VS ESSR: Shade general discussion thread.

Ok, they took good approach:

https://twitter.com/mhigby/status/433701905978519552

Hope they will stop this madness.

Looks like there's some interesting things going on with all the rifles. Very pleasing, Stalker has been addressed too.

I agree. Just wanted to add the unlimited ammo will be a good for some. Others it is low priority.

Is everyone here DENSE?

The Shade has more than infinite ammo, it has no CLIP. Regular weapons have a number of bullets in their magazine, alongside their full ammo pool that equals out to around 8-9 kills if you're good. But each kill requires you to exit your scope, reload, and relocate.

The Shade has none of that. You can literally stay zoomed forever. Don't excuse yourself with "Infinite ammo already exists.". Yeah it does, but a bottomless clip doesn't.

I am quite fine with it, the cooldown after a fully charged shot could be slightly shorter.

This new straight-pull thing comes pretty close to staying in zoomed forever. BASRs can fire faster than the Shade, it cools down a long time after a charged bolt. Staying zoomed in forever, you don't want to do that. It's dangerous and you won't see anyone staying zoomed in without breaks to look around.

a bottomless clip that gets either 2 charged shots or 6 uncharged shots before we hit a heat limit and have to slow down or wait for a cool off...

wow that sounds VERY similar to a reload to me...

now point me to a BASR with a 2 round clip or a SASR with 5 round clip and your argument will have merit.

TLDR:
The shade is worse than every SASR when operating as a semi- auto and worse than every BASR when charging for a headshot
it's advantage lies in that it can do both.

also staying zoomed in forever isn't a good thing.
infact it's asking to get knifed by that LA sneaking up behind you

Why would it be worse than a SASR? Its basically one with the addition of the charged shot, and you have the bottomless clip.

slower rate of fire, inability to sustain that fire over time, lower damage per shot, i felt that there was greater recoil when i last got the chance to use it... the list goes on.

the design of the shade is so that the existing weapons around it (the SASR's and the BASR's) still have their place. a paralax is going to be better sniping off the crown and the specter is still going to be a better mid range option.

the appeal of the shade is that i can now move from BASR range to SASR range, or closer, without having to detour to an iTerm to change my kit. it also has the appeal, that should i get stuck in an area pinned down by an engy on a mana turret, I can take that 1 BASR shot and remove him from his turret, and allow my squad to advance.

in the grand scheme of things "infinite ammo" is almost a non-concern.
the only times i do run out of ammo is when i'm off in the hills sniping somewhere, and then it's usually a trivial matter to find the nearest engy/sundy/base to resupply myself. or, i simply drop my squad beacon and redeploy

Yeah...

The honeymoon is over, it's unlikely I'll be getting the Shade. I'm more keen on getting the attachment for the Parallax.

Seems in changing some of the values the devs screwed up the charge shot so it no longer ohks on hs on any class other than infils.

I'm assuming this is a bug..

Taking some ideas from other peoples suggestions here is what I would like to see.

Firing mode A: Single Shot
Single shot using what ever scope you have mounted, charging remains the same BUT remove the delay
in firing, this keeps it function the same as any other bolt action weapon.

Firing mode B: Semi - Auto
Defaults to a 3.4 or a 4x scope ( In a perfect world you would be able to attach to scopes of your choice but
I don't think they would have the time to change the loadout UI to accommodate this)

Each mode would have the hip fire/recoil for each class of weapon.

This is a weapon I would buy, the current version is too complicated to use for the average player.

Maybe you should add a 70 ammo pool, which is the same for any semi-auto sniper rifle, leave infinitive ammo to engies (with their turrets), keep the heat mechanic and no clip thingie. I would like to continue giving xp to ammo packs with infls.
Current 15.02.2014 variant feels nice, needs other scopes to test it out.

in the latest update, the charge fire now is back to ohk on headshots, the weapon is in a decent place right now apart from the fact it now has a 'reload'.
This reload occurs if you reload the gun or max out the heat, it instantly removes all heat, i'm assuming its a bug and not a change of the fundamentals of this weapon by the devs.

How about a video of its current functionality? Would be nice to see if you can bolt stopping people at 300m as quick as with the Parallax: "Hold Breath, steady aim, shoot" within 1-2 sec at most

Ok guys, just tested Shade again.

I like what happened to overheat.

What I dont like is the balance and lack of logic.

1. Lack of logic. Charge can ohk up to 200 meters. Like we didnt have no sway weapon with nearly flat bullet trajectory already. No constest ghost is better in this department. But lets go - over 200 meters - charge or no charge - requires 2 jeadshots to kill. Kinda wird, but lest go deeper - engie past 300 meters on a turret. Less shots with tap to kill compared to charge. Logic lost...

2. ...Yet still NC gest no-skill "I win" insta kill sniper rifle with OP as hell stats.

3. Maybe if we get the hard-shaky-mode - lets do it even? OHK up too 400 meters with charge? Add bullet drop, no problem. Cause you know, CQC sniper [up 200m is "sniping cqc"] rarely need more ammo then ammo belt can provide. Mid and long range sniper - need more ammo big time.

