scout.

General Discussion
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DPS = Fire Rate * Damage

M4RA Custom DPS with 10x24 AP = 1.67 * 33 = 33 + 22 for 55 DPS

M4RA Custom DPS with A19 HV = 1.67 * 60 = 60 + 40 for 100 DPS

M4RA Standard DPS with 10x24 AP = 2.86 * 42 = 120.12 DPS - Additionally M4RA magazines load 25 bullets and are not specialist ammo, thusly the economic implications of using standard M4RA is far more rewarding and forgiving compared to scout ammo.

M42A DPS with 10x28 marksman rounds = 0.63 * 70 = 44.1

Without factoring incendiary rounds “of which all 3 firearms possess, but only the spec firearms make readily available”

The M42A proves weakest but combined with its built in 8x sight and the snipers abilities to fire while cloaked, combined with the existence of flak and incendiary rounds, the M42A has rewarding niche stuff that makes this manageable.

The M4RA regular proves strongest, both interms of ammo capacity, fire rate, and dps. Ultimately the sole struggle the M4RA regular possess is the inability to load impact or flak, and the lack of regular accessibility to incendiary rounds.

The M4RA “Custom” proves middle of the pack, both interms of ammo capacity, dps, etc. But when you factor its a 1x range weapon with no iff, its a spec weapon loading extremely expensive bullets, and its mechanically inferior to the M4RA stats wise, it becomes clear its underpowered for the role its intended to fufill.

The point of all the aforementioned information is that the scout rifle is underpowered, and with all the nerfs, the sole thing the scout is truly good at is chain stunning xenos with impact rounds, and ditching there rifle for an smg and focusing on there other key role stuff.

This leads to an interesting phenomena where you see 3 key behaviors with current scout.

  1. A hard focus on chain stunning with the impact rounds and ignoring using the rifle as a true damage source.
  2. Scouts packing smg’s and alternative weapons to use when frontlining because there weapon doesnt serve sufficiently to match there armour and endurance stats.
  3. Scouts being forced to function as an auxilary combat role lasing coordinates and communicating with CIC, which while not a bad thing, forces the skill floor up quite a considerable bit leading to scouts getting themselves killed quite often.

I don’t expect any changes to be made. But would be nice to have discussion had around this.

Arguably the custom in my opinion should be strong enough of its own right to load standard m4ra rounds and be functionally a superior variant to the regular m4ra. Its a specialist weapon, the uss almayer only tends to get 4 of those, forecon relies on the rifle to live on chances claim, honor guards should be nightmarishly scary, etc.

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what if we gave the scout rifle a burst fire mode

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We had a conversation about this in contribs some time ago, I’d be okay with the rifle being on par with the standard M4RA when loading regular ammo, but the ammo types scout have access to are very powerful for their own reasons (stuns, fire), and scout has a lot of tools at its disposal that make it strong for things that aren’t just killing bugs (instant lazing, invisibility, 24/7 comms, NVG) Minor buffs to bring the weapon up to not be a downgrade over the standard M4RA in specific scenarios without otherwise making it more powerful than it already is would be preferable to me since scout already has the capability to do so much with its kit.

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Why are you even comparing all these weapons in the first place? They all fill different roles, sniper is a long range weapon for holding down sightlines and fronts, heavy does it with more damage, regular does it with flak slowing down targets, and incend punishing backliners, boilers to an extend etc.

Scouts weapon is instead a duelist, its regular damage is lower, but you gain the highly overpowered impact rounds, and incendiary for hunting and punishing bad positions, the flat damage of it is worse then the regular m4ra which is the cost of being able to use the A19 rounds.

M4RA regular is just a standard PFC weapon, in this case ment as a longer range variant of the default mk2 choice.

Scouts bring a secondary, usually a m39, because the A19 bullets are valuable as hell, having a close range/chaser tool is very complementary.

But make no mistake, the A19 incends is enough to kill a badly positioned backliner or a weak xeno running, stop a boiler from having an easy time gassing, and the impact rounds are down right oppressive if used with any other person shooting at a target, you can effectively stunlock a t1-2 and downright kill it if you have a full mag all on your own incredibly easilly.

The custom is made around having stupidly strong but rare bullets, and trades that for what the regular one specializes in, IE additional damage, id personally be fine with improving its stats if say the impacts and incends were gone, but no matter how strong you were to make the custom, the special rounds being so oppressive wouldnt be changed to APs in any half decent scouts loadout.

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The M4RA itself is underpowered, the scout rifle is even worse but people were able to make the best of it by attacking isolated xenos behind cover while <50% health; something explicitly enabled by cloaking and helped with incendiary and impact rounds.

