[Brainport] Increase damage of Hand Grenades

[Heavyporker]

You know, thinking about this, I think that Hand Grenades desperately need to have their damage doubled or tripled to bring them a little more on par with other weapons.

They're one-shot AoE weapons with the slowest rate of fire of anything in the game, except maybe hoverbot ion beams!




Now, I've essentially lost hope of ever seeing special-purpose handgrenades, but at least THIS could be done!

[Okran]

How difficult would it be to create a flash grenade, or a toxic grenade for example?

[Zheo]

You know, thinking about this, I think that Hand Grenades desperately need to have their damage doubled or tripled to bring them a little more on par with other weapons.

They're one-shot AoE weapons with the slowest rate of fire of anything in the game, except maybe hoverbot ion beams!




Now, I've essentially lost hope of ever seeing special-purpose handgrenades, but at least THIS could be done!

This issue will be looked at in the balancing....

[Heavyporker]

:wtf:


How do you know, Zheo?

There hasn't been, as far as I could see, the merest whiff of anything relating to grenades in the Balance Discussion forum. I will have to go back and read everything throughly again. Ugh!

[Sylow]

At some time, there were some good suggestions about grenades there.

The all-knowing veterans at that time were busy in screaming that all changes are bad, though, and generally dismissed any suggestions of improvement to be bad and should not be done and they team should rather only change one ppu-spell and be done with it.

Basically the most important things were:
- damage of grenades to be adjusted
- the functionality of the belt being changed a bit so it restocks itself when consumeables are drawn out of it. (The original suggestion just was, if you use a grenade from your belt and you still have the same type of grenade in your inventory, the grenade stays in your belt and one is taken away from your inventory. But then i dare to say, if it works with grenades, it should also work with medkits, psi-boosters and other consumeables... )
- grenades comming in big variety and with numerous effects.

I just dug out the old posting:


- the incendiary grenade.
Effect: When exploding, it splashes the area with some inflamable material and sets it's surrounding on fire. Everything in range or moving into this area is also set on fire and takes appropriate damage.
PvE-use: damage. NPCs are not smart enough to react on this, so they will walk into it and burn.
PvP-use: damage and tactical blockade of areas

- aerosol grenade
Effect: A substance is burned, creating damage in the AOE while using up all Oxygen. Extinguishes fire in the area.
PvE-use: damage again.
PvP-use: damage and extinguishing fire. This means, clearing the path again.

- alternatively: the foam grenade
Effect: splashes the area with some unstable foam. It extinguishes fire but only lasts for a short time.
PvE-use: targets in the area get slowed down a bit.
PvP-use: Flames in the area are extinguished (clearing the way which is blocked from an incendiary grenade), somewhat reducing movement speed in the target area for a short time.

- the shock grenade
Effect: disorientation of targets in the area of effect, minimal physical impact.
PvE-use: little damage. Attackspeed and accuracy of NPCs in the area of effect are noticeably reduced. Movement of NPCs get even more erratic than it already now is. (If that is possible, that is.)
PvP-use: little damage. Values for weaponlore and psi-use are strongly reduced for a short while, movement is somewhat hampered by random movement. (Like we already now know from drug flashes, you press the forward key and sometimes run to the side or even backwards instead.)

- the flash grenade
Effect: blinding targets by burning up some substance.
PvE-use: very little damage, only close to the point of explosion. (Only targets right on the grenade when it blows up are affected.) Accuracy of NPCs is strongly reduced, they start to turn around even more stupid than they normally do.
PvP-use: very little damage, only close to the point of explosion. The screen gets whitened out for a short time (not by adjusting gamma, there are some "tools" to avoid that, but by creating an approprite overlay). Values for weaponlore and psi-use are noticeably reduced for a short while.

