m79 idea

[Horve]

this might go more in the improvement section, but i think it pertains to weapon balance.

to reward skilled shots, punish short range shots, and make the m79 fresh,

the m79 grenades gain damage potential the more time they spend in the air, until they become strong enough for a one hit kill.

or simpler, the m79 does more damage if the user is far from the explosion, or it does more damage when the grenade has slowed down.

Or, instead of gradual increase, it goes from paltry damage to deadly after it reaches a certain point.

Increasing splash damage is also good, but i think it will make the m79 too useful for splash damaging enemies.
the idea came to me when i was playing clone wars, because the game's rocket launcher does that.

plz do not respond with "in real life," as if you can take a couple ak-74 bullets to the head in real life.

now attack my idea ruthlessly

I know you said not to mention "real life" -- but real life is more supportive of your idea than you might expect. The real M79's 40mm grenade had an arming range of 30 meters. Anybody that got hit under that range wouldn't get exploded, but it sure would hurt.

Or, instead of gradual increase, it goes from paltry damage to deadly after it reaches a certain point.

Basically, this is perfect. I love this solution. The arming range would need some tweaking, of course. Also, IMO a direct hit below the arming range should still do substantial damage, say 70-80% of health -- but not enough for a one-shot kill, of course.

support! no more 1-hit lucky airnades!!!!

[-Vis-]

1. barrett has a fire delay, you can actually fire some bullets before you gets killed

Since when does it take a quarter of a second to kill someone with an mp5? Hitting the guy with two bullets doesnt do enough to save your life.

Not kill, but bink. Hitting your opponent with a few shots before he fires is often enough to make him miss. Without the delay, you could barret your opponent before the bullets even reach him.

[popsofctown]

the main point of the delay is to give a non-one-hit-killer a chance to bink the barret enough to save his own life.  It is good to have a feature like that in place to limit the barret.  I think the feature needs improvement though, for a couple reasons. 
One, bink causes inaccuracy, which nonsensically encourages an mp5er to stay away, otherwise the barret won't miss no matter how much he's binked.  Some people don't care about this. 
Two, right now the bink rate simply isn't enough to prevent a sprayer from getting killed anyway
.. at midrange, pumping bullets during the barret's entire delay, he still has a pretty good chance of getting sliced in half by the barret.  And the auto shouldn't even half to get every single shot to bink him enough.
The solution to satisfy number two is fairly popular, to bink up the barret.  I would prefer a barret that locks up after reaching a certain level of bink, however, to satisfy my problem one. 

I'm glad papercut at least understands experience-dependent-balance.  The barrett probably has it as good as it does because it is difficult to use without practice.  As a concession, it can take several bullets and still land shots.  I think this concession should be taken away, and I would be quite ok with it if it became easier to use.  The barret would have a learning curve more similar to the other weapons if its shot speed went higher.  This would have no effect on a pro's balance, because they time their shots great anyway.  But it wouldn't be unusable for noobs in pub servers.  Noobs have an ok time using it now, but they might need shot speed as a concession in exchange for binking the barret up, because the barret needs to be binked up.

Btw, I think I got your analogy, papercut.  If anyone has ever played SSBM (super smash), you know that many of its characters have experience based balance, to varying degrees.  Ganondorf would be like an mp5, fighting a pichu that is like a barret.  At first, ganondorf mauls the pichu when two new players play.  But soon pichu dodges all of ganondorf's slow moves, and lands more of its quick ones, and by the time the two players a pretty pro, the pichu is winning every game.

[papercut]

personally, I think the barret should go. There's not enough that can be done to it to make it less annoying to be killed by, but still be a sniper.

Not kill, but bink. Hitting your opponent with a few shots before he fires is often enough to make him miss. Without the delay, you could barret your opponent before the bullets even reach him.

I suppose thats possible, but its oh so unlikely.

Another way to think of it is like the gears of a car.

1st Gear - Starts up really fast, but only speeds up to a limit
6th Gear - Gets moving really slow, but can get you to the highest speed.

I think what bothers me the most about one hit kill weapons, is how guns like steyrs and mp5s, which are generally good guns, kill people afer I hit them with a good 8-10 bullets, but a barret or m79 can kill me with just one. It's hard to comprehend the balance when I hit someone with a bunch of bullets that doesnt kill them, but I get killed by only one.

[ZWZ]

An interesting point of view I see in this, is that the barret to the rest of the soldat arsenal, is like the few races you get to pick in an RTS game.

If we have any starcraft fans or at least former fans, you can see it this way. There are a total of 3 generic races.

Zerg - Primitive aliens
Terran - Humans
Protoss - Robots

Zerg is an easy race to be. For a short amount of resources, you can load up huge armies of units. You can easily overwhelm your opponents with a vast array of monsters in a short amount of time.

Terran is in the middle. They can produce even stronger guys, in shorter numbers, in a slightly longer amount of time.

Protoss is near impossible to get the ball rolling. Producing even the weakest of units can be really time consuming. However, They pay off as being the strongest race. If you take the time to earn more resources at a faster rate, whilst producing small armies, that will soon evolve into giant ones, you can overwhelm your opponents with a large army of incredibly strong units.

Game over, Protoss wins. Protoss overall has the strongest units the game can provide, and will always win in the long-term games, however they are very vulnerable at their beginning.

Now compare the length of a starcraft game, to a soldat player. When the soldat player decides he wants to use barret, he will probably do terrible at first, do to as pops said... human error. Though if he continues on and on and on, he can kill his opponents at a really high rate. Which... evantually gets boring in the victims case.

This isn't really the perfect example. I hope some of you guys see my point.

You forget the fact that while Protoss have stronger single units, they take up more resources. 2 zerglings take up 1 resource, 1 marine takes up one, and one zealot takes up 2. No horrible oversight by developers would make it so one race clearly has such a huge advantage.

Date Posted: December 24, 2006, 11:09:27 PMWill people please stop whining about geting killed by some "noob" at close range? If your game is won or lost on such a factor, you don't play soldat well enough to comment about ballance.

To check the ballance of anything, it's really simple. If someone is using a m79, how does this limit your choice in counters? The answer is not much, you can have bigger problems with other guns. Infact, other than the minigun, you have a very reasonable chance to kill any m79er of equal skill.  There is no balance issue here.

[popsofctown]

I agree that the m79 is not overpowered.  i simply dont like the gun the way it is for a whole bunch of reasons.  and i dont think papercut was trying to bash that game's balance, he was just trying to make his little analogy.

[mar77a]

M79 is not overpowered. Its just easy at short range but that's it.

Btw: all autos, deagles and spas are easy at short range, so meh.