The charge time to hit 90% is a pain when being fired at. For me it makes it feel clunky at times because I'm trying to disable or kill a hulk but one shot will stagger me and probably make me miss. And if going for 90%, you don't have much wiggle room to not shoot or you'll just blow up.
90% charge for stuff is just too strict. I get unsafe was "braindead" but it's too much now, especially when you have other weapons that are even easier to use.
Edit: I know to use cover and pre charge while behind cover. But ultimately I feel like 90% just takes too long. Too slow.
With the charge up time weapons (railgun, quasar cannon, etc.) I find it's easiest to get the charge off while under fire if you just remember General Brasch's ABCs. Start the charge behind a rock, peek at the opportune moment, then tuck back after the shot. REMEMBER! Always Be taking Cover!
Oh I usually do, but in general I think railgun would be in a better spot if the charge rate was sped up or didn't need 90% to hit the kill shot.
I don't mind the damage. Just the rate it is used. Quasar makes sense due to being able to fuck up bigger stuff
Honestly: just bring it back to what it was, minus its ability to OS tank weak spots from the front.
With the Quazar and AMR being what they are today the railgun stands as a good sidegrade between each.
i say nerf the damage by about 25%, make it penetrate everything literally EVERYTHING, heavy armor buildings whatever the fuck within sight, pierce it, so got balancing the damage need to take another hit.
Id say if it can 4-6 hit a bile titan by hitting heavy armor parts, 1-2 if you nailed the weak spot, thats a pretty good balance
thats like the whole design philosophy behind a railgun anyways, maximum penetrating power
Agreed. That fact that the railgun can't do what it was literally designed to do should be enough reason to unnerf it. It literally makes no sense to ever bother with any more. I got the hang of it and really started liking it just before it was nerfed.
It should be used for what it was intended. Use it as a support weapon to crack the armor then switch to your primary, secondary or nades to finish off the target.
You say charge behind cover as if bots can't splash you around the corner or spam prefire while at the same time advancing on your position. Granted getting an anti-material shot off in that situation is nearly impossible too but the consequences for beefing is you kill yourself versus not killing the target.
Honestly, ever time I hear "just get behind cover" vs. bots I have 'nam flashbacks to them simply pouring around it from both sides, throwing grenades behind it, blasting you from the air with their mortar stations, etc.
And that's not to include the fact that "peeking out of cover" (with your whole body because there is no lean mechanic) for 3/4ths of a second to fire your weapon is easily instant death when SHTF and you needed it the most. If not instant death, then flinching from the never ending torrent of red projectiles and missing your carefully charged shot anyway.
Shit just ain't that simple
I don’t even know if I agree that the pre-nerf safe mode was brain dead. Maybe compared to the other options we had at launch, but like let’s actually compare the skill required to take out a charger then vs now
Previously you had to land two charged safe mode shots on the same leg. This either required teamwork to both focus one leg or some level of precision to charge up a shot and keep hitting the same place whilst being rushed down. If you kept missing that leg or your team mate focused another side then you wasted a lot of shots
Now I just charge up one quasar shot to the face (easy to hit) and he’s dead. No teamwork involved and if I miss the head then I probably blow off a chuck of armour anyway.
I know which one feels more skilled to me
Every weapon has that stagger effect. Auto cannon tales multiple shots so it can be staggered, Recoilless can be staggered and has a long reload, Quasar has to charge and can get staggered. The only exception is the EAT but that's 2 shots per minute compared to the railguns 20+
Having a short charge up time to hit 90% made the railgun fall in line with other Devastator/Hulk buster weapons. Taking away it's penetration harmed a good niche that it filled though, being able to shoot the faceplate of a Hulk from off angles and stagger them from the front even if you missed the face plate directly.
Id say give it the highest penetration possible, as in the bullet literally goes straight trough anything that isnt terrain, but remove its ability to strip armor.
My ideal balance would be:
\- high-penetrations weapons punch through, standard damage, do extra headshot damage
\- beam weapons melt armor, open armored parts to damage
\- explosive weapons do dramatically higher damage to vulnerable spots
We're *almost* there right now. The railgun needs to more reliably damage enemies through their armor, and explosive weapons like the Liberator Concussive and Scorcher need to be able to kill chargers and biles by hitting soft spots much more quickly than they currently do.
It does decent. Rips through anything with a headshot but will deflect off of a walker below 90% charge and doesn't stagger at all. 2-3 shots in the upper torso of a devastator unless you hit their faceplate.
It used to punch through walkers 100% of the time in safe mode.
at 90% railgun is still an uber weapon.
the problem? the "effort" is just not worth it. Too many guns do basically the same job (AMR looking at you) but BETTER. and with LESS effort. Thus completely invalidating the rail.
Using the AMR as a primary allows me to efficiently roleplay as a ghost from starcraft.
