Weapons : feedback

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
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I’ve just finished a campaign, and felt it was a good time to give some feedback about weapons in the game, especially because i felt many were broken, in a way or another.

Preambule : My feedback takes into account how battles occur in this game. In general, they last for 3-4 turns mostly, with the first one being the most critical. Especially the first enemy turn, because usually, the map is crowded with enemies, they will take your team by surprise, appearing here and there, and strike with their full strength. With every enemy down, the danger will lower greatly, as will their willpower. After a few turns, their fate is sealed.
So, concerning weapons, you want them to hit hard and fast.

This leads to my first remark : Viral weapons
They are really really bad. The base damage is very low, and the viral effect too. It would need hundred of turns to do anything meaningful. Viral damade should be 10x higher to have any meaningful effect. Another possibility would be to mimic the virus spread in the body by increasing the viral damage each turn, but as i say in preambule, it would still be meaningless because fights are too short and you want that enemy down as fast as possible, to avoid retaliation and to weaken the group.
Redemptor and Dominator are really bad weapons.

Acid damage : Does it work properly ? As far as I’ve seen, Acid damage attacks armor, but doesn’t transfer to health. Maybe i missed something. If you have to wait all armor to go away before any damage is done on health, it’s too long.

Crossbows : DPS is OK, but precision is a bit low. It’s fairly common to miss at close/medium range.

Snipers : Generally the best weapons. Very high damage allows to pass armor easily and with the incredible accuracy, it’s The weapon to disable body parts at any distance. Some skills make it even more powerful, shooting twice a turn, or unloading the full mag on a target (best damage i’ve found so far) . The magazines are usually very large, worsening the case.

Pistols : They can be useful early on with their 1AP cost, to mix with a movement or other weapon with 3AP cost, not to mention the jetpack or a free overwatch. Later, they do too little damage to be of any use on the bigger targets. The skill to unload the mag on a target could benefit pistols, but as you can use it rather on snipers the choice is moot.

Assault rifles : They would be very well balanced if all other weapons were more in line with them. Sadly, they pale in comparison with anything, so their use is quite limited. They suffer the most of armor, having low bullet damage, and spread their damage over several body parts if not in the air due to bad accuracy.

Melee weapons : Going into melee range is so dangerous (exposition, mind control), that i rarely see the use for it. Melee attacks cost too much APs for what they do. They shoud have a charge movement specific to them to be effective. Some protective skills (evasive, tanking) or equipment (physical or energy shield, better armor, etc) could help their viability. Right now you need to be lightly equiped to be fast enough to close combat, and die trying, unless you use some excentric combos.
I don’t understand the weapon variety. The Anu hammer seems to be the best. Enything you can research ends up being worse. Worse damage, same AP cost.

Spiders : They are very effective. However, their AI is sometimes laking. They have a tendency to fo behind covers, especially undestructible covers… It would be nice to drive them around, like the technician does, but his AP cost for this is heavy. Maybe if he could control a cluster of 3 rather than just 1, it would be manageable.

Turrets : I couldn’t test them much because i had only a few engineers very late. But their price stroke me as very high. For a consumable, it’s too hard an investment.

Individual weapons :

Destiny III : Is the targetting method intended? Currently, it’s like using a grenade, with the area of effect bubble and all, except it shoots a burst of lasers. It’s very hard to aim. Why not the standard reticle or at least a smaller AoE bubble ? The damage isn’t that much interesting for a late game weapon. Better to use a fury or ragnarock.

Canon Hel II : Interesting powerful weapon, but the accuracy is really really bad. It pales in comparison to the snipers. A shame.

Archange RL1 : A real mess. The projectile looks bad and slow. The damage is ridiculous (for a rocket launcher and for the late game when you get it). It doesn’t even have AoE (seriously?!), and a shred of 5… Please revamp this weapon, I don’t see any reason to waste anything on it!

