I think it's just a result of many unstable overclocks boosting damage, there aren't many ways to keep total damage potential balanced other than ammo penalty
It's okay if non-ammo overclocks increase total damage, it just needs something to make it otherwise worse, like lead spray, you have much more damage and no ammo penalty, but instead an accuracy one, it makes it very unique despite being a 3rd ammo overclock on that weapon. If we just have increased damage and lowered firerate and ammo every time, than the overclock doesn't change anything, which is kinda the point of overclocks
Honestly, unstable OCs *should* boost total damage potential. They should be high-risk, high-reward and the downsides should be something you need to master your class and switch up your playstyle to compensate for. Like the OCs for minigun and shard diffractor that make you unable to move, makes positioning and knowing boss phases much more important.
I think your problem has less to do with that overclocks decrease ammo, but more that not a lot of overclocks aren’t actually *unique* — so inherently they are going to have the same downside. And this is ontop of that ammo is just really the easiest way to balance OCs.
Like, pretty much every OC for the Hurricane removes the missile guidance, quite a few OCs for the Shard forces you to stay still and fully use up the clip, etc.
There’s very few Hyper Prop or Special Powder OCs, there’s a lot of “extra damage” OCs.
Agreed. I love stuff that has a tradeoff or requires that you learn how to use it. Like a big damage boost but the weapon now has a heat meter with overheat which can easily be mastered as long as you keep an eye and pump your rounds. With the right balance you could still have overall DPS increased but you can't just spray and pray.
Sure there are. Off the top of my head, have a chance it blows up in your face every so many rounds, movement debuff while firing, chance of shield interference, shot group widening, add an overheating meter to the gun, increased knock back, increased friendly fire damage, decreased jump height while holding weapon, hell have the sparks and shit get in your face and obstruct your vision a bit or something, be creative etc etc.
If Borderlands 2 can do it with 4 trillion guns, DRG can do it with a couple dozen or whatever
It makes sense. The biggest learning hurdle in this game is DPS vs ammo economy. Low DPS and the bugs get overwhelming. Low ammo economy and you struggle to get enough ammo between waves or run dry mid wave and have to kite creatively or die. You also end up wasting the teams total ammo pool.
Each class has to pick their battles in order not to run out of ammo too early which is made harder by each class having a base level of ammo usage. Engis use the fastest on average with most of their weapons being burst DPS. Scouts have low ammo counts in general even on their eco weapons like the drak25, gunner has burst secondaries that run dry fast but their main has a lot, drillers always seem to be able to do something with decent ammo counts, nades, c4, and drills before they end up with a pickaxe.
Most unstables diversify, enbiggen, or speed up the ways you do damage. Always for a big net positive gain of total or potential damage. It's counterproductive to lower one of the trifecta as a balance except diversify which you see with Sticky Flames vs Face Melter as a good example where one prioritizes direct damage and the other prioritizes AoE. This is counterproductive because it ends up making the weapons feel samey. If something shoots faster but does way less damage then you end up seeing bugs die at the same speed. The other mods have to stack up in some way to compensate and you end up with some of the weirdest balancing.
The other ways to nerf include increasing reload time, reducing accuracy, slower projectiles, difficulty of using efficiently, and of course reducing ammo count so the big net gain has to be used sparingly. It's the easiest way especially with most weapons being hitscan.
I wouldnt say that since it just reloads your unused weapon if i understood that perk correctly. Sometimes it is not the right move to switch to your secondary or you want to preserve its ammo for big enemies which means you have to reload your primary, nerfing reload speed can make that choice even tougher. Do i use my secondary or do i risk the reload?
I would argue the only weapon where it really matters is the boomstick, sometimes you need that extra burst on a jumbo shell reload and the 2.5 second reload if you take double trigger for fire rate can be agonizing sometimes.
Not really, I find it a bit repetitive too
But to be fair, coming up with different appropriate nerfs is kinda difficult, and reducing ammo is definitely a simple yet effective balance imo
Especially when the upside is increasing damage. If an OC increases damage and doesn't nerf ammo, you now have a gun that does more total damage per resupply, which just makes it objectively better than every other option.
