With the upcoming balance project and it being a topic that half the current posts on the forum are about, I thought I would start a topic to discuss the options and pitfalls. Obviously the dev team have thought hard about it, but everyone has a different perspective.
A couple of rough idea's that would need polishing to work. If you can think of any good ideas, post them.
The biggest problem I can see at the moment is TL. The higher the TL, the higher the damage, as it should be, until you get to end game. Once you hit end game, if everything is balanced by TL, then there is only one logical weapon for each class in general, the highest.
I can think of 2 possible ways around it.
- Make all rare weapons the same TL
- Drop ammo mods for rares and give them different damage types based on type of weapon
The downside of making all rares the same TL is you suddenly hit a certain level and open them all up. There is no gradient to work through, so the fun element of leveling and opening up new things is gone.
Dropping ammo mods would be hard to implement (current rares would need to have a slot opened and the mod dropped), but it would open us up to different builds. You are going to hunt players in a popular firemob spot. They are in inq armour and using a gamma weapon. How do you equip yourself? Do you spec to protect against the other players, with x-ray/energy, or do you worry more about the firemobs you have to negotiate? Maybe a bit of both?
It gives you reason to have different setups depending on where you are hunting. Yes you can argue it means you need even more equipment to be viable everywhere, but it also means you can be viable with less equipment sooner.