This only works if you are hitting point-blank burst fires via sprite-clicking and being directly next to the xenomorph. Otherwise if you are standing 1 tile away from a xeno you can not kill a T3 in a single magazine assuming every single one of your bullets hit. Even a Boiler escapes with their life.
Also, again, I stress that using white-room perfect 100% accuracy tests to state how strong a weapon is presents a false image of a weapon’s viability, as no Marines is going to achieve perfect hit rates at the perfect range against an enemy who won’t react to them.
The mod88 can’t put a T3 into crit with one full mag
It puts an average T3 about 3 bullets away from crit. Also the mod88 has infinite ammo, good resupply ability, has a fast rate of fire (meaning its easy to follow up your damage) is easy to use and actually can hit a target at long range.
The VP78 fails at being a decent weapon compared to its supposed in-universe “inferior” predecessors. Boosting its max damage fall off is the minimum required to make the weapon actually viable.
Increasing its single-shot ROF is also required since it means the single-shot fire mode is now actually viable, as without it, the ROF is terrible even compared to the already painfully slow fire rate of the burst fire.
The range buff is all it needs, and the white room testing shows that it’s possible to kill everything with its current rate of fire at almost the same speed MK2 has. If you can’t achieve decent hit rates, then you just die. That’s how it’ll go with every gun. You can afford to miss one or two bursts, but if you miss more, you die. That’s the tradeoff of having no wield slowdown and having a pistol that hits like a MK2, you get low capacity.
Also the VP78 can get more ammo from Req vendors, and two vendors in preprooms. It’s not like everyone is taking it. The range buff is needed, the ROF isn’t.
It still has far more limited ammo than the near infinite quantity of the other pistols.
I refuse to believe that a Pistol that is dealing 15 more damage than its contemporary pistols, something that still fails to even kill T2s in a single mag, is non-viable to buff when it is currently sitting in the realm of F-Tier guns.
In either case I’m simply waiting for the power’s that be to weigh in and I can make the needed changes they request, assuming they don’t reject any change to the VP78 outright. Things like damage, movement speed, ROF or even ammo availability can be changed fairly easily.
Unless you’re sitting right NEXT to xenos to PB them, I highly doubt the VP88 is killing shit at ‘almost the same speed as a Mk2’. No one uses it unless they’re trying it out for the first time, if this gun was even remotely competitive to a Mk2 at combat then we’d actually see people using it.
@Steelpoint
I think starting off by removing falloff entirely would be a good choice. It’s like… why the fuck does it even have falloff? Literally no mainstay marine weapon has falloff like the VP78 except for the SG, except I can’t think of a single reason why it has falloff and the other pistols don’t.
If Bobby used it without falloff and thought it was fine, maybe it’s worth a shot? Could remove falloff and change absolutely nothing else, and then see how it goes. Cause most people agree pointblank the gun is nice, but at range it sucks in comparison to everything else. I think with balance changes like this you’d probably be test merging anyways, right?
My personal design philosophy is I’d rather over-buff something to start with and work down during the review process, than be timid to start with and effect a change that has only a minor effect.
In either case, I can give you more raw stats about how the weapons functions.
Basically TL;DR, my proposed fire rate achieves a fairly balanced kill time, in white room conditions, compared to other mainline secondary and primary weapons. The VP78 will still suffer from the fact it has the harshest damage falloff of most guns in the game (even mod88 or M4A3 still deals most of its damage up to 7 tiles whereas the buffed VP78 will still lost half its damage by then) and that the VP78 is much harder to keep resupplied in a long fight due to its ammo being non-standard issue.
(all tests conducted against Warrior at 3 tiles distance, unless stated otherwise these all took a single magazine)
(I should note the VP78 still suffers significant damage reduction at long ranges, this becomes noticeable at 5 to 7 tiles where it is dealing around 25-26 damage versus 45 damage at 3 tiles, other pistols don’t suffer from this)
VP78 (With No Damage Falloff to 3 Tiles but with current Rate of Fire)
Time To Kill Single Shot -: 13 Seconds
Time To Kill: Burst Fire -: 8 Seconds
VP78 (No Falloff plus increased Rate of Fire)
Time to Kill Single Shot -: 5 Seconds
Time To Kill Burst Fire -: 6 Seconds (Sometimes 8 due to accuracy debuff)
For Comparison to other weapons
M41A Mk2
Time To Kill Burst or Single Fire -: 5-6 Seconds
Mod88
Time To Kill Single Shot -: 7-8 Seconds
Time To Kill Burst Fire -: 6-7 Seconds
M4A3 (takes 1.5 magazines, speed heavily based on how fast you can reload, if you use macros you could achieve sub-3 second kill times)
This is a terrible design philosophy. This is why we have a lot of OP stuff that is still in game only because people sleep on it and haven’t got to abuse it yet.
I did state in the quoted text that this is for the review process. I’d rather make the initial large scale changes then work from there, instead of starting from a far smaller point. At the end of the day the final result will be up to the maintainer manager’s assuming they want to accept such or any change to the weapon.