Crossbow or Railgun?

[DrunkenQueen]

For bosses, I most likely prefer Railgun due to auto lock.

For normal waves, Railgun is very powerful against Big zeds. While Crossbow seems not bad and saves more weight.

What do you think?

[Fumo Bnnuy n Frends]

m99 is better normal waves
railgun boss
crossbow is good for going all r and getting trash and stunning zeds

[CursedPanther]

Team = M99
Solo = M14

[Ant Ra]

Crossbow is nice. Fair damage, fair equip speed, broken special stun hits by 50/50 chance.
Best is that most ammo shot at targets can be collected and used again. Good prize/value concept and rarely dry on ammo. Weight is nice, as mentioned before.

But the crossbow is a slow weapon. Means not that good at fast trash but really useful to stop a small medium zed army - all this gorefiends, rioter & stuff. To engage big ones is situational. Maybe yes or better no. If yes Scrakes can be nice targets to kill (no wonder)..

[Seiryurin]

I prefer the M99 over any of Sharpshooter's weapons.

[amathy]

railgun if you want to focus on large zeds
m14 if you want to be a generalist and be good at everything
railgun for boss

[m550]

Crossbow, so i can free feel to shoot their knees with overused meme.

[Nightstrasza]

Crossbow can stun bosses with lvl 10 100% increased stun power ss skill, it can also stun calm fleshpounds with this skill, the skill also allows to stun scrakes even without shooting them in the head. It also have seemingly limitless ammo since it can be picked up and also great penetration allowing to destroy waves of small zeds going in line. The thing is, even when upgraded to t5 it only gains +60% damage, that's something on levels of unupgraded and not locked railgun, m99 however will always be strongest.

As for boss, not sure why ppl praise that lock mode for railgun, it reduces the damage to half making crossbow already better as crossbow can stun, rail not. M99 will shred bosses better, tho it have like 2x less ammo than railgun so gotta aim for those heads for max efficiency.

[Fumo Bnnuy n Frends]

Originally posted by Nightstrasza:

As for boss, not sure why ppl praise that lock mode for railgun, it reduces the damage to half making crossbow already better as crossbow can stun, rail not. M99 will shred bosses better, tho it have like 2x less ammo than railgun so gotta aim for those heads for max efficiency.

i know for a fact that the lock on helps a crap ton more on hanz and patty that tend to move around alot and are invisible vs the abomination and KFP which tend to move but more predictably in a straighter line and are visible.

People use the railgun mainly because spamming (LLRRL) with the lvl 10 Left and lvl 15 Right perk skill you can practially spam it for days and unload like 3 shots in the time it takes to unload 1 m99 shot. Considering your grenades have a very tiny window to freeze bosses and even then not for long, gotta make every single shot count.

i feel like the m99 is more for in-wave big zeds rather than the boss zeds because it just destroyes them (makes mince meat of fleshpounds, quater pounders, and especially scrakes). On bosses it's okay but can't beat the spam of the railgun

crossbow don't really like using it on boss waves because it's not a guranteed stun, even with all R unless you initiate zed time it's very random when the bosses will get stunned, especially patty and hanz seem to be more immune to stuns by crossbows.

agree on the headshot efficiency but then again that's sharp in general.
also agree that the crossbow is a real dosh saver, but the problem is that the arrows sometimes go out of bounds or just places you can't reach them or just vanish and are harder to pickup, that and you gotta plow through zeds to get to them again, so you gotta make the shots all count, or get someone to cover you like a zerker or a firebug / demo so you can pick them up all the way across the map or hallway.

[Nightstrasza]

Originally posted by (TF2SP) God of Beer and Games:

Originally posted by Nightstrasza:

As for boss, not sure why ppl praise that lock mode for railgun, it reduces the damage to half making crossbow already better as crossbow can stun, rail not. M99 will shred bosses better, tho it have like 2x less ammo than railgun so gotta aim for those heads for max efficiency.

i know for a fact that the lock on helps a crap ton more on hanz and patty that tend to move around alot and are invisible vs the abomination and KFP which tend to move but more predictably in a straighter line and are visible.

