Weapon balance

[BEER FAIRY]

I can't build anything as good as AR, not even close, help. I mean I can beat the boss with any weapon, but with AR it's so much easier, after first few minutes I don't even see enemies, they are all dead off the screen at spawn.

[glythe]

Originally posted by BEER FAIRY:

I can't build anything as good as AR, not even close, help. I mean I can beat the boss with any weapon, but with AR it's so much easier, after first few minutes I don't even see enemies, they are all dead off the screen at spawn.

You cannot hope to build every weapon the same and and think they will be better than an AR built with the "perfect setup".

To be perfectly honest there is no gun that is faster to setup than the pistol (because it gets part upgrades at a faster rate).

[WasabiCannon]

At first I thought the Hydra Minimissle Swarmer was the best gun in the game and Id never make something better then the build I had with it.

Then Im come out with a pistol build that gets online quicker and ends up doing better at clearing packs and melting bosses.

Just comes down to getting all of the parts you need for a GG weapon. Zero wasted parts or side upgrades. I knew I wanted the instant reload so I just avoided anything that gave me reload speed and focused on anything that would drain mag size to get me more nades as well as proccing the charm that give you bonuses on the last bullet.

[Falchoin]

I'd say that the AR is probably the best weapon without needing a specific build or genes. It's good out of the box at level 1. It's also a lot harder to fail using the AR than any other gun in my experiences with the game so far, which makes it just feel better. While it's possible to make other guns screen wipe faster or have silly amounts more dps eventually with upgrades and genes tailored for a specific build, most don't really get online until mid to late in a run.

[nachterg]

Perso, my preferred is the Hydra. I also like the Optical Carbine and the Shotgun.
I do have all the genes.
I found the very costly RYS hard to use and I hate the 50 cal.
I don't really see the interest of the Telsion and I'm not sure how the railgun works (still have to try it but I'm not enthusiastic about it)
Globally, I find the high spread weapons easier since in the end, you pretty much have to send lots of bullets

[Kyouko Tsukino]

My favorite is the shotgun. Easy to build around, small magazine making it easier to get bonuses to "one bullet" magazines, large number of projectiles which makes things like projectile size or individual bullet damage upgrades worth a lot more, and it can be a real game-breaker if you get the Dissuasion Barrel, making it so you have a circle of bullets around you at all time, shredding whatever dares coming too close to you.

And you can get weird and do Dissuasion + Containment, and become a walking bubble of bullets. Add armor and you get a very melee build.

... And then on the next run you build almost the same thing while giving your previous shotgun to your drone, and Titannus gets shredded to bits before it can say "why is my health bar getting wrecked?"

[thegreatvarholy]

The shotgun sucks early-midgame but with a lil bit of love, it gets plain dumb. I love getting a stupidly high bullet count and increasing bullet speed/range while reducing bullet spread for what is essentially a buckshot laser or pellet hose. It's how I got my first T2 zone clear. Next round I gave it to my drone so I could play around with other weapons like a railgun that thought it was a SMG.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

There's an upgrade that reverts bullet decay, at least the text hints at that, so bullets do more damage the more they travel. Awesome with a sniper or rifle, but the shotgun? Add bullet speed and you have a wall of sniper shots.

Spread is tricky tho. If you add too much of it (mostly done through genes,) you can end up with all the shotgun's pellets concentrated in one small dot of doom. It will still act as all the separate pellets so any non-boss enemy hit by it will die unless you've managed to not increase damage as the run goes. High spread also does wonders to the Hydra, making it so the missiles stay clustered for longer, which can make their homing less effective.

[thegreatvarholy]

Originally posted by Kyouko Tsukino:

There's an upgrade that reverts bullet decay, at least the text hints at that, so bullets do more damage the more they travel. Awesome with a sniper or rifle, but the shotgun? Add bullet speed and you have a wall of sniper shots.

Spread is tricky tho. If you add too much of it (mostly done through genes,) you can end up with all the shotgun's pellets concentrated in one small dot of doom. It will still act as all the separate pellets so any non-boss enemy hit by it will die unless you've managed to not increase damage as the run goes. High spread also does wonders to the Hydra, making it so the missiles stay clustered for longer, which can make their homing less effective.

On paper, it's excessively dumb using the scope for a shotgun but it works in the most important way: makes you laugh at the stupid **** happening on screen. Homing shotgun is silly and the game plain damn breaks if you have the bullet hell barrel along with the +Bullets genome from the first miniboss. I got to around 100 or so bullets and the game just friggin' stopped. I swear those stalactites in caverns move faster than the game.

The lower path means you can essentially have some sort of lead vomiting Thanos snap. Whatever it hits gets mega dead. Reducing spread multiplies the death factor, from mega dead to giga dead possibly to tera dead depending on tunings and other augments.