Can anyone give me an in depth explanation of the new gun handling system, i.e. how steadiness and confidence affect accuracy and damage, the difference between different aim modes and if it affects leveling at all.
This is as of Experimental 2477.
Steadiness is how much recoil you’ve collected and confidence is how confident your character is on hitting the target.
Steadiness is a relative measure of how steady your aim is compared to “the best you can do”. If the bar fills up all the way, you can’t do any better (though if an enemy is getting closer to you, your chance to hit keeps going up).
Confidence is your character’s estimation of how likely they are to hit, if it fills up all the way, they’re certain they’re going to hit, and they’re usually right, since it’s a really pessimistic estimate. The different characters indicate steadily improving hits, from a regular hit, to a ‘good’ hit, to a headshot.
Damage is only affected if you score a better hit.
There are two different aiming styles, incremental and targeted. If you keep hitting ‘.’ it increases steadiness to a maximum, after which it goes back to passing turns.
If you use “aimed” or “careful” or “precise”, it aims to a certain level of steadiness, then fires. Except for precise they’re all kind of arbitrary, but “precise” aims until you can’t get any more steady then fires.
None of these have anything to do with skill increase, which is only influenced by how many times you fire.
Is the leveling system really that simple? Just how many times you fire?
The gun/ammo combo needs to be accurate enough that you can tell whether you hit/missed because of your own skill or the weapon, but other than that, yea it’s just practice, what else do you expect?
A more dynamic system, I suppose. Where the more damage you do and/or the more accurate you make the shot the more experience you get. Granted that might not be wholly realistic, but the player should be rewarded more for actually trying to kill Zeds rather than simply grind their skills.
Why? Your reward for doing more damage to an enemy is the enemy takes more damage. Practicing your skills is really a side effect of that. Cataclysm doesn’t reward you for things, the scenario is set up a certain way, and you take from it what you can.
so we get better by doing this- 
While I don’t agree with this completely I can understand why its there. I’d rather it be a skill gain for every HIT against an enemy instead of just every bullet fired. an analogy would be throwing a basketball. you could throw it for years, but if you never tried to hit the hoop what good have you done?
You clearly know what Granade meant. Being uncharitable and strawmanning a person’s argument instead of interpreting it in the strongest possible interpretation is just a big waste of everyone’s time as he or someone else has to correct you in the assumptions you have made on the person’s behalf.
But you have been shooting at hoops. Marksmanship is merely the skill of putting a projectile at the place where you’re aiming. You ave no reason to assume that the character is doing anything otherwise as all shots the player takes has a target. Even missed shots has educational value.
Fallout (the originals) got it right: after the apocalypse, bullets are too valuable to waste on shooting without a known target. You’re making an attempt to fire the gun at a definite point, and in that sense every shot, even if not at a (potential) hostile, is good experience, whether you’re blasting the wall, a target of some sort, a zombie, a jabberwock, or a fungal tower.
There’s a reason the trope “Exactly What I Aimed At” exists.
[quote author=Flare link=topic=8782.msg200815#msg200815 date=1418536330]
You clearly know what Granade meant. Being uncharitable and strawmanning a person’s argument instead of interpreting it in the strongest possible interpretation is just a big waste of everyone’s time as he or someone else has to correct you in the assumptions you have made on the person’s behalf.
I apologize if I did indeed oversimplify the argument. The way I see it in game is that when i’m ready to raise my skills in a firearm I just take out my MP5 and spray the area with an excessive amount of 9mm until I’m satisfied or out of ammunition. Boom, skill ups.
This works whether i’m 5 feet from a wall or shooting at a tree line at the edge of my vision. I just feel like it’s too easily cheesed. Just my opinion really on how the mechanic works as-is. I’m a fan of the slower progressions so not being able to train on just anything appeals to me a bit more, but I understand the arguments.
[quote=“KA101, post:10, topic:8284”]Fallout (the originals) got it right: after the apocalypse, bullets are too valuable to waste on shooting without a known target. You’re making an attempt to fire the gun at a definite point, and in that sense every shot, even if not at a (potential) hostile, is good experience, whether you’re blasting the wall, a target of some sort, a zombie, a jabberwock, or a fungal tower.
There’s a reason the trope “Exactly What I Aimed At” exists.[/quote]
My thoughts have been a bit scattered on the subject and I admit I didn’t clarify my stance before blurting out that post.
I feel shooting and hitting a creature to gain skill would be better than aiming at a fixed point, like at a tree or can or something along those lines. An argument could be made that melee forces you to do this already as hitting inanimate objects don’t allow for skill gains. Maybe that’s not quite the same but in my mind I feel like it is?
It follows the same logic as leveling non-combat skills: harder and more complicated objects give you more experience. It’s a system that’s existed in pretty much every RPG ever. The harder the item/boss/spell/etc. the more experience you get. Sure, you get other rewards too but experience is a reward that exists separately - for good reason. If I make something in real life not only have I literally made the object and I now possess it but I also have the knowledge of making the object.
Sure, the reward for doing more damage is literally doing more damage. But now I also know HOW to do more damage.
The problem with improving your skill with guns is that in real life there’s a handful of areas you can get better at, shooting a target next to you with a burst is going to help you learn to manage recoil and handle the gun better, but you’re not going to get any real improvement on medium/long range marksmanship.
In an ideal world where everything is simulated to an unnecessary detail, you’d have subskills on the skill for stuff like this, but that’s probably a little TOO indepth for Cata.
[quote=“Datanazush, post:13, topic:8284”]The problem with improving your skill with guns is that in real life there’s a handful of areas you can get better at, shooting a target next to you with a burst is going to help you learn to manage recoil and handle the gun better, but you’re not going to get any real improvement on medium/long range marksmanship.
In an ideal world where everything is simulated to an unnecessary detail, you’d have subskills on the skill for stuff like this, but that’s probably a little TOO indepth for Cata.[/quote]
I agree totally. What I was trying to say is that steadying your aim and taking a precise shot requires more finesse and skill than a snapshot - making a bullet go exactly where you want is harder then just pulling the trigger and hoping it hits a Zed. So, a shot that’s aimed or that does more damage should give you more experience.
But Granade said it’s apparently impossible to implement this, so it’s a moot point anyway.