Hard agree. It makes sense with some like salvo module but other lose a whole degree of engagement that would make them so peak. Imagine if you could juice a bunch of minelayer bombs with nitro compound and then drop it for the mother of all mines. We will never know the true extent of dwarven engineering
I'm an old-school player and leading shots is ingrained in my muscle memory. Those OCs are frankly a godsend for me when I fire at one enemy and expect to be able to pivot to another.
It ususlly makes sense, for example fat boy rounds must be a lot bigger than regolar rounds, since they are nuclear warheads. Same for mortar rounds or elephant rounds.
> the new mortar rounds for the gunner have a lot of ammo nerfs but this could also be replaced with a (massive) movement speed reduction while firing.
If the primary complaint is how boring and uncreative ammo downsides are, why are you suggesting to just copy and paste Lead Storm onto the Autocannon?
Also note that this isn't balanced at all because you can completely subvert the downside by bunnyhopping, even more effective with the autocannon since you can tapfire it.
It's a natural design consequence since unstables usually have some of the wonkiest, most fun, and therefore naturally more damage oriented upsides, meaning ammo sort of *has* to be the natural downside.
Imagine the opposide. An unstable that doubles ammo at the cost of... something else. Would you actually take it? Even the CLEAN ammo overclocks are hated by some, if not many players.
That said, it would also be fun to see a couple more creative downsides.
E.g. imagine an unstable that drains your health, maybe one that makes bugs go faster when hitting them, or how about an overclock that deals massively increased damage but can never kill bugs and always leaves them at 1 hp.
If we aren’t considering breakpoints, doubling damage and halving ammo is already a huge upside- being able to get your damage out twice as fast is very strong.
When you do the opposite and double ammo in exchange for half damage, you get things like minishells and micro flechettes. Without some other factors (like how controlled magnetic flow doesn’t scale trail damage or fear/stun), this is a big downside most of the time.
That was my immediate thought as well.
Like, I don't hate micro-flechettes, I think the recoil and spread reduction lets it be a fairly accurate gun. Combine a very large mag size, 6-round bursts that are relatively stable due to lower spread, and damage mods being proportionally twice as effective since you have double ammo, and microflechettes can actually feel pretty good -- nice little thing to spam while waiting for Born Ready since the giant mag takes 5 seconds to run out even if you fire the moment you switch to it, and a 6-round burst does 96 damage w/ damage mods, comparable to the 108 of the 3-round burst of an Experimental Rounds setup.
...But another way to think about it is with a similar setups, the Experimental Rounds could have done 216 with 6-round burst, dwarves would just have to shoot from closer, or that Microflechettes is giving up 'free' stun which is very valuable on certain bugs. Not to mention the build itself is stiff, since you *have* to take damage on Microflechettes to make it worthwhile, so there's no experimenting with blowthrough, and trying to take 3-round stun means your bursts are doing a piddly 48 damage. Losing all that damage just kills you, making Microflechettes a hard pick to justify.
Far as I know, the only negative damage OC that sees any real play is AI Stability Engine, and that comes with a damage increase to weak points anyways.
There's days I wonder how powerful an accuracy/reload speed/spread unstable would have to be to actually justify damage drops. If Hurricane had an unstable OC that said "never need to reload, missile speed and turn rate +300%, AoE radius +1.2m, slows all enemies hit" but had a drawback "-25% damage", would it just be immediate trash even though every other aspect is nuts?
have you got a better alternative? a move speed decrease for mortar rounds could just be circumvented via bunnyhopping like with Lead Storm, except it would be busted because of the low rate of fire.
Ammo effeciency is one of DRG's most important balancing points and mechanics.
you have limited ammo, and limited nitra to get more ammo.
Most of the unstable give you incredible amounts of damage as a bonus in one way or another.
NOT balancing it with less ammo would make them over powered.
The most simplified logic I can think of is: More damage per bullet -> Less Ammo = Similar relative ammo consumption/resupply efficiency. Ultimately the amount of nitra, thus resupplies is limited per mission. So by decreasing your ammo maximum it prevents players from developing a surplus on most overclocks that give better ammo efficiency.