The rifle is basically useless in the frontline, it’s useless for self defense. It’s only viable when someone else is attacking a xeno and the scout comes out of left field to throw in some extra damage, or to pick off wounded xenos resting in exposed locations that aren’t as safe as they thought.

The balance changes to the weapon aren’t made because the weapon is too good, it’s total utter crap. It’s the special ammo, cloak, and engagement process that enable a scout player to kill anything.

I take issue with this, because that is actually not what the M4RA is. It’s a worse M41 with no movement speed or wield penalties which paradoxically make it superior for chasing, not long range shooting - which is how it’s now used - a followup no damage dropoff chase weapon when a xeno is on fire or running away.

Anyone who has ever tried using an M4RA to snipe with can attest to how awful it is for that - if you want to do this, you grab an XM88, not an M4RA.

The niche the M4RA had but which was recently removed, was stacking some IFF damage from the back of a blob; which is no longer possible to do. The gun was balanced around the B8 scope, but never got rebalanced alongside the B8 scope being rebalanced.

I think the M4RA could have its niche back in some respect if the B8 scope had some tweaking to do two things:

  1. Get rid of the click delay for followup shots after the IFF triggers and blocks a shot
  2. Return the 2x scope to the B8
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So… im not gonna really elaborate, but it is called “scout”.

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True the M4RA is not in a great place, but its partially because the mk2 is really outshining it everywhere. Xenos are a hugely close ranged faction, and having a long range battle rifle with scopes would be insanely bad for combat in general, just imagine how bad the cadesitting would be, B8 was removed and with good reason, as IFF with a stack of marines is hellish even with the stat nerfs it gave.

XM88 is a better replacement yeah, cause its both limited and has a niche with hitting continious shots, IMO its a fair tradeoff and you dont see them everywhere, if it replaced M4RA for example then it would be too strong, arguably it kind of is now even.

Scouts custom has massive utility useage instead, together with the fact that their kit makes them generally the strongest single marine on any battlefield, they dont need to have their gun be a t3 melting super machine ontop of all that.

Id argue that a full on rework of how the guns function would be needed for the m4ra to have a decent role, id love something like a minimum range being introduced, the mk2 being too unwieldy to shoot at PB range, getting better like 2 tiles out and falling off a bit further out, m39 being about where its at now, and m4ra being the offscreen/most of the screen away option for hitting accurate shots.

You could also do something like making sprite clicks more accurate/damaging, making a reason for running non mk2 full auto all the time, and instead like olden days running burst or single and spriteclicking, it would make mk2 sprays less favorable, and would increase m4ra useage alot, skill expression and all that.

But yeah, m4ra isnt terrible or anything, but it does get shit on by mk2 in like all metrics so its got no place, best would be a change in guns overall, or a change to make full-auto less of a default choice all the time to give it a place that isnt just cadesitting with an 8x.

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M4RA slander will not be tolerated its the best chase weapon in the game just spriteclick

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Mk2 Superior.

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I have to strongly disagree with your outlook. And to explain why I need to provide more context as to what my opinion actually is.

Before I discuss more about the rifle itself, we need to look at scout and the wider context of specialists in a shift.

The crew at 0 pop gets one specialist per 20 pepole up to 80, meaning that in general the crew gets 4 specialists + 1 from foxtrot if intel does there job adequately. This means that the specialist role is of all the marine roles one of the most critical interms of “pulling there weight”.

The scout themselves receive a multitude of strong tools to work with, but none of these tools are inaccessible to the rest of the crew with the immediate exception of the cloak and insta las designator “which itself while strong isn’t AS strong considering a good player can often guess ob coordinates, and more often than not signal flares are the way cas gets there work done”. The new addition is the helmet radio, which is quite good, but considering that radio packs already exist and the scout has the unique issue of losing there back slot to the cloak, it feels more like a balancing fix for an issue that made scout unable to use telephones without taking off there cloak.

Aside from that scout gets a very strong armor set with good protection in most everything, in that way scout is quite well equipped to fight in general.

But none of the above is again, very out of the ordinary, especially for one of the extremely rare and valuable specialists.

Thus we look at the specialist weapon of the scout, there special rifle, a weapon which no other person on the ship and in most cases byond can use.

This weapon SHOULD be sufficient for most any engagement as, as far as specialist weapons go, its unique in being the only true combat focused rifle.

But its handling stats are worse than the m4ra, making it inferior in fulfilling the niche of ranged fire support.

