Now, a good chunk of the community agrees: The battle rifles feel hastily put together, without many interesting mechanics or synergistic traits to them, as they are long range weapons with high spread, low velocity, and no targets which they are effective against. However, other players argue that not a lot can be done about their effectiveness against infantry, lest battles become too much about people just headshotting one another from across the map. So, my proposal is simple: 1. We reduce the battle rifles spread down one tier, to the 0.03 base, 0.06 bloom per shot tier. 2. We change the battle rifles damage to aircraft machinegun, which will improve their effectiveness against soft targets, and making them capable of damaging all targets. This would solve the accuracy problems, and leave the choice of "Do I accept the poor velocity, or do I increase recoil greatly," in the game, giving it a small boost, but the other change is something that will be contended a bit more. Ultimately, the point in changing the damage type would be simple: To give the battle rifle a niche in battles, without forcing them to offer the higher DPS or better TTK's under regular circumstances. Of course, one might wonder how much it would hurt the tank/air game, and I will argue this: It won't hurt it very much. Much like how the archer hasn't hurt MBT's substantially, but it would provide a greater degree of feedback regarding exposure to infantry (Taking archer fire, lets find some cover before the lancer squads get charged,) and cause a large number of infantry to be more willing to expose themselves to vehicles (You might not have noticed, but a lot of your kills in any armor is from people trying to C4 you.) But. Back to why this wouldn't actually hurt vehicles very much: This would be one of the lowest Infantry weapon DPS to Vehicle weapon DPS schemes in the game, as would make sense for a weapon whose primary targets would still be soft targets. For example, against sunderers, the DPS of a battle rifle with the Aircraft machinegun would be less then 30% that of a Basilisk, due to limited magazine size, lower rate of fire, a weaker damage type then the Basilisk (When firing at any vehicle which isn't a flash,) and a closer range at which the weapon stops doing its maximum damage. Not enough to be useless, but enough to give more life and tactical nuance to the battle. For reference, rocket launchers do 50% the DPS of a halberd.
I disagee with the change: 1. The BRs already have a niche combat role of medium-long range infantry combat. I would say they perform best at ranges ~50m for most classes except the infiltrator where they're better used a little closer (~30m). 2. Giving every infantry and his dog a weapon capable of doing even small amounts of damage against vehicles will break the game when you scale it up to large 100v100 battles. Tank columns will instantly vaporize when 100 people are all shooting at the first tank in the column. If you want to do damage to vehicles at range, either pull a heavy with a ground lock launcher (or dumb fire if you're good at predicting movement) an engineer with the AV-MANA turret (if you're talking extreme ranges) or a basilisk flash for the nanite cost of a couple grenades.
This is correct, but then a question pops up: why do we have attachments like 2x scopes and laser sight, if they're meant to be used in long range engagements only? Imho that's the biggest problem with Battle Rifles: they're not flexible, and if you even dare to use them outside their niche then you basically handicap yourself as you get outgunned by everything else in the game. As you are in the carbines range, there is no reason to use a Battle Rifle any longer. Imho the solution is one of these points (or a combinations of them): - Buff damage. - Reduce CoF bloom. - Give Adavanced Laser Sight and / or Soft Point Ammo as attachments. We would at least be able to configure our Battle Rifles to do something else than long range sniping.
They are typically less flexible then the CQC Bolts. That says something. The sad thing is, weapons designs get increasingly clumped together at a pace where stranger solutions are starting to get to be the most practical way that you can actually make weapons that don't overlap with something that is objectively better/worse. The reason I want to see my idea tested is that I feel that this one to three value change might be one such strange solution, as the archer hasn't broken the game, and it is a similar inflexible niche weapon to the battle rifles.
