Oh yeah I LOVED the heavy in gears! Feels so appropiate to! If you played the other gears (I mean normal gears 1-3 not gears tactics) and tried to fire the grinder without setting it up first the weapon was so bloody inaccurate. It would spray bullets all over the place and I love how they managed to represent that in gears tactics!
I think a passive skill could represent this nicely if they dont want to remove the accuracy penalty alltogether. If you dident move yet in this turn remove accuracy penalties of your armor. That allows you to still use heavy armor for…well, its armor. And the jumppack.
OR
Have a heavy ignore the penalty alltogether if he wears heavy armor. Hes proficient in it right? Doesent feel right that hes trained in its use and still gets a massive -30% penalty to hit.
Heavy weapons already have a very low effective range which makes them inherently inaccurate to begin with. Adding the accuracy penalty ontop of that just feels like an unfair overkill.
Yeah, I tried heavy again but nope. People just tries to give a reason or excuse to use them but without explosive, heavy sucks as weapon, armor and skills.
If I wanted to melee, I would get a proper melee class not a guy with a huge weapon to just jump and bash enemies.
The weapon profiency perks in particular are so that you don’t have to multiclass to get another profiency. At the same time, as they are randomly assigned and, for example, a Heavy can get the Strongman perk, they have some bonuses so that they are not a ‘waste’ of one of the three personal traits to the operative that has the proficiency already.
And then because some of these traits are deemed too powerful, they also carry a penalty (the - 20 to Perception of Strongman, and the - 4 to Willpower of Sniperist).
I get the fun in having random weapon specialization perks. What I don’t understand is why they have these bonuses (and penalties) attached. That’s pretty much saying: “Yeah, you have skill trees for specific weapons, but you can be even more efficient with those weapons if you happen to get a random perk. No need to even be of the correct class.”
What I’d personally prefer is removing the bonuses&penalties, then reducing the SP cost of an extra weapon specialization (to maybe 10 SP, feel free to balance it better). Now discard those penalties completely, and work the bonuses in the correct skill trees somewhere.
The result would be like saying: “Sure, you can learn how to handle a different weapon. If you want to truly excel in its use, however, you should dual-class into the correct skill tree.”
Edit: If this was a Star Wars game, you could always just leave it as is and call those perks dormant Force powers. I mean, a Jedi or a to-be-Jedi often is better at flying, shooting, or whatever, than those who have trained for it their whole life.
Well I dont know about that. On 1 hand it makes sense that the class with the profiency to use those weapons is better at them then someone with a random skill. But on the other hand it makes for some very fun and interesting combinations. And I think the idea behind it was to add weapon and build variety to the game which it does very nicely.
I love my Strongman assault. I can dash him into position with his 20+ movement and fire it very effectively because of how close that got him to the enemy. Kind of a shotgun, but on crack!
On the other hand I have a heavy with (forget the name, shotgun and melee weapon specialisation with like 20% extra damage?) and I LOVE smacking things in melee with him. I intended to give him a shotgun but honestly a melee weapon so far has just been to entertaining. I think im going to add beserker to the mix for an even sicker combo
Er…what im saying is that the current system as is, is fine imho. Adding penalties to the skills that are to good otherwise is a nice balancing act.
I agree in that these personal profiency traits should be handled somewhat differently. I hope that something more interesting will be done with them at some point, perhaps via some new mechanics.
Personally, what I don’t like about them are the damage buffs, because they can seriously disrupt the balance. For example, shotguns with 35 damage per pellet are good, but not too good when you consider opponents with say, min 20 armor. However, once you add the 20% bonus to damage from Close Quarters Specialist, they are too good, not to mention if you throw Reckless into the mix.
I would rather they didn’t give the damage bonus, just give the profiency and increase accuracy, except for melee weapons; an accuracy buff would be meaningless there, so an increase to damage would be OK.
It’s pure RNG, I assure you. The funniest thing happens when a character rolls both Cautious and Reckless, which shouldn’t be possible unless he has some kind of mental health issue.
Cautious and reckless sort of cancel eachother out but IIRC you still gain a net 10% damage buff from it. But im not to sure if thats worth 50 SP.
I dont see a problem with the perks having a damage buff tbh. Its already random which ones you get and a shotgun with 20% more damage isent more dangerous then say, a sniper rifle with 20% more damage who can snipe you from the other side of the map. At least with the shotgun you still need to get close
Actually, there is a very big difference. A shotgun with 20% damage buff becomes very effective against armored targets, i.e. it removes its weakness. Against a body part with 20 armor (and even the most armored Arthrons and Tritons have 20 armor body parts), an Iconoclast would do 10(35-20) =150 damage if all pellets hit the target. Once you buff it 20%, it does 10(42-20) = 220 damage. The real increase in damage is much more than 20%, it’s closer to 50%.
This doesn’t happen with single shot weapons like Sniper Rifles and Hel 2 Cannon.
To add to Volands explanation. Damage perks for shotguns are what differentiates crappy shotugnner from a godly one. Reckles + Shotgun perks transform 35 base damage into 49. That means you can one shot almost every end game Athron / Triton and as a result get easy chain kills via Rapid Clearance.
On the other hand Sniperist is one of the worse perks (at least in my opinion).
One reason is that going from 130 to 160 damage does not really change anything (just a small damage buff, that does not affect game dynamics, like in shotgun’s case).
Two it costs too much ( -4 WP hurts a lot and is not cheap to buy back).
