What About Battle Rifles?

It surely will affect all weapons, but will it affect them to the same degree? I say no, sir.

First of all, with burstfire and full-auto weapons accuracy degrades progressively with each shot fired until the burst ends. There's the issue with manual (read imprecise) recoil compensation, and there's the issue of COF bloom. Personally I can't think of any player who can control both recoil and bloom to a level that they don't matter at all.

Secondly, accurate weapons gain more by inertia than inaccurate ones. If I fire multiple bullets with random spread through a wide cone, then it is completely irrelevant where my target is as long as it is inside the cone. It is completely irrelevant whether the target moves slowly and smoothly, or instantaneously and erratically as long as it moves inside the cone. The chance for each bullet to hit is exactly the same.

However, a weapon which fires only one bullet through a narrow cone will miss the target that moves exactly as far. The only relevant difference is in how fast a target can move out of the cone, but for obvious reasons accurate weapons are affected stronger in this regard as well.

To sum it up, inertia does affect all weapons, but it affects accurate semi-auto weapons stronger than inaccurate full-auto ones.

I've unlocked it eons ago, I've used it widely but I dislike it.
The fact is recoil is insane for the damage these weapons do actually deliver, it's really to hard to handle. They perform ok at long range, but attachments suggest they should be viable at closer range as well (laser sight, 2x scopes).
But even if you slap a compensator on the barrel and play without HVA still recoil makes Battle Rifle hard to control, thus absolutely underperforming at close range.

So, unless one is trying to snipe from very long distance there is really no use for these gun, automatic weapons perform infinitely better.

As far as I see it there are several alternative ways to improve these guns:
- Higher damage.
- Lower recoil.
- Adjust first shot recoil multiplier like you did for burst weapons.
- Advanced Laser Sight and / or Soft Point Ammo as attachment.

You could also consider to apply these changes differently to the 3 weapons (TR Higher damage, VS lower recoil, NC advanced attachments?).

I use AMR66 on my engineer for longer engagements. With 4x scope (because it doesn't move), compensator and foregrip. I tried HV Ammo, but had worse results with it - but that would be because I don't aim carefully, but click fast and don't care much about oversampling. I would like to try it without zoom and with softpoints on close range. With this option, or more projectile speed it would be very good gun.

Directives are not well done, I don't want to play infiltrator. Problem is, there is not a similar gun for engie. And if you add SABR (and it's equivalents) for engie, I think most of people would just use that. Also directive DMR could use some change.

To other classes: Light assault would snipe with it, I guess we don't want that. And heavy will always lack ammo for this gun. Also they have LMGs. I don't think that these classes are suitable to use this gun. And medics have long range weapons, I never understood why.

Battle Rifles are indeed ok for long range fights: damage falls off very slowly over distance so you can still deal a decent damage to distant enemies.
But as you get in closer quarter you're at serious disadvantage and that's where Battle Rifles suck. Even with a 2x scope and with Laser Sight they perform very bad at close range, due to high recoil and CoF bloom. Playing a Battle Rifle in short range engagements is just deciding to have a handicap, carbines, LMGs, Assault Rifles of course perform infinitely better.

I think one solution could be to give these weapons Advanced Laser Sight and / or SPA as attachments: one could at least configure Battle Rifles for short or long range fights.

It needs more damage. That or extend the maximum damage range by a lot.

This might interest you.

http://www.si.com/more-sports/2013/07/24/sports-gene-excerpt

You're acting as if a BR is as good as a SR, SASR, or BASR. A battlerifle with its current stats and such is really only useful in a Light Assault's hands. It takes something like 4 or 5 shots to kill until you get to 8m. 8, ocho, eight, it'd probably do more damage to throw your gun at them if they're 9m away. This means that it's not so overpowered that you'd be hit twice in a second and then be dead from some dude on a roof that nobody but his class can access. Engineers can use it as a "support" weapon meaning they soften the enemy and rarely get the kill, but LAs could actually use it to soften up enemies behind cover and flush them out. And you would have to still move a lot as an LA with a BR, because if you piss off a hornet's nest with a BB gun you better be ready to book it out of there. Kill one or two to distract the enemy team and find a new spot now that they're distracted. Otherwise you would absolutely be outdamaged.

Again, this is with current BRs, I'd much rather have longer range LAs than a redundant weapon outclassed by everything else and unable to be used by the one class that it would shine with. LA is capable of being a scouting class, but they only have short range, and that's just silly to me. If an LA manages to kill you without you getting to cover with a BR, then the solution is to git gud. Seriously, their TTK is really high and you should have plenty of time to return fire or hide.

I, personally, would be fine with it, as I am in a Vanguard or Reaver 90% of the time. I think you underestimate the damage someone could do with a Warden and a jetpack, though. I would love playing as an LA with my Warden, but I think it'd be absurdly OP. Nobody bothers to look up in this game. You can sit in a tree with a select fire and pick at enemies for so long before they realize where you are. BRs would make it that much easier. The only time people seem to actually find LA's in trees or similarly out-of-the-way places are when they are close. Long range would be hilarious.