I didn't realize they lowered the OHK range to only 200 meters. I guess I am sticking with the Parallax after all

This got a little longer than I thought it would but I have some thoughts on how the gun could operate. I've mentioned versions of this idea in a couple of threads but never tried thinking it out too much until now. My main thinking behind this is remove the addition of having to actively charge the gun. It's a crazy thing to make VS snipers have to do in addition to decloaking and steadying aim. Hope this makes sense:

- Weapon charges “passively”. Its default state when equipped is either a BASR, capable of OSK on headshots or a Semi Auto with 5 shots before heat lock. This is switchable via the weapon toggle key.

BASR Mode
- As a BASR after the first round is fired the weapon drops to 20% charge.
- The weapon doesn’t start re-charging for 0.5 seconds.
- After 0.5 seconds the weapon re-charges at 20% per second.
- Before the weapon is fully charged it can fire Semi Auto rounds (without the weapon toggle button needing to be used) to allow for a quick follow up if needed.
- If a shot is fired before the charge reaches 40% (i.e 1.5 seconds after the BASR shot) then the weapon will heat lock and be unable to fire until it has fully re-charged (this is 5 seconds, 1 seconds per 20% of charge).
- If the weapon is fired after the charge gets past 40%, the charge drops to 20% and starts charging again. This continues up the charge levels, get past 60% and you fire? Drops to 40%. Get past 80% and fire? Drops to 60%. Until you hit 100% at which point the weapon will fire a full BASR strength shot and drop to 20%.
- Since the charge mechanism is passive and not active the weapon obviously holds the charge at 100%. Just like any other BASR with a round in the chamber.

Semi Auto Mode
- In Semi Auto mode you start popping off shots to your hearts content, with each shot taking 20% charge and each 20% taking 1 second to recharge.
- There is a 0.5 second pause between shots meaning that it takes 2.5 seconds to fire the full charge and activate heat lock.
- Since the gap between shots is less than the time it takes to recharge 20% of the charge the weapon will lock after 5 rounds are fired in the quickest time possible. This is because firing resets the recharge for the 20% you are currently charging, i.e You fire, the charge drops to 80%, the recharge starts but it takes 1 second to reach 100% and you fire before this time which drops your charge to the next charge level which is 60 %. So you get a shot at 100%, 80%, 60%, 40% and 20%. If you fire your fifth shot before the weapon has recharged to at least 40% the weapon heat locks at 0% and you have to wait a full 5 seconds for a recharge.
- Switching between firing modes during heat lock will not affect the re-charge, it will charge at the same rate and remain heat locked.

Damage and Range Stats
- The BASR full power shot would have a muzzle velocity of 575m/s (Right in the middle of the BASR’s we currently have in game). With a damage of 650 at 10m (like the Ghost and the XM98) and 400 at 300m (so between the Ghost and XM98).
- For the specs on the Semi Auto mode I would just mirror the Phantom or Spectre stats, this is just another method of playstyle not necessarily better or worse. To give the gun more balance maybe the Semi Auto mode takes 1 more head shot to kill at long range than the Phantom or Spectre? Make it that little worse than the other Semi Auto’s.
- Scopes would be available from 6x to 12x, like most BASR’s.

TL/DR:
- Slower than half the BASR’s muzzle velocity.
- At longer range body shots do less damage than 75% of current BASR’s.
- Weapon charge is passive and does not require another action while ADS
- Takes 4.5 seconds between OSK capable rounds (comparable to short reload on a Parallax, Longshot and RAMS .50)
- If a follow up shot is used then it takes almost as long as any other BASR in the game to perform a long reload/recharge (5 seconds compared to 4s-5.57s).
- Scopes from 6x to 12x


If anyone still thinks this might be an OP BASR because of the ammo functionality and the lack of bullet drop I can't imagine how you would need a VS sniper to be crippled to make it "Fair", this version and even the one currently in test, take over 4 seconds to perform another OSK round. That's compared to less than 1 second for the top BASR's and between 1.2s and 1.6s for all the other OSK capable rifles. If nearly quadrupling the ROF for a OSK round isn't enough of a downside then I don't know what is.

Thanks for reading this and let me know what you think. I really hope the Dev's get this weapon to work better than it does right now. It'd be a shame to see the first VS BASR that has actual faction specific features be neutered into unplayability.

Bloody hell missed that 200m limitation, ok been giving it a run through and this rifle is in a really, really odd place right now, with the new 'reload' and scope sway aside, this gun can rattle off as many charged shots as the ghost ( hitting reload after one charge shot and holding down fire will start to charge the next as you scope in) in the same amount of time factoring in long reloads when out of rounds ( slightly longer than ghost with straight pull, slightly shorter than without).

What we have right now is a ghost married to a spectre with its own separate upsides and downsides

I can't see the rifle staying like this, the reload function just completely overrides the heats cool down penalty what is the point of heat if you can just reload it?

It leads me to suspect they are looking to remove the heat mechanic, which I really hope they don't, it's one of the unique aspects of the rifle

Too complicated? Sure, if you're 6.