1.3 General Speculation

[awkm]

This is what's happening:

I made the Field Gun a little better at armor breaking along with increasing gatling spread and people say that the field gun is too powerful and fulfills too many roles and the gatling is useless.  This was all an attempt to offer another piercer other than gatling.  I take the field gun's piercing out and now people tell me that now gatling is required (it is currently about half its original piercing).

Is there any middle ground?  You know, this makes my work very difficult.  But yes, I knew exactly what I was getting into when I made the field gun piercing nerf.  In fact, this reaction is purposefully elicited.

I hope this sheds light on the predicament here and on what's at stake.  For 1.3, no new guns can be added.  I am not changing damage types on guns.  The only guns that deal piercing are as follows:

- Field Gun
- Harpoon
- Gatling
- Mines

I don't want to touch harpoon until I can get more features out of it.  Mines do not significantly fulfill the role of a dynamic and offensive armor breaker.  All we have is the field gun and gatling.

I await your suggestions.

[awkm]

2 other damage types are also fairly effective as armor killing (when compared to everything else)

- Fire
- Impact

The weapons that deal fire damage are:

- Flamethrower
- Banshee (by way of ignition chance)
- Any explosive weapon that has large single hit dmg like flak (ignite chance is built into explosive dmg numbers, higher the more % ignition chance)
- Flare gun
- Mines (by way of ignition chance)

The weapons that deal impact:

- Mines

[RearAdmiralZill]

Point is that they didn't need to be changed in the first place. A merc buff leads back to 1.0 matches, which we all can agree no one would like. You already nerf the gat by nerfing heavy ammo, so roll with gatling unchanged and try that.

This is my opinion, but mercs and gats are fairly balanced right now. People want more options but that requires more guns which as you say, isnt going to happen now, so thats how that works.

The issue with nerfing heavy clip is then you indirectly nerf any gun that can successfully use it. Sure you get gat in there, but you also grab carronades and hwacha, which don't need nerfing (opinion). So you look at the gat itself. Maybe a small clip size nerf? Then greased will look nicer for its increased clip size, or you go for more precise fire at the cost of lower dps.

Mercs also don't need penetration. It's cool and all, but I just had to face against 5 of them pointed at me last tournament, and god forbid if they were knocking out multiple components with one shot. You would have to nerf it so hard, that it would lose its purpose to begin with, so I'm not for that.

We all appreciate the work you and Muse do for us.

[Echoez]

Leave the Mercury's damage as it is in 1.2, give it the reload nerf, forget about any other buffs to it unless you still wish to give it the wider gun arc so a Spire can get 2 of these on one target with some effort.

Revert any nerfs to the gatling, it never needed them.

I would say that you need to reconsider the thought of Muzzle speed affecting raycast weapon range. It currenlty makes using both the gatling and the carronades way harder than it needs to be and carronades don't need even more indirect nerfs.

If not that, at least consider removing the muzzle speed penatly from Heavy clip, the Firing rate penatly is already more than enough of a DPS decrease for any weapon that makes use of it.

Nerf the arming time bonus on Lochnagar, please don't nerf the damage bonus to anything lower than 200% as it will break its already great synergy with the Heavy Carronade and just turn it to a HF/LJ round.

Basically.. I agree with Zill and thank you for responding here, it is much appreciated.

[Surette]

Agreed with everything Zill said.

I don't think mercs needed to be changed at all. I get changing heavy clip in an attempt to make gatlings with heavy clip less ubiquitous, but as Zill said, then you're also indirectly nerfing things like carronades which are a little underused as it is after their last nerf.

[Captain Smollett]

I've been focusing on the weekend tournaments and am not exactly certain on the current state of the 1.3 build but I am of the opinion that some sort of gat nerf was necessary, whether through heavy clip nerf, direct nerf or both.

Nerfing the gat in and of itself becomes a buff to the mercury; since relative to the only other piercing weapon, it becomes significantly better, and as it already is quite a good gun it seems that a slight nerf (not as large as the gattlings nerf) to it as well makes things balanced.

awkm, you have no idea the tremendous respect we have for you.  The delicate balance of the game and dealing with everyone's opinion about it is no easy job, but we really do all have faith that you'll get it right and are incredibly grateful you take the time to listen to our opinions.