Deceptor MG : Why only one MG in the game? There should be several of them. (maybe i missed some?) Anyway, it’s rather well balanced on par with assault rifles, but the accuracy and range are bad. Some boost about it would be nice, would make them a little bit more playable. The ammo count is quite low. It could be ok, but the snipers have so much ammo capacity that they pale in comparison, especially when using Rage Burst, badly…

Sorry, it’s a bit late here, I hope I summarised my points clearly enough, and this can be of use. This is just my humble opinion.

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I agree viral weapons need EMERGENCY reworking. Not even my priests run viral weapons because just killing monsters take their WP down way faster. And yes, that 4 tube missile launcher, I think the devs left out a “0” behind the damage number or something.

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Viral: My primary issue with viral weapons is that they apply effect on end of enemy turn. So, even if you apply enough viral to drop WP to 0, enemy will only panic after executing their moves. That’s too late to matter.

Acid: there are better ways to shred armor that don’t take forever, namely Berserker’s ability, Sniper’s Weakspot and shredding shotgun.

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It kind of feels like viral should be reworked.
I’d suggest that instead of it being DOT to WP, it works as a WP lockout (with reduced numbers). So if you have 10 points of virus, that lowers you WP max by 10 points.
As the virus fades you get your WP back (if it removed WP you actually had available).

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I would hope that the Hel cannon’s accuracy was lower than a dedicated long range rifle :stuck_out_tongue: lol
The main issue is that heavy armour decreases your accuracy by so much. Even if you had a sniper rifle in full heavy armour, you wont hit much…

The destiny III is useless atm, true. It does a perfect 90 damage each time though (I guess that’s useful?) but the ammo is expensive and as you said, aiming is really hard. It would be really nice if it didn’t have an AP cost to it (as it’s a presumably auto-aimed shoulder mounted weapon, ala the Predator). Maybe even if was an overwatch only firing weapon. I think that would rock!

I fully agree they’re missing a 0 on the 4 barrel missile launcher damage. I had a guy with bonus damage on, and hit several body parts on an alien and did a maximum of 150 damage (very rare to even get that). You get more with the early grenade launcher, which also strips body parts on multiple enemies. Honestly, this should be an early game missile launcher as is… at least it’s accurate!

Viral would be workable if it did the virus damage up front (and slightly more of it) the virus weapons are also too inaccurate imo. If it just did direct WP damage (and nothing over time), it would be FAR better at weakening an enemy for your priests to take advantage of. As it stands, you actually make it impossible to MC an enemy, because the viral damage then panics the unit for several turns after… not good

Turrets are NOT a consumable. Currently, they appear to get their ammo back at the end of each mission and you also retrieve them after each mission (assuming they’re not destroyed) - even in missions where this makes 0 sense (like after running away in an ambush, or attacking and stealing an aircraft from a Haven lol)

Turrets are quite good. They really should use the over-watch mechanic though imo, instead of an “after the enemy turn” thing they have now - where they have a small-but-real possibility of shooting your own soldiers by accident.

I think the Machine guns (which, yes there should be more versions of - there’s an “independent” version, that’s a strict downgrade), should only be 2AP to fire. Making it 3 means you almost never get into range and still have enough AP to fire them, even with quick shot (which does help). Coupled with the heavy’s innate inaccuracies, it wont even kill an Arthron (etc) from point blank range… Maybe it should just be similar to the Arthron’s one? They seem to be too effective!

The poison crossbow is where it’s at! the normal one is crap. The poison one does 10 less (actual) damage, but adds 40 poison per shot. This can add up quickly. The normal one should have its accuracy increased and extra bolts added to its clip imo (5-6 would actually be awesome). Maybe slightly more damage too… currently it’s an accurate pistol…

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I didn’t get machineguns to work at first…but if you get them to work the amount of damage they inflict is off the charts.

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Try it on a sniper with the heavy weapons perk for the proficiency and extra damage and stacking accuracy buffs (all sniper armor + sniper L5 ability) - the accuracy becomes good enough to easily hit long-range shots, especially since with cannons you no longer need to hit a specific part of the body, as most small enemies die to cannon in 2 hits anyway.

