does the engineers sm4rt rifle just have a low ammo pool, or was it just me?

[Dewutt]

felt like I ran out of ammo too often when playing engineer back then (unless they changed it since I last played a while ago) and that's why I switched back to the sub machine gun

[ShugoTheRipper]

Its low, you give up a lot of direct damage for auto aim.

And its garbage.

[Bookslayer10]

It's less ammo efficient, and isn't as good at self defence as the other primaries, so for a basic weapon you probably do better with one of the others. However, it's good against single high value targets at long ranges due to the accuracy, so it can certainly be worth taking if you are okay with the trade-off.

[AyyDimitri]

While I'm not the biggest fan of lok1.
I have aspirations to fiddle with unreal until I can make a pump shotgun with a lok1 style auto aim slug shot.
Man that'd make a nice boomer shooter workhorse...

[Xv_F1nalZz_vX]

the lok-1 one has always feel to me, that the reason for why they gave it so little ammo is because the weapon has a pretty "sky high skill ceiling", so if you want to be "ammo efficient" with it you really need to somehow get weak-point kills 99% of the time Or carry Explosive chemical rounds (ECR) and pray that the spiders will remain next to each other all the time. So that why i rarely use it myself. Such a shame that the lok-1 does not have a more ammo/less damage overclock. But like i said that's just how the weapon feels to me...

Another reason might be that the weapons is only really meant to be use against single-targets. so you can deal with HVT from far away just like how the scout is meant to do with the M1000.

[Mason]

Without any overclocks Lok-1 is terrible. Use it with Executioner or ECR if you want to get any use out of it.

[Ittrix]

It's a low ammo pool. The logic goes that because it's got an auto-aim you'll never miss your shots, so it's ammo pool should be lower.

Of course, the auto aim can still 'miss' via hitting armor, terrain, or not hitting weakpoints. And it already has a time investment of about a tenth of a second per lock.

It's a fun weapon, but I'd be lying if I said it was more effective than the other primaries. To echo Shugo, it's garbage. At least until you bring out ECR or Executioner.

[Lahgtah]

I never really felt this problem. The trick is to make sure you're not overly reliant on your primary for anything. Turrets, grenades, and secondary especially will smooth out the ammo attrition. It mostly shines in solo play where you don't have teammates to help(and bosco is, frankly, terrible at combat if not for his infinite ammo.)

By far, my favorite engi primary. The other two don't really click with me. The shotgun especially just feels bad in spite of how strong it is; maybe if it had better feedback from shooting things with it and a not-awful recoil pattern. Otherwise shotty just feels like the game's most bland weapon. Even the scout's AR has more character.

[babuk.fracal]

Originally posted by Lahgtah:

I never really felt this problem. The trick is to make sure you're not overly reliant on your primary for anything. Turrets, grenades, and secondary especially will smooth out the ammo attrition. It mostly shines in solo play where you don't have teammates to help(and bosco is, frankly, terrible at combat if not for his infinite ammo.)

By far, my favorite engi primary. The other two don't really click with me. The shotgun especially just feels bad in spite of how strong it is; maybe if it had better feedback from shooting things with it and a not-awful recoil pattern. Otherwise shotty just feels like the game's most bland weapon. Even the scout's AR has more character.

Default shotgun has turrets whip and greatly reward your accuracy in a way that is specific to drg and getting close to enemies, while default gk2 is just your good old asssault rifle you would see in any other game.



I would say that default lok 1 do have an ammo problem, but it become good/very strong depending on the overclocks.
And no, ecr and executionner arn't the only acceptable options.

[The man, the myth, the leg]

the issue with lok1 is that its one of the many guns carried hard by its overclocks(for lok1 more specifically explosive chemical rounds and executioner).

[Lord Trashcan]

The issue with the LOK-1 is that it's a weapon with a high-skill ceiling masquerading as a no-brainer primary. You NEED to learn how to curve the bullets to hit weakpoints, get used to holding the mouse button for the initial lock-on and waiting for the locks to fill, and learn how the rifle prioritizes locks and which target to shoot first (from most important to least important.) Even if you learn how to use it, you need two modifications to make it truly shine and become a very powerful weapon.

Modifications are a lot less balanced than other weapons; SMRT actively makes the weapon worse by not allowing you to lock on enough to active modification/overclock bonuses, macro lens is needed on 90% of builds or else you're gonna lock on enemies you don't care about, last tier's FEAR modification is competing with two overclocks that could help you deal even more damage with the weapon. Then you have the issue with overclock balance; Eraser is outclassed by ECR for what it's trying to do, seeker rounds cuts your DPS in half and still requires you to manually aim at weakpoints to not waste ammo so Armor Break Module is better for single-target damage, ECR and executioner are overpowered and neuro lasso is fine for support.