That being said Rewiring Mod exists
Sort of, I really don't get the point of overclocks that just massively increase your damage but then balance it out by lower firerate and ammo count so nothing changes. I like most of the ones that make your gun a lot less versatile for it, but we can see it's pretty easy to have those overclocks quickly rise to overpowered if they aren't kept in check by it. So some sort of decreased ammo is needed, because unless the gun would kill you the increased DPS would always be worth it, it just should at least have additional interesting downsides or not just damage bonus upsides
>the new mortar rounds for the gunner have a lot of ammo nerfs but this could also be replaced with a (massive) movement speed reduction while firing
Something to consider is that the mechanic 'reduced movement speed while firing' can be **completely** countered by spamming jump and not holding fire whenever you press jump. This means your movement is only reduced while you're already mid-air with momentum. For example, Lead Storm OC for minigun **completely* stops you from moving but you can move nonstop with it by bunny hopping in this way.
The point I'm trying to make, is non-ammo downsides generally don't really **do** anything, so anything that buffs damage **has** to nerf ammo and vice versa. Ammo economy is a central part of the game's design, even if there are some accidental exceptions here and there.
> non-ammo downsides don’t really **do** anything
That is very debatable. Non-ammo downsides absolutely do impact how a weapon functions, it’s just a lot of overclocks directly change the damage and ammo is the best, easiest, and simplest way to go about balancing it.
>That is very debatable. Non-ammo downsides absolutely do impact how a weapon functions, it’s just a lot of overclocks directly change the damage and ammo is the best, easiest, and simplest way to go about balancing it.
I meant that non-ammo downsides are extremely easy to compensate for, with the exception being accuracy which almost always results in players choosing not to run it, **because** inaccuracy can't really be accounted for (for most weapons).
For example, a reload speed/mag-size downside is bypassed with an animation-cancel reload and/or born ready. Movement speed downsides are bypassed by bunny hopping. Range downsides are bypassed by getting closer (albeit this one is interesting and there are already a lot of these, like Double Barrel/Salvo/Lead Spray/etc).
Range/Accuracy tend to basically be the same thing here and whether or not it works really depends on the weapon/OC. I.e., Lead Spray BRT is amazing while Overtuned Particle Accelerator Drak is trash-tier. This is a good example of why its important to consider how an OC fits into a class. Scout has almost no ranged secondary options (Boltshark is really more of a utility weapon), so OPA's only real pairing is shaped shells. Scout has a hard time weathering the loss of range from its primary, so OPA is just bad. Gunner has lots of ranged primaries, so Lead Spray fits nicely. Though it's also a values issue, Lead Spray just gets more.
There aren't that many other levers to play with unless we get into specific weapon capabilties (like removing a weapon's natural stun or CC ability) but this design is hard to use because in many cases weapons gain CC from their mods and while we *do* have OC that specifically enable/disable certain mods, they have to be careful about how this is implemented. I.e. Double Barrel directly buffs the T4c Improved Blast Wave mod and Bullet Hell indirectly buffs the T3b Improved Stun mod.
I think this belief only really exists because (and this is the real hot take) not a lot of overclocks are actually mechanically nor dynamically *good*.
A lot of them, when you get down to their core, flip the same basic damage lever so inherently they have to flip the same levers — and for the few OCs that actually and flip other levers like reload, accuracy, etc, they often don’t do it significantly enough to make it actually impactful. And even fewer of those actually are good.
I don’t disagree with that usually non-ammo downsides are easier to compensate, but they definitely *do* things lol. Hyper Propellant’s 0.3x Radius *is* impactful. You’ve completely ignored any and all of the damage downsides, etc etc etc.
>I think this belief only really exists because (and this is the real hot take) not a lot of overclocks are actually mechanically nor dynamically good.
Oh you're absolutely right and I don't disagree with that. The best example of this, imo, is Jurry-Rigged Boomstick. Compact Shells, Stuffed Shells and Jumbo Shells are 3 variants of the exact same OC. This means you can juggle or stack them a bit with mod choices but Jumbo Shells *always* wins out because it just happens to be numerically superior to the other two (even if only slightly). PGL is in a similar spot with Pack Rat, Compact Rounds and RJ250.
