The Big Bad Pistol Thread

Yes but the flip side of this is that realism didn't go both ways. If you want your rockets to gib me, fine. However if I land just ONE dumbfire or other AV weapon on your aircraft, that's it, you're done. THAT would be realistic. Even small arms fire would be a HUGE threat to your hovering cheese-copter. So don't sit here and preach about realism.

Same with tanks. Wanna farm infantry and everything else, cool. But the fact that your tank can soak up 20+ AV rockets and still keep going is absolute and utter BS.

ES pistols need 1x & 2x scopes.

Also compensators & flash suppressors.

If pistols were be competitively equal to primaries, gameplay
might just get a bit more interesting.

I thought the handicap was you couldn't carry another weapon like a sniper rifle.
The pistols are good in there own right.

You know you can't have vehicle weapons in a FPS game. They will always be *********. They are infantry weapons with the appearance of vehicle weapons. Some of them with the stamp "can hurt armor". Viper cannon shoots low velocity explosive rifle bullets from a banana magazine.

I would prefer the 1x and 2x scopes and Soft point ammo. Compensators would only really be good on NC pistols and flash suppressor doesnt have a big enough downside for pistols.

At the very least give AMP a good model. Not this over sized vanu-drill-machine-space-ship.

A small, very accurate SMG with high ROF and big magazines ? This may be a bit too much I believe ...
What about a repeating recoilless sniper gun ?
TR already have high ROF and mag size, they have to get a downside on something (you know, the balance thingy ...)

In the case of the AMP it has extremely low damage and as proposed it would still be pretty inaccurate. Just more limited than it is now. It nearly blooms to your entire screen.

Game balance > realism

I thought we figured that out when MBT HE tank shells started doing less AoE damage than thrown grenades.
Or when 2 C4 could kill just about anything.
Or when .50 sniper rifles could only deliver one shot kills to the head where IRL they will blow your limbs off.

You got my approval just after these words. It's very well known devs have bigger fishes to fry (they always do actually) but it's not a secret Commissioner and Underboss are way better than all the other pistols of the game. The damage is just so high you don't need anything else.

Personally I'm not for buffing pistols: i'm for nerfing the Commissioner (which I bought when it came out).

It's not a problem of balance vs realism, it's a problem of everything vs level design.
All the bases are too open, it's too easy to farm infantry from outside the bases, you just have to be there. The bases are placed by people who never heard about strategy also. If they had made bases with real inside parts, the whole vehicle problem would be secondary, and much easier to admit to people.

Game balance should trump realism.. to a point. Players shouldn't get wrapped up around numbers.. the numbers are there for the computer to adjudicate what happens to X when Y shoots at it with Z. As a Player we know there are AI weapons, AV weapons, and AV weapons with additional properties against Air (we call it AA).

In the skyguard example, its not an X damage weapon doing less than a pistol doing Y more damage. Its an anti-air flak gun used against air and not so good against infantry. With pistols, they're base damage is what it is to have them effective at what we believe pistols can do. Short range, large caliber rounds. Low ROF and High Stopping power.

You can compare pistols to pistols with the numbers. That's what they are there for. It makes NO sense to compare the numbers from pistols to AA weapons. AA weapons aren't designed to be used against infantry, and pistols (in most cases) aren't designed to be used against aircraft.

And one thing everyone loves to leave out in such discussions is vehicle resistance and armor. Armor applies then resistance to the weapon type. This is to cut down on lethality to infantry so they are still relevant and to make vehicles able to withstand a hit or two. But I'd wager many know this and are just cherry picking info and trying to display numbers in the hopes of misleading others to further agendas. This makes them corrupt, and well outright liars.

Thank you. I also would be for nerfing the revolvers but they have been in game far to long and become such an integral part to so many it doesnt make sense to nerf it now.

No. This would just make people use those 24/7.

First off, some "back of napkin" calculations of how damage profiles in PS2 should look. This is just a proportional system based off of muzzle energy (e=0.5mv^2), which then relates to damage.



For example, let's say that we're going to use the NS-357's 375 damage as a baseline. Well based on that, the NS-44/NS-44L should get bumped up to 600 damage. Not bad, right?

But the thing is that vehicle damage is so much more powerful than a dinky pistol. If the NS-44 did 600 damage, then the following would be true:
20mm Basilisk: 15,685 damage
40mm Skyguard: 213,162 damage
120mm Prowler: 2,113,125 damage

Now I'm a reasonable person and I understand the need for balance. So maybe vehicle weapons should just do 10% of what they really ought to. That's a 90% nerf to vehicles! I propose:
20mm Bailisk: 1,500 damage
40mm Skyguard: 20,000 damage
120mm Prowler: 200,000 damage

I think a 90% nerf to vehicles is more than enough of a concession to infantry.

AA cannon aren't "anti everything" weapons. For example, even a 40mm shell would do fairly little to the front of an MBT, particularly if that shell wasn't designed for AP work. So it would wreck some things, but certainly not all things.