Even after using the weapon for a couple of promotions with the more powerful overclocks, I still wish it had 36 more base bullets and the powerful overclocks' features were added to base or modifications in some way. SMRT should be removed entirely as it's not useful for ANY build whatsoever compared to a 20-40% damage increase or +3 blowthrough.

Also, this is a bit offtopic but if I have to choose between reworking the LOK-1 and reworking the Stubby, I'd choose the Stubby in a heartbeat. At least with the LOK-1 you can build it for brainless shooting as it was intended and still get a very powerful and viable weapon, unlike the Stubby where the only two builds it has are either single target DPS or cheap turret AOE. There are absolutely no overclocks that makes the weapon better for stacking DOT on enemies, even though the scout has an overclock that guarantees shock for only 1 bullet, and said shock does 120 damage over 6 seconds with roughly the same ammo poll.

[Chibbity]

Loki could use a touch more ammo maybe, but really; is ammo ever really that hard to come by when most games you have extra Nitra?

Being essentially an auto aim gun, Loki is only ever a few changes away from being OP as all heck; so I can understand why the devs would rather keep it ever so slightly under tuned.

[RUCKUS RELOADED]

if you use it for waveclear its going to run out of ammo extremely quickly. the gun's just not built to take on crowds. even the stubby is arguably a better pick for waveclear with electric arc
i understand that it's confusing, GSG put waveclear related mods like T2B CCD array or T3B SMRT targeting on the gun despite its stats precluding it from being an effective waveclear weapon
i honestly think they just didnt bother testing the base gun for haz5 because they knew veteran players were just gonna be running overclocks on it anyway. the LOK1 is absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ without overclocks, and even then ECR and EXE are so overpowered they make running anything else pretty redundant. which is a shame, i like seeker rounds and neuro lasso a lot

[Lord Trashcan]

Originally posted by kestrel:

if you use it for waveclear its going to run out of ammo extremely quickly. the gun's just not built to take on crowds. even the stubby is arguably a better pick for waveclear with electric arc
i understand that it's confusing, GSG put waveclear related mods like T2B CCD array or T3B SMRT targeting on the gun despite its stats precluding it from being an effective waveclear weapon
i honestly think they just didnt bother testing the base gun for haz5 because they knew veteran players were just gonna be running overclocks on it anyway. the LOK1 is absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ without overclocks, and even then ECR and EXE are so overpowered they make running anything else pretty redundant. which is a shame, i like seeker rounds and neuro lasso a lot

I still question Seeker Rounds' effectiveness, since they decrease DPS way too much for a bonus that you don't want to use a lot because you're supposed to be aiming for weakpoints, and curving bullets to hit said weak points usually ignores armor too with oppressors and sometimes prats being the exception.

[RUCKUS RELOADED]

Originally posted by Lord Trashcan:

I still question Seeker Rounds' effectiveness, since they decrease DPS way too much for a bonus that you don't want to use a lot because you're supposed to be aiming for weakpoints, and curving bullets to hit said weak points usually ignores armor too with oppressors and sometimes prats being the exception.

seeker rounds ignoring all armour makes it an ok pick for elimination (particularly vs standard dreads and twins) since, now dreadnoughts can be electrocuted, you can proc the T3A/T5A combo against them and spam 3-round bursts from really far away (with macro lens) without having to worry about armour or positioning. you can just let your teammates take all the aggro whilst you deliver constant DPS onto the dread

i'll admit it's not a very good build, executioner is significantly better in almost all cases, but the fact it takes no effort to use seeker rounds makes it passable at the very least in my opinion. i agree that firing speed penalty really sucks though

[Sokaku]

A stock LOK isn't worth running IMHO. It really needs an OC to shine. That said, what many don't account for is that like most weapons, the LOK has single-target and swarm management builds. OCs like ECR & Seeker are quite good at managing crowds. For these builds I recommend going wide-angle so you can stay more mobile while filling locks. SMRT is designed for these builds as it prioritizes weaker targets in the field of view so more locks go to grunts & such than a praet in the field of fire. The odd swarmer will only tie up 1 lock, which can be detremental when you want to deal with lots of swarmers (no ecr bewms) but honestly you should have a turret down to sweep swarmers. Some want to capitalize on 3-locks for ECR & such for groups with a narrow focus but this requires babysitting lock allocation. I recommend the wide angle fast lock + SMRT for group management because it makes it easier to clear out threats while on the move.

HVT builds can make use of Executioner, Seeker, or Lasso as good options. Here you benefit from the narrower targeting.