- the EMP grenade
Effect: creates a strong electromagnetic pulse when detonating.
PvE-use: no effect on purely organic NPCs. (no damage, nothing...) Desorientation (like on the shock grenade) on cyborgs, e.g. aggressors and so on. Targets which are purely machine, e.g. Warbots, are paralysed (no movement, no attack) for something like 5 seconds, then are disoriented for a while, too. Cyborgs take litte damage, pure machings good damage from this grenade. After paralysation / disorientation wears off, the target should be immune to the effect for 15 or 20 seconds, otherwhise this might be too powerful.
PvP-use: Strong disturbance of sight. (Use the statics which already is known from drug flashes. Cyberware, like the display system, are affected by the EMP, after all.) Values for weaponlore and psi-use get reduced for a short time, active implants (everything but the bones) can be affected and stop working properly for something like 15 seconds. This does not mean, that implants are removed and need to be reimplanted, they just should not give their modifiers for a short time. (Since i know that some people will test around and look a the info screen while having such grenades thrown at them, it would be a nice bonus, if the list of modifiers would be replaced by the word "rebooting" in the info screen as long as the implant is disabled.)

To make sure that low-level tanks also have their fun, it would make sense to make these grenades in three XP-stages. (Just like with weapons already in place. Most weapons are available in the flavours "newbie", "normal", "expert" and "rare". Since grenades are getting used up, i would forget about the "rare" style, though.) To make sure that the bigger grenades make sense, compare the level of the NPC to the power of the grenade. If the level of the grenade is too low, it fails to affect the NPC. Players would have to use their resist values to avoid or reduce effects of grenades. (Fire resist vs. the incendiary grenade, resist force vs. aerosol grenades and shock grenades, energy resist vs. the flash grenade and x-ray vs. the EMP grenade.) The higher the resists, the shorter the effect, if the level of the grenade is too low, they don't do their effects at all.

This would give the tank some nice tactical options on the battlefield and would be much more fun to play, instead of having no other purpose than (taking and) inflicting damage.

[John Wu]

- the functionality of the belt being changed a bit so it restocks itself when consumeables are drawn out of it. (The original suggestion just was, if you use a grenade from your belt and you still have the same type of grenade in your inventory, the grenade stays in your belt and one is taken away from your inventory. But then i dare to say, if it works with grenades, it should also work with medkits, psi-boosters and other consumeables... )
I would love that...

and yeah, grenades need a boost.

[giga191]

:wtf:


How do you know, Zheo?

There hasn't been, as far as I could see, the merest whiff of anything relating to grenades in the Balance Discussion forum. I will have to go back and read everything throughly again. Ugh! becuase they clearly stated it 0o

if you want to help balancing then there's forum section for it ^^

[John Wu]

well grenades are considered h-c weapons, so they'll probably get the same balancing as the rest, ie damage depending on their TL.

would be cool if grenades become usable .. there could be nice types, like poisongas grenades. toss 4-5 of them in front of the pussy club sync in pp3 and watch all those syncwhores leg it :D

[Heavyporker]

Geez lordus, that one line was difficult to find.


Anyways, even a high-level HC gentank has trouble maxing out a hand grenade, it seems.

You know what would improve it so much? No H-C requirement. Just strength.

Then that'd open it up so damn much.


And, dude... hand grenades are already linked to TL, dammit. And they fucking suck! That's why I'm bringing up the damn issue.

[John Wu]

I know they have a TL, like everything. what I meant was that they will/should do the damage that other weapons at their TL do.

[SorkZmok]

I know they have a TL, like everything. what I meant was that they will/should do the damage that other weapons at their TL do.
They are still quite useless as they don't stack in your QB. And you can't really afford several slots just for grenades or constanly open the inventory to put in new ones.

At least i couldnt be arsed to do that. :)

But i'd love working handgrenades.

[Heavyporker]

Each grenade does like... one round's/strike worth of damage of any other weapon!

Even the Freedom Strike's damage only equals, what, two shots from a CS or something, from what I remember! Probably less!

[John Wu]

They are still quite useless as they don't stack in your QB. And you can't really afford several slots just for grenades or constanly open the inventory to put in new ones.
at least having stacks of 5 nades would be a solution, but of course I'd prefer what sylow wrote (for stam boosters etc as well).


Even the Freedom Strike's damage only equals, what, two shots from a CS or something, from what I remember! Probably less!is that two shots or two bursts? even if its two 'shots', that would mean around 30 damage to a PE .. thought they were crappier. if its two bursts, which would equal to about 100 damage, I'd say the damage is fine, if not too much ...

[Heavyporker]

Ech! I'm sort of dubious about the auto-loading suggestion, but it *would* help, I suppose.

Even better would be a bandioleer piece of armor that gave you a second 'quickbelt' usable only for grenades.

But the stack of grenades probably would be the most practical solution.