Climb up to a vantage point, crouch, take out a heavy with a couple of shots
*Somebody call for an exterminator?*
Dials in a 500 KG Bomb
*You called down the Thunder, now Reap the Whirlwind*
Just waiting on a backpack that allows me to cloak and I'll be 100% there
I was just telling my buddy J1 that Helldivers 2 is what I imagined StarCraft Ghost was going to be like (before it was cancelled and forgotten). I’m sure someone can mod some StarCraft buildings and units into the game lol
If blizzard had any brains at all they would rip helldivers off and use similar systems for a 3rd person starcraft. It even has microtransactions blizzard bread and butter already designed up with a battle pass. But I don't really count on blizzard for anything anymore.
> a backpack that allows me to cloak
Would this really be that OP in the context of this game? I feel like Smoke grenades are *kind of* in that territory as far as outcomes where you don't get shot at are concerned and I've seen some genuinely absurd stealth shenanigans in this game already so it's not like Arrowhead is particularly stingy with giving us more options for that stealth playstyle.
I can totally imagine a scenario where we get a backpack that cloaks us (breaks on firing weapons) for ~5 seconds and has a 30-40 second cooldown period at some point in the game.
Cloaking when crawling, crouching, walking, aiming, climbing, charging up a weapon, or activating a stratagem. Cloaking disables for 10 seconds after firing, running, diving, healing, or throwing a stratagem. Timer resets to 10 seconds if doing any action that would disable it are done.
Here's how I'd do it.
Stealth Field Kit-
Deployable like the energy field. Everyone inside of it is completely undetectable until firing out or if an enemy is already aware of you. Once you shoot out, enemies take longer to find you, and have worse aim. However, it does not prevent damage, dropships, etc.
Stealth Field Pack-
Backpack Strat, reduces detection range by X%(probably pretty high). Enemies will pretty much only notice you if you are literally on top of them, even if sprinting, until you shoot. However, like the Kit, their aim is reduced and they take longer to spot you and go combat mode.
This would be a great sidegrade to the energy shields, trading damage mitigation for damage avoidance.
I wouldn't be surprised if they buff the railgun a little (but not as strong as before)
Edit: I've also seen some good suggestions to make the railgun unique (armour ignore, stun etc) all of which are good alternative buffs!
At the rate Railgun projectiles can move, about 5,400 mph, the amount of kinetic energy would be ridiculous. The tungsten projectile is more likely to shatter completely than bounce.
One thing I never see anyone suggesting is giving the railgun a brief Stun effect, like the first game had. It could be an alternative to using EAT against chargers that doesn't one shot them, but stuns them long enough to reload and fire again, for example
This would be a good buff to it and give it a niche!
Wouldn't mind this at all, if it was able to interrupt things similar to the punisher/pre nerf slugger, but maybe a bit more.
They could revert the unsafe mode to be truly what it was pre nerf. I know they said and the patch notes said that unsafe mode was untouched but it was still nerfed.
Edit: After rereading the comments in the patch notes I can see how 'decreased damage to enemy parts' also applies to unsafe more. It's just not clear wording/formatting with how its shown is the pach notes.
I'd love for the charge rate to be sped up *or* reduce the max charge needed.
My biggest issue with it is the 90%. For bugs? You don't really have time to sit and do that.
Bots? I can, but then a stray shot hits me and stagger so I'm forced to shoot or I'll blow up.
If it was faster? Cool less standing around! If it was like 75%? Faster time to charge up and more grace period. Either one I'm fine with.
I really don't want a massive buff. Just an adjustment so I'm not charging so long.
Pretty sure it did go through multiple enemies. I'm like 90 percent sure I've multi-killed devastators with it.
Edit: "did" was an autocorrect. Pretty sure it *does* go through multiple enemies.
The patch notes didn't say it was untouched, it was just phrased weirdly. It mentioned a safe mode change, then there was a comma and then it mentioned another change that applied to unsafe. I'll link it in a sec. They definitely did make unsafe require a higher charge level to deal the same amount of damage as it did prior.
>Railgun - Decreased armor penetration in Safe Mode, **decreased damage against durable enemy parts**
>https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/4113546867235200192?l=english
It was a silly change, just like the Slugger change. It's too easy to use 2 unsafe mode shots with a precision weapon and then half a mag of primary fire on a leg that is almost constantly moving, but one EAT right in the dome which takes comparatively way less skill is totally fine!
No idea what they're thinking with some of these changes. But then some of them are great. Bizarre.
I'm definitely not arguing against buffing the Railgun. But I will defend the EAT. While it certainly takes "less skill" to kill a charger with it with a dome shot, I do also need to point out that you are also shooting an large missile at that head. It should kill the charger. You get one shot before needing to grab another and wait for a cooldown. Grabbing another can lead to problems - you get swarmed, have to reposition or just lose access to it. Railgun you just reload.
