It's one of those "just because you can doesn't mean you should things". Random bullets can kill a lot of things. I killed a liberator by small arms fire despite the fact that it doesn't take damage, cos it crashed and I had the last hit. Doesn't mean it will happen regularly.
The NCs are like BUFF EVERYTHING WE HAVE!!! The TRs are like NERF EVERYTHING THEY HAVE!!!! The VS-s are like F**** EVERYTHING!
30-50m kill with the jackhammer is a fluke. The min damage used to be 90, but they have since nerfed it to 70. Maybe before the nerf it was more likely, but I probably wouldn't even try now.
So don't buff their damage or rate of fire then. Reduce the elements which make them hard to use instead. If those top tier players have truly mastered the handling of NC weapons, then making them slightly easier to control isn't going to make those players any better. Buffing/nerfing, or refusing to nerf/buff, based on the top 1% of players is just stupid.
I call ******** on the "nc weapons are better in their niche so don't buff them" all the important combat in this game takes place in courtyards and towers etc. Where vs/tr have a advantage the theoretical longe range advantage is buloney as vs/tr also have access to long range slow firing weaponry. The stupid thing is tr/vs ha's have access to exact copies of nc 167 damage long range lmg's yet nc do not have access to anything in the 700 to 800 rof lmg's its complete crap.
Ah yes, that Excel spreadsheet was made by me. I posted it on /ps2g/ first before putting it on the forums. This is my latest version, just in case you would want to see it. There were a bunch of mistakes in my older versions. Kind of a late reply, but I haven't logged into the forums for the past few days. My reasoning behind pure DPS increases, with no change to their recoil or moving-accuracy stats, is because Nanoweave armor and resistive abilities (Nanite Mesh Gen, Resist Shield, medic self-heal) will impact slow-firing weapons the most. The more health you stack on, the wider the gap between a slow firing weapon and a fast firing one. With how short "10 meters" in this game is, every weapon should be judged on their minimum damage output or longest-TTK; their max damage output is often irrelevant. The chart shows how the CARV (or Orion) will pull ahead even compared to a buffed SAW with 550 RPM when NW5 comes into play. But if you increase the damage output dramatically, then the low moving-accuracy of NC flavor weapons is A-OK for balance. The same concept applies to battle rifles, NW5 affects them really hard at long distance battles, but a simple buff of +10 damage negates that. The third solution to all of this is to completely overhaul their damage range system into something sensible, like actually making the max-damage range matter. This is the only game I've seen where the max-damage range is standardized at point blank instead of being varied to give some weapons a tangible range advantage over others.
I think the weapon stats should be in scales: RPM [poor - decent - great - TR] Damage (per bullet or pellet) [poor - decent - great - NC] Reciol [poor - decent - great - VS] Muzzle velocity, Reload speed, Clip size, etc. [poor - decent - great] The damage, rpm or recoil should be empire-specific, but other stats should vary, so that plyers could find weapons matching their playstyles. Of course TTK needs to be normalized across the weapon types, but that doesn't mean their stats chouldn't be taken into extremes. Only starting weapons should be good all around, but more advanced weapons should have some stats that one could name OP, like badass clip size or almost no reload time. Perhaps that's the problem with NC weapons - The Gauss SAW is a great weapon, but it's not good all around, so it's hard to learn for new players, since their playstyle hasn't clarified yet. Right now i know what i want from a weapon and this is accuracy. Since i'm NC the weapons recoil should be on great level, and damage must be on NC level. Other stats aren't that important. So basicly i want Commissioner to be an NC weapon
Commissioner should have been NC to begin with- it is more NC than NC and that is strange. The other NS weapons are a bit of blend of all factions (i.e. they do not have greater mag ammo than TR, but it is higher than typical NC/VS, etc.). They definitely dropped the ball with NC IMO in that it is billed as the damage faction but with the ROF*Damage per shot equation the most iconic NC weapons usually have the lowest meaningful damage output- yet NC still pays for this damage per shot through the nose. Meanwhile, TR has mag ammo, rof, and hipfire accuracy and you sometimes have to strain to see the drawbacks.
I think that Higby has fairly stated the issue with the NC arsenal. It's a faction that has guns with a higher skill floor, but pretty much the same skill ceiling. This means that stronger players do well with the faction, but it can feel weaker for average players. The problem is that if the weapons are improved, the skill ceiling will go higher then the other factions, which is a very bad way of balancing since it will cause power creep. The ScatterMAX is harder to use effectively if the player has bad aim, but its very strong when used well. The Reaver is the hardest hitting aircraft -once you learn how to aim with it the Vanguard MBT is the strongest MBT once it's shield and reload time is fully certed, and if you have a player who misses rarely using it. Weapons such as the Anchor, Gauss Saw, Razor, GD-7F, and Carnage BR are all very strong weapon options in the hands of an accurate player.
if you want to see what SOE's overall plan for the NC is, just check out the "This version of the Enforcer Modified should not go live" topic.
