So, weapon balance...

[fawstoar]

I haven't really been as active as I used to be in the RE community & around the forums, so I feel as though I'm somewhat out of the loop regarding recent changes to the game. I decided to fire up the game today and mess around in some good old deathmatches, and quite frankly it feels as though the weapons are completely out of whack.

While I realize this is a delicate subject and something that quin has spent a great deal of time honing and perfecting, I'm just curious at this point if I'm just ridiculously rusty and forgetting how the balance used to be or if other players might share my sentiments. The following criticism is intended to be constructive, and it is entirely subjective (though you might take into account that I've been playing RE for about 5 years now).

Overall, the weapons are all extremely weak compared to their former versions. If my memory serves me correctly, this is the result of several revisions, but I fear that at this point the nerfs have become too extensive.

Weapon specific reviews:
- The sword is simply no longer viable - its lack of accuracy and completely disproportionate risk/reward ratio makes it impossible to use effectively. Two secondary hits no longer appear to warrant a kill, and these hits are extremely difficult to land - there are many times when I feel as though the weapon should hit, but it doesn't.
- The shotgun and the smg are so effective given their respective time to kill and range that there is no point in using any other weapon (unless you happen to have ridiculously good aim with the rifle's secondary). The latest buffs to the smg have made it an unstoppable death machine when compared to the relatively mild plasma and flamer.
- Speaking of which, while the flamer is decent, its damage over time does not make up for the superior damage of the smg or shotgun.
- The plasma's secondary is useless; it barely retains its power to wall off areas and it certainly does not kill players.
- The rifle - while I support the removal of the splash damage primary - takes far too long to kill; two direct hits to the body should be enough for a kill, not three to five.
- Lastly, grenades, which have not seemingly been subject to much tweaking in the latest update, are far too powerful. The most effective way to play a non-instagib gamemode right now is to run around gunning down players with the smg and stockpiling grenades to serve as instant, almost guaranteed kills - thanks to their damage and radius.

Ultimately, I find Red Eclipse currently to be in the most polished and seamless state it has ever been. And yet it is unsatisfying and frustrating to try new weapon combos only to have them fail completely in the face of the dominant weapons where they used to be competent.

Or perhaps I'm merely whining about the game being too hard... you tell me.

[qreeves]

The question is, are you playing using an SVN client on an SVN server? The only guaranteed server to be running latest balance is play.redeclipse.net. In particular, all the mentioned weapons have had their settings revised to address the exact issue you are raising. In addition, a bug in the 1.4 release client which has since been fixed in SVN breaks the ability of a projectile to use a negative hitpush, making the Plasma secondary useless against people not using SVN.

That all being said, a release is on the horizon..

[fawstoar]

I'm just using the 1.4 release client... I'll try downloading the SVN, then! I look forward to the release. Thanks for the prompt response