Three it does not open any class combos (sniper is a long range, low DPS weapon, it does not fit any niches other than its main role).
In contrast “self defence specialist” is an amazing perk, that not only gives you access to the Gorgon Eye-A (the best weapon in game), but also slaps +20% damage and (what’s more important) +20% acuracy on top of it (+ some hearing range as a bonus).
When it comes to personal profiency traits, I think that
Sniperist is the worst, for the reasons stated in your post
Self Defense Specialist and Close Quarters Specialist are way too good.
Strongman is OK for some weapons, too good for other, and because all Heavy Weapons work differently it’s impossible to get its balance right. For instance, it’s OK for the Deceptor and for the Hel 2 Cannon, but it takes the GL over the edge, and perhaps Dante too.
Bombardier is too good, for the same reason that Strongman takes GL over the edge, because explosives do damage to all body parts.
Trooper is alright, and I think it would make sense to take the damage buff from the skill and just add it to the ARs…
IMO, it’s not a particularly good system, but it kinda does what it’s meant to do, which is to provide an easy way (for the devs) to allow for more variety in the builds. I don’t think there is any question that given time and resources they would rather do something else with it. For example, off the top of my head, allow the player to train operatives in additional weapon profiencies and create a different set of personal perks that would feel, well, somehow related to the operative’s personality.
A sniper has insane range and ungodly accuracy (specially the Senydrion one) so while the damage increase might be smaller and it has a big penalty. You can also use it ALOT more then the other weapons.
Most of the other weapons are used at ranges where your troopers are in danger of counter attacks from enemies if the shots dont kill them or you cant kill all of them. The sniper doesent really have that. He can park his ass on a rooftop somewhere or crouching behind a low wall while he snipes at things that cant even see him.
I dont feel that the damage numbers are that borked honestly Maybe add a penalty to the perks that are to good though? I dont think many other then sniperist actually have one? I mean Strongman has one but im not to sure if it effects that much to be perfectly honest… And when I see a perk that just gives me a bonus and no penalty im like…yes please.
Well, Strongman and Sniperist have penalties, but that’s probably because they boost the two weapon types (sniper rifle and grenade launcher) that are the most useful overall. If Sniperist didn’t have that -4 will penalty I’d take it on every soldier that had it, no questions asked.
I’m not sure why Voland talks down Snipers - he obviously knows what he’s doing, but practically everyone finds Snipers super useful for very good reason. Yeah, they TECHNICALLY have lower damage per AP than other weapons, but they’re vastly better at applying that damage. 100 damage that you can deliver consistently at long range while ignoring armour is much more useful than 200 damage sprayed out from an inaccurate weapon over multiple shots.
It’s a bit sad that the Hel Cannon and the machine guns get indirectly nerfed by being in the same category as the Goliath, though.
Absolutely agree.
With this two weapons you can win the whole battle standing around at the initial position, without any risk and against every opponent even with high armor.
Oh, I don’t. I think SRs are very useful because of high accuracy and high damage per projectile. This is compensated by low damage per AP, but it doesn’t make the weapon type somehow inferior - it just doesn’t make it the superior weapon. In fact, I find all weapons mostly well balanced in their base stats, before they are buffed.
What @PradBitt and I are saying is that SRs just don’t get the same kind of benefit from a damage buff as does a Shotgun, or a PDW. These are high damage per AP/low damage per projectile weapons to make them less effective against armor. Once you start applying buffs to them they lose that disadvantage - they become effective even against armored targets: it’s not just that their overall damage increases, as is the case with the SR.
I think it would be the same as with other proficieny traits, except that Sniperist would never have the same ‘pull’: I mean, if you have an operative, almost no matter the class, with a Personal Defense Specialist trait, you will want to give him a Gorgon Eye-A PDW. I wouldn’t give Sniperist, even without the malus, to someone who didn’t have Quick Aim or Adrenaline Rush.
(I have experimented with giving Sniperist to pure Assaults, for example, and it’s absolutely useless, while an Assault with the PDS trait and a Gorgon Eye-A is a Terminator).
I’m not sure. I’ve frequently ended up ignoring most of the proficiency traits I get offered.
• Trooper – problem here is that Assault Rifles aren’t really all that good. You use them a lot in the early game, but that’s more because they’re easily available than anything else.
• Bombardier – awkward because in the early game the only way to activate it is to put your soldier in a suit of heavy armour, which you can’t effectively use because you aren’t proficient with the jetpack.
• Close Quarters Specialist – obviously, if you want to be shotgunning things in the face then this is great. But on a long range soldier all it does is give you a bit of versatility, which is nice, but not amazing.
The PDW trait is the only one that’s good on basically everyone, and that’s only because the Gorgon Eye is kind of broken.
I’m a big fan of ARs, actually, and with the Trooper perk I find them more than adequate for any situation. Also, I’m discovering that they have great synergy with Marked for Death from a Sniper buddy. (but on the defense of the ARs I think I’m pretty much alone, so I’m just saying that I like them for the record - I’ve given up trying to convince anyone of their merits )
That is true, but if you have the DLC1 there is a (completely OP, imo) bionic torso that doubles your weight capacity, has no significant malus and allows to mount weapons/exo arms.
Well, see, here I kinda disagree - for me CQS has pull. If I have a long range operative with CQS, I will turn him into a close range shotgunner because the perk is so good. Perhaps the best thing you can do with a Sniper with CQS is to multiclass him into Assault and build him for close encounters. And if he has Reckless too it’s an absolute no brainer, imo.
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