I would actually said the opposite. Its very bad now, and should be redesigned.
It does not have to be like it was before. It does not have to be suitable for all guns, or allow manual aim.
For example automatically shoting with certain weapons all targets in sight inside a cone would be just fine.
Want to tweak it later?, adjust the cost, range and cones of fire, make it not usable with sniper riffles (it only makes sense), add a cooldown … If the devs are unwilling or incapable of making the ability useful and satisfactory, they should just remove it and think on different ability instead.
In my opinion, on paper it does exactly what a “Rage Burst” should do, wipe a long burst in a cone over the enemies. The result against big enemies feels very good, you get rewarded for a dangerous move close on to them.
But against a group of enemies is underwhelming and my guess it is because of the -50% inaccuracy on top, so it scatters also a lot in the vertical direction.
I would like to test it without acc penalty or even with acc buff, maybe it could be a lot better than.
This is the main point we brought to the devs, but they don’t want to narrow skills down to special weapon usage, this would be against their general sandbox philosophy. I can understand it somehow, but their current RB is IMO exactly that: useless with anything other than burst weapons. It just don’t deny the usage with other weapons, so if you want you can do so …
The thing is the concept itself os a eage burst does not make any sense with a sniper riffle. And there are alreadu guns where you xant use it.
I undersrand they wanted this sandbox philosophy. And the decided to keep that philosoffy to an extreme when gameplay and as a result the game itself suffers from it. Which is just an obvious mistake. It is more than natural that not every weapon should use every ability and it does not already. But toneach their own. They can make bad decissions and we can point out that are bad decissions. Whether they do something about it or not is their choice.
Still, i understand RG may feel satisfying for you, It was just not the case for me. After three full gameplays, I did not found it useful a single time, and everytime I used was not only dissapointing, but never ontained any better results tham normal shot.
I may be using the ability just wrong together with everyone else who thinks the same as I do. And still would indicate a problem in its design.
Sure, the problem in my opinion is, that it is only useful in extreme close range (max 3-4 tiles distance) and almost useless on longer ranges and also against groups of enemies.
But as I said, my guess is that the acc penalty of -50% (double aim circle!) on top of the wipe that already spreads the burst in a 10° angle is probably too much.
Some paint work to show what I mean, black is normal aim, red the current RB wipe, blue would be a wipe without aim penalty:
Because I’m already on modding the game I think I will try it out and my guess is that I will end with an aim buff but wider angle to the left and right. And testing a lot of course, maybe it will work out how I think …
The problem with Rage Burst is distance, and players not understanding how to maximize damage.
Yes, it is Level 7 skill, and yes, it is powerful but you have to set the proper conditions, it is not just hit and forget
Current rage burst aiming is broken for smaller targets. Try to aim at a humanoid point blank. Half the time shots will go in like opposite direction. And this isn’t just result of bad accuracy, since shots are clustered tightly enough.
I don’t think the purpose of RB was small targets, it is the same case of Acid cannon, you can use it on Arthrons but you benefit the most on medium large size enemies
Did you try shooting humanoid sized enemies point blank? RB often will fire whole burst in completely wrong direction.
I suspect this happens because it’s aiming doesn’t take weapon stances into account. Targeted point seems to be selected from center of firing unit, but shots come out from end of barrel, which can be very far from it.
I’d very much prefer at least proper UI for arc targeting, like draw that huge oval instead of circle. As it is you, can have weird snapshotting sweetspots that actually allow to get better hit grouping, and can only be found by reloading multiple times to try firing RB from various positions (since you can’t adjust what you aim at even a little, adjusting relative position is what’s left).
Simply changing it from five to only three shots would have been ok. Or, if we want to have five shots, let each one be aimed independent- with overlapping zones not allowed. Completely independent shots - even separate targets - then make it a bit slower so the target can attempt to dodge/bob away some of the later shots…
As it is it is not really ragey as much as panicky.
