Lighting bullet is broken.

[Grimacetexas9]

What makes you use anything other than the lightning bullet with a rifle/shotgun?
i just end up with lightning bullets every time, infinite ammo since just shooting metal stuff with it directly drop the ressource to craft more, the damage is insane and you can just use other bullets to deal minimal damage while waiting for the cooldown.

[[AC] Seraface]

Or just have 4 carbines/shotguns with lightning strike on both bullets and cycle through each one. By the time you cycle back to gun 1, your cooldown has reset haha

[Grimacetexas9]

true, i dont see the use of the other bullets at all, this one is just too op and some like the poison are just not worth the effort, maybe if the poison stayed longed and had an actual "poison the enemy and then change to another type of bullet" playstyle. Lightning strike is just infinite ammo, tons of damage and completely broken

[MechWarden]

I'd imagine that will be nerfed relatively soon. But yeah, it is stupidly effective, especially when leaning in hard with multiple guns.

Have to admit, it is fun, but it does ruin other options in comparison.

I'm a bit concerned that they didn't nerf this either before release or shortly after release with a day one patch.

[Richard]

indeed, lightning strike bullets are absurdly OP, everything dies in 1 shot its not even fun :(
i know people will say to simply ignore lightning but the problem is if something is the best alternative, why bother with the rest?

[MechWarden]

I did my first run without it, pretty much ignoring the shock bullet tree, and the game was fun. Still beat the game deathless, and kind of owned the finally boss first try because I knew what guns to bring. (because of another cheese strat I heard about)

Second run and I did try out Lightning Strike bullets midway through, once with a Lightning Strike and Freeze combo on a carbine (which was devastating), and later with a revolver with two loaded in, but I never geared up with more than one gun with that. It was still nice having a heavy hitting gun on hand, but the ammo usage felt ridiculously light for what you got out of it. It was really tempting to just run nothing but Lightning Strike bullets given what you get from it.

Most of the bullets are fairly balanced, but the most glaring unbalance is Lightning Strike bullets with the high damage and very very high ammo amount per resource. The cool down for it kind of balances it out... almost, if you followed it, but it is so easy to side step that and render it almost useless.

[Grimacetexas9]

a way to balance it, have the bullet cooldown be "by bullet" not by gun slot, so you cant spam them. AND have the lightning be delayed by like a second and have a small aoe so you can only use it on slowed enemies or in situation where you know the enemy is not going to dodge the lightning. and then you can keep the damage.

Another possibility is to have the lightning stike be a bit random and hit around what you hit so it's not a 100% hit rate, and you need to put water on the enemy to have it be more reliable.

[Sepherix]

People will also flock towards it when faced with having to spend 20 seconds to kill one frog with poison ammo. And +2 seconds of having to gather material for said ammo.
Vs kill - grab material for the ammo you're using on a third of the enemies and destructible - have to replenish much, much less often too.

No way thunder should have more than 10% of its ammo cap either.

[Psycho Pie]

Meh. I rather charm ammo with level boost, strength boost, endurance boost powder.
Coupled with healing bullets for obvious reason.

And a carbine with resurrect ammo. Order ammo for quickly killing chaos monster and heal mechanical charmed robots.

And a blunderbuss with bramble ammo to have at least something to defend myself with.

[J9ma6]

partly that they're OP
partly that other stuff is UP
and partly that buff stacking/mechanics are either hidden or not functioning as described

lightning strike *just works*, even without being autotiered it would still be useful when shooting at objects above yours, raw power to crack through the armor, and while it doesn't show up in a spreadsheet there's a value in front-loaded results that you can pay off while doing other stuff (eg. hide and heal, CC) people in AC6 saw this with zimmerman superiority

other approaches you need bunches of tomes to research several bullets, upgrade them bing bing bing, research several mods/powders, often grind outlier mats

you could make lightning strike eat 5~10 bullets per shot (it probably should) and double craft costs and even reduce the damage and it would still be king, paying off cooldowns while in 'lol, walking.' mode/etc is very good value

[Luis_Alberto]

Pretty good true, but I still prefer carbine with fire bullet and oil trail for maximum clear. And Order bullets with damage boost for chaos insta kills taht arent on a cooldown. Poison is probably the weakest probably should add that lighting into poison gas to get an explosion from the trailer.

[Suprage]

Originally posted by Luis_Alberto:

Pretty good true, but I still prefer carbine with fire bullet and oil trail for maximum clear. And Order bullets with damage boost for chaos insta kills taht arent on a cooldown. Poison is probably the weakest probably should add that lighting into poison gas to get an explosion from the trailer.

I've been using fire+oil combo since beginning and i must admit i fint it absurd that a random weapon with Lighting bullet not even upgraded do significantly more damage. Fire just look impressive but dont deal that much damage, maybe i do something wrong but the biggest damage output from Fire+Oil combo is actually just the bullet, not the fire to me.

[Grimacetexas9]

which is kinda dumb imo since all the bullets have interactions and other stuff and are element based, make the elements matter more than the bullet, if the poison bullet deal more bullet damage than poison damage what even is the point if any? same for fire.