[Suggestion] Dual Wield Sidearms for LA

Nice necro-post, although the real question is wtf are you talking about?

Players who pull a tank acknowledge that they will have a fair amount of armor around them, but no one using them thinks they're invincible for a second. C4 is far from being the only solution to dealing with tanks

Laughed out loud for a minute.

According to Wrel, "it would take animation guy a whole month of working time to create animations for dual wielded weapons. They are not ready to commit to something like that"

... Especially when it concerns such a controversive idea, which got as many downvotes as upvotes when proposed originally. And no, nobody cares that original idea wasn't thought through.

So y'all can forget about dual wielding for a good long while.

Dual Repeater that firing simultaneously

My dream

This. Is. GOLD! xD

I don't think it would be that bad of an idea. In case it would be OP by default, LA could replace their jetpack with a cool looking rack for the sidearms and I doubt they would be much more threatening than HAs, considering obvious downsides to this

Dual wielding has an almost mythical attraction to it. Flying about while wielding two weapons and firing them at the same time? Wonderful! Count me in!

But practically, it serves no purpose in the game. At best it'll just add a slightly different playstyle for the LA, at worst it'll be either OP or completely useless.

The LA needs something, dual wielding isn't it, and it has never been it.

You know. That actually makes sense.
Dual-wielding requires a way to reload. Which could be a system attached to your torso that automates the process. Which would be additional hardware and require trade-offs on the jetpack side.
If dual-wielding actually filled a real purpose, I'd say that this could be an interesting thing.

Wait, what if dual-wield Light Assaults only had short bursts of movement, like evasion movements in Unreal Tournament or Hawken or Titanfall whatever, but were allowed/forced to dual-wield?
They would be agile opponents that are hard to hit, but they can only engage at mediocre ranges because they are limited to side-arms without optics and they don't have the ability to switch to a secondary weapon if their ammo runs out.
Hit and run fighters that need to constantly stay on the move and time their reloads very carefully. Perfect assassins if the dashes can be used for some mediocre terrain scaling.
It's a bit of the same logic as stalker cloak, really. Add something potentially obnoxious and then force the player to neither have a primary weapon, nor the quick switch to a second gun.

Basically, shotguns but possibly fun to play and play against. In fact, I even would rather fight these guys than snipers.

Hopefully, the incoming New Player Buff (along with the Rocklet Launcher) will be just the thing.

The Rocklet Rifle will do many good things for the LA, but it doesn't do it in the direction I would expect it.

The LA is supposedly a mobile fast-attack unit. Yet in practice almost everything points in the opposite direction. You have to choose between mobility or firepower, because if you fly your aim is completely screwed up (Just imagine a HA gaining a huge COF when activating his shield). If you want to be accurate, you are suddenly downgraded to a watered down Engineer.
You want to use smoke grenades? Well I hope you enjoy losing all your mobility because using anything to look through the smoke means you have to go into ADS and lose all your speed.

The Rocklet Rifle is supposed to give up that accuracy while flying. But considering it's DPS against infantry if said infantry is gratuitously standing still for you, you might as well not bother. I think the idea behind the Rocklet Rifle is a good addition to the AV capabilities for infantry. It's relatively short-ranged but on the mobile LA you stand a better chance at a good firing position. Personally I would have put the Rocklet Rifle in the utility slot and made people pay nanites for each rocklet. That way the Rocklet Rifle can have more firepower than "just enough if you get everything in the back of the vehicle" and in a shorter time without becoming unbalanced.

What I would have given the LA? Abilities for speed, transportation, accuracy. Give the LA the ability to swap their Jumpjets for the Charge ability, or a teleportation ability (The UT teleport guns come to mind). Give the LA an activateable ability that reduces your moving COF to that of standing COF and your jumping/jetting/falling COF to moving COF at the cost of burning jumpjet fuel so you can be much more accurate and can use that jumpjet fuel indoors and outdoors for various things. Allow the LA to fire their weapons while sprinting but with a large COF! Something unique, something that sets the LA apart from the other classes during combat, rather than pre-combat.
Extra things you could give the LA is more utility options. For instance, visors that have different effects. You could have an NS/NV visor so you don't have to use a scope when throwing smoke grenades, or an enhanced HUD visor that puts a wireframe on all enemies you spot that is visible through walls to you and any allies within X distance. This way you can much better track enemies and have a much more important role in teamplay. The LA and Infiltrator have always shared a lot as they both form saboteurs and spotters, the LA would finally have it's spotter ability enhanced and in a unique way compared to the infiltrator.

They already can do that with Drifter jumpjets (which kinda suck). LA should be the DPS class of the game; fast, deadly but frail when spotted parrallell to the Heavy being the Tank. The rocklet rifle is a step in the right direction, but it really is a utility gun; unlike the rocket launchers, it has extremely limited anti personnell aplications. I don't see it having any impact on the infantry meta but it will definitely shake up the air and armour ones.

Dual wielding could be the gimmick that LA need to complete them. If akimbo pistols behaved like max guns and had a small cof even when flying, it would make for incredibly enjoyable close range air skirmishes (and also cement the LA's repuation as a close range skirmisher, because currently the heavy is a better close range class) Obviously twin pistols would need balancing compared to single pistols and certain sidearms would have to be exempt (NS pistols, crossbow) but dual wield would be worthy of the patch highlight and I'm sure that the promise of a fast paced gunslinging air shootout playstyle would bring people back to the game on its own. It's just such a shame that the biggest obstacle to this happening is animation.

1: The Drifter Jets do not do that and only work in the sense that you can close the distance quickly but with an enormous COF.
2: Drifter Jets do not suck, they are awesome.
3: What on earth does this change?

The LA could be a DPS class, it's one of the roles you could give it. But there's absolutely no reason not to make the LA a highly mobile class that uses that mobility in combat (rather than pre-combat) to get an advantage. You could easily even make the LA do both: DPS and mobility in one nice package.

Akimbo could be one solution, but it wouldn't be much different from wielding a shotgun due to the COF restrictions. So why not cut to the chase and actually wield a shotgun?
That's why Akimbo wouldn't bring anything really new to the table. It would either eclips shotguns, which isn't a good thing since you would make shotguns obsolete, or it would function the same as shotguns, which means you haven't done anything to renew the class, or it would function weaker than shotguns but with more range, at which point it would be closer to an amped-up SMG, making the SMG class obsolete or of course it would function similarly to SMG's at which point you haven't changed anything, again.

Assuming you wanted this ability to be possible to use with all of the normal sidearms it would be very hard to balance properly without making sidearms very weak for everyone else.

Just imagine what sort of damage output would be possible with 2 commisioners. 900 damage pr triggerpull, or instant death to anything aside from a MAX with a headshot. I imagine this would completely outclass SMGs that fill a very similar niche.

-Stigma

So the best i can do is dream of dual weilding T4 amps?

That would never happen anyway, so yeah. Dream on.