[awkm]

Penetration can be tuned so it doesn't go through a ship completely.  With production values, is the Field Gun even used to disable components?  In my opinion it's not happening enough due in part because of occluding hitboxes, some piece of the hull might just block your engines.  I will tweak this, but I think the feature needs to stay in order to get around clunky hit boxes (I can't change some).  It's not gong to be absolute penetration but partial.  It's as if penetration wasn't a feature, but you could actually hit something that you could see.

Field Gun and Loch returned to a state similar to their previous.

Heavy Clip removes all spread at cost of -30% ammo.

Gatling will maintain a +0.5 degree spread from production values and increased reload time.

[awkm]

Also, the other thing that *might* make it to penetration is decreased dmg after every consecutive penetration.  Therefore, I can maintain shooting through stuff but not necessarily kill a bunch of stuff at once.

It's a code change so I don't know if that will go in.

For now, maybe reduction to field gun shatter might be in order.  This will also eliminate luck shots, you need to hit twice to disable components.

[RearAdmiralZill]

With production values, is the Field Gun even used to disable components?

You mean currently? Yes by all means. It's got the dual purpose of disable and armor destructs.

[N-Sunderland]

With production values, is the Field Gun even used to disable components?

You mean currently? Yes by all means. It's got the dual purpose of disable and armor destructs.

Agreed 100%. The merc is already an amazing disabler.

[awkm]

How about this for Field Gun:

- Penetration stays, penetrates the entire ship.  Tweaking penetration amount is opaque, it's hard to judge where you can hit something from.  Penetrating through a ship and hitting an engine feels awesome.
- Decreased shatter so that it takes 2 shots to kill engines and big guns.  1 shot for small guns.
- Increase reload time... let's say something like 10s.
- Increased rate of fire (double tap possible)
- Still only 2 ammo in clip
- Small AoE (currently 0.85m radius, or even lower)
- Decreased Projectile Speed but decreased drop too (leading required)

This eliminates the luck shot of penetrating through everything and destroying a crap ton of components.  You need to hit something TWICE.  I can make it so the rate of fire still requires aim readjustment between shots.  Maybe 0.25s time between shots.

[Queso]

The fire buffs are certain to make it a more interesting battle structure. Flare guns might be a viable armor stripping option.

[Frogger]

As a regular user of the mercury field gun, here are my thoughts regarding your proposed changes:

I am not sure I am such a fan of penetration. It is indeed impressive be able to take out a row of guns on a galleon, but I think it is unnecessarily powerful. Considering the length of rebuild time on large guns, I think that the current dynamic is quite fine - simply let the gun one-hit kill the single component that it touches.

10s reload time is way too long; current reload time seems quite reasonable, given the difficulty of hitting components at range vs. the time it takes to repair them.

Increased rate of fire to double tap doesn't seem very realistic for the style of weapon that the merc is (a slow-loading long-range cannon).

Decreasing the projectile speed again seems unnecessary; plenty of leading is currently required to hit moving targets (or to hit while moving) with non-Lesmok ammos.

I regularly play with one of the best Mercury gunners in the game (Sunderland) and then current dynamic of 6s reload time, one-hit non-penetrating component kills seems like a good balance of risk vs. reward. I feel that your proposed changes would too seriously nerf the gun.

I do see the value in decreasing the piercing damage. It doesn't seem right that grouped merc fire should be able to singlehandedly drop targets from extreme distance.

[awkm]

Problem is that many components are occluded by invisble hit boxes that I cannot solve.

I think Penetration needs to stay to mitigate this.  It might be time to bite the bullet and accept changes to the gun.

If you're a tester, please try it.

I am looking forward to tester feedback on this.


Although, the Field Gun is just a big goddamn slippery slope.  Every time I touch it, I'm asking for it.  So yeah, I know this.  FML.

[James T. Kirk]

God, I love the care that goes into this game.

But to backtrack for just a second, it was my understanding that the Heavy Clip nerf was to shake up the meta (as it is a similarity between the Gat and the Flak).

Nerfing Heavy, in my opinion, is either going to cause more coordination between Combat Engineers in pub matches (everyone bringing Heavy won't cut it for close quarters engagements) or cause us to see a few more gunners.

Like I mentioned, all of this is for pub matches, seeing as that's where I spend most (all) my time in-game.