How Beneficial is No Bullet Drop?

I feel like I'm firing tennis balls when I'm firing my rotary.

B-But Vanu is easy mode! It has no bullet drop!!!

Good post btw.

Recoil...... this is the where the numbers start to change from my experience, with drop you guys can watch your tracers with my NS-11c i use that recoil to keep it sighted by watching my tracers arc, its very hard to do the same with the VS's flat trajectory
i find the NS guns a lot easier to use than with any of my VS guns

Ha yeah I have been playing NC HA on the Test Server and I only realized they got bullet drop through this forum post. I didnt notice it while playing with the NC6 Gauss SAW at all. Because all the fighting is usually in ranges the drop desnt matter. Except maybe for the Battle Rifles, but they such in general so they dont count

NC6 isn't zeroed at 0 meters either. With a 3.4x scope I think its zeroed at about 150 m. Its the reason why aiming for the head with the NC6 will frequently result in its rounds flying straight over a players head.

This is why the devs changed the damage dropoff for the VS weapons because that was the ORIGINAL balance mechanism when non-VS weapons had real bullet drop.

The unfortunate truth. There is no engagement range that actually happens where 'no bullet drop' is a significant 'perk'.
On top of the fact that any weapon that could actually benefit from having no drop; is mysteriously excluded from the 'perk'. (Comet is the outlier.)

However, there are plenty of engagements where VS players are penalized from burst firing with all of the darn 3X firstshot recoils. That is a meaningful disadvantage.

While we're on the topic of bullet velocity however...
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...ight-tweak-to-the-ns-11c.157845/#post-2258021
The only weapon that really needs a velocity change is the NS carbine. Its very uncharacteristically out of place for an NS weapon.

To be honest the ONLY place where bullet drop actually matters (and isn't identical or nearly identical, i.e. not snipers) is with tanks and the Magrider has the most drop anyway due to the lowest shell velocity.

Killing snipers with slug ammo is the #1 reason why no bullet drop is awesome imo.

I don't know what to tell you other than graphs, statistics, etc, don't compare with how the game "feels" after nearly 20,000 kills racked up. What I can tell you, however, is that fighting against the NC in both small and large engagements feels more "fair" than engagements with VS. Why? Well, whether getting hit from a distance or up close, VS small arms and rifles take me down faster than the comparable NC variants. At night, I hate fighting the VS because they're harder to spot. I find myself finding more cover more quickly and taking fewer risks when fighting the Vanu because it "feels" like the fight, pound for pound, is on their side, no matter how slight the Vanu would like to argue. I don't feel this way with the NC, as I've noted, a fight against them feels more fair.

So, bullet drop is one of those things imo that should not be given to one faction and not the other two. I understand different tank designs, or even the CQ potency of the NC Max as their own, but bullet drop to me isn't something that makes that list. A wealth of fighting is done with small arms now post tank/vehicle whining and base design overhauling. Despite all this, however, I still find the fighting pretty fun regardless of who I am fighting, so I don't see this as a glaring problem.

Yeah well guess what, you balance on numbers, not how people "feel". If you balanced on "feeling" then every man ever would have a huge wang. Numbers on the other hand, say otherwise.

LIkewise all the statistics in all the books have little say in how the gut comes across in similar experiences. This doesn't have to do with people's wangs, but I suppose if that floats your boat...

And numbers don't play this game. I do.

Guessing on the number of the next die roll is COMPLETELY different from deciding how you should shape the die to make it "fair".

Using statistics to balance things in this game is EXACTLY how it should be done and nothing else.

Heh, 10-15 round bursts, that's cute. Try the 3-5 round bursting needed to hit at all that I recall on the NC some time

Anyways, the Original Poster is informative, good on them. Yeah, doesn't look like the bullet drop is much of an advantage ... its just I could have sworn I recall having to angle up due to bullet drop on the TR and NC at a lot shorter distances than 250 m ... which velocity for the drop is being used to compare here? Oh, 450 m/s. That might be why I remember it being a lot shorter distance (definitely around 100 and sometimes 50 m with some weapon load outs) where I would need to elevate my angle.

Just being clear here, thanks again for the post thepackett.

The faction traits shouldn't matter, yes.

In practice it does matter in a few cases. Like TR carbines being about rapid-fire rates, so they ended up with larger magazines -- but then this inadvertently caused their damage per magazine to be higher across the board than the other empires (33% higher than all VS carbines.) Since the rest of carbines' stats tend to be more or less balanced, it ends up being the higher dmg/mag that gives a slight advantage to TR.

Same deal with Gauss SAW, which feels like it originated as a balanced generic LMG, then they added higher damage (NC trait) and adjusted rate of fire to balance the DPS output -- but they neglected the fact that 100 bullets with 200 dmg puts it at 40% higher dmg/mag than the other empires' best dmg/mag (and 69% higher than the average dmg/mag across all LMGs.)

Granted I feel overall infantry balance is pretty dang close, and it's the non-infantry balance issues (ZOE, Vulcan, Marauder, C85) which are really impacting empire performance. But eventually they should get around to addressing these lower tier balance issues because they are imbalances and worth fixing, even if they're not super disruptive to gameplay. (And really I didn't even mention some of the guns I feel are most imbalanced.)

They also gave it a very long reload time. Same with TR, which has a longer reload than VS which has very quick reload speeds. You can't just act like there is no trade-off to it. In the case of the NC6 SAW it is also a very slow weapon both in fire rate and in terms of mobility(worst COF when moving of all LMGs). Doubt I have to tell you why standing still is bad.

Why the SAW got the nickname "GodSAW" I'll never understand. SVA-88, Orion, CARV, and MSW-R are better choices in almost every situation except at long/extreme ranges. I guess people just see that 200dmg and go "WOW!" EM6, Anchor, or GD-22S are better choices as well.

How beneficial is no bullet drop?
Well, you already said it yourself.

This.

VS have some of the best recoil patterns ya mook.

All TR weapons have pretty bad horizontal recoil to limit the usefull of our (sometimes) faster Rates of Fire, VS guns have much less horizontal recoil, and slightly more vertical recoil. This matters because vertical recoil is easy to control for, you just drag the mouse down. Horizontal recoil is unpredictable because it can yank left OR right with any given shot so you cannot just pull one direction to counter it.

VS gets slightly slower in some cases, and faster in others (serpent anyone) rates of fire to TR. 10 less bullets (because TR's trait of higher mag sizes is bogus) and the fastest reload speeds.

There is a reason the SV-88 is the best LMG in this game, it gets all the VS traits + the move speed modifier of a Carbine.

Then show us the numbers. I'll wrestle stats with you all day. You already ignored the stats from the OP.

The vs doesn't get movement speed multipliers for their carbines. Thats a TR thing.
The VS first shot multiplier is more difficult to control then horizontal recoil. 3x multi guns are hard to ADS with.

Heres a recap on recoil for you:
VS weapons have the worst first shot multipliers.
And NC weapons have the worst vertical.
TR weapons have a horrible horizontal.