Ranged Damage is weak. Especially guns.

[elite outsider]

- Too dependent on pumpkin: if you don't find it, you can never come close to what an average melee build can do in the first 20 waves. Once you find pumpkin, the game feels normal again. DLC adds more ways to pierce but only 1 item reduces the penalty so it actually matters. Feels really bad finding eyepatch instead of pumpkin! We already had enough pierce with sharpbullet+bandana. No other playstyle requires 1 item so badly, not even elemental or engineering. You only have to find pocketfactory once, but a ranged build has to find tons of pumpkins.

- Because pierce mostly doesn't work without pumpkin past wave 9, you tend to build up crowds of enemies. You never attack from any farther away than a melee character would, but your guns don't do the damage of melee weapons. The advantage of guns (range) never shows itself. Once you find 3 pumpkins or 50 knockback it starts to feel like guns aren't just bad inaccurate melee weapons.

- Guns have a terrible set bonus. Medium amount of added range when you already have lots of range. A thiefdagger build buying glasses gets more real value from range than a gun build completing a full set. Tags like blunt/heavy/primitive/medieval carry your defense in early waves while a ranged build has to buy all that from items (while being unable to find ranged damage).

- Ricochet is still a complete joke. Legitimately worse than Torture. At least make it so pumpkin reduces the bounce penalty! You know, the bounce penalty that is completely hidden and never mentioned anywhere. Can't wait to buy tons of ricochets so I can lose!

- Lack of low level ranged damage items: it's way easier to find melee damage, AND you find it at 2x the value (hedgehog etc all have this pattern). You can play a ranged damage character with 6 guns and build higher melee than ranged by accident just by trying to buy enough HP with commons.

- The 2x value pattern on items makes no sense. Melee attacks have infinite pierce AND you buy their damage way cheaper, why? It's made as if enemies aren't running into melee range of your guns getting tickled all game no matter what.

- The shop is overall melee-sided. Guns have to buy 200 luck to get the items they need?

- Melee can build around healing with consumables and regen, Ranged wants to build around lifesteal and regen. Lifesteal is the weakest healing source in the game, and the most expensive/rare to buy. Lifesteal has 2 forms of hard cap: 10/sec and 1/attack, both are totally unnecessary. Other forms of healing have no cap like this - jerky consumables or fairy regen can carry your build's healing on their own in the first 20 waves.
Have fun with no healing until you find tons of tentacles and goblets on wave 25! Melee characters can use both of those more effectively than you, of course.

- Manual aim is ineffective, there's no way to target big important enemies other than running into melee range. The most consistent way to play guns is to use a bunch of shotguns and play like a weak melee character, since stuff like lasergun just wastes damage on little guys half the time.

- Pretty much all the new spellcasters are anti-ranged. Tendency of ranged is to let back-line enemies stay alive longer, so you spend more time pressured by spells while a melee character runs in to clear them fast. If I have to use shotguns and run in to clear them, why am I playing long range guns? Once you find some pumpkins on wave 28, you can start easily killing molluscs the way a melee build does when it first sees them on 17.

- Pistol is probably the weakest weapon in the whole game. Totally pointless having it in there. You can reroll your shop searching for pumpkins and find pistols, what a great deal!

Very unfortunate stuff! I think the piercing and bouncing penalties alone totally ruin ranged. Everything else just compounds the issue.

[R3sistance]

Guns definitely have more weaknesses then melee weapons, crowd control is the biggest issue. Shredders, Rocket Launchers and Nuclear Launcher can do well due to their high level of AoE, SMGs, Minigun & Chain Gun are good for life steal builds,

The flip side of guns is while they have the most weaknesses, they can benefit from bounce, which other than melee weapons that launch projectiles on hit, melee weapons can never benefit from.

Pierce is only needed for guns with 0 or 1 piercing, SMGs heavily suffer from a lack of Piercing, most guns have 1 piercing or higher.

Baby with a Beard can help a ranged build but honestly I see it as much more of a pairing with Sacred Sausage on an elemental build.

Gatling Laser, if it ever comes up (The chances are far too low), that gun is basically the best weapon in the game, it shoots as fast as the minigun IV, it has a X3 critical multiplier and does significantly more damage than either SMG or Minigun while having a default Piercing of 3 (default -25% piercing damage). Chaingun is about the only ranged weapon that can potentially compete with it.

[elite outsider]

Weird how nobody engages with the first post and just posts their own random factoids.

Wow, you're right ranged is pretty okay if you get gatling laser. smart stuff!

Isn't it brutally obvious the whole game is night and day around whether you find a pumpkin? Being able to win 20 waves playing like pacifist running away from a huge crowd isn't an accomplishment.

Not an 'endless complaint' either. The point is melee is easy to build in the first 20 waves, to the point that you can make your stats explode and then pivot to ranged later. The reverse isn't true, because ranged is weak. It's really simple.

In fact, you need to make that pivot because melee falls off in value in endless.. but you can because by then you have the zillions of items required to make it work.

Originally posted by Moncho:

4 SMGs + life steal for healing and focus damage
2 Shredders/Rocket Launchers for big groups
Some dodge
Easy win every time.

do you run from 75% of elites and not kill them because half your damage is shredders/rockets? or do you just ignore the runs where you don't have perfect luck?

[GaviJa]

Gun give you safety over melee. That's the trade in.

