Weapon Balance: Rifle

[Matadula]

Greetings Blue Nebula Community!

I love the rifle, it’s the weapon that allows me to enjoy parkour/freestyle the most and it is the weapon I always use. Still, I think it needs a small nerf.

The rifle is technically the best weapon. A person with perfect aim would hit rifle2 headshots and kill everybody no matter which weapon they are using without problems. And I’m fine with this, because:

1. The player “hitbox” is SMALL. If you play other arena shooters like Quake 3 or Xonotic you would notice that their “hitboxes” are bigger and wider than the model, or the bullet/ray/laser is big and it explodes with a wide area of effect, making it easy to hit someone. Even on Red Eclipse 2.0 with their twice as big “playermodels” it’s harder to land a good rifle shot than on those games.
2. You can move faster than on other arena shooters and change your movement direction mid-air, making it easier to evade someone shooting you with a sniper rifle. On other games you can move fast (rocket jumping, strafe jumping) but on predictive trajectories.
3. It’s the weapon with the highest skill ceiling in the game. Its fine if it has a way to kill someone faster compared to easier to use weapons.
4. Nobody has perfect aim.

But there is something I don’t think is healthy for the game: body shots make way too much damage. A fully charged shot makes 60 damage (“rifledamagetorso2” to .5). INSTANT Damage, from anywhere, no matter how big the map is, as long as you have someone in your line of sight, they are dead. You can even half charge two shots, dealing 50 dmg, to kill someone faster.

What I suggest is to change “rifledamagetorso2” to .25; which would deal 30 damage as a full charged shot to the torso. And I know this change I’m proposing will affect me, because I don’t land that many headshots compared to most people (and the ones that I do are mostly by mistake), but I believe this will make Rifle a more healthy weapon.

It also would give people an incentive to use “rifle1” more, since if you have a small window of time, not enough to fully charge a shot or switch weapons, and you aren’t sure if you’re going to land a headshot, you would use “rifle1” instead.

What do you guys think?

[Scatter]

Well it is hard to tell how would your proposed changes affect Rifle2, but i think charging the rifle was already a sufficient nerf. Landing shots to the the feet decreases dealt damage, so nerfing body damage would make headshot the only one way to kill really quickly. You can kill very fast with other weapons too, sword/shotgun user can easily outplay rifle2. Making it deal even less damage, would make it pretty useless against that weapons.

[MoonPadUSer]

Hi, we agree with you that the rifle needs to be balanced, in fact a lot of weapons do. But regarding your exact values, we'll have to try these out on a test-server which we should definitely setup.

[freem]

Well, I agree that a re-balancing would be needed, but for that we will need testing servers with clear informations about the changes done, and a reference server for current.

For information, few weeks ago I wrote a short script that does a basic Damage per Second calculation for weapons (not the kick though, didn't find how to do that). Just feed it a dump of the variables, and it should be able to find it's way. Here is the code:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

#!/bin/sh

# script to extract damages per seconds of RE's weapons

die()
{
   echo $@
   exit 1
}

FILE="${1:?"1st param must be a file containing a variable's dump"}"
test -f "${FILE}" -a -r "${FILE}" || die "$FILE is not a normal file or is not readable"

weapon_list="$(sed -n '/delayattack[0-9]\> [0-9.]*$/ s!.* \([a-z0-9_-]*\)delayattack\([0-9]*\).*!\1\2!g p' "${FILE}")"
for weapon_mode in $weapon_list
do
   weapon="$(echo -n $weapon_mode|head -c-1)"
   mode="$(echo -n $weapon_mode|tail -c-1)"
   awk 'BEGIN{damage=0;rate=0;fkdamage=0;} \
      /.* '"${weapon}damage${mode}"'/ {damage=$3;} \
      /.* '"${weapon}delayattack${mode}"'/ {rate=$3;} \
      /.* '"${weapon}flakdamage${mode}"'/ {fkdamage=$3;} \
      END{printf "weapon %s: dps: %f flak dps: %f\n", "'${weapon_mode}'",rate * damage / 1000, rate * fkdamage / 1000;}' \
      "${FILE}"
done



Feel free to tinker with and improve it. I intend to somehow have that thing working for my servers, so that player could go on my website and have some basic idea of current balance. I don't say it's for tomorrow though, it's a medium-long term goal, since I'm a bit busy those times.

