Shotgun Weapons (Missile Slave) and critical hits.

[Keynesian]

I was thinking that shotgun weapons should have a damage increase compared to the other weapons because right now they are pretty much useless(Minus missiles). And because you can achieve the same dps for something that has a higher accuracy and range shotguns are never used. So a buff to damage is needed. I was thinking something along the line of a 300-400% increase in damage if all projectiles hit. That brings me to my other suggestion critical hits.

Critical hits should have a certain percentage of times it could happen. As in lets say a 10% critical hit, and weapon would have a critical hit every ten shots or so. The type of weapons would effect your critical hit chance. With shotguns and sniper weapons a higher critical hit chance should happen. And as reload increases so should critical hit chance. That makes weapons that fire rapidly (AMC slave) have lower hit chances due to more projectiles fired. I have said all of that but I haven't even explained what a critical hit does. A critical hit to an enemy will cause the projectile to do double damage. The critical hit chances will make it so that ships now do not have a set dps or they instead have a maximum and minimum dps fired. So no longer will it be totally about size (Yes size will still matter you can't have a 1k mass ship against a 100k mass ship, I am talking about similarly sized ships.) it will be about luck and the skill of the pilot.

 

[PseudoGold]

I wholeheartedly agree about this. The only thing I'd say is that crits don't do too much extra damage (preferably a set percentage, say 15% extra damage) in order to keep combat more about 1) who has the better ship and 2) who is the better pilot. 3) would be if, like me, you have a small habit of killstealing.

 

[jayman38]

I think there should be similar links in improved bonus to both increase base damage and increase chance of a critical hit.

Examples: (numbers are subject to change, so if you don't like 'em, feel free to give examples of different numbers)

For every additional hit in the same gametick, the damage of all hits increases by 2%. (Focused fire can really add up! Damage increases as nearby hits add to the trauma. This is why shotguns are so effective. Multiple pellet hits increase the trauma geometrically by tearing the material in-between the hits.)

For every additional hit in the same gametick, the percent chance for a 10% more damaging "critical hit" (+ 50 damage?) increases by 1%. When the percent chance hits 50% (>49 hits in the same tick!), the critical hit calculation changes: 25% more damage + 100 damage (to give smaller guns more oomph when critting) starting at 25% chance of critical hit, with a server-selectable hard cap on the chance for a critical (90% chance to get a 25% critical?)

Problem: This is introducing additional calculations into a part of the game (the heat of combat) when multiple calculations are already taxing the game heavily. Maybe this idea could be a mod to the game, rather than a default feature, to avoid overloading weaker servers?

Additional problem that's not quite so problematic: If you make these values server-configurable, you'll find instakill servers with high caps and high initial values. Those servers might be popular!

 

[Criss]

If I take a rack of ten missiles with 100% shotgun missile effect attached, it blows a pretty decent sized hole into both types of armor. Once shields are down I can use my small fighter to blow holes all over a much larger vessel to the point where I lowered their effectiveness. That's not appealing to me. Shotgun missiles should be overall doing the same amount of damage as normal missiles, just spread out over different impacts. That was pretty much how they were intended to work.

 

[Keynesian]

If I take a rack of ten missiles with 100% shotgun missile effect attached, it blows a pretty decent sized hole into both types of armor. Once shields are down I can use my small fighter to blow holes all over a much larger vessel to the point where I lowered their effectiveness. That's not appealing to me. Shotgun missiles should be overall doing the same amount of damage as normal missiles, just spread out over different impacts. That was pretty much how they were intended to work.

Read the op again:

I was thinking that shotgun weapons should have a damage increase compared to the other weapons because right now they are pretty much useless(Minus missiles).

 

[Criss]

Read the op again:

Lol wow sorry. I havent messed with other shotgun weapons because I think they are kinda dumb anyway. Shotgun lasers..really? I'd rather it do some sort of explosive effect with the impact instead.

 

[NeonSturm]

Hit the Reactor join with a punch-through = critical hit.

I like doing (EXAMPLE numbers!!!) 5 damage, but because (through round-down) you would only do as much as 4 damage, put this 1 damage on next shot.


I don't like completely randoom you or your enemy dependent on if your ping is 0.000000001 seconds higher or lower. Maybe I've seen too many pseudo-random generators fail to produce the percentages they should.

But I dislike it mainly because it increases chances players are thinking "damn critters" when they always get crits while the shot hits useless stuff and never when it hits where they want it to happen.
At least from a player's perspective.

We should add a bit (<=10%) randoom if it helps increasing performance or lowering memory consumption for more accurate stuff, but we should not add more luck factor than required. Players themselves do this already (reaction time, custom ships, ...)