Considering range builds, I only build them if the chars has an affinity with range damage or range weapons. Melee is always superior because of infinite pierce.

[Jaasrg]

"only i can bring up endless to fit my narrative"
Maybe I misquoted but what's a misquote or two between friends.
If any of you haven't, you should give pistols a try. Surprisingly good or maybe that's just because it's renegade.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3359628480

[elite outsider]

the first post doesn't say endless a single time
anyway congrats on dying on wave 22 with all those very low stats i guess

[Ric]

The first post doesn't say endless a single time, and yet you continue to rebuttal responses by bringing up Endless as a benchmark, when most posts here don't seem interested in Endless, therefore don't care whether they last past Wave 20.

You should have outlined that Endless was the focus of your complaints, rather than explaining that ranged is weak, when it's clearly more than capable of handling 1-20 on D5.

[Monchito]

Originally posted by elite outsider:

Originally posted by Moncho:

4 SMGs + life steal for healing and focus damage
2 Shredders/Rocket Launchers for big groups
Some dodge
Easy win every time.

do you run from 75% of elites and not kill them because half your damage is shredders/rockets? or do you just ignore the runs where you don't have perfect luck?

Sure, always running for my poor life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6EJ4jkYctI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU18FQjqxSI

[elite outsider]

Originally posted by Ric:

The first post doesn't say endless a single time, and yet you continue to rebuttal responses by bringing up Endless as a benchmark, when most posts here don't seem interested in Endless, therefore don't care whether they last past Wave 20.

You should have outlined that Endless was the focus of your complaints, rather than explaining that ranged is weak, when it's clearly more than capable of handling 1-20 on D5.

well the idea is that most of the characters/guns/mechanics are only strong enough to barely win a 20 wave run and then fall apart after, while demon/loud and melee in general makes it super easy to breeze through and then scale up into endless, because they're actually strong

nobody wants to talk about how the entire game boils down to pumpkin, instead choosing to explain how they can just barely win d5 with 26 dodge using shredder, so we talk about endless. if your benchmark is just winning wave 20, literally anything can do that, but most builds are going to be weak and unfun while they do it. especially guns, because they're badly designed!

i had a run yesterday where i made 1k minerals on wave 9, and by the final waves 18/19/20 i was making 6-7k per wave. water pistols can't do that!
and when you make that much money (with melee), you can safely buy all the stuff you need to use guns and then switch over to them. builds that begin with guns simply can't compete.

because again: the big problem with guns/ranged (explained by the litany in the first post) is how much weaker they are than melee in the first 20 waves. they're weak in endless too, unless you started with melee. don't you see how bad that design is?

[Ric]

if your benchmark is just winning wave 20, literally anything can do that

Congratulations, you've now invalidated your problem in regards to how most players will enjoy the experience. It doesn't matter how Endless mode's balance is, and no: It's only unfun if you find the struggle un-fun. I enjoy the struggle and I'll gladly play any character knowing that I have to puzzle out a solution and can't just rely on the same copy-pasted 1 weapon x 6 strat.

[elite outsider]

okay you defeated me without engaging any of the things i raised

you're right, selling people a game where 90% of the content is badly designed and lame is cool because you can cope with it by saying it's about the struggle. but endless mode isn't important for when you want to struggle in your game, the proper gentleman's way to do that is to play bad characters and weapons right?

epic steam forums win

brb spending my whole evening on chef runs. wow it's crazy you can set them on fire and then kill them with something else. this will surely be interesting for more than 30 seconds.

[Ric]

It's because the things you're raising aren't worth engaging with, since they're caked in nit-picks over one form of gameplay not satisfying you enough as others. Not all loadouts are going to be created equal, and to expect that they all be tailored to suit the same busted output is unrealistic. Btw, chef is fun, and it won't take you a whole evening to complete, either, if you know what you're doing.

[elite outsider]

alright well this is boring. you couldn't handle the part where i said guns are too dependent on finding pumpkin, so you're doing all these slimy high school debate class tactics instead

pathological weird behaviour like that is no use - not convincing. i still think what i think, you're basically just talking to yourself in the middle of my thread.

be sure to let me know when you make a thread with ideas in it, so i can come in and tell you it's not worth engaging with.

(and now you will reply in 30 seconds flat with something that took zero thought to come up with. gotta get the last word in and defeat the guy who said ranged damage is weak, otherwise i'll look like a wimp!)

[HeraldOfOpera]

Endless was added due to player request, not developer intent. When it was first added, we had people like you complaining about how narrow the "necessary" strategies are, oblivious to the fact that the mode itself is more or less explicitly a joke.

[elite outsider]

once again ignoring the point of the thread to take shots at the strawman

the necessary strategies really are narrow. endless being in the game makes it easy to see, but you don't need endless to see it.

you could just look at things like how guns are dependent on pumpkin. like what the thread is about.

i just played a loud with guns run and once again everything changed dramatically when i found my first pumpkin. before that, it was garbage, afterward it was easy.
if all the guns' pierce penalties were moved back one notch there would be no problem, basically. but apparently that's tHeStRuGgLe

Originally posted by HeraldOfOpera:

Endless was added due to player request, not developer intent.

amazing sentence btw

[OriginalMK]

calm down. guns are fine. I don't have any issue with gun builds, just gotta know when to hold em and know when to fold em.