Like I said. It really makes no difference to me. I just think it would be hilariously annoying for the vast majority of infantryside players.

Nice read, and it perfectly illustrates my point.

Skillful athletes don't react - they anticipate, and in order to anticipate they need subtle changes in an opponent's body movements. But, those body movements precede the actual motion. That's the very definition of inertia.

And, that's the situation in this game. Player's movement is perfectly disguised, which means no anticipation is possible. I just hope the devs read this article.


Fun fact: the article also illustrates why near-hitscan bullet velocities are a worse solution than inertia.

Well said, if a LA in a tree with a BR survives his second kill, I give him -major- Kudos. Because any kills with a BR take a lot of skill in this game.

this might answer you qustion about the amr

That's a pretty good explanation of how inertia would benefit accurate weapons like the BR. However, it looks to me like your suggestion to add inertia to indirectly buff Battle Rifles is predicated on a couple of inaccurate assumptions.

1) You're assuming BRs are more accurate than automatic weapons, and as such inertia would help them more than automatic weapons. This isn't necessarily the case for Long Range Automatics (LRAs). The COF of many LRAs is tighter for the first 2-4 shots than a BR's if you're stationary, and it's tight enough during short bursts that you can maintain roughly equivalent accuracy to a BR indefinitely.

LRAs are more accurate during semi-auto fire too. BRs are only superior semi-auto weapons due to their higher damage per shot and 0ms recoil recovery delay.

2) You assume that lack of inertia is responsible for a significant number of missed BR shots. The number of players who move in such a way that takes advantage of the lack of inertia and juke back and forth to become a hard target is extremely small. I'm betting <2-3% of the people I've shot at do this. The vast majority either continue what they're doing and die, make a beeline for the nearest cover, or try to return fire. And in each of those cases, inertia would make little difference.


Don't get me wrong. Your inertia suggestion would definitely help out BRs somewhat at long range. I'd like to see it implemented as well, but I don't believe it will be a fix for BRs and see it more as a general improvement to character movement. I just don't think it will help BRs all that often.

IMO BRs are already accurate enough when fired single, settled shots, and it will only improve BRs in a vacuum, or in comparison to short-medium range weapons where BRs already have a clear range advantage. IMO Long Range Automatics and sniper rifles would still be superior weapons. Even with inertia added in, I'm willing to bet that I'd be better off the vast majority of the time w/ a Corvus, Ursa, or burst weapon than a BR.

I'm firmly convinced that nothing short of a damage increase will help BRs get out from underneath the feet of long-range Automatics and sniper rifles.

It would be usable if it OHKd snipers. As it stands they are utter crap.

Imho the damage is rather ok. It's the best things BRs have.
The problem I have with those rifles is I they perform bad at close to medium quarter. Hitting with BRs requires a very high trigger discipline: tap furiously mouse 1 and you will land the first shot then just miss due to the high recoil. This makes Battle Rifles so poor when the battle is such that you have to fight players with carbines, assault rifles and LMGs. While you have to wait for the crosshair to to go back to the initial position, automatic weapons users just have to keep Mouse1 down while they compensate recoil.

Imho the way is to make BRs more competitive in other scenarios than just long range. SPA and / or Advanced Laser Sight as attachemnts. A damage increase and / or recoil reduction.

And that's an opportunity devs should not miss to diversify those weapons and make them ES.

You name it: if you're stationary. But, obviously I wouldn't suggest adding inertia if I was worried about standing targets. The addition of inertia aims at moving targets, and in terms of moving ADS COF only some SMGs () and burst carbines/ARs are more accurate (on the first and sometimes the second shot).

My proposal is primarily not meant as fix for BRs (as in turn them into Tier 1 material), but as a fix for an inherent flaw of this game which unfortunately prevents players from using semi-autos like actual semi-autos and forces them to use them like full-autos in semi-auto mode.

Sure, increasing damage will make BRs more competitive, but they still play the same as before. If the STK against Nano5 players goes down to 5, we'll still have to fire ~12 shots to land those 5 hits. On average. Sometimes though we fire 17 shots and don't land the 5 hits needed, and we die to some n00b who goes full-auto in our general direction. And then, sometimes we fire 5 shots and land all 5, and we kill a player who is much better than us. And, I really don't think that a coin toss is a sensible metric to decide a firefight.

Maybe I should start playing on your servers, because on my servers close to 90% of all non-sniper players who fire at me do strafe from side to side. And, regarding players who continue what they're doing or run for cover - let's just say I'm not worried about being killed by them.

I use the Eidolon a lot, and it doesn't have the stopping power you would expect from that type of weapon. I think a slight damage boost, maybe with a tradeoff of magazine size would make it a much more usable weapon.

For sake of battle rifles, which are good in their role, repair directives. It's bad that they are in directive with infiltrator weapons, those directive versions aren't worth much, and to complete the directive two Vandals are needed. Directive reward weapon can have just +50 projectile speed (without HVA recoil increase, instead of having HVA preinstalled) and it's good. A new NS rifle would repair the two Vandals problem.

The critics say, that these rifles are made from parts of old overused Vandals. Even if true, they are popular for making careless snipers sad.