It’s still nicely balanced with the sniper rifle - sniper rifle is better for “mission kills” (headcapping sirens, shooting down arms to stop 2h weapon use, destroying the tanks turrets, etc), while the cannon is better at blowing down cover and better single shot damage (234 after +30% bonus - killing most smaller enemies in 2 shots), and the extra effects - daze (useful on overwatch) and armor reduction (especially useful before piercing weapons become available)

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Assault rifle has an advantage of being a 2 AP mid-range weapon - making it only 1 AP with quick shot, allowing for a nice 4 quick shot alpha strikes (reasonably accurate mid-range on a sniper), which can be useful once you get piercing assault rifle to soften up multiple enemies to make them ‘reliably killable’ in one shot by something else (cannon, sniper, a chain of point blank shotgun shots, etc), resulting in better action economy. So this feels more like a support weapon with a rather nice alpha strike dps if you have will points to burn. The basic 2 shots totaling 300 dmg per turn is not that nice, but 4 quick shots from an ‘aggressive + assault rifle perk’ sniper makes it 900 dmg that, if necessary, can be spread over 4 targets. Even without considering random perks, 600 dmg alpha strike is more raw damage (before rage burst, of course :slight_smile: ) that you can get from 2 cannon or sniper rifle quick shots, which is quite useful on the first contact round.

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About the Hel canon, the bad accuracy may come from the armor, yes, but in the end, a heavy (class) with his standard gear has an enormous reticule in my experience, and can’t hit anything except at very short range. Sure, if you multiclass with a sniper you may make it more accurate, but multiclassing with sniper shouldn’t be the answer to anything, and at this point you’d better use a sniper rifle all along, and cherry on the cake, use rage burst.
Maybe the blame could be transfered to heavy armor, in the end, because accuracy is so important and armor less and less meaningful through the campaign, its usefulness vanishes quickly, except for the chest part with jumpjet.

My mistake for turrets. As I mentionned, i didn’t test them a lot, and the only time I used it it musthave been destroyed, so I thought it was consumable.

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I actually trialed the Destiny III again last night, with a different Heavy (lower lvl, not dual spec-ed into a sniper) - and found it really useful. For 1 action point, the damage was better than a pistol and was very good at disabling body parts. Great for jumping in and letting off a disable shot

Poor aiming aside (really needs to use the normal fire reticle) it will become decent, me thinks

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Yes, you’re right. From the standard heavy gear, mounted NJ rockets are still viable as you don’t need an exact hit, and are a good counter to clustered enemies or enemy snipers, even if you don’t see them but know the general location they’re firing from. With the heavy guns, multiclassing either to assault (to dash up close once the enemies are close, or sit and spam rally the troops if there are no nearby enemies yet) or to sniper (to actually be able to hit long-range shots and do 2 shots per turn instead of 1 in the first critical rounds) is necessary to get reasonable DPS out of them.

I think you’re also right here. Sadly, heavy armor is quite useless - it only protects against bursts of low-damage bullets but not against poison/melee/snipers/explosives/mind control. “They can’t kill you if they’re dead/crippled/have no LoS/too far away” becomes a much better armor.

Cannons have some advantages over sniper rifles - 2-shot kills on small enemies (so you can conserve ammo by only rage bursting chirons, scullas, and Disciples’ beast tank - though chiron only needs 3 cannon shots for mission kill so is usually not worth a rage burst either), more 1-shot kill opportunities on wounded enemies, daze for better overwatch, better cover destruction, mostly ignoring armor from the start (while piercing sniper rifles is a mid-level NJ tech). So there’s some niche both for sniper rifles and cannons, which feels ok - I guess a lot also depends on what random +dmg% perks you get.

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Melee and viral weapons desperately need a boost. Also, any enemies with return fire will wreck a melee. (How about no return fire on targets within melee range and/or a limit to the number of times return fire triggers.)

(Attacks of opportunity on targets that run up to a melee equiped opponent or run from melee range).

(Allow melee weapons to target body parts/weapons.)

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Destiny III is just plain stupid and almost unusable. I find it hard to believe a developer made this and though yep that is how it should work. You should get the recticle at teh very least it isnt a rocket

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