And this is hardly just a realism/immersion problem. It's also a gameplay mechanics problem, where vehicles are heavily underused in competitive play simply because they have been nerfed so hard and so far. For example, in the July 6 Server Smash, there were 25,520 total kills. How many of these kills came from tanks?
Lightnings (both factions)- 26 (0.10%)
Vanguards- 23 (0.09%)
Magriders- 10 (0.04%)

So how effective are tanks in actual competition? Well all tanks only accounted for 0.23% of all kills... less than a quarter of a single percent.

But regular gameplay is different, you might say. And I would respond that against terrible players, sure tanks will be more effective. In the alert that just happened on Emerald a few hours earlier, this is what it looked like out of 11,453 total kills.
Lightnings (all factions)- 392 (3.4%)
Magrider- 236 (2.1%)
Prowler- 150 (1.3%)
Vanguard- 62 (0.5%)

Even in "regular" play, tanks are still heavily underperforming, only accounting for a total of 7.3% of all kills.
In other words, if you add up just Orion, CARV, and SAW kills, those account for 8% of all kills... more than all tanks combined.
So you have an incredibly unbalanced situation where 3 LMGs are killing more than every single tank out there.

Buffing tank damage to semi-realistic levels would improve the value of tanks and see both an increased usage of them as well as increased lethality. This will make for a better balanced game, rather than "infantryside".

I own the carbine B variant of those, so I'm quite familiar with that. But at any rate, two things remain true:
1) The SU-16B carbine will outshoot the PLR almost every time. It will have better ballistics and do more "damage", due to increased muzzle velocity, all other things being similar.
2) A PLR will never do more damage than a 40mm Bofors cannon.

So long as PS2 conforms to those two expectations, that's ok in my book.

The Skyguard 40mm cannon does 200 damage per direct hit. A "long" NS-44L does 450 damage per direct hit.

Isn't it a problem where one sidearm is so obviously the better choice and even outperforms SMGs?

If you buff everything, then you also need to buff everything else so that a sidearm is not an acceptable alternative to a SMG or anything else.

I'm just referring to direct damage. Of course the 75mm Viper, having explosives, will do extra damage. But we're just imagining a 11.17mm slug and a 75mm slug hitting a target... from the impact alone one would expect the 75mm slug to do far more damage!

Oh, I'm going to design my massively expensive and fragile cannon to do less damage to certain targets because it would be too harsh on the enemy otherwise.

Said no military engineer ever.

The Skyguard should be able to absolutely chew up infantry. I mean it's already bad enough that the Skyguard cannon has a worse first-shot CoF than a sniper rifle... but we also must make it shoot gummy bears too.

It could probably keep going all day so long as the APS was constantly being reloaded... so yes, not inconceivable that it could neutralize 20+ rockets or so.

And again, that balance stems from the basic idea that tanks can carry much more weight and defenses than a rifleman can.

Why so? Damage is a function of the characteristics of a projectile. If a projectile is heavy and fast enough to penetrate heavy armour, then it stands to reason that the same projectile would penetrate light armour and still have more energy left over.

I know you're smart and experienced enough to understand this concept. If I shoot a pistol at an armoured vest that's only rated to stop handgun rounds (say Level IIIA), then it would stop the handgun round. But shooting a more energetic rifle round at it would defeat the ballistic vest.

The same should be true of a handgun versus a 40mm AA cannon. Sure AA cannons are not meant for anti-personnel duties, but the energy of that AA cannon is going to absolutely tear through even a heavily armoured infantryman.

This is a game. Not warfare simulator 2000 like ARMA 3.

In real life smgs tend to be extentions of pistols with higher magazine capacity and higher RoF therefore damage per shot should be equal to or greater than that of an smg with a lower fire rate and reduced magazine size.

*rolls eyes*

Your sig makes it pretty obvious you're playing Vehicleside, so I don't know why I bother. You're trying to use modern-day demo videos in extremely favorable situations to make a point about a video game? Absurd. One solid hit on that tanks treads, and it's disabled anyway. Where's the fancy system for that?

I don't think many people would want to play in your version of Planetside 2. AA weapons that insta-kill infantry. Tanks that literally cannot be stopped by anything besides another tank. Go play ARMA please, you would be much happier.

No thanks. /unsub

there are no names on the lines?

did i get it right?

seriously tho, pistols are supposed to be fun finishers. or CQC headshot tools.

what graphs don't show are the fun factor. the amp is crap for damage compared to a commissioner or underboss, but I've killed players with those pistols with my amp by dancing around them and spraying bullets at their head. it's lots of fun.

you don't factor the fun factor into your graphs... with fun factored in, the amp's numbers look a heckuvalot better

you do know that computer games are really about having fun, right?

An individuals "fun" can never be represented in the form of numbers. Also, you are wrong, the amp is not "fun", its a fun concept but in reality it's a tickler. IT does EVERYTHING the Repeater does but worse and that is a fun weapon.

I guess my point is pistols, in this game and others, but not all games, are meant to be a viable close range finishers or backup weapons. You should WANT to use your pistol and be ENCOURAGED to get kills with it.

If i were in charge i would make the relatively small changes i mentioned and will mention and give a 25% exp bonus for getting an ES pistol kill so instead of 100 xp for a basic kill, you would get 125xp. Not everyone would run around as a pistol hero but it would give reason to use them. Currently ES Pistols are used next to and never. I remember me and this guy dancing around each other , reloading because we didn't want to pull out our sidearms.