Pneumatic Assault Rifle nerf?

[quote=“Murphy, post:20, topic:9092”]I’d rather see light firearms gain a buff. PAR damage is on par (pun intended) with 9mm – that is, enough to kill one zed but a horde will tear you apart. I.e. not really any more effective than going melee.

And on top of low damage, PAR is also annoying to reload, heavy, bulky, doesn’t take mods and has a small magazine. I can’t fathom a situation where I’d use it over a proper 5.56 rifle or shotgun. Even if I didn’t have a proper gun, I’d just use melee and throwing.

Bolt driver sounds better, though its damage drops off with range too quickly, and I’m a passionate hater of reload-by-one.[/quote]

Agreed. I typically keep a slingshot in a holster for food, a bow of some kind for most of my distance kills and larger game in a back holster, and whatever my most powerful gun is(with a suppressor/flamethrower/etc) in another back holster for when things gets FUBAR.

yes, carrying an arsenal around will get heavy, but if you create SOME kind of cart(a light frame, and a floor trunk. i believe all this is required are some 2x4’s, nails and maybe some scrap metal) put all your crap in the cart instead

My point is that you could easily replace the bow with the PAR and have basically the same functionality. I don’t believe they are overpowered. I think that they are just right. I DO think that they should have to be pumped up though. but other specs should be left alone

light sidearms are just light sidearms. They don t do heavy dmg irl either. you can kill a hhuman with it quite easily cause they have vital organs and tend to bleed to death. The dmg is fine.

One note: crafting difficulty 6 is probably too much for PAR. By the time you achieve this level of mechanics you can survive long enough and find way too cooler weapons and lots of ammo for them even with low items spawn rate. 5 maybe or even 4?

you can get mechanics 6 just by taking apart a single car. I’ve had mechanic 6 by day 6 or 7 before. and I’ve sometimes gone till midsummer before finding anything other than marbles/nails/BB’s and .22

Yes mechanics is the easiest skill to lvl up-

Option A:
I just assumed that the character gave the tank a few pumps when reloading each shot. Hence the tank always remains at a high pressure. As a minimal effort nerf we could double the reload time or something.

Option B:
If we want to get more fancy, how about having craftable air tanks that can be used the same way that a ups is used in energy weapons.

That said, I don’t think that the gun needs nerfing. If we were to go with option b. It would be nice if the air tank can be stored in a cart that the character is dragging. Also, if we are talking about realism there is no particular reason why the magazine isn’t bigger. Maybe at this point we were just talking about a different gun.

[quote=“Pandromidal, post:26, topic:9092”]Option A:
I just assumed that the character gave the tank a few pumps when reloading each shot. Hence the tank always remains at a high pressure.[/quote]

That is indeed how it works. Same with the pneumatic bolt driver.

I managed to kill a sluge crawler with the Pneumatic Assault Rifle. If you can get a hold of a proper SMG and craft ammunition for it, your better off with that mostly, but the PAR is really powerful, I must admit.

I mean … is it not supposed to be powerful? I thought it was supposed to be powerful. I only recently discovered that my character could craft it and it was one of those cool moment where I got to have fun with a new rewarding part of the game.

I have an idea: instead of nerfing the weapons, buff the targets.
A super-sonic rock smashing a zed kid in the eye should hurt, but a hulk/zombear/zoose should just get madder.

I agree that enemies should be buffed. However ranged weapons are closer to doing realistic dmg to our enemies atm-.

I mean … is it not supposed to be powerful? I thought it was supposed to be powerful. I only recently discovered that my character could craft it and it was one of those cool moment where I got to have fun with a new rewarding part of the game.[/quote]

It should definitely be powerful. The problem is that at least when I play, once I have the PAR there’s nowhere to go from there. Like I said, I’m throwing away top-tier guns because the cost/benefit ratio for any other weapon just isn’t there. Eventually the game stops being fun because of it; you either end up with multiple trunk-fulls of weapons you’ll never use or just… stop playing.

Maybe it’s actually a symptom of a more systemic problem. It seems like after the first month or two you’ve pretty much “won”. You can beat up the Triffid Hearts and smash the Mycus’ stuff, but there’s no real reward for doing so (and honestly I’ve yet to run into anything but the little fungal spires anyway, and those aren’t even tough; you can just blow them away with the PAR). I know the design document says you’re not supposed to be able to reverse or stop or even really slow the Cataclysm, but if not what the hell else is the player supposed to do?

