NailGun Seems gimped or broken?

[TheZoneWizard]

So I start off with my normal character Handy Man. Problem is, the Nail-Gun does no damage on a handful of zombies. Granted I understand a nail gun isn’t a real gun. But they have gimped range for a reason. Within that short range, they are just as capable as a .22. So if this isn’t broken, someone who changed it, please change it back to do damage to everything with exposed flesh.

At close range it drives a 2-3 inch shank of metal through 2-3 inches of wood. Your flesh isn’t as hard as wood. Ergo. A zombie, no matter how tough isn’t going to deflect the nails nor bone either!

Balance shmalance. Nobody uses the nail gun that long for the game to be unbalanced because of it. Even for purpose of skill gain.

[Kadian]

So I’m looking at the stats of the Nail Gun + Nails and the S&W 22A Handgun and the .22 Ammo it uses, and, to be honest, I can’t see much difference there.

The Nails do 4 Damage, have 3 Pierce and make 5 noise, while the Nailgun doesn’t have any modifiers on damage. The Pistol doesn’t have any modifiers either, and the ammo has between 6 and 12 damage, between 7 and 44 Noise and no piercing besides 2 FMJ variants which have a piercing of 2. That’s not that much difference at all.
The Issue with the Nail Gun comes from it’s high dispersion rate (double that of the .22 Handgun) and high amount of moves needed per attack, both of which makes sense though since it’s not supposed to work like a real gun.

Now, to your issue at hand, ignoring the stats given by the game:

• A Nail shot from a Nailgun has very inconsistent speed. A video i found gave the nails a speed between 90-144 feet per second, while a Red Ryder BB-Gun has velocities between 270 to 350 feet per second. Even if you count in the weight of the nail, this is NOT a heavy punch at all.
  Even more, due to the form of the nail, it looses a lot of power while travelling through the air, to a point that shooting something from 1-2 meter or so away will, if you’re lucky, dent the target. At this range, a nailgun might draw some blood, but it would be more of an annoyance than anything else. There is also the issue that a Nail is more likely to spin around and hit the target with it’s blunt end, basically loosing it’s potential to pierce the enemy.

For a Nailgun to be effective, you would need to be in melee range - you would need to put the gun up to the zombie, basically pressing the nailgun at its flesh, and shoot. And even then, all you did was shoot a nail through its arm or so, that won’t do a whole lot to the zombie…

For more on Nail-guns as ‘weapons’, this video seems to be more than enough:

Look at 5:34 at this video specifically. The Guy stands not even 2 meters away and shoots at cardboard, and it’s unable to penetrate the cardboard due to the loss of velocity…

[TheZoneWizard]

Many mobs keep saying, deflected off of hard skin or whatever(memory is crap, sorry).

Skele zoms don’t take any damage.

So I assumed it was a bug or badly changed coding. The fact that they hit wasn’t the problem I was having. Sorry. Forgot that part. They hit and then do nothing to skele zoms and a handful of other zoms. Easy enough to test which. =)

Interesting video. Put me onto ponder .22 speed. I guess the nail gun able to shoot 35-50 feet is not indicative of penetration like I thought. Thanks for the video. On a side note I looked up BB pellets. Those can go almost as fast as a .22 in some pellet guns. ranging from 550fps to 1000fps and a .22 is around 1500-1800fps. Neat stuff.

edit:
Video oddly enough details the nailgun NOT on the compressor is actually better able to penetrate than one with the compressor. Go figure.

I concur. Very close range to do damage is needed. Which I think in game terms is normal. They already are short range. Well in any event. Good for training 1 level at startup. So I guess it was legit?

2nd Edit:

Well…ya know what I found out?

You can do some serious damage after all with a nail gun. If I am to infer a few pieces of information from my uncle(that works of construction sites) and this dude in the video. Plus that nailgun test. You put something in front of the nail gun and it actually seems to penetrate better than against nothing at all.

This guy shot himself through particle board and nearly dies. My uncle was on site with 2 other guys using nailing dry wall he says and the 2 dudes foolishly on opposite sides of the same wall. 1 Guy missed the stud and the nail shot through the dry wall into the other dudes chest bone. Got lodged in the bone and went to the ER where they had to use a hammer nail puller to dislodge said nail. OUCH!

I wonder if any other real world test could be done to see this effect repeated. That cardboard was pierced on the other side of the box too when the guy shot using direct contact. Interesting. Trick to shooting a nail gun is put something in direct contact with it?

[Kadian]

Aye. In order for a nailgun to work properly, you would most likely need to put it in contact with whatever you want to penetrate. This, of course, means that the Nailgun would actually be a melee weapon instead of a ranged weapon, but I’m not sure if the game really allows for loaded melee weapons and stuff. In either case, the game assumes that you’re shooting the Nailgun like a normal handgun, that’s why the damage output is so low.

On another note: Skeletons don’t take much damage from ranged weapons, that’s intended. Ranged weapons do Cutting and Piercing Damage, both of which are negated by cutting Armor, obviously said cutting armor is not as effective against piercing as it is against pure cutting damage - still, you have on a nail + nailgun 4 damage and 3 pierce, while a skeleton has 15 Cutting Armor, so unless it’s a critical hit i don’t see you doing any damage to skeletal enemies.
The basic zombie and some of the other ‘base’ enemies have no cutting armor, but everything beyond that is most likely immune against a weak weapon like the nailgun. (I’m not going to check all the zombies for their armor…)
If you want to kill skeletons, you should be using blunt weapons. Hammers or so. Those should work the best against them.

[TheZoneWizard]

Sorry. I added a few caveats when I found new information. But yeah. I think this could be a average melee damage weapon. But could be switched to a pistol for purpose of low level gain as a handgun and marksmanship. To me, I’ll ignore the reality of how to make it penetrate and assume the game is coded correctly for purpose of not making coders change crap for little gain.

Would not have guessed it required going through something to make it penetrate something after it, better. Go figure >_>

[TheZoneWizard]

experimental version 8065 is pretty new and I seem to have a rather bothersome thing. At first I was surprised by the nailguns and that seems legit. But using a 9mm pistol has the same effect on skele zoms. The bullets ping off of the skele critters and that definitely seems to be a problem or bad code or the like. But not so much the guns as is the skeletons? Kadian pointed out that the armor rating is a bit high for a nailgun and sure, ok.

But a 9x19 pistol shot should shatter bone right? People have been shot by them for decades and bone does get damaged by them. Googling the question will a 9mm break bone? The answer is yes it can, but will it? Seems average chance to chip and crack. Breaking seems plausible but not as common and it will deflect it once in a while too.

Is this a new change? Skeles shouldn’t be deflecting 9mm with what seem 60 bullets 100% of the time. I was chilling in a gun shop shooting the hell outa this 1 skele and I was really surprised the damn thing just deflected every shot. I literally beat the thing to death with that same Beretta after I ran out of bullets. Come on now! >_<