AR-23P Liberator Penetrator

[Asherogar]

So, what are the use cases for it?

Obviously not bugs, hard to beat Breaker here.

Against bots, Diligence is just better, because it can one-shot all the small bots, have crazy ammo efficiency and against anything it can't handle you want to use autocannon anyway.

Am I missing something or the gun is just not very good?


EDIT: Okay, I'm back after more testing and trying to make it work. First, I need to summarise a few points:

Against small enemies damage per shot is one of the most important stats. They have a very small HP pool and difference of 1 damage can be a difference between spending 2 and 3 shots, a whole 50% increase. Assuming enemy has 100 hp, base Liberator with 55 damage will kill it in 2 shots, Penetrator with 45, on the other hand, will need 3. If both guns shoot in bursts of 3, it's even worse, because now Liberator has a 1 miss window, while Penetrator must hit all 3 shots or will be forced to make a second burst, dealing only half of the "practical damage".

It goes to an absurdity when you realise that Penetrator can't one-shot standard bots with a single headshot. Not Devastators, basic small bots instead. On top of needing 4 body shots and now you need a doudle burst for each bot. Mag size is a porblem too, but later.

Medium enemies are a bit different. They have too much HP for per shot damage on most weapons to be relevant. The important things here are DPS and Armor Penetration (AP). Penetrator is alright on the latter, but DPS is quite sad. Incredibly low damage per shot, coupled with okayish firerate result in a very long TTK against medium enemies.

And then small mag size comes into play. By itself it's not a problem, Breaker is doing alright with it's 13 shots mag, but by the time you need to reload it, anything encroaching on your personal space is already dead. But Penetrator has no damage. Against most medium enemies you need to dump the entire or most of the mag and if you miss a few shots or get distracted by shooting something else, your already long TTK draws out into unacceptable 6-7 seconds per a single enemy territory.

Small mag size doesn't help against small enemies either. Large number of shots to kill anything, coupled with small mag results in constantly being overwhelmed, especially with stuff like Hunters, who have 0 armor rating on all body parts and take 3 full bursts to kill.

TLDR:
Against Light enemies outclassed by every other primary and even some secondaries.
Against Medium enemies outclassed by other Medium Pen options and completely obliterated by Big Boys like MG, AC and Grenade Launcher.

(There's also some leaks about a whole bunch of Medium Pen rifles incoming, so...)

IMO, Penetrator either needs a serious buffs to its damage per shot to at least make it solid against small targets, but then it will be just a Liberator upgrade and won't help much against Medium targets. Maybe if they make its damage per shot higher than base Lberator, like 70-80, but slow down the firerate a little bit, so it's not as efficient against Small targets.

Or devs can make it a primary version of Redeemer with Medium Pen, by giving it massive fire rate and some bigger mag, so it turns into an option to vaporise any Medium target, but too ammo hungry to use on Small targets.

[kknd]

The 23P basically requires you to be fighting walls of medium armor to be worth using. So, Devastators instead of basic bots, armored Bile Spewers and the like.

[Silverlight]

It's bad, use the sickle

[SLDFMechwarrior]

It's my default weapon and has been since day one. I use it vs. bugs or bots, being semi-auto gives me lots of fire control and I rarely have any issues with it. It's a great gun, lots of fun and takes skill to use. Way better than that crappy new machinegun laser everyone raves about.

[Pain]

man, they definitely need to tune the weapons more. I pretty only see people recommending the breaker (even with the nerfs) or the Sickle. I will put a note down to give the diligence a try though.

[Girthquake]

I use the Penetrator but exclusively on Single shot fire. Sadly last I used it, it was bugged and never remembered my fire selection between lives.

[Pain]

Originally posted by Catgirl Collector:

It's my default weapon and has been since day one. I use it vs. bugs or bots, being semi-auto gives me lots of fire control and I rarely have any issues with it. It's a great gun, lots of fun and takes skill to use. Way better than that crappy new machinegun laser everyone raves about.

