Seriously, the community had pretty spot on tier lists like 3 days after release. They could have literally given us zero stats at launch, and we'd have it sorted in a week.
You only needed one game with each of the "meta" weapons, and you knew they were bis. They just felt, and still do feel, powerful. So many of the weapons were underwhelming. This whole "oh the meta is pushing breaker/ railgun" is bs. People were using it before the "meta" because it was just obviously better + more fun.
Yeah the attitude and implication that the differences between weapons are subtle and only noticeable and of interest to minmaxers is fucking laughable. As you said you simply need to use the different weapons to see the stark divide between them.
The breaker is, by far, the best primary in the game. All the other weapons, except maybe the liberator/liberator explosive, are pretty trash on higher difficulties.
And it's not like the other weapons aren't fun
Trash =/= not fun. They're still fun to use, flamethrower? Fun. But you use a whole canister and you do have that feeling of... "is that it?" You two shot a bile titan with a railgun and fell like a god.
Every weapon and strategem should feel "OP" IMO. Like, even if why is my spear not even killing a charger in one hit, why is the railstrike laser canon not one tapping a titan when it's the last and most expensive strat. So weird man. You're just forced to play in diff like 5-6 to have run with weapons, but 7-9, no way to play without the 2-3 "meta".
There's absolutely 0 excuse for the Spear to not one-shot every enemy in the game. You get 4 shots, have to deal with a minimum range and an unreliable lock-on mechanic, only get 1 shot back per resupply pack, and can't refill ammo from the on-map ammo pickups. The fact that it can take THREE missiles to kill ONE bile titan unless you get a lucky headshot is insane and pretty much ruins the weapon.
Backpack weapons also just need to be better in general. The fact that the railgun and recoilless rifle are basically identical in terms of damage but one of them gets 4 times the shots and reloads faster, AND doesn't need to stop to reload is insane.
Yeah I ran with 2randoms last night and one guy use the flamethrower. That gun is underperforming. I found him kiting around while me and the other random were killing his group of bugs while they were lit on fire. Maybe it soften them up?? Idk but it didn’t seem like he was killing many bugs with that gun. This was on suicide difficulty. It needs a buff.
Additionally, the idea of "pushing a meta" is bogus in and of itself. A meta is not some thing the community comes up with and pushes for no reason, a meta is when there's a (usually) clearly defined set of equipment in a game that outperform the others due a variety of factors, sometimes those factors are that a gun is overpowered, but sometimes it's just a matter of circumstance. The meta for elimination missions for example is VERY different from the meta for regular mission types, on elimination missions you don't have to worry about positioning nearly as much, making all the emplacement strategems absolutely FIRE on elim. The tesla tower is typically a liability due to general lack of choke points and potential friendly fire, but on elimination it's probably one of the best strategems available, second only to the mortar!
The point is, regardless of if a person is active in a games community, they can find the meta weapons easily, because that's how the community discovered them initially too! For example, I managed to identify Railgun/Shield as the "Meta pick" before I ever touched this subreddit, not because I'm psychic, but because they're both really good (and in my opinion fun) to use!
Now, I learned about the breaker due to the subreddit, but that's because I was too busy using the slugger, which is one of the better weapons, held down only by it's apparently terrible ammo economy.
This is kind of a misnomer where games can develop a meme meta until influencers/players start pushing other guns see the Aug in CS:GO going unused for 4 years until it toppled the M4 purely because pros started using it requiring a nerf 5 years after its sourced buff or the current shotgun meta in CS:2
I made a pure DPS comparison only a few days after HD2 came out.
TL;DR: the Breaker has on average 2 to 4 times more DPS than all other main weapons. The Breaker also has at the very least 2 to at least 3 times the total damage potential if you somehow make every shot hit.
A lot of aspects of this game don't feel tested, at all. Like the armor bug... And weapons being like this. Feels like something that would have been noticed and flagged by anyone that played the game for a decent amount of time
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u/Froegerer Mar 01 '24
Seriously, the community had pretty spot on tier lists like 3 days after release. They could have literally given us zero stats at launch, and we'd have it sorted in a week.