and more grind.

[Forthwol]

I'm not liking how this sounds. Multishot mods already cost a nice chunk of capacity to put on your weapons making you work for a good build to get your weapons high tier but who knows maybe they might make it so when that extra round pops off it has a chance to consume an extra shot.

Edited September 4, 2015 by Forthwol

[Don_T_Shoot]

I love how everyone raging is also ignoring how they said they'd rebalance all the weapons shall these changes be made.

 

 My answer to that is they didn't want to bother rebalancing the base damage system that requires Serration and Multishot in the first place, what makes us think they will devote the time and effort to rebalance Multishot's destructive effects on so many weapons?  Because it is easier to just keeping breaking and fixing smaller things?

 

"Doctor, my leg doesn't work right. Please break my foot and reset it so it works better with my messed up leg."

 

Does the base damage system need to be remade?  Most certainly, but this seems like a half-arsed way of going about fixing it.

 

I'm hopeful there is a bigger more encompassing plan but break multishot and fix the casualties after the fact is NOT it.

[(PSN)inuyasha279]

First people complain about melee multishot...then multishot on guns is nerfed... now even more complaints...

[(PSN)TheYetiMan22]

So they're nerfing mandatory multishot mods so that you'll need ammo mutation/extra clip size mods which will then become mandatory if you want to use a weapon to kill in higher level content? Or you can drop the multishot mods and have more choice in using other mods but then you can't kill higher level content because you haven't got the DPS? 

 

Help me fathom this please. 

[Don_T_Shoot]

So they're nerfing mandatory multishot mods so that you'll need ammo mutation/extra clip size mods which will then become mandatory if you want to use a weapon to kill in higher level content? Or you can drop the multishot mods and have more choice in using other mods but then you can't kill higher level content because you haven't got the DPS? 

 

Help me fathom this please. 

Sounds like you have the same understanding of it as many of us.

 

And we are all standing around with stunned and confused looks on our faces.   or some are red-faced spitting mad  but most are just stunned.

[(PSN)inuyasha279]

Since we want less mandatory mods can we nerf corrosive projection?

[Azamagon]

As of Devstream 59, DE said that multishot has been bugged all this time, that they should be consuming extra ammo when it procs...

 

I believe this to be both true and false.

 

True, because that's how it worked in the "original" game, darkSector. So, extra ammo-consumption might've been the ORIGINAL intention, having it as a kind of chance-based pseudo-fire rate mod.

 

False, because it seems like they "went with the flow" with this bug, letting it add extra shots at no extra ammocost. Because hey, why not? It sounds like a fun and interesting thing. And it really is an interesting idea!

You can clearly see they have went with the flow if you look at the mods in question. Otherwise, Split Chamber and Hell's Chamber wouldn't have cost up to 15 points and the mods wouldn't have been so rare as they currently are.

The problem though, is that these mods are, in most cases, considered mandatory mods right now, due to the sheer power they add.

 

Now, what would be the best course of action here? There are pretty much 2 things you can do, if you want to remove the "mandatory" status from it.

1) Keep it as a free shot, but simply lower numbers.

2) Make it consume an extra shot upon proc, pretty much making it into another (unreliable) fire rate mod of sorts.

 

To me, option 1 seems more fun. Also, it seems easier to do, as multiple existing mods wouldn't go from "mandatory to useless", instead they go from "mandatory to should-I-equip-this-or-not?"

 

All in all, if they really want us to make choices in modding, I believe they need to do all of the following things:

1) Enemy scaling is made less severe.

2) Basic multishot mods are down to 30%-ish chance (still not consuming ammo), along with other heavy rebalancing of damage-boosting mods, not just multishot mods.

3) All Weapons (and Warframes, Companions etc) have access to 2 or 3 Exilus slots for free! (Unlock a 3rd/4th with Simaris' Exilus item). Exilus mods used in these dedicated Exilus-slots have a seperate modding-point pool (1 per level, so 30 points at max level, unaffected by Reactor/Catalyst, but can still be forma'd).

 

With that, multishot becomes less mandatory (but still a decent option, for automatic weapons in particular) and you give us actual choices, as we can still mod for damage in various ways (also keeping progression mods like Serration) AND also for various utility and personal style (with Exilus slots). That, while not having damage vs utility competing as much with one another.

 

TL;DR - Don't change the multishot mechanics, just nerf the numbers if you want those mods to be less mandatory. If you want us to have actual FUN choices, add Exilus-slots to everything moddable (and expand the Exilus-system)!

[EetNotErn]

so...no clarification or points as to why is should think anything to the contrary? great, i thought as much.

 

 

Uhh I already stated why many times. Because NOT ALL THE DETAILS ARE IN YET. You have no idea how DE is going to rebalance the weapons, the enemies, ammo drops, etc etc. Yet you pretend that your doom and gloom scenario is fact. 

[NeoCrimson]

Sounds like you have the same understanding of it as many of us.

 

And we are all standing around with stunned and confused looks on our faces.   or some are red-faced spitting mad  but most are just stunned.

 

And yet, there's a few that are smiling and saying "thank you de may I have another?"