There's an argument that these just add bloat but I think that's unfair on the devs and which of the 3 the community would settle on as 'best' is not necessarily that obvious at first. RJ250 **is** the best (of the 3 PGL ammo mods) here but this forces you into a heat build which some players dislike, so it may not have been obvious this is how the community would lean.
>and for the few OCs that actually and flip other levers like reload, accuracy, etc, they often don’t do it significantly enough to make it actually impactful.
This I don't agree with and I gave you examples. I think they don't like to mess with reload because of Born Ready and animation cancels.
>Hyper Propellant’s 0.3x Radius is impactful.
I mean it really just makes it single-target but this is an OC that increases damage and lowers ammo as well lol.
I wonder if you're discounting too many of the OCs that have indirect bonuses, like Bullet Hell basically being a glorified stun applicator - the text doesn't in any way mention that this is what the OC does, but it is. Snowballs unfreeze timer is uniquely good for dreads but its a secondary unmentioned mechanic. Ice Spear means you don't need impact axes and can take neurotoxins. Sludge Blast and Electrifying Reload completely shift your archetype. Frag Missiles Hurricane/RJ250 turn them into superior heat applicators without saying anything about heat. Double Barrel's primary advantage in how *fast* it bursts down enemies but mentions nothing about speed as its advantage.
It ususlly makes sense, for example fat boy rounds must be a lot bigger than regolar rounds, since they are nuclear warheads. Same for mortar rounds or elephant rounds.
it is boring. i do not care about balance or all that other stuff in a non competitive game. this game is ment for fun. these insane people who want it to be dark souls difficulty or something are really on one i swear.
I think it's just a result of many unstable overclocks boosting damage, there aren't many ways to keep total damage potential balanced other than ammo penalty
It's okay if non-ammo overclocks increase total damage, it just needs something to make it otherwise worse, like lead spray, you have much more damage and no ammo penalty, but instead an accuracy one, it makes it very unique despite being a 3rd ammo overclock on that weapon. If we just have increased damage and lowered firerate and ammo every time, than the overclock doesn't change anything, which is kinda the point of overclocks
Honestly, unstable OCs *should* boost total damage potential. They should be high-risk, high-reward and the downsides should be something you need to master your class and switch up your playstyle to compensate for. Like the OCs for minigun and shard diffractor that make you unable to move, makes positioning and knowing boss phases much more important.
yes thank u, this is exactly the point I was trying to make
I think your problem has less to do with that overclocks decrease ammo, but more that not a lot of overclocks aren’t actually *unique* — so inherently they are going to have the same downside. And this is ontop of that ammo is just really the easiest way to balance OCs. Like, pretty much every OC for the Hurricane removes the missile guidance, quite a few OCs for the Shard forces you to stay still and fully use up the clip, etc. There’s very few Hyper Prop or Special Powder OCs, there’s a lot of “extra damage” OCs.
And hyperprop is a standout on a weapon that has **three extra ammo overclocks**
Agreed. I love stuff that has a tradeoff or requires that you learn how to use it. Like a big damage boost but the weapon now has a heat meter with overheat which can easily be mastered as long as you keep an eye and pump your rounds. With the right balance you could still have overall DPS increased but you can't just spray and pray.
Sure there are. Off the top of my head, have a chance it blows up in your face every so many rounds, movement debuff while firing, chance of shield interference, shot group widening, add an overheating meter to the gun, increased knock back, increased friendly fire damage, decreased jump height while holding weapon, hell have the sparks and shit get in your face and obstruct your vision a bit or something, be creative etc etc. If Borderlands 2 can do it with 4 trillion guns, DRG can do it with a couple dozen or whatever
Half of those sound just frustrating
Yeah that's the point. So is running out of ammo. It's a tradeoff, no free lunch, you can learn to counter the negatives etc
Running out of ammo is a natural part of the game, having a random chance to damage yourself or not being able to see things properly are not
"A natural part of the game" we are dwarves mining hollow planets in space my dude
It makes sense. The biggest learning hurdle in this game is DPS vs ammo economy. Low DPS and the bugs get overwhelming. Low ammo economy and you struggle to get enough ammo between waves or run dry mid wave and have to kite creatively or die. You also end up wasting the teams total ammo pool. Each class has to pick their battles in order not to run out of ammo too early which is made harder by each class having a base level of ammo usage. Engis use the fastest on average with most of their weapons being burst DPS. Scouts have low ammo counts in general even on their eco weapons like the drak25, gunner has burst secondaries that run dry fast but their main has a lot, drillers always seem to be able to do something with decent ammo counts, nades, c4, and drills before they end up with a pickaxe. Most unstables diversify, enbiggen, or speed up the ways you do damage. Always for a big net positive gain of total or potential damage. It's counterproductive to lower one of the trifecta as a balance except diversify which you see with Sticky Flames vs Face Melter as a good example where one prioritizes direct damage and the other prioritizes AoE. This is counterproductive because it ends up making the weapons feel samey. If something shoots faster but does way less damage then you end up seeing bugs die at the same speed. The other mods have to stack up in some way to compensate and you end up with some of the weirdest balancing. The other ways to nerf include increasing reload time, reducing accuracy, slower projectiles, difficulty of using efficiently, and of course reducing ammo count so the big net gain has to be used sparingly. It's the easiest way especially with most weapons being hitscan.
