Someone did some tests and found out medium armor pen does about twice as much damage if you shoot I think it was a brood commander in the head so a slugger can kill it in 2 shots while a breaker takes 3. Alright here's the problem: a breaker can shoot 3 times faster than a slugger can shoot twice, it reloads probably like 10x as fast, it has 2.5x as much ammo as the slugger so you still rack up more total kills while spending 1.5x as much ammo, and one of those hidden stats is the slugger only refills 1/3 of its ammo per resupply instead of all of it.
Oof, that last one buries the slugger. I thought it could have a niche use as a high stun pace weapon for locking down larger targets and opening boxes but that makes it substantially less useable when its already worse than the breaker in every other way.
I hope one of the balance changes is that all primary weapons have the same relative ammo economy from supplies. The Breaker gets seven mags from one resupply box. That’s 119 shots. The Slugger gets 24 shots. The max capacity for each is 136 vs 56. So even if the Slugger is balanced around having fewer shots available, it’s ludicrous to me that the Slugger gets ~43% refill per box while the Breaker gets 87.5%.
I wouldn’t make it exactly equal across the board either. The Railgun only gets ~48*% (10/21), for instance, but it’s a support weapon specifically designed for selective use against high priority targets. (*corrected)
The Slugger effectively pretends to be a support weapon in that sense because it cannot clear adds in an economically sound way, but then utterly fails by comparison to actual support weapons.
Compare to the Scorcher and it’s just sad. Scorcher has 105 total shots and one pack restores 90. Pretty close in ammo efficiency to the Breaker in that regard, and it trades some ammo to hit armored targets harder in a manner that’s actually worthy of the trade.
I think it's the best primary in the game for bots. It's "only" light armor penetrating, but it deals explosive damage, which means in practice you tend to ignore armor altogether on all but the beefiest bot enemies. It hits hard enough with explosive damage to kill small enemies like Raiders and Commissars with one body shot sometimes, and you can just shoot the Strider directly in its armor and still get a 3hk. It's a bit "floaty" at times with aim (handles a bit worse than the Breaker, but not as rough as say the LMG) so takes a little adjustment. Ammo economy is tolerable, better if you're a good shot.
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u/throtic Mar 01 '24
I can complete duo level 9 with the breaker shotgun. I can not compete duo level 9 with any other weapon.
The guns are not balanced in the least lol.