Hitscan Charge-Weapons

[DDRRE]

Have we considered having hitscan charge weapons? Like the Halo pistol:



Perhaps the Enforcer primary can be charged when the key is held. Or maybe have super-strong stinger shards that work like hitscan when released after being charged?

[Wail]

Halo's Plasma Pistol is a projectile. So that's a bad example.

I do think it'd be fun to have something like this in UT. Are we talking core weaponset here or mod weapons?

[Dementiurge]

The impact hammer is a charged hitscan. :thatguy.gif:

[FirebornForm]

That halo pistol is more akin to the dispersion pistol and yes we've talked about charging projectiles and the DP.

We've also talked about charging hitscan. Wayyyy back in summer ? of last year our friend Tidal Blast made a proposal to make Shock primary charge fire. You can imagine the backlash from that, but it's kind of the same backlash as ever for changing anything about the shock rifle. Besides the shock rifle I don't know what else you would do for a charged hitscan weapon? Sniper definitely does not suit it, but if we swapped that out for the LightningGun or Gauss Rifle then it would work a lot better.

[LeMNaDe xD]

Sniper definitely does not suit it, but if we swapped that out for the LightningGun or Gauss Rifle then it would work a lot better.

My thoughts exactly

I think its a great idea. Considering some people aren't necessarily fond of the helmet starts, this might be a better solution to the sniper's balancing issues. Just off the top of my head:

No charge:
body shot = 60 hp
head shot = 90 hp (1.5x body shot)

Full charge:
body shot = 90 hp
head shot = 135 hp (1.5x body shot)

As long as the right indicators are there to show your opponent has a full charge, I could see this working out pretty nicely.

Our problem right now is that we only we only have damage and rate of fire to tweak for balancing purposes. The charged hit-scan route would mean we have a whole new set of add variables to play around, giving us more opportunity to make a sniper-like weapon work (without having to resort to helmets on every fresh spawn ).

[FirebornForm]

A bow seems a little hard to justify in UT against all of the other over the top weapons, ChaosUT has em but it's not such a drastically out of place gun due to Chaos being a mixture of some medieval low tech stuff as well (sword / grapple winch / crossbow ect).

If we had a bow though I think it would be an alternate to the Sniper instead of a replacement outright to anygun. Bow could have zero trace fire so it's essentially the stealth option, while sniper is power, and lightning is alternative effects.
Bow in futuristic games always make me think of the Techbow from Turok though Personally I don't find Bows to be interesting enough to use on their own compared to the rest of the weapon set, however we don't have to just look at standard bow and arrows and call it a day, perhaps a little inspiration can be found via the land of comics? There has definitely been a good run of bow and arrow heroes in comics.

[DDRRE]

This still sounds interesting.

[nubizZz]

The only hit scan weapon theme that would really do enough damage in one shot to justify a charge mechanic is the sniper rifle. The only problem with a charge mechanic on an arena sniper rifle, is that the charge mechanic is more of an imposed bring up time, where the power of a sniper rifle in an arena shooter is it's put down time, which would be inherently unaffected by such a mechanic. This can be seen in the hellbender turret seat, where a charge mechanic is employed in a situation where it's your only fire mode. Since you can't "dump it" for another more appropriate close range weapon easily (you can switch seats, but it's a bit disorienting), then the charge limitation makes sense, and adds versatility. I also really don't think the sniper rifle needs the versatility of a faster, lower damage follow up shot.

A bow would make sense for a charge mechanic, but not to be hit scan.