[Matadula]

...would make it pretty useless against other weapons

Hey scatter, welcome back

I feel like the problem with the rifle is that right now is the perfect weapon and it doesn’t have enough outplay potential. We can play exclusively with the Rifle during a whole match and still do amazing. On open maps, a shotgun/sword user could get hit multiple times before they can get closer to the rifle user and this is even somewhat accomplishable on smaller maps if the player has good movement. I don't know how to use Freem satanic speech, but with current vars, "rifle2" does as much DPM to the torso as the plasma with the difference that the plasma particles travel slower and have limited range. Personally, i don't mind if the Rifle gets a weakness; you can still deal damage while spacing yourself so the other player don't get close to you, or land a headshot or just switch weapons into a close combat one.

But i agree with you, we need to test the vars first. Right now, it takes 2 “rifle2” shoots to the torso to kill someone, the change I’m suggesting would take 4 shots, but what do you think if took 3? (40 damage)

[Lyberta]

And I think rifle was nerfed to hell since 1.4.0...

[freem]

I don't know how to use Freem satanic speech

True, I should have added output for default settings, too. Here it is:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

weapon claw1: dps: 12.500000 flak dps: 12.500000
weapon claw2: dps: 8.000000 flak dps: 8.000000
weapon flamer1: dps: 0.540000 flak dps: 0.540000
weapon flamer2: dps: 12.500000 flak dps: 12.500000
weapon grenade1: dps: 75.000000 flak dps: 75.000000
weapon grenade2: dps: 75.000000 flak dps: 75.000000
weapon melee1: dps: 15.000000 flak dps: 15.000000
weapon melee2: dps: 20.000000 flak dps: 20.000000
weapon mine1: dps: 50.000000 flak dps: 50.000000
weapon mine2: dps: 50.000000 flak dps: 50.000000
weapon pistol1: dps: 3.250000 flak dps: 3.250000
weapon pistol2: dps: 7.000000 flak dps: 7.000000
weapon plasma1: dps: 6.300000 flak dps: 6.300000
weapon plasma2: dps: 18.000000 flak dps: 18.000000
weapon rifle1: dps: 24.750000 flak dps: 7.500000
weapon rifle2: dps: 150.000000 flak dps: 12.500000
weapon rocket1: dps: 300.000000 flak dps: 300.000000
weapon rocket2: dps: 300.000000 flak dps: 300.000000
weapon shotgun1: dps: 4.500000 flak dps: 4.500000
weapon shotgun2: dps: 7.500000 flak dps: 7.500000
weapon smg1: dps: 1.440000 flak dps: 1.440000
weapon smg2: dps: 5.600000 flak dps: 1.400000
weapon sword1: dps: 15.000000 flak dps: 15.000000
weapon sword2: dps: 52.000000 flak dps: 52.000000
weapon zapper1: dps: 0.450000 flak dps: 0.450000
weapon zapper2: dps: 21.600000 flak dps: 21.600000


If there are some needs for specific numbers, or more numbers, or some sorting, please just ask, I'll do what I can depending on available time, will and skills
Since there are several posts for rebalancing, maybe I should pin that data in a dedicated post, too.

[Matadula]

Thanks Freem

Could you tweak it to make it DPM? (damage per minute)

--Edit--

btw, does your script takes into account the reload time and how fast the weapons shoot? i can't read programing language >.>

[MoonPadUSer]

Thanks Freem

Could you tweak it to make it DPM? (damage per minute)

--Edit--

btw, does your script takes into account the reload time and how fast the weapons shoot? i can't read programing language >.>

It appears as if he is also using the delayattack variable, which is the reload time, so I'd say yes, he does take into account how fast the weapons shoot

[freem]

Well, just need to multiply by 60 to have damage per minute, but I don't really see how that is useful.
Also, I do not take into account the reload time, only time between 2 attacks. Maybe I could somehow add the reload time in that.

[Matadula]

Oh yeah sry, i didn't see the "delayattack" var

[Matadula]

I was thinking about it. Another way to "nerf" the rifle without really doing it would be by increasing the control on your "air drift", you know, the slight movement you can do while you fall. This way it would be easier for someone to dodge a rifle shot during your most vulnerable moment.