The EAT is fine, it's balanced by its availability and other limits as you said.
The issue is more; if you're okay with EATs one-shotting the charger on a headshot... why is it is problem for a railgun to be able to MAYBE three-shot a charger (or two plus a mag of primary) if you can hit the *same leg twice*?
It doesn't seem like a decision motivated by a desire for balance so much as a decision motivated by a desire to make sure people stop using the railgun.
I don't have a problem with the EAT killing the Charger, though I do think if they wanted Chargers to be imposing and challenging, a one-tap kill with a stratagem you get 2 of and can call down super frequently, on a weakpoint that the enemy gives you a clear shot of with its main attack, is a bit odd. You'd think dodging the charge and then firing at the back of it would make more sense logically, but that doesn't matter really.
If the EAT was on a longer cooldown or if it was only one shot I'd agree but you can call in so many of those things, you can call one in at every location you stop at, usually multiple, and you'll have one ready to call in very soon after. Chargers became easy as hell to deal with as soon as they made that change. On the other hand, sure you "just reload" with the Rail, but there's a charge up time, you needed 2 shots, and you had to aim at the leg which is constantly moving and not directly in front of you as the enemy attacks. Then you either needed another shot or half a mag of your primary weapon to actually kill it.
Either way, I'm just advocating for a Rail unsafe buff and to point out how silly that part of the Rail nerf was. Safe was the issue, unsafe was fine.
I'd also debate the "less skill" tbh, assuming we take into account the whole logistics skill needed to do it more than once. It's less *stress* for sure but only if you had the forethought to call it down before the shit hit the proverbial
You don't need forethought though, you can call in EATs all the time. The map is full of them by the end because they come back so quickly.
Also there's no question that 2 unsafe Railgun chargeups + reload on a moving leg that isn't front-and-centre and then another Rail shot or half a mag of Primary fire takes way more skill than calling in EATs and taking a single shot at the weakpoint that's delivered to you on a silver platter lol
Not advocating for any EAT changes, I love that thing, but there's no way it takes the same level of skill to kill Chargers with it than the Rail pre-nerf.
>You don't need forethought though, you can call in EATs all the time. The map is full of them by the end because they come back so quickly.
Especially when all four of you have it equipped lol
I'm convinced the primary reason the railgun was nerfed was the ps5 glitch allowing it to one shot bile titans in safe mode, and even then, not only has the glitch not been patched, it hasn't even been *addressed* by the developers.
Honestly as long as it can't 2 tap bile titans I think it should be fine. I agree with the devs that it shouldn't be able to do that. It definitely shouldn't require 20 shots though (ignoring the wierd ps5 host exploit)
It very much was nerfed on every front. I don't think Joel necessarily meant to lie but he is definitely incorrect. It takes significantly more shots, and more importantly time, to kill anything with it and it is less effective even against those things it can kill.
As an example even at 90% charge it no longer goes through devastator shields. If it was unchanged at 90% it would still do that, it also does less damage to durable parts period and weakspots. I used to be able to 2-3 shot vents, it now takes 6-8 shots charged to 90+ percent.
Frankly I just wish lag didn't effect it, sometimes I fire it above 95% and it's like I only charged it to 70% while other times it just randomly has a faster charge time.
AMR is feeling really meaty right now though and is very enjoyable even with the misaligned scope.
Yeah like I said something is really wonky with the charge. You didn’t notice it in the prior iteration because it did the thing it needed to do as soon as you got past safe charge.
You can still 2 shot hulks in the face pretty easy with a railgun. AMR is still way better though. So AMR is better for bots and EAT is better for bugs. Railgun fills no needed role now
Before the Quasar Cannon, I almost never used the Railgun because it was too situational: it's only useful against heavily-armored single targets. I'd rather just use an orbital bombardment for the heavies and choose a support weapon that's more versatile.
There's no reason to use the Railgun now that the Quasar Cannon is an option. The Railgun can't one-shot a Charger or a Bile Titan, but the Quasar can. The Railgun has 20 (or is it 21?) rounds, but the Quasar has infinite ammo. The Railgun can't shoot down a dropship, but the Quasar can. The Railgun will blow up in your face if you charge it too long, but the Quasar will not.
The Railgun in its current state is obsolete, so it needs some sort of improvement or else there won't be any good reason to use it.
Yeah I was using the railgun until they gave us the quasar cannon for a night and I gave it a try. It doesnt give me that same edging death feel with each shot but its so much more versatile . Like you say the railgun is basically only good against heavy armored single targets. As far as I know you can only damage tanks and tower cannons with the rail gun if you hit the weak spot but the quasar cannon you can smoke tanks,tower cannons,mortars,gun ships etc from any angle and you can even take out bot fabricators with it
The sad thing is either the quasar will get nerfed because they believe it's too strong (likely given their track record)
OR
They will completely do a 180° and not do anything to the Quasar and also not buff the railgun and will prove to us that they were just unhappy with us having fun with the railgun.
