Is there a reason you can't block with long firearms?

Just wondering. Is it because it’ll be labour-intensive to give block techs to all long firearms now, is it due to balance, or what?

I don’t know, but it sounds like a cool idea. Buttstock and bayonette attacks would also be great.

Bayonets are already in, and buttstocks would be normal melee “walk into the enemy” attacks without one, I suppose.

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Found out its rather easy to make every long firearms to have a block ability by simply editing the most basic of its abstracts. The only problem though is that I can’t make a mod out of it without breaking everything it seems, gotta edit the files themselves.

I wonder if its actually balance driven, or if its more due to difficulties with durability. More specifically, just having something wail on the side of a modern rifle is pretty liable to fuck it up - Zombies are fairly strong, and special variants or people with weapons even moreso. But making them too weak would make using bayonets a nightmare as your rifle tries to fall apart on you if you get boxed in. Better to not eat up the players rifle so casually. And I’m not aware of a way to make an item strong in some situations but fragile in others, durability is pretty absolute.

It is more a limitation of modern rifles though - The good old Mosin Nagant had manual for blocking swords with it, different times and all. Something to be said for a sturdy block of steel and wood, over free floated barrels and ‘good enough’ stampings. So there’s case to be made that a few weapons could hold up to blocking.

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Yeah. I can see that. If blocking was automatic as before it would surely break the rifle, especially the more modern ones with more complicated bits not meant to be rattled by melee hits. But all the balancing it does is to make a low-dodge surv be much worse getting attacked in melee, its not like its the thing preventing rifles from becoming a good melee weapon.

Modern rifles are still pretty tough and they could hold up to quite a bit of melee combat in my opinion. The magazine might get dislodged or a scope might become misaligned, but the rest of it would be unlikely to be destroyed unless it was used in a very unconventional manner.

Considering blocking regular zombies can damage solid steel swords, the possibility of bending the barrel at the trunion is not off the table. Its worth keeping in mind that Bayonet Fighting is considered a last resort with modern rifles, so even the ability to stand up to that is more “If required” and not “By design” - Breaking parts of a weapon during bayonet drill is not at all unheard of, and thats against stationary practice targets that aren’t trying to kill you back. This is understood, and many parts of modern rifles are modular not just for manufacturing ease and customization, but to facilitate repairs - a good smash from something trying to kill you to the top front of a rifle can break the polymer handguard and bend the thin tubes of the gas system, and then its little more than an awkward club.

The exact vulnerable points will vary from gun to gun, but generally speaking, that feral with a crowbar will fuck your rifle up if you try and block with it.

It sounds like the problem is that zombies have gained superhuman abilities to bend swords and other solid objects. Bodies absorb a lot of energy. While those handguards could be broken, it is highly unlikely that they would do more than crack and stay put. If the gas system was damaged the weapon could still probably be used but it may need to be manually charged and that doesn’t take long. People dive to the ground and plant the buttstock frequently. Everything can break, but you’re going to struggle to find a video or an essay about bent and broken rifles because they are reasonably robust.

I’m done, I don’t have anything else to say about this.

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Yes, they’re pretty terrifying at times. The normal versions are reasonably strong, and the tough ones are already full on high athletic humans. They’re a reanimated corpse, but they do know how to use the muscle they got. They’re slow, not weak. You might also be surprised how flexible a sword is - a proper steel longsword will have a surprising amount of flex to it, an excessively rigid blade is actually a detriment as its more prone to shatter. Being able to bend protects it in the short term, but allows it to warp and become pretty awful in the long term.

I own a well crafted sword and it springs back to form readily. Cheaper swords will bend with considerable force, but it will not actually ruin them. decorative swords will bend readily. a gun barrel is on the rigid en of the spectrum, but they are far from easy to bend and then you may get something like shattering.

There are varying qualities of swords now. Plus there are certainly wrong ways to block that’ll ruin swords or guns, and when skilled enough in melee the objects I use to block rarely gets damaged.

Although I’m not really sure about the normal zeds being able to damage them, the more special ones who are sturdy sure, but normally the bones of regular zombies are brittle and I don’t think they have the muscle to damage proper steel, or wooden rifle stocks which’ll be the most likely spot to block an attack with. Even athlethic types aren’t supposed to do that I think, they still have human capabilities.

This is the reason yes. We would want to pair the extra flexibility of using your gun in melee with the extra risk of damaging it when you do so.

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So the main reason for not giving it a block tech is due to durability potentially being eaten up by blocks, which is an action the player does not have direct control over?

3 posts were split to a new topic: Derail abiut gun rarity

I’m just curious as to why blocking tech is not given especially after finding out how easy it is to do. If its gonna be an irl reason I’m personally too much of a sissy for pain to not put something like a gun, despite how brittle it is, between me and an attack so I feel like if it goes to that territory of reason then I’ll just be waiting to hear the statistics on that.

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It might make more sense for muskets since they’re more purpose built with the possibility and likelihood of being used as a bludgeon. You could probably get away with putting block on the flintlock weapons as such.

Though as someone pointed out even relatively unimpressive zombies can damage a steel weapon being used to block, so I can imagine it being hard on your gun. All the same it’s easier to replace a flintlock than a survivor soooo.

Its not the most common thing to get your blocking weapon broken nowadays. Since low melee skill and the 100% success of blocking attempts were the combination that eats through durability. Now at low skill I rarely block with anything, and at high skill I can block sometimes yet the blocking object suffer less damage.

This is of course a different thing from smacking zombs and eldritch threats around while at low skill. At least blocking is an attempt to save yourself in a direct sense, so might be something worth considering to add, since you only need to edit one thing for most guns to get a blocking tech.