So, we all know that weapon balance is well, so broken that calling it a "balance" is something of a joke. In yet another indication that 2.2 was dramatically ill-considered, the changes were rushed out despite plenty of us pointing out that weapon balance was in an abysmal state, and the "fixes" since then have completely missed the point. (The generic burst-weapon buff left AKs and pulselasers overpowered, while other bursts - gats and smgs/assaults are still useless). The extreme strength of a few weapons also makes it hard to come to any clear idea about where class balance is at overall too.

So, what's the fix for all this? Assuming under the hood of Neocron it's fairly simple to change weapon values, there's a few steps to go through:
  1. Arbitarily pick freqency, magazine size, range, aimspeed for weapon series (eg Beam laser pistol, assault rifle, raygun cannon, etc). The numbers should obviously represent the sort of "feel" a weapon is required to have. It's also important to remember that aim speed is heavily effected by range - I don't know the exact mathematics for it, but I'd hazard a guess that if you want a weapon with half the range to aim identically to the other, you'll need to give the shorter ranged one double the aim speed.
  2. Allowing for capped frequency and reloads, set the per-shot damage so as to give all weapons a total damage rate (DPS seems as good as any) that scales linearly with TL, as was the original intention of 2.2. (I'm still not sure that linear scale with TL is the right answer, but I think it could be made to be, with the right tweaks elsewhere). For weapons like rayguns and fusion, take the damage at 50% range as the point used. AoE weapons probably need to be done on a seperate graph entirely.
  3. Make some gross modifications to the damage by weapon type (HC/MC/PC/APU/etc). There's some value-decisions to be made here, which we'll come back to later. Basically, heavy stronger than pistol etc.
  4. Now, tweak the numbers by series a lot. Weapons like plasma that miss a lot probably need to go up. Weapons that having amazing aiming and range like beam laser probably down. Weapons with big magazines, or very low freqs (snipers, ion pistol) probably need to go down. Weapons with exotic damage types probably need to go down.
  5. Playtest a little. Tweak in response to that. This includes altering aiming rates etc as seems necessary to get the desired "feel" from each weapon.
  6. Consider applying the old modifiers again (ie rare + x%, WoC + x%, etc). I'd suggests that those modifiers are actually too big, and probably all need halving.
  7. Unleash on the retail game, with the commitment to monitoring what weapons and continuing to tweak values as necessary. Be prepared to buff as well as nerf


For this to really work well of course, the bug with beam weapons really needs fixing.

I think at the end of a process like that, we'd be back in a situation where class setup and viability wasn't dominated by a few overpowered weapons. A big concern would be that without some changes to weapon-skilling, implants and indeed weapon-spread (and dealing with the stupidity that is current PA), PvP weapon choice will simply come down to "use the highest TL you can" or at least "the highest TL you can with chosen number of resist chips". Hopefully for some people at least, personal taste with the different weapon "feels" that are generated should matter more than pure DPS.

There are obviously a few value judgements to be made along the way: Just what should each weapon type "feel" like; how different should the weapon classes be; how powerful should AoE be in comparison with single target; and so on.

On the weapon classes, I think I'd be happy with something like this: HC/MC >> Rifle > Pistol > APU/Drone. However, with some extra caveats: HC weapons should give significant slowdown to the user when wielded; rifles should cause little slowdown but have a real penalty to aiming while moving (maybe exclude special cases - ie shotguns); APUs should aquire an additional range of skills to compensate, something I'll set out my stall for in another post (if not, then APU obviously needs to be up at the other end).

As for the AoE/single target thing - I think that AoE probably still hits too hard at the moment and needs to be comparativley weaker. There's a careful bit of judgement here of course - too weak and nobody will use it - but look at the total damage done by a RGC or a barrel on a group of say 6 targets, to that of any single target, and I think it's clear that one of those is the best choice by far too much.

The nature of these "value judgement" elements is of course that people are going to disagree with them. I'd like to see how other people feel that NC should be in the weapon heirarchy.