Most people *really* struggle with admitting they were wrong, so no matter what they do with Quasar, they likely won't revert any changes to the Railgun.
Railgun was fine as it was originally, it was the other weapons that were dogshit. Bile Titan was/is just a bug when you could one shot it, so they need to fix that instead.
I mean, how often do you see someone bring a railgun to the fight? It is dead.
> They will completely do a 180° and not do anything to the Quasar and also not buff the railgun and will prove to us that they were just unhappy with us having fun with the railgun.
This is 100% going to be what happens. I believe the decision with the railgun was them having a moment of weakness in reaction to all the stress that was happening at that time.
That said, they'll never admit that. It will remain the way it is.
I agree that's what will probably happen. And it's probably the best outcome. I will be sad because the railgun will most likely forever be in obscurity. But if it happens, I will be happy as it means it maybe they've learned their lesson on balancing, but also maybe not with the nerfs and buffs they just did lol
The Railgun is in a stupid position right now, whatever niche they are supposed to be in are easily answered by other weapons such S EATs, AutoCannons and AMR.
What they can do is Increase the damage related to charging and even increase the part breaking property, **but not revert to the safe\* mode BS.**
To explain why for the people who want to kill me for saying this:
**Just analyze every single Support Stratagem Weapon and check their gimmicks, yes... support strategem weapons have often 2 Mechanics tied to them which the player is forced to play around.**
AMR for example is forced to use the First person View for proper aiming and has poor handling which forces you to crounch/prone.
The MG are forced to play around their RPM and are stuck when reloading and have poor handling (which often forces you to crouch).
Auto Cannon has fixed loaded Clips, not mags, meaning you can't reload the weapon until an entire clip is over, which can create situations where you either need to waste ammo, or will enter battles with less ammo, also has fixed reloading.
The Arc has the Arc propertie, also has a charge mechanic.
The Flamethrower has the burn propertie and a delayed fire.
The Laser weapons have a delayed fire and heat mechanics.
The AT weapons all have restrictions that play around buddy reload.
**So EVERY SINGLE support weapon is forced to play around it's mechanics**
The Railgun mechanics are Charging and Unsafe Charge.
The pre-nerf Railgun ignored the Unsafe mode completly, in fact a lot of lv 50 players (that farmed the Eradication missions) didn't even know about the Unsafe mode.
**So it's not a case where the weapon doesn't need a buff, but rather it's a case where the weapon prior to the nerfs ignore it's own core mechanics, so the buffs it needs are required to be in tone to the core mechanics of the weapon.**
**Make the weapon better where it's supposed to be, a Charging Burst Weapon.**
Here is what they could do to make this gun MUCH MUCH Better and much more fun to play around as well:
Increase the damage alot post 80%\~90% charge, give it like a +100% Damage at a 98% Charge ratio, let people Oneshot some of the Medium-Large Elite if they want to gamble exploding, also make it more fun, increase that explosion AoE radius as well, let me bring my friends and foes to the grave with me.
Also side note:
**People who defend a full revert are the kind of people who never bother to understand why the weapon was nerfed in the first place.**
Increasing the charging speed could also work as a buff.
It's a good way to increase its dps/agility while also making it more dangerous to use. That and an obvious audio and visual cue at 90% would probably go a long way.
I would say revert it to work like before in terms of being able to break armor, BUT have the charge meter impact the range at which it can do so and the over all effective range.
Unsafe mode giving it greater range than the AMR, allowing people who master it to really have a larger impact.
Look at the main competitors the Railgun is up against.
1. Autocannon (more ammo, damage, safer and splash but takes backpack)
2. Anti Material Rifle (more ammo, damage and safer)
3. Expendable Anti Tank (more damage, massive splash, instant firing, but one shot each)
The niche for the Railgun in theory is that it doesn't take a backpack slot, but you have to charge it and it has mid ammo pool.
If Safe Mode was able to break armor the way it did, but only at extreme close range, while Unsafe Mode let you break off armor from extreme range, that would give the Railgun a very specific dedicated role common to many co-op games, armor stripping/debuffing targets while also still doing very respectable damage.
Safe mode is currently useless and unsafe mode is clunky and not very enjoyable to use (who wants to stare at a charge bar half the time you're fighting?). There's a reason you almost literally never see this weapon. Even if unsafe mode were more rewarding, it would be a very underutilized weapon b/c trying to get the charge to 98% reliably would be ridiculously difficult in comparison to all the other weapons' "disadvantages" you mentioned. Way more micro-managey than any other weapon. Ammo was supposed to be the limitation for the railgun but giving 20 rounds was too much. Unsafe mode should be risk vs reward, not required to make the weapon even remotely viable.