There’s also a severe lack of tactical diversity. There’s truckfulls of rocket launchers and nail rifles and other such things, but in the end the FOOS of “get an automatic weapon and mash F” or “get a decent melee weapon / get good at bare-handed and run into things” is king; there’s no use for, say, smoke grenades. EMP grenades are handy against turrets, but that’s just “see a cheap instakill turret, lob EMP, you’re winner;” that’s not really fun. And tear gas is supposed to be nasty against triffids, but I’ve never tried it 'cos I just run them over.

I’d aggree that existring enemies might need a buff and/or new enemies might need to be added, yeah.

This is starting to get off topic, but I would like to see zombies mutate and grow more powerful over time. The problem is that there is no sliding scale in difficulty. Zombies have a fixed difficulty level. This level has to be low enough that a brand new player will have fun. However as a result any experienced player no longer finds the game very challenging. It’s just one more zombie to mow down with your weapon of choice. There isn’t much between getting instantly killed by a turret and instantly killing a zombie. What would be more interesting would be if zombies slowly become more powerful over time. I think the way this should happen in is through mutations. In the simplest form zombies can randomly get a health boosting mutation that add points to their health. Another way this could be done is through a toughness mutation that can upgrade a zombie to a tough zombie … eventually to a hulk. Something else that would be cool is a spitter mutation. In general it would be nice to have zombies develop more ranged attacks because currently there isn’t much of a sliding scale to prepare characters for dealing with turrets.

The possibilities really go on and on: Fleet footed night vision zombies, Hulk spitter zombies, webbed shrieker zombies, schizophrenic zombie brutes, etc.

id rather see the fighting system itself tweaked instead of new monsters… though i am not directly oposed. I just think that thats not the right way to make it more challenging.

[quote=“Pandromidal, post:33, topic:9092”]This is starting to get off topic, but I would like to see zombies mutate and grow more powerful over time. The problem is that there is no sliding scale in difficulty. Zombies have a fixed difficulty level. This level has to be low enough that a brand new player will have fun. However as a result any experienced player no longer finds the game very challenging. It’s just one more zombie to mow down with your weapon of choice. There isn’t much between getting instantly killed by a turret and instantly killing a zombie. What would be more interesting would be if zombies slowly become more powerful over time. I think the way this should happen in is through mutations. In the simplest form zombies can randomly get a health boosting mutation that add points to their health. Another way this could be done is through a toughness mutation that can upgrade a zombie to a tough zombie … eventually to a hulk. Something else that would be cool is a spitter mutation. In general it would be nice to have zombies develop more ranged attacks because currently there isn’t much of a sliding scale to prepare characters for dealing with turrets.

The possibilities really go on and on: Fleet footed night vision zombies, Hulk spitter zombies, webbed shrieker zombies, schizophrenic zombie brutes, etc.[/quote]

This idea was suggested like dozens times, but this ship always crashes against not being thought through.

Makes sense. I can’t have been the first person to think of this. What exactly crashed the ship? Maybe we should be getting the ship off the rocks? At the very least it seams like a configurable setting can’t hurt.

I still think that my proposal about this was a good starting point:
Forum topic

Makes sense. I can't have been the first person to think of this. What exactly crashed the ship? Maybe we should be getting the ship off the rocks? At the very least it seams like a configurable setting can't hurt.
Everyone suggest their own monsters evolution.

I still think that my proposal about this was a good starting point:
Forum topic[/quote]

I ll totaly ponder on all this and will certainly start suggesting things after the fatigue system is here and i have tested it thoroughly.

Regarding the pneumatics, they should have a longer reload time at a minimum, and we can balance more from there.
Regarding monster progression over time, it’s simply a matter of it not being implemented yet. It’s not even that complex, there are just a million features we want to add and it’s not at the top of the pile. Personally I’m planning on doing a stamina/running system next, then sort out hordes properly, monster evolution might be easy to drop in while I’m doing hordes, but if it isn’t I’m not sure when I’d get to it.