Is railgun useful for bots or bugs? 7+ ?

[Youshisu]

I never used railgun, now I can but it feels useless a bit. Only pros I think is range.
It does not one shot, or 2 shot. It even bounce of heavy bug armor... :P
Do I use it wrong? I tried unsafe mode but feels no different.

[Chocbomb]

There are better options than a gun that will blow up and kill you by accident then need to wait for your stratagem cooldown to call down another one.
Why even bother with Safe Mode.

Its basically a spare battery to jump start your car at this point.
It doesnt matter how many charge bars they add to it to try fix their kneejerk nerf.

[Rincewind]

Every other support weapon works better than the railgun. Eeeeeh, maybe not the HMG.

But you are better off bringing ANY other weapon.

[Quadsword]

Railgun isn't useful for anything. Just use the AMR.

[Mikail]

AMR is now better that railgun vs bots, you can 2 tap hulks and destroy ships.

Railgun now is not best option.

Railgun is worth in +7 bugs cuz u can 4 tap chargers or stagger them.
But you need to wait 3 secs before shooting, its kinda risky but worth, hope they will change it back cuz now its kinda B tier.

[Pigeons555]

I think the Railgun is completely outclassed by other options. If you like the Railgun and find it fun, feel free to use it, it is a gun that does damage. But you cannot ignore the fact that there's not a single result you can achieve with the Railgun that you can't achieve with another support weapon that does more.

For bugs, it won't serve well as an anti-armor option (Chargers and Bile Titans) because the anti-armor options are EAT/Recoilless/Quasar which kill Chargers in one headshot and Bile Titans in 2 if you hit both. Railgun can't compete as an anti-armor option so I don't think there's a point to bring it to bugs and anyone who says it's good anti armor compared to the other options is actually flat out lying to you. It is passable at best if you waste all of your time sitting there overcharging it for 2-3 seconds per shot, for multiple shots for your bog standard Chargers (guess what charges in that amount of time). If you need to kill armored Bile Spewers (the worst enemy in the game) bring an Autocannon or a grenade launcher. No other notable medium armored bugs.

For bots, it competes with AMR and Autocannon which dispatch medium enemies (Devastators, Striders) much easier, because both are semi-auto and can still 2 shot Hulks in the eye. Autocannon staggers Devastators allowing safe kills.

As for unsafe mode, you overcharge the Railgun to get more power and penetration out of it, at the risk of blowing up the gun and yourself (you will have no support weapon even if your respawn in which is worse than dying) if you hit 100% with it. Arguably, the Railgun is only good in unsafe mode. Again, even if you can time it perfectly to hit maximum power and never blow yourself up, you are still sitting there doing nothing while other support weapons let you do something and move on. You might as well use a laser weapon, and we all know how good those are.

So the Railgun can one shot Hulks in the eye if you charge it up in unsafe mode enough? Two-tapping with the AMR or Autocannon can get done about as fast, as well as allowing you to continue to kill everything else around the Hulk. And what if you miss an overcharge shot with the absurd bobbing animations of the Hulks? Just because a gun can do "one thing" that no other gun can do, doesn't mean that "one thing" fulfills a valuable niche that no other gun can come close to doing. The niche for a weapon that can efficiently deal with medium enemies while having the ability to occasionally kill a heavy enemy with serious effort, is not a useful niche.

[Explodium]

It's fine against bots, pretty bad against bugs. Role-wise it's pretty much a more forgiving AMR, 1 tapping all mediums if you hit them in the waist, and hulks in the eye. For tanks and turrets you'll need something else, like the scorcher.

[Eagle_of_Fire]

Originally posted by Explodium:

It's fine against bots, pretty bad against bugs. Role-wise it's pretty much a more forgiving AMR, 1 tapping all mediums if you hit them in the waist, and hulks in the eye. For tanks and turrets you'll need something else, like the scorcher.

I use my eagle strike (which I always bring with me no matter what) and/or my orbital laser for that. It is like my panic button but you know... Without the panic.

[PVT.Blueberry]

its for nothing, auto canon canon 1 shot all the things a rail gun can to the weakspot and its explosive and has stagger.

[Luchs]

Quas, or recoiless are top tier

i still ahve lock on issues with spear so idk aobut it

[CountCapacollo]

Originally posted by Youshisu:

I never used railgun, now I can but it feels useless a bit. Only pros I think is range.
It does not one shot, or 2 shot. It even bounce of heavy bug armor... :P
Do I use it wrong? I tried unsafe mode but feels no different.

Can railgun be used for either? Yes, I've used it in helldive (diff 9) plenty of times.

Do I think there are much better available? Absolutely. The charge time and reduction to both armor pen and the requirement for you to constantly charge in unsafe mode make the weapon unattractive for any combat that is hectic or you need to move around constantly.

EAT, Quasar, Recoiless all outperform rail gun by a significant margin due to their ease of use, sustainability, stopping power, and lack of needing rechage multiple times to get the desired result (dusting bug / automaton).

Combine this with the fact that other medium armor piercing weaponry, such as the vaunted autocannon and grenade launcher can kill all major automatons via weak point damage (eye slots/head shots, vent shots), the rail cannon loses even more ground.

The final nail in the coffin is the very poor handling and informational feedback on the weapon itself. Requiring you to judge the gauge from mental timing (no matter how good you get, you still make mistakes in timing), or be in first person shooting to watch the red gauge, while you try to watch the enemy weak spot and track with movement, and judge when the gauge is just below maximum (because lol, analog display is just too ez), is too many things at once for a gun to be reliably effective.

It needs a rework, that's really the short of it.

[Chaos]

It kinda "okay" for bots since devas and husk are the main threat there, but just using AMR or AC will give much better result and it's actually decent at blowing up tanks when shooting heatsink and can actually deal with gunship...unlike RG.

As for bugs it's also kinda "okay" if you want to deal with brood, green bile bug and maybe charger...but you are also much better off with ARC/AC for medium target and EAT/Quasar for heavier one.

RG main benefit back then was that it can deal with everything and have a nice piercing effect if you line up multiple targets, but it's all gone now and you can't do ♥♥♥♥ to titan/tank anymore, plus other AT gun are buff to a much better place now.

So there aren't any reason to use it anymore, since it's just a worst AC/AMR now with no other redeeming quality it used to have.