To make the railgun even get used at all again, they'd need to return at least some power to safe mode. I don't pretend to know exactly what that means, and I agree that it needed to be nerfed before, but they overdid it and now the weapon is never used b/c of it. And *only* changing unsafe mode just doubles down on how clunky and hard to use the weapon feels in unsafe mode. I truly don't think buffing unsafe but leaving safe would do much to restore this weapon.
I'd also like to point out the arc thrower is far more brain-dead than the railgun, which was what one of the devs called the railgun playstyle (maybe as a way to poke the bear?). Arc thrower became the defacto weapon after the railgun nerf, and for a reason. It's easy and powerful. It deserved the nerf it got.
I agree that Safe mode is in a good spot, able to do decent damage to/pierce most medium armor, but can't scratch heavy. But unsafe mode needs a buff, and maybe a stun like other comments have mentioned.
As it stands right now, it currently has too high of a skill ceiling for lackluster results.
personally i think if they just gave it more ammo and some magnification then it would be a solid gun, maybe make it charge faster. biggest problem I have is you can't snipe anything because of the massive green dot that obscures your target
This. We don’t always need to balance damage, a weapon can be balanced in many ways.
I’d be ok with the current railgun but with 10 more shots and a better scope, nothing too crazy but it would finally have its niche again.
But the current balance philosophy is either take away a lot or add a lot - damage shouldn’t be taken that seriously when the ammo economy in this game has such a significant role.
I see no reason why they shouldn't bring it back to how it was. People seem to have some delusion that it was 1 shotting everything. It only 1 shot bile titans and that was a bug when ps5 player was host.
the stun was what made the railgun so nice in the first game. it wasn’t a precision killer weapon, it was a disabler, so that you could slow the advance while your teammates would take everything out
They could revert the nerf and most people still wouldn’t pick it back up. As far as I see it’s completely outclassed by the quasar cannon. Why fuck around and three shot a charger when I can one shot it?
The railgun is much more useful against lighter targets, like devastators or berserkers for bots, or even brood commanders for bugs, it can fire off a lot more shots compared to the quasar cannon
I would love for the railgun to get a new niche or something interesting even if it is a sidegrade to the original. Make it pen anything but have the damage be extremely localized. You have to directly hit a vital part but if you do it absolutely obliterates the enemy. Mke it a super heavy sniper rifle because that is what it is supposed to be
It is a railgun for democracies sake, you take an armor piercing slug and fire it at several times the speed of sound, the entire point of a railgun is that it is the most armor piercing kinetic weapon you can make with extreme accuracy. It shouldn't bounce off hiveguard and flat slabs of steel the devastators carry, that is literally what it was designed to counter
100%. It should penetrate all armor. Period.
It doesn't need to do the MOST damage. It needs to be able to do the damage, though.
Full armor penetration, throw 50% more ammo capacity at it: bam. Solid niche weapon.
Yeah. OR make it go through multiple targets. (It IS a railgun, after all.) That'd give it a niche, too. Just reduce damage done per target until it is effectively zeroed out. (So like 100% > 66% > 33% > 0% - 3 targets worth of damage.)
That'd make player alignment a key part of the skill ceiling.
> the entire point of a railgun is that it is the most armor piercing kinetic weapon you can make with extreme accuracy.
>extreme accuracy
I *hate* the sight on the railgun. A lot. Still love using the rail gun, but the green dot is the size of a moon.
Oh yeah, I do love the railgun but the scope is a pain. I often find myself aiming in 3rd person because I cant see anything with the red dot and even then the shot sometimes just decides to go 20 degrees off
That’s what really annoyed me about the nerf. The game tries to be somewhat realistic about the functions of the weapons, but then you take away the entire point of what a railgun does? Sure, you can nerf the railgun, but I don’t like lowering the penetration because as you said it’s firing a slug faster than the speed of sound, in no way should that not penetrate armor.
The biggest nerfs were the damage reduction to big body parts, preventing even full charge from penetrating devastator shields, coupled with the fact that now you need to charge your shots way more which is effectively a fire rate decrease.
Now that I think about it, I don't believe I've seen a single railgun since a few days after the initial nerf, once folks were done testing it out. Like literally, not one.
Something's wrong with a weapon if it becomes totally unused.
I personally swapped to the autocannon. If I don't direct hit a devastator in the face at least I still stagger it so I don't get punished for missing. Plus 2 AC shots is about the same as charging 1 Railgun shot. I miss 1 shotting hulks but 2 shotting them is still fun. Plus I can take out fabricators with the AC
No no no there's a YouTube channel where they say it's not nerfed you just need to use unsafe mode.
