In my current game, I recently installed a Finger Laser, but apparently it has either been nerfed to the point of harmlessness or isn’t working for some reason. My character has pretty decent handgun skill, but any time I try to use it the shot always “bounces off the [target]'s thick hide.” Even on squirrels.
I was not able to find an issue report for this on Github, and I also wanted to post this here because I wanted to ask about the general developer concensus regarding finger laser balance. (My attempt at source-diving to see if the actual stats had changed was unsuccessful.)
While I liked the general balancing principle of the finger laser in previous versions (low damage, high accuracy, moerate armor piercing, and no recoil,) I do understand if people though it was a tad overpowered, since once you got enough skill to reliably deal headshots you could waste most unarmored enemies in 1 or 2 ammo-free zaps indefinitely.
Anyway, I have enjoyed the new version a great deal, so thank you to all the developers!
Uh, as a finger-laser fan, they do need some punch. If you can’t even hunt with it, I’m at a loss for what it’s supposed to do, and it takes up a letter on the bionics screen.
Oh, absolutely. The finger-mounted laser is one of my favorite bionics, but it’s useless as it is. I suppose the question I meant to ask was: Is the finger laser broken because it was being nerfed but something got screwed up, or is it broken for some other reason?
AFAIK no changes have been made to the finger lazer for a long time, so if something changed it wasn’t on purpose. (Or potentially something was fixed that used to make the finger laser powerful, and now a rebalance is required.)
So I just found the definition in itypedef.cpp; it looks like the stats should be the same as before, but there were edits to the definition in the last release. On the one hand, I’m kind of glad that the nominal stats are staying the same, since the Finger-Mounted Laser is a ton of fun. On the other, it’s looking like I won’t be able to fix my current game with a simple .json tweak. Oh well.
Replied to the issue but figured I’d post here too. This was an issue in the original release but it should have been fixed in a later commit and I can’t reproduce it on my local machine. Is this a problem on the current git build, or on one of the releases? It’s entirely possible that the patch hasn’t found its way into the release builds yet. I’ll go dig up the fixing commit just to be sure though.
edit2: Verified that fingerlaser works on commit 048f503ec33913efc06538209aa127401be6a7b4 (the git build from 9/18): http://imgur.com/woiSuoQ
edit3: Verified that it works on commit e683a00d90dd3d46b82120ac05b67d875437acfd (the git build from today): http://imgur.com/VNBC2TK
In all likelihood it’s just that the fix hasn’t been built into a release version yet. For now I guess you’ll have to build from git if you want it to work but it should definitely be fixed in the next release build.
Okay so apparently I was wrong and this is actually a bug, although not the bug I thought it was. Long story short, gun armor pierce values were only being initialized to their appropriate values if the gun was loaded from JSON and the finger laser isn’t loaded from JSON, so it would have a random gibberish value for armor pierce. And if that value was negative, it would basically make every enemy seem as if they had absurdly large amounts of armor.
but it should definitely be fixed in the next release build.