Its extremely distinct, having a dead giveaway along with the scout kit that a scout is present.

Its damage stats are inferior both in dps and chance to hit, including less opportunities to hit than almost any other weapon. “this weapon misses around 38% of the time on average even on a hit to a target, this is a real fact”

Its ammo is incredibly expensive and requires great care to get ones hands on.

Thus the rifle is relegated to being exclusively useful in stunning opponents, and setting them on fire. Which to your credit ARE reasonably powerful things to be able to do.

But there not OVERPOWERED, nor are they some be all end all thing that the scout has that just makes fighting them impossible.

HIP rounds are strong to be sure, but they only apply to the following castes :

Runner - Lurker
Drone - Burrower
Defender - Warrior
Sentinel - Spitter

to be clear the stun effect they have FULLY DOESNT APPLY to anything else, doesnt even effect yatuja, doesnt even knockdown humans, just slows them down for a grand total of 2 seconds.

The bullet deals 40 damage and can be fired every 1.68 seconds with over a 1/3 chance to miss as is, combined with the inaccuracy of players in general, the scout rifle rapidly becomes unviable in most every engagement that isnt specifically engaging a t1 who overextended on front or a lurker who pounced someone in the backline with no support.

Incendiary rounds are less marred by nerfs but still arnt as strong as overpowered, to start ravs and the queen are immune to fire, most xenos have 480+ hp, and in general xenos dont tend to EXIST without active healing from weeds and support from hivemind, they can also extinguish themselves behind barriers the scout cannot dispel in short order which effectively means that while incendiary rounds do serve utility in illuminating, scaring, and applying a very real but not especially strong DOT effect to a xeno, its not a case of you get hit and your dead, a xeno can stay in the fight for quite a long time and may even be able to outright shrug it off.

Which brings us back to the basic A19 bullet, which does the same amount of damage as an m1911 pistol with a significantly lower fire rate than the m1911 and worse handling stats along with rifle wielding stats. Which is to state the basic A19 bullet itself at the VERY LEAST is horrifically underpowered for what its supposed to be.

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Interesting to learn about the miss chance (do attachments even reduce that miss chance?), I find that after burst fire removal, the time to kill (TTK) is insanely long. I posted two vods below with me killing a drone each and to be fair I missed my first incen shot that was chambered in the rifle. I still think the TTK is way too long for a spec and it might even be more viable to roll with a m41a or m39 as you really have to make every shot count with the battle rifle. I will also some vods where I was using burst fire.

Burst fire is a completely different game, I can actually reliably take out T1/T2’s in a timely manner. I might even go so far and say that it was indeed overpowered for what it could do, then again it is a skill-based class and you need to be decent at sprite clicking.

In conclusion, I really think there needs to be a middle ground between burst and what scout is currently. Right now, the gun kinda sucks, burst you could somewhat tackle T3’s but now you simply don’t have the dps to do so and it simply takes too long to down a T1.

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The only stuff that got into my head is this.

  1. Normal rounds should be buffed. Probably make it an extended clip + Buff the damage? Lets not kid ourselves. No one uses those unless you run out of incendiary and impact rounds.
  2. Why doesnt scout have a built in MD already like IOs do? One that doesnt ping to xenos would be a very good utility buff for scout. Even the laser desig not making a sound, windup or laser paint target would be a good util buff to it.
  3. Scout Incendiary rounds could have fire penetrating effect unlike the snipers long range so it can actually shoot T3s with it.
  4. If scout gets a built in MD. Why not give scout its own sidearm + own special belt? If we are going full solid snake you might as well give scout a buffed .45 ACP/MK.23 socom for CQC and DPS
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literally just make the scout rifle a better m4ra, its a spec gun
have it have m4ra stats or better and ability to load the special ammo, simple as

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just give the scout an M46C

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huge work actually do this.

On the real, though, the lack of burst fire is ridiculously nerfing to the kill capability of the scout and they simply don’t fulfill other roles in a way that much more spectacularly than a PFC. The role of the Scout is to pick off and report flankers and occasionally laze an OB. But how often is a flank reported that wouldn’t be caught by people with flares and binoculars and it made a difference? How many OB’s do scouts laze that an experienced SL doesn’t just feel around themselves?

A skilled Demolitionist places a good shot that gets follow-up and a T3 or the Queen are killed. Nobody else in the entire game can do that. Why is it so problematic that Scout is THE scary motherfucker in a 1v1? I’ve played plenty of Lurker and I hate 1v2’ing a Scout, even, because the other bug tends to run. Yet, I still think double-shot impact stuns are balanced for what the specialist is.