So it's a weapon that simply requires patience to use? hmm.. I'll have to learn the hitboxes then and give it a chance.

[Bybloss]

consider it a jack of all trades . lots of zoom with decent pen with burst with the option of single shot with decent accuracy . not the best of anything but you can use it in just about every situation . it just wont out perform weapons made for those situations

[Onimaho]

You aren't missing anything, it isn't very good because of the reduced damage. This makes the ammo efficiency of this weapon absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

There are many other weapons that can do better what this weapon does and only have light armor penetration. Which doesn't make sense, but that is how it goes.

[Dust]

It's not very good, but it has its uses. With the number of hive guards and armored spewers that there are now following the patch, a primary that has medium penetration capabilities is nice to have. It used to be my favorite gun, I'm now a Sickle convert.

Edit: Also, I heard that it's got a crazy crit multiplier, meaning that it requires significantly fewer headshots to blow up a brood commander's head, for example. just what I've heard though, not sure if it's true or not, feels like it takes the same amount of headshots with a sickle to pop a commander's head to me.

[Khloros]

To sit on a shelf, thats all its good for.
Not a single viable use case for it.

[Gaz]

Originally posted by Pain:

man, they definitely need to tune the weapons more. I pretty only see people recommending the breaker (even with the nerfs) or the Sickle. I will put a note down to give the diligence a try though.

or just realise that what one person likes, another does not. I hate the breaker. i'm still using the default gun i cant remember the name of, despite having collected a load of them. play with what feels best to you and how you play.

[Dust]

Originally posted by Gaz:

Originally posted by Pain:

man, they definitely need to tune the weapons more. I pretty only see people recommending the breaker (even with the nerfs) or the Sickle. I will put a note down to give the diligence a try though.

or just realise that what one person likes, another does not. I hate the breaker. i'm still using the default gun i cant remember the name of, despite having collected a load of them. play with what feels best to you and how you play.

I really like the Blitzer but it doesn't change the fact that it's basically outclassed by every other weapon that isn't the Scythe. Just realize that some people would like to have their favorite primaries buffed but are resorting to using powerful guns until then, because higher difficulties push you to do so.

[Onimaho]

Originally posted by Pain:

man, they definitely need to tune the weapons more. I pretty only see people recommending the breaker (even with the nerfs) or the Sickle. I will put a note down to give the diligence a try though.

Punisher for bugs

Scorcher for bots

Everything else is less effective at accomplishing a low TTK, stopping power, and ammo efficiency.

[Asherogar]

Okay, I run around with it against bugs and it's not outright terible, but... definetly needs some improvement.

Also looking at weapons stat sheets and they make no sense. Starting with the Penetrator, I understand it's idea of sacrificing some damage for more armor pen. The problems are that Liberator, which this modification is based on, already has rather low per shot damage, on top of it the mag size is cut severely too, resulting in you spending most of the time reloading. Penetrator probably has the lowest damage per mag in the entire game, even worse than a single shot weapons like EAT. Breaker doesn't have big mag, but it has so much damage per shot, that by the time you need to reload, everything around you is already dead.

There's a bit about weapon damage balance too. Standard Pistol has 60 damage per shot, Redeemer has 60 too. Submachine gun has 70, makes sense. Why Liberator is 55? How is it possible that an assault rifle has less damage per shot than a standard-issue pistol? It's not a Senator, it's a normal pistol. And then we have Penetrator with an anemic 45. At this point enemies receive more emotional damage and die out of pity for you.

Liberator damage should be at least 65 or 70 and Penetrtor would be okay at 60. Maybe that would give those guns some actual fighting chance against other more specialized weapons.

Btw, is there any in-game way of checking stats of supply weapons? There's only vague descriptions.

[ZeroOne]

too low damage ... and a auto firemode would help also. Even the Standard Liberator iss better ...