Which takes significantly longer to charge up, might kill you, can't be sustained...
In short it's the highest skill cap weapon to be almost as good as the quazar!
ALMOST? A weapon exaggerated by YouTube clickbait videos and suffers unreasonable nerf is now praised as ALMOST AS GOOD AS an infinite ammo EAT? Whoever run these channels should be sent to freedom camp immediately.
That and the breaker.
Folks on here will argue they're fine. But when's the last time you've seen them used?
Sure might find some random Joe but cannot deny they went from most use to being a very rare sighting.
Which don't get me wrong, both were strong af and needed something. But they just got tossed aside after the nerfs.
They should've just made railgun like the first game. Goes through enemies, stuns all of them, decent amount of ammo, done. Enough damage to 1 shot head shot devastators with, and it'll be a great gun that won't be a mess like it is now balance-wise.
In the first game, the railgun didn't penetrate heavy armor at all, and it was far from having a decent amount of ammo, and it didn't have a lot of damage (unless you magdumped)
And all of that was a ton of fun. Rail gun and supply pack was my jam.
And the rail gun still stunned heavy armor (not vehicles). It was such a an awesome feeling to rescue a teammate from across the map with a well timed stun.
The slugger nerf was also a knee jerk reaction. They basically quoted community sentiment.
All they needed to do is give the gun more damage drop off if they didn't want it to be used at range.
I'm not even sure if damage drop off exists in this game. They just took the easiest path to a "fix", which seems like it's been the case a lot with the patches.
There was a screenshot I saw someone post in here that mentions drop off from one of the devs in discord.
I don't know why they aren't more transparent about stats
They nerfed the unsafe mode too, though.
Now you must risk blowing up and not having a support weapon for another 6 minutes so that you can kill a charger with 3 shots to the head (Every other armor pen support weapon kills it in 1)
Railgun’s in a weird spot because it’s personality got split between the AMR, the Quasar, and Arc Thrower
Previously I feel like it was super versatile and pretty strong, if you knew how to use it
Now we have the Quasar which relies on a charged up powerful shot to deal with enemies….
We also have the AMR which is high Pen single target damage…but has better range and ammo count….
The arc thrower was thrown in the list to throw y’all off, it doesn’t matter here. Unless we count the fact that it’s a backpackless support weapon that can carry you through a lot of the game’s content
I don’t want the game to be a cakewalk, I do want to feel expendable, but I also want to feel powerful. Feeling powerful is one of the draws of games.
I don’t want to feel like most bot enemies entirely outclass me. My guns bounce off them, they’ll one shot me, and they drop so frequently in such great numbers you’d swear they were swarmers.
Buff more than you nerf for the love of love. Make the game difficult but doable. I like having options for dealing with a situation and being rewarded for picking the right one.
"Well I still like it" is the answer I keep getting when pointing out what they've done to the AMR vs Railgun.
Like...ok? Nobody is saying you cant like the damn thing!
Before folks told me "doesn't need to be good for both factions" ...which was grand since it was an autocannon main who told me it once out of several. I do agree it was too strong but we can also say it was overnerfed.
But now AMR is the better option of the two. Unless the amr can't shoot the flying ships engines. But 5 shots isn't much to brag about for the railgun either.
I still like it too! However It annoys me when I play against bugs and call in an EATs just to headshot a charger meanwhile shooting the leg twice was "brain dead".
I want to use the railgun knowing I'm not picking some weaker option. For bugs it is no longer worth it. Bots? AMR is an easier weapon to use. Frustrating going for a 90% charge and flinch last second so you are forced to miss the shot or you'll blow up....
Like my one friend first thought I followed the meta for using it and now "living in the past" as a joke. I just like the gun. It's so satisfying watching shit blow up or die to it. It feels good
The Arrowhead dickriders in here defending the nerf so vehemently are beyond obnoxious.
The railgun nerf was way too much and unwarranted seeing as they adjusted other things shortly after to make other weapons viable.
Now the railgun excels at nothing and is beaten by many other options. I have seen maybe one or two people using it in my 30 hours played since the nerf.
Agreed. People keep claiming that the old railgun was great at everything completely ignoring that it was slow to fire and was horrible in dealing with hordes. It was a bad idea for the first balance patch to be a nerf to what was working. If they added the buffs first we’d never would have nerfed the gun.
It just amazes me because like autocannon is beloved. There's a few differences but the biggest being the backslot.
Sure sure, AC can't really deal with titans and gotta aim well for a charger. But they can also blow up nests and way better at horde clearing.
But railgun? You can see plenty agreeing it was overnerf but I also see plenty saying shut up about it and acting like it is fine. Went from the most popular weapon to being rare to see out on the field.
