The BR/GF combo doesn’t need further iteration. It needs to go away. Breaking the concept of a utility weapon into two, weak, half-utility weapons will always lead to frustration.
If you want people to pick up more weapons, you don’t have to make the starting weapons weak. Instead, They should be powerful, but require more skill to efficiently use that power. Done this way, People will pickup weapons in exchange for an easier time performing a specific “niche” task. Ideally you would achieve this by having pickup weapon that are functionally unique rather than analogous to the magnum (a weak AR with fast melee and instant camo, a plasma rifle that stuns enemies, a carbine that eats away at shields overtime. A dmr that temporarily marks a target until their shields recover, etc). It should be about marking guns UNIQUE, not just damage and Range variants of each other. That said, there are still things that can be done to satisfaction with H5s functionally redundant sandbox.
For example, with magnum starts, Someone choosing to drop a Magnum for a BR should be making a tough decision: perhaps they are trading the pistols lower minTTK, for friendlier aim-assist. Though the Magnum would still be the better weapon on Paper, the BR would, on average, be the more lethal because it’s easier to land shots.
The magnum would have a lower minTTK while the BR would have the lower avgTTK. This creates interesting scenarios when a player fresh off spawn encounters a player who had map control and decided to change weapons. Can the magnum user execute perfectly and over come the advantages the BR user enjoys or will the steadiness if the pickup weapon prove too much to overcome?
These are the kind of dynamics people expect. The problem before the tuning was that picking up rifles was always a no brainer- it was all benefit, no trade-off- which made the sandbox uniteresting. The BR/GF + other tweaks dont address this at all, it just butchers the concept of utility weapon and makes every other gun in the game less fun.
If you want people to pick up more weapons, you don’t have to make the starting weapons weak. Instead, They should be powerful, but require more skill to efficiently use that power. Done this way, People will pickup weapons in exchange for an easier time performing a specific “niche” task. Ideally you would achieve this by having pickup weapon that are functionally unique rather than analogous to the magnum (a weak AR with fast melee and instant camo, a plasma rifle that stuns enemies, a carbine that eats away at shields overtime. A dmr that temporarily marks a target until their shields recover, etc). It should be about marking guns UNIQUE, not just damage and Range variants of each other. That said, there are still things that can be done to satisfaction with H5s functionally redundant sandbox.
For example, with magnum starts, Someone choosing to drop a Magnum for a BR should be making a tough decision: perhaps they are trading the pistols lower minTTK, for friendlier aim-assist. Though the Magnum would still be the better weapon on Paper, the BR would, on average, be the more lethal because it’s easier to land shots.
The magnum would have a lower minTTK while the BR would have the lower avgTTK. This creates interesting scenarios when a player fresh off spawn encounters a player who had map control and decided to change weapons. Can the magnum user execute perfectly and over come the advantages the BR user enjoys or will the steadiness if the pickup weapon prove too much to overcome?
These are the kind of dynamics people expect. The problem before the tuning was that picking up rifles was always a no brainer- it was all benefit, no trade-off- which made the sandbox uniteresting. The BR/GF + other tweaks dont address this at all, it just butchers the concept of utility weapon and makes every other gun in the game less fun.