Suggestion to change weapon balancing

[AfterCrow]

I have really been enjoying this game on console and I have to say great work to the developers for creating this rich cyberpunk world and game. Yes, there are some glitches and crashes here and there, but honestly I say great craftsmanship on the overall game design and attention to detail!

There is one thing I'd like to address outside bug reports, which is weapon balancing.

[Mild spoilers about available weapons in the game]

I have been using the Dread assault rifle for much of the start (First half?) of the game. But I've noticed that the DPS of this weapon struggles to keep up with the enemy armor now as I am at level 21. It just doesn't have enough firepower any more, despite being heavily leveled up.
So the obvious thing to do is to switch to a more late-game weapon such as the HMG42 Dominator, or the Overwhelmer, or even just switch to exclusively using the "excessive" category of weapons. But; one of the reasons I liked the Dread, is that it kept its bullet spread relatively accurate at sustained fire, allowing me to pick out enemies surrounded by innocent civilians.
In comparison, the Dominator HMG has a drastic reduction in accuracy at sustained fire, so you either have to be real close, or accept the deaths of innocent bystanders. The same goes for the Overwhelmer, with its explosive rounds.

This game is one of few that regularly pits you against armed enemies situated within crowds of innocent people. I would really like to avoid killing (most of) the civilians, and I also really enjoyed using the Dread assault rifle. By the way, I'm impressed by the attention to detail where they added a mechanical warning sound in the loading mechanism for the last few bullets in the magazine. Good sound design.

I'm not asking for the DPS to be higher than the aforementioned weapons, but it would be nice if the damage output could scale somewhat similarly as one increases the "mk. level" of the weapon. Currently at mk. 8 and having to dump several magazines into each basic enemy.

I think the problem is basically that the weapons all have drastically different DPS stats at mk.1. With the current balancing, this forces the player to utilize "late game" weapons.

Effectively, this lowers the diversity of the available arsenal, and creates a "meta" for each phase of the game. (Well you know, for the enemies that respond well to kinetic damage that is).

On to the suggestion:
One alternative to overcome this problem, is to balance all the weapons out equally at mk.1*, raise the mk-cap to 20, and allow the weapons picked up mid-game and late-game to come pre-installed at, lets say, mk.5, mk.11, and mk.14 respectively.
* When I say to balance the weapons equally, I intend the weapons should still have somewhat different DPS, based on the weapons other stats. But much more similar than in the current iteration of the game.
With this system, your Dread assault rifle or P9000 SMG would still be viable options later in the game, if upgraded sufficiently through a weapon-smith.

Forgive me for the wall of text, and thank you for your consideration.

[Asheira]

Fully upgraded weapons add about 50-80% more damage there about?
I used to put the game on "Easy" to test drive a new weapon as compared to a mark 5-8 which I was using at that time.
Not sure if accurate.
The thing I was missing mostly was a way to augment a weapon.
As if there was an interface to add a scopes (high accuracy), bigger mag size or a RoF mod.
You're definitely on to something in your analysis & suggestions,
thumbs up

[dgresevfan]

Can someone please explain "The Fist"?

Described as being an amazing shotgun. Stat screen shows it to be a piece of garbage with lower damage than the riot gun.

- Correction. At the same upgrade level the damage is somewhat higher than the riot gun but nowhere near as much as you'd expect.

[AfterCrow]

Originally posted by dgresevfan:

Can someone please explain "The Fist"?

Described as being an amazing shotgun. Stat screen shows it to be a piece of garbage with lower damage than the riot gun.

- Correction. At the same upgrade level the damage is somewhat higher than the riot gun but nowhere near as much as you'd expect.

Yes indeed it does start out higher than then RG. I assume with the same mk.-level the The Fist will indeed be higher DPS than the RG.
I don't really use shotguns that much but if the Listed DPS is true (487), then you can compare that to the DPS of the Dread, which is 108 at mk.1.
Also there may be a damage drop-off applying to the buckshot pellets, so the listed DPS probably only true at a given range.

I have a theory that the listed DPS on the burst rifles is also misleading, as it might be based on the rate of fire within a burst rather than an overall average including the gap between bursts.

There are at least three more shotguns with different damage types, the Eraser (Energy), Scorch (Fire), and Bitsplit (Digital). The last two are missing from the wiki, so I don't know the numbers on them.

Originally posted by Asheira:

Fully upgraded weapons add about 50-80% more damage there about?
I used to put the game on "Easy" to test drive a new weapon as compared to a mark 5-8 which I was using at that time.
Not sure if accurate.
The thing I was missing mostly was a way to augment a weapon.
As if there was an interface to add a scopes (high accuracy), bigger mag size or a RoF mod.
You're definitely on to something in your analysis & suggestions,
thumbs up

Thanks. Yeah changing ammo type from kinetic to energy would be a cool mod as well, to add to your list. And ricochet rounds. So far only seen on the Crazymaker SMG (afaik).

[TheSuit]

Ya game desperately needs a weapon damage pass.
I think the Developers played the game with 4 player coop constantly and kept nerfing weapons into the ground.

So instead of buffing enemy HP with more players, they instead reduced weapon damage instead.

[AfterCrow]

Originally posted by The | Suit:

Ya game desperately needs a weapon damage pass.
I think the Developers played the game with 4 player coop constantly and kept nerfing weapons into the ground.

So instead of buffing enemy HP with more players, they instead reduced weapon damage instead.

Amen to that. This is essentially a story-driven single-player experience so it's weird how they expect it to be played like a premium PvP title like Battlefield, Halo, CoD, etc.

As I said, I really do like the game, but its somewhat of a niche product and simply doesn't have the popularity to where one can expect multiple players in a given group of friends.

It may make sense to nerf the weapons in a multiplayer environment, but this should only be implemented in multiplayer, factoring in the number of players.