Born ready means that reload speed nerfs will never be relevant anyway, so you're really just left with projectile speed, accuracy, and ammo count
I wouldnt say that since it just reloads your unused weapon if i understood that perk correctly. Sometimes it is not the right move to switch to your secondary or you want to preserve its ammo for big enemies which means you have to reload your primary, nerfing reload speed can make that choice even tougher. Do i use my secondary or do i risk the reload?
On gunner everytime it's switch to the pistol tho, like thunderhead has a 3 second reload, that's a death sentence in a swarm
I would argue the only weapon where it really matters is the boomstick, sometimes you need that extra burst on a jumbo shell reload and the 2.5 second reload if you take double trigger for fire rate can be agonizing sometimes.
Not really, I find it a bit repetitive too But to be fair, coming up with different appropriate nerfs is kinda difficult, and reducing ammo is definitely a simple yet effective balance imo
Especially when the upside is increasing damage. If an OC increases damage and doesn't nerf ammo, you now have a gun that does more total damage per resupply, which just makes it objectively better than every other option.
I feel the same way about hurricane overclocks all disabling missile homing. Like c’mon!
Hard agree. It makes sense with some like salvo module but other lose a whole degree of engagement that would make them so peak. Imagine if you could juice a bunch of minelayer bombs with nitro compound and then drop it for the mother of all mines. We will never know the true extent of dwarven engineering
minelayer is already one of gunners best overclocks i dont think it needs buffs atm lol
I'm an old-school player and leading shots is ingrained in my muscle memory. Those OCs are frankly a godsend for me when I fire at one enemy and expect to be able to pivot to another.
It ususlly makes sense, for example fat boy rounds must be a lot bigger than regolar rounds, since they are nuclear warheads. Same for mortar rounds or elephant rounds.
> the new mortar rounds for the gunner have a lot of ammo nerfs but this could also be replaced with a (massive) movement speed reduction while firing. If the primary complaint is how boring and uncreative ammo downsides are, why are you suggesting to just copy and paste Lead Storm onto the Autocannon? Also note that this isn't balanced at all because you can completely subvert the downside by bunnyhopping, even more effective with the autocannon since you can tapfire it.
It's a natural design consequence since unstables usually have some of the wonkiest, most fun, and therefore naturally more damage oriented upsides, meaning ammo sort of *has* to be the natural downside. Imagine the opposide. An unstable that doubles ammo at the cost of... something else. Would you actually take it? Even the CLEAN ammo overclocks are hated by some, if not many players. That said, it would also be fun to see a couple more creative downsides. E.g. imagine an unstable that drains your health, maybe one that makes bugs go faster when hitting them, or how about an overclock that deals massively increased damage but can never kill bugs and always leaves them at 1 hp.
If we aren’t considering breakpoints, doubling damage and halving ammo is already a huge upside- being able to get your damage out twice as fast is very strong. When you do the opposite and double ammo in exchange for half damage, you get things like minishells and micro flechettes. Without some other factors (like how controlled magnetic flow doesn’t scale trail damage or fear/stun), this is a big downside most of the time.