People use the railgun mainly because spamming (LLRRL) with the lvl 10 Left and lvl 15 Right perk skill you can practially spam it for days and unload like 3 shots in the time it takes to unload 1 m99 shot. Considering your grenades have a very tiny window to freeze bosses and even then not for long, gotta make every single shot count.

i feel like the m99 is more for in-wave big zeds rather than the boss zeds because it just destroyes them (makes mince meat of fleshpounds, quater pounders, and especially scrakes). On bosses it's okay but can't beat the spam of the railgun

crossbow don't really like using it on boss waves because it's not a guranteed stun, even with all R unless you initiate zed time it's very random when the bosses will get stunned, especially patty and hanz seem to be more immune to stuns by crossbows.

agree on the headshot efficiency but then again that's sharp in general.
also agree that the crossbow is a real dosh saver, but the problem is that the arrows sometimes go out of bounds or just places you can't reach them or just vanish and are harder to pickup, that and you gotta plow through zeds to get to them again, so you gotta make the shots all count, or get someone to cover you like a zerker or a firebug / demo so you can pick them up all the way across the map or hallway.

Well, everything gets incapacition immunity for a duration after it happenes, they panicked from poison? they won't panic again for few seconds even if an elephant foot would lay next to them. The same is for stun, yesterday stunned hans multiple times before he could destroy our allies with his fangs, that's a less likely thing to happen to patriarch, rarely got him stunned but still did. For ammo during wave, best buddy to have would be lvl 20 support to replenish that 30% ammo and yes, arrows often bug out or land in unreachable places, especialy on official maps.

Also railgun for bosses, lock mode is the longest vs bosses it takes like 1 and half or 2 seconds forgot) to lock onto boss so that's meh and not having difficulties to hit heads of patriarch or hans (well, hans a little, he wiggles alot while sprinting and his head is so tiny). Also not having problems with cloaked patriarch that much, just waiting it out or headshoting him if he is running straight at us.

In the end, would not suggest going right side stunlock ss tho, atleast not on official maps, they are so small and cramped that tis better to just take down the threat instantly with m99 than waste multiple bolts for pointless stun on maps where there is no place to kite.

[DrunkBunny94]

Originally posted by (TF2SP) God of Beer and Games:

Originally posted by Nightstrasza:

As for boss, not sure why ppl praise that lock mode for railgun, it reduces the damage to half making crossbow already better as crossbow can stun, rail not. M99 will shred bosses better, tho it have like 2x less ammo than railgun so gotta aim for those heads for max efficiency.

i know for a fact that the lock on helps a crap ton more on hanz and patty that tend to move around alot and are invisible vs the abomination and KFP which tend to move but more predictably in a straighter line and are visible.

So you take lock on to do half damage with a 35% multiplier (headshot+SS passive) and lower your rate of fire instead of bursting the boss down? That sounds incredibly inefficient..


So let's say you are running LLLRL because the elite reload doesn't speed up the reload cancel time (with RC you fire the railgun just as fast with or without tac reload - and that speed it stupid fast).

The T5 rail gun does 700 damage so assuming no ReU and no headshots (only stability and sniper) that's 1085 damage and also assuming there's no resistance/weakness (like patty's arm weakness or leg resistance). In reality though if you can land those Headshots your looking at 1680.

With lockon and max stacks (which it would be possible to maintain but just for arguments sake) thats 840 damage (assuming headshot damage) but now you have to do the full relaod AND wait 1.1 seconds for the boss lockon.
If you don't take ReU and opt for the faster reload then you still shoot slower than the person not using lock on only now your doing 665 damage...

So your doing less damage per shot AND shooting slower using the lockon for boss. At this point you would be better off taking ballistic shock to stun the boss for your team to DPS the boss.

Please never use lock on for the boss.

The crossbow is ok mid wave, its largest strength comes from its stun, compared to the railgun it loses in terms of DPS which is what you want for the bosswave - unless your comparing it to a lock on railgun then yeah your doing more DPS... Have I mentioned how bad lock on is?

The main advantage of the crossbow is you can carry the M14 with it which means you can both clear trash and large zeds. Although with that said the M14 is ok for the boss wave as well since your shooting so fast you can actually proc the stun on the boss pretty easily which is great for bosses like abomination or Hans or patty (it's hard to CC KFP since once he's raged he gets massive CC resistance)

[Nightstrasza]

M14 have only 5 stun power from what wiki says, surely it can't stun anything outside of lvl 25 ranger skill.

[amathy]

use ballistic shock and it stuns scrakes in like 5-6 shots

[Nightstrasza]

Well, that's weird then on the wiki part as even with 100% more stun power, it would have 10 per shot, scrake needs 100 power to acumulate, head have 1x multiplier and stun for him have 20/s decay ratio which means it needs definitely more than 5-6 shoots, unless wiki is wrong or there are some other mechanics in play that didn't notice.

[HiTmAn]

crossbow is nice but not for bosses

[Amplifier]

Crossbow sucks because of bullet drop off. Sure you can recover your ammo and maybe stun on a good day but that doesn't help anything when your effective range is lower than a Support Specialist.