One of the oldest debates known to Dchat is about the Scout, specifically the Incen + Impact combo. Some people say it’s broken, other people say it’s not, etcetera and etcetera. I personally never played as scout/never fought it, so i can’t give my opinion on it. What do you think?
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I personally don’t like that scout flips the balance, where he is able to 1v1 any xeno because he can just stunlock them to death (15 second stun with one mag).
compare that to the lurker, who people say have a lifetime long stun of 3 seconds.
I like it - gives xenos a taste of their own medicine with stun-based gameplay. More importantly it makes them mald.
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You say that while having nades, slugs, buckshot, mortar, rockets, etc.
Don’t pretend only xenoes have stun combat.
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honestly, im fine with scout outside of 4x scope incind impact. there are clips of scouts killing xenos that have no indication of the scout there, just getting stunned while on fire repeatedly from 20 tiles away.
Honestly i’d just make placing a new mag require to clear the bullet in the chamber (unique action) before you can fire, to kill incind impact.
xeno players when they realize stun combat is unfun 
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In all my experience with scout there is so much you need to take into account, it punishes xenos for not being vigilant of their surroundings and not treating a scout like 1/4 of the USCMs most well equipped marines, much like how wandering around alone will likely land you dead to a lurker, if you dont have another xeno in close proximity you are dead.
That being said it is comedically easy to kill a scout if you know what you are doing, going behind a wall and setting nvg to fullbright will make him stick out like a sore thumb, get a lurker, warrior or runner from there and they are as good as dead, or literally 2 of any xeno, they cant stun lock more than 1 and dont have enough ammo in a mag to kill 2.
I would ask then why should nerfing it be the solution, when the solution is right infront of you, treat them like a warrior or lurker, “why u lone” is an age old lesson and one that you need to be educated on
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Mostly because lurkers and runners are much harder to roganise due to their speed, stealth and reactive fighting. So going in as a group with no comms becomes disorganized after traveling together for 10 seconds.
Especcially with lurkers, as once you go stealth, you need to pounce immedietly or you are gonna lose eachother. Hence they are mostly played “solo” in backlining.
literally yesterday, me and 2 other lurkers coordinated at solaris hospital by calling out our locations periodically and sticking together uncloaked when the queen died, we basically chose hospital as a rendezvous point and saw great success with delimbs, fracs, kills and caps, so no reason why there should be a struggle
mfers weren’t vigilant against the air itself, they deserved to die from someone off screen
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In a straight up fight I think its a terrible gun.
I’ve only seen the scout rifle doing well when the scout can pick out a slanted situation already in his favor. Usually some isolated xeno already wounded. Funny, when this happens to a marine, you’ll be hit with “why u alone” but when it happens to a xeno player…
You say that while having nades, slugs, buckshot, mortar, rockets, etc.
Don’t pretend only xenoes have stun combat.
Every xeno caste has a pocket stun called tackling, and almost every xeno has on top of that, an extremely useful grab, slow, or stun effect. It’s a stark contrast to marines where only a select few people have any sort of stun and it’s either highly telegraphed, restricted, or niche.
I don’t consider the situation similar at all; we have asymmetrical stun balance. If you’re trying to argue that it isn’t meant to be - then marines have a lot of catching up to do on the stun side of things: Nearly every single xeno engagement against a marine involves a stun/slow/grab application, that is absolutely not the case vice versa.
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It’s really not that hard to bring a slug shotgun on your back, guys.
Both lurkers and the scout unironically have lifetime long stuns. The scout stuns for the 15 seconds it takes to kill a lone xeno, the lurker stuns for the 3 seconds it takes to kill a lone marine.
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Slug shotguns are simply not that good. If you want to see them used more often; buff them.
As a rule of thumb: If something isn’t being used much it’s because it sucks.
You can disagree, you can think it’s the greatest weapon of all time, but if nobody is ever using it, you’re probably wrong.
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I use it as my secondary and having a pocket stun is way more valuable than anything in my satchel ever was, just saving people from warrior grabs is good enough for me to bring it with, not to mention the offensive uses of being able to stun and slow at range.
I agree it has value, but I disagree on how valuable you’re arguing it is.
IMO the slug shotgun is in a precarious situation where if it were genuinely great to use, it’d be overpowered due to its availability. What I find is that in its current place it’s a niche weapon that requires a specialized loadout and a lot of teamwork (and frankly, luck) to really be effective.
And what I think is the worst aspect of the slug shotgun is that it’s constantly pointed to and used as a crutch in arguments regarding balance simply because it exists, rather than because it’s actually being used, let alone used effectively. For that reason I’d actually rather see the slug shotgun disappear entirely, because I feel a number of other balance issues are hiding and surviving solely because of and behind this masquerade of “its great actually”.
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Honestly the people who run slug shotgun are doing the lords work. The worst thing that can happen in an OP is that the xenos start getting a lot of captures. It starts making it impossible to win as marine, so any caps that can be avoided is a massive plus.
Now i will say that it definitely is a niche loadout by its self, but paired with other guns it is pretty good cause all you need is a straight line of fire, and a poor marine who just got pounced, and boom cap denied.
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My subjective experience tells me that Slug Shotguns are very rarely used by Marines. I typically see them being used by rushed Staff Officers who nab the MK221 from the armoury but forget to load buckshot. Now, I won’t say if this is the case of a slug shotgun being non-viable, or if the weapon is underappreciated, but that is my experience of the weapon.
Personally I think the Scouts Rifle is fine. It has surprisingly huge damage output against all xenos when it loads its default ammo, and its Incin into Impact combo is great at targetting solo xenos. I feel a Scout is in their element when they are lurking in the Marine backline as well as working on the edge of the frontline, attacking solo xenos or diving to kill wounded targets.
Scout strikes me as very high skill ceailing spec in terms more so of positioning and game sense
A scout easily kills a wounded or even healthy T3 with incendiary cartridges, especially because of the S8 4x Telescopic Scope attachment, preventing him from running away and extinguishing himself due to speed and range. Essentially being a more mobile sniper. It would be nice to nerf the sniper scope, leaving only x2, or at least make the scatter of a special rifle like a regular one.
Scout is pretty clearly an outlier in how strong it is in 1v1s, but isn’t that kind of the point? It’s a specialist. It is lame to die because the scout managed to land one shot on you and can now stunlock you to death but generally my experience fighting against scouts is fun, but maybe I’m just lucky enough that I’ve not fallen victim to the stunlock very often.
But anyway “why u alone” is a dumb response because the game is asymmetrical, marines are balanced around larger numbers and xenos are supposed to win 1v1s. Scout is one of the few exceptions. Yes you should fear and try to play around scout but let’s not act like runners/lurkers should never be on their own just because scout exists. If a scout assassinates you from off screen as a runner you just got unlucky, the answer isn’t “you should never be alone”
The real bullshit is how for some reason staff approves of scouts camping next to the hive core and assassinating larva as soon as they spawn (if they manage to sneak to the hive) even though shipside xenos are not allowed to kill marines that have just spawned in. It’s only happened to me once but it’s not exactly fair that you can get instantly spawn killed just because your team mates were incompetent enough to let a scout sneak into the hive.
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