The Spiker is a great concept and I think the regular 2x burst fire mode can be left alone. But the Armor Piercing mode is so useless. It does so little damage that the only practical way to get armor kills with it in the field is to opportunistically prey on vehicles that are already on fire... Else, no one is going to sit there and wait for me to kill them 1% at a time with my spiker. I can accept that just firing off single uncharged shots with the spiker might take off 1 percent-ish at a time, but the charged firing mode is just so underwhelming right now... you take the risk of charging it up and moving slower just to potentially miss because the projectile is so slow... not to mention that if you DO manage to land a hit, it does like 5% dmg. Not rewarding enough if you ask me. I would rather have the spiker charge take all the ammunition in the clip and do damage on par with a rocket or something. Thoughts?
Now, I know this may sound mean - it's not intended to be -, but: Nice to ask for only the weapon who blatantly stole another faction's up-to-that-point unique weapon mechanic to recieve a buff and not the original holder. I will agree though that putting AP on a pistol was a very questionable choice to begin with and that requires some intnese rethinking. AP mode in general, even on the original holder Godsaw, is mostly good to give Liberators a little scare or shoot tanks that you couldn't reliably hit with the rocket launcher. It doesn't do much tho.
I would take the Godsaw over the Spiker any day. The thing is that even if the Godsaw has low AP dmg per hit, it has a big magazine and a high fire rate even in AP mode. The result is that you are legitimate threat to vehicles with the Godsaw. Whereas with the Spiker, you are vulnerable during the time you're charging the weapon, and even after the charge, you barely do any damage.
As said, putting it on a pistol was very questionable. But no, it is not that good on a Godsaw, and this is coming from a person whose second most used weapon is the Godsaw according to fisu statboard (for obvious reasons excluding knives here). The AP can be helpful occasionally, but it's never a prime method of engaging anything. My list of targets for AP Godsaw (in order of regularity): 1) Magriders that strafe like crazy while being further away than ~80 m, making them somewhat of a pain to hit with the rocket launcher (unless of course they are strafing non-erratically, then it's fine). 2) Liberators to give them a bit of a scare, some of the Lib pilots are really sensitive when it comes to incoming damage. 3) Faraway tanks just for a tiny bit of chip damage to mildly inconvenience them. 4) Burning vehicles that move away fast. 5) When encountering heavvy vehicles and the rocket ammo is completely depleted because there is not a single Engineer or terminal around. This usually ends in me dying relatively quickly, as I have nothing to even give them a second of pause for thought and shooting them is more an acto of definace than anything else. Fortunately happens extremely rarely as terminals and Engineers are both quite common.
its best just to forget about the charge mode entirely, its not very practical, but the burst fire mode is pretty darn competitive! its almost identical to Desperado, the faction specifics are still massively overshadowed by the NS stuff, but desperado/spiker are some of the best faction specific sidearms.
Except the TR Repeater - this is in a class of it's own and is arguably the best faction specific sidearm in the game - and probably better than most NS stuff too. I hardly see TR using anything else, which says a lot considering they have access to all the same NS stuff that the other factions have.
Technically, the Godsaw stole the VS' unique faction mechanic, first. In PlanetSide 1, you could switch between anti-infantry and armor piercing ammunition so long as you had the correct type in your inventory. With TR and NC, you needed to manually reload your weapon to do this, while for VS it was just a simple button toggle.
Personally I think most of the sidearms could use a buff. They should be comparable to primaries with a smaller mag. Especially since some classes can now carry primaries in their secondary slot via ASP.