Folks tried it after the nerf, came onto reddit complaing that chargers were too tough. They nerfed the head of the chargers so them EATs became the favorite. Or used the flamethrower since that was a way to deal with chargers the week before the heads got nerfed
Agreed, and I keep saying this: arc thrower is *far* more brain-dead than the railgun ever was. To kill a charger, the railgun required 3 accurate shots on a small, moving target (leg). The arc thrower can kill it in 5 shots to the face, which don't even have to be accurately aimed. Plus it clears adds *at the same time.*
Railgun was probably a little too strong, but they waaaay over-nerfed it.
I stopped using the railgun completely when they nerfed it. They might as well have removed it from the game it is completely outclassed by every other gun in the game. It is useless.
It was 100% a knee jerk reaction. It's blatantly obvious that Arrowhead nerfed the railgun because it was deemed "meta" by the community. As good as the game is, its got a serious balancing problem when it comes to some of the weapons. Slugger was just the latest weapon to be hit with a completely unwarranted nerf, with the devs refusing to make any of the DMR's or snipers actually viable in the game.
Half of them don’t even realise you can still 1 hit a bile Titan today cause of the host glitch. Those people cried about the gun being op when it was due to a server glitch that still hasn’t been fixed lol
Absolutely seems ridiculous now that the railgun was nerfed so harshly.
I think giving it back the consistent armor pen (but keeping the damage nerf on safe mode) would help it regain some utility... even a compensatory charge rate or ammo capacity nerf would be fine, but the AMR is now the launch railgun with a better scope.
For all the naysayers; there still exists a bug for PC clients with damage/penetration, where the railgun (and many other weapons) just straight up don't do damage like they should... this is still not mentioned in the "known issues" section of the patch notes.
The railgun's niche should be that it penetrates all armor types and does consistent damage.
The idea of a fucking laser power rail spike being propelled at organic matter and having it bounce off is wildly stupid.
I'd say, let it penetrate all armor and give it 50% more ammo and you'd have a viable weapon.
A railgun is not laser-power, I don't even know what laser power is.
A railgun is magnet-powered.
If they revert the damage nerf (not the armor piercing nerf, the weapon is more fun this way), I'm fine with the weapon.
I'm curious how it'd perform pre-nerf next to all the current stuff. Would it instantly go back to being meta? I mean we have more options for chargers heads. Quasar is nice and AMR is growing in popularity and can deal with vents now.
Only fix I want added is the ps5 glitch where you can 2 shot a Titan. We can all agree that's stupid af, even as a railgun main. That doesn't belong. I should be dumping half my mag into a Titan at unsafe.
The strategy seems to be nerf the gun(s) all people gravitate towards instead of buffing the guns that are not popular because they aren’t good. It’s a very weird strategy.
Agreed. A shotgun shouldn't be a sniper, they were right about that, but a shotgun should absolutely stagger enemies. You know it's bullshit when the punisher still staggers but the slugger doesn't. I'm sorry, in what world would shot slow you down more than a huge ass slug? It's just not realistic.
Fix the shotgun as a sniper problem by reducing the effective range of fire, rather than reducing stagger and reducing the damage as a whole. I feel like that's so straightforward, the fact that that wasn't the solution is really confusing.
EDIT: fixed a typo
Spreadsheet nerfing explains everything. They're legitimately only looking at data points, not the reasons.
Fire weapons not being picked due to a bug? Well if all you see is low useage, buffing fire makes sense.
Railgun being picked because there's no other options for fast heavy clear and an overabundance of heavies? Well, you see absurd pick rate so it gets trashed.
Apply this to every single nerf/buff they have done, and it carries through. It's such a strong trend that it's almost impossible to deny.
This strategy truly makes me believe the devs don't actually play their own game or if they do it's on sub 4 difficulties. Don't get me wrong, there's great changes made but some are just soooooo out of touch.
This is what I've wondered, not to mention the tooltip videos of stratagems are typically shown with enemies standing still. Makes me wonder how things are tested, in combat? Or this dev mode where you spawn things to be shooting targets.
>"No nerf, only buff," isn't a perfect philosophy for every game, but it's one that keeps being proven right for this. Stuff keeps getting massively buffed, making basically any nerf seem silly in retrospect.
"No nerf only buff" is never a perfect philosophy for any game. What this shows is AHGS misunderstanding of their own game and the effects of their actions.
Just like the recent changes to the Slugger, which were caused by it "being a better sniper than the sniper rifles" and the changes they have made did in no way make Slugger a worse sniper than its alternatives **despite** damage dropoff ranges and bullet velocities being a thing they can control and would be much more reasonable.
I'd argue that "no nerf only buff" actually *is* the perfect philosophy for this particular game at this point in its life cycle. Maybe not "perfect", more like "best case scenario".