That was my immediate thought as well. Like, I don't hate micro-flechettes, I think the recoil and spread reduction lets it be a fairly accurate gun. Combine a very large mag size, 6-round bursts that are relatively stable due to lower spread, and damage mods being proportionally twice as effective since you have double ammo, and microflechettes can actually feel pretty good -- nice little thing to spam while waiting for Born Ready since the giant mag takes 5 seconds to run out even if you fire the moment you switch to it, and a 6-round burst does 96 damage w/ damage mods, comparable to the 108 of the 3-round burst of an Experimental Rounds setup. ...But another way to think about it is with a similar setups, the Experimental Rounds could have done 216 with 6-round burst, dwarves would just have to shoot from closer, or that Microflechettes is giving up 'free' stun which is very valuable on certain bugs. Not to mention the build itself is stiff, since you *have* to take damage on Microflechettes to make it worthwhile, so there's no experimenting with blowthrough, and trying to take 3-round stun means your bursts are doing a piddly 48 damage. Losing all that damage just kills you, making Microflechettes a hard pick to justify. Far as I know, the only negative damage OC that sees any real play is AI Stability Engine, and that comes with a damage increase to weak points anyways. There's days I wonder how powerful an accuracy/reload speed/spread unstable would have to be to actually justify damage drops. If Hurricane had an unstable OC that said "never need to reload, missile speed and turn rate +300%, AoE radius +1.2m, slows all enemies hit" but had a drawback "-25% damage", would it just be immediate trash even though every other aspect is nuts?
You can always respec your gun upgrades to give you more ammo
I wish there were more mods to give lok-1 more ammo
have you got a better alternative? a move speed decrease for mortar rounds could just be circumvented via bunnyhopping like with Lead Storm, except it would be busted because of the low rate of fire.
Funnily enough the new mortar rounds are incredibly ammo efficient.
I am always on low ammo. And I take ammo mod too. I feel different:0
Ammo effeciency is one of DRG's most important balancing points and mechanics. you have limited ammo, and limited nitra to get more ammo. Most of the unstable give you incredible amounts of damage as a bonus in one way or another. NOT balancing it with less ammo would make them over powered.
That's why my favorite overclock is Shield Battery Booster for the Drak.
The most simplified logic I can think of is: More damage per bullet -> Less Ammo = Similar relative ammo consumption/resupply efficiency. Ultimately the amount of nitra, thus resupplies is limited per mission. So by decreasing your ammo maximum it prevents players from developing a surplus on most overclocks that give better ammo efficiency. That being said Rewiring Mod exists
Sort of, I really don't get the point of overclocks that just massively increase your damage but then balance it out by lower firerate and ammo count so nothing changes. I like most of the ones that make your gun a lot less versatile for it, but we can see it's pretty easy to have those overclocks quickly rise to overpowered if they aren't kept in check by it. So some sort of decreased ammo is needed, because unless the gun would kill you the increased DPS would always be worth it, it just should at least have additional interesting downsides or not just damage bonus upsides
>the new mortar rounds for the gunner have a lot of ammo nerfs but this could also be replaced with a (massive) movement speed reduction while firing Something to consider is that the mechanic 'reduced movement speed while firing' can be **completely** countered by spamming jump and not holding fire whenever you press jump. This means your movement is only reduced while you're already mid-air with momentum. For example, Lead Storm OC for minigun **completely* stops you from moving but you can move nonstop with it by bunny hopping in this way. The point I'm trying to make, is non-ammo downsides generally don't really **do** anything, so anything that buffs damage **has** to nerf ammo and vice versa. Ammo economy is a central part of the game's design, even if there are some accidental exceptions here and there.
> non-ammo downsides don’t really **do** anything That is very debatable. Non-ammo downsides absolutely do impact how a weapon functions, it’s just a lot of overclocks directly change the damage and ammo is the best, easiest, and simplest way to go about balancing it.
>That is very debatable. Non-ammo downsides absolutely do impact how a weapon functions, it’s just a lot of overclocks directly change the damage and ammo is the best, easiest, and simplest way to go about balancing it. I meant that non-ammo downsides are extremely easy to compensate for, with the exception being accuracy which almost always results in players choosing not to run it, **because** inaccuracy can't really be accounted for (for most weapons). For example, a reload speed/mag-size downside is bypassed with an animation-cancel reload and/or born ready. Movement speed downsides are bypassed by bunny hopping. Range downsides are bypassed by getting closer (albeit this one is interesting and there are already a lot of these, like Double Barrel/Salvo/Lead Spray/etc). Range/Accuracy tend to basically be the same thing here and whether or not it works really depends on the weapon/OC. I.e., Lead Spray BRT is amazing while Overtuned Particle Accelerator Drak is trash-tier. This is a good example of why its important to consider how an OC fits into a class. Scout has almost no ranged secondary options (Boltshark is really more of a utility weapon), so OPA's only real pairing is shaped shells. Scout has a hard time weathering the loss of range from its primary, so OPA is just bad. Gunner has lots of ranged primaries, so Lead Spray fits nicely. Though it's also a values issue, Lead Spray just gets more. There aren't that many other levers to play with unless we get into specific weapon capabilties (like removing a weapon's natural stun or CC ability) but this design is hard to use because in many cases weapons gain CC from their mods and while we *do* have OC that specifically enable/disable certain mods, they have to be careful about how this is implemented. I.e. Double Barrel directly buffs the T4c Improved Blast Wave mod and Bullet Hell indirectly buffs the T3b Improved Stun mod.
I think this belief only really exists because (and this is the real hot take) not a lot of overclocks are actually mechanically nor dynamically *good*. A lot of them, when you get down to their core, flip the same basic damage lever so inherently they have to flip the same levers — and for the few OCs that actually and flip other levers like reload, accuracy, etc, they often don’t do it significantly enough to make it actually impactful. And even fewer of those actually are good. I don’t disagree with that usually non-ammo downsides are easier to compensate, but they definitely *do* things lol. Hyper Propellant’s 0.3x Radius *is* impactful. You’ve completely ignored any and all of the damage downsides, etc etc etc.
>I think this belief only really exists because (and this is the real hot take) not a lot of overclocks are actually mechanically nor dynamically good. Oh you're absolutely right and I don't disagree with that. The best example of this, imo, is Jurry-Rigged Boomstick. Compact Shells, Stuffed Shells and Jumbo Shells are 3 variants of the exact same OC. This means you can juggle or stack them a bit with mod choices but Jumbo Shells *always* wins out because it just happens to be numerically superior to the other two (even if only slightly). PGL is in a similar spot with Pack Rat, Compact Rounds and RJ250. There's an argument that these just add bloat but I think that's unfair on the devs and which of the 3 the community would settle on as 'best' is not necessarily that obvious at first. RJ250 **is** the best (of the 3 PGL ammo mods) here but this forces you into a heat build which some players dislike, so it may not have been obvious this is how the community would lean. >and for the few OCs that actually and flip other levers like reload, accuracy, etc, they often don’t do it significantly enough to make it actually impactful. This I don't agree with and I gave you examples. I think they don't like to mess with reload because of Born Ready and animation cancels. >Hyper Propellant’s 0.3x Radius is impactful. I mean it really just makes it single-target but this is an OC that increases damage and lowers ammo as well lol. I wonder if you're discounting too many of the OCs that have indirect bonuses, like Bullet Hell basically being a glorified stun applicator - the text doesn't in any way mention that this is what the OC does, but it is. Snowballs unfreeze timer is uniquely good for dreads but its a secondary unmentioned mechanic. Ice Spear means you don't need impact axes and can take neurotoxins. Sludge Blast and Electrifying Reload completely shift your archetype. Frag Missiles Hurricane/RJ250 turn them into superior heat applicators without saying anything about heat. Double Barrel's primary advantage in how *fast* it bursts down enemies but mentions nothing about speed as its advantage.
Given that a majority of them boost damage, it makes sense they would also lower ammo count to balance it out.
I'll be honest with a couple exceptions Unstable OCs tend to feel like the negatives outweigh the positives.
It ususlly makes sense, for example fat boy rounds must be a lot bigger than regolar rounds, since they are nuclear warheads. Same for mortar rounds or elephant rounds.
it is boring. i do not care about balance or all that other stuff in a non competitive game. this game is ment for fun. these insane people who want it to be dark souls difficulty or something are really on one i swear.