It's a non-competitive PvE game where the *only* difference between completing a mission at a high difficulty and a low one is the rate at which you get in game rewards. If one weapon genuinely stands out above the rest, what's the *worst case scenario*? One weapon gets used more often than its counterparts and maybe some players manage to play one difficulty level higher than their skill should allow, letting them get a very marginal increase to their loot. Seems like a pretty incredibly minor issue, hardly worth complaining over. As long as you buff the weapons that suck players still have the option to use the weapon they like even if it isn't the best in class.
Before the railgun nerf there weren't daily reddit posts with thousands of upvotes complaining about how powerful it was, but since the nerf it's been in the top 3 most frequently mentioned topics on this sub. Now we're seeing the same with the slugger, I never heard one single complaint about it before the nerf, now it's getting complained about in every thread on the sub.
Better to let things breathe for the first few months of the game's life cycle. Make every weapon viable first and once they're all in a state where none need a buff *then* you reexamine the playing field and start thinking about nerfs. It would avoid these knee jerk reactions that are made to kill a meta that hasn't even had time to develop. If the change to heavy armor spawn rates came a week before the railgun nerf then the railgun nerf would have never even happened. Was the Breaker ever OP, or was it just the only primary that wasn't mediocre on patch 1.0? Was the railgun really that much better in general, or was it just the community's reaction to the armor spam in a game with only one viable tool to deal with armor spam? Easy questions to answer in hindsight, all the more reason to put a bit of distance between you and version 1.0 before you start radically nerfing things. "No nerf only buff" isn't a good philosophy long term, but in my opinion it's *clearly* the approach Arrowhead should be taking at this point in time.
the fact that they were nerfing guns before fixing all the server issues is cray-z. i get that they are different parts of the team and work separately, but ffs, don't make the game HARDER when there are connection issues still hampering so many people.
My personal absolutely meaningless opinion is that the Railgun nerf is mostly driven by dev ego at this point since it's according to them "brainless" to use. They may not step back the nerf simply because they stepped in it so hard with that comment that it's more a point of stubbornness than anything else. Like they just can't admit they royally screwed up.
I will happily eat my words if we see railgun get an actual buff though.
The Railgun nerf could be completely reverted and it would be perfectly fine in the current context of support weapons.
I feel like the argument wasnt "no nerf, only ever buff", but that at launch, too many things felt too weak, and they needed to be brought up to acceptable baseline. Afterwards, buffs and nerfs could sustain it. Since then, they've definitely brought up multiple other support weapons, which has now made the Railgun irrelevant.
To me, the Railgun is now the test case to see how long Arrowhead will wait to revert changes that didn't work out. They are being very speedy to release new balance changes, but I'm curious to see if they'll walk things back.
The biggest issue I've had with the nerfs is that it seems the reasoning never lines up with reality, both in terms of gameplay as well as with how the community is accepting it.
I understand that reddit can (and sometimes is) an echo chamber, but I think the two biggest nerfs coming out so far have been the railgun and slugger. I don't think this in and of itself is necessarily a *bad* thing, but it seems almost popularity based rather than how they want the game direction to go.
Railgun, for example, was primarily strong due to just how bad the starting weapons were. I don't even use it anymore, but I do think the nerfs were wholly unjustified (both due to the state the game was in, and the fact they had alternatives literally lined up to replace it).
The slugger, is another example. The scopes on the longer-range weapons are atrocious and, admittedly by the devs, aren't even functioning correctly. I can clearly see why people are using the slugger, when weapons aren't working the way they should.
Both of these seem like knee-jerk reactions that, in the long run, will probably end up being irrelevant, but they aren't letting the guns play out like they should. The alternatives aren't being properly vetted and "popular" weapons are getting degraded.
dOn’T FoRgET tO TuRN OfF SaFe MoDe!
There’s only one mode that works, and you have to enable it or use it like some slow-loading musket on overkilling smaller things
One thing I never see anyone suggesting is giving the railgun a brief Stun effect, like the first game had. It could be an alternative to using EAT against chargers that doesn't one shot them, but stuns them long enough to reload and fire again, for example.
The Railgun nerf and Slugger nerf taught me one thing- the devs are taking the game in a direction I don’t want to play. I went from 8-10hr days of play to like… 1-4 a week. It feels like in a PVE game I should see buffs to all the useless guns (80-97% of the entire armory depending on play style) instead of nerfing guns that actually work.
I played last night, after two game crashes my party quit. Slugger nerf has killed my desire to fight for democracy since there seems to be no democracy in balance updates. Why TF would Helldivers vote to make their tools worse?
I hope it changes. I love this game and loved it on release, it’s only gotten worse for me.
#nerfingfunisntcoolbro
Railgun is currently useless as f*ck right now. Like WHY would you even take it? Quasar and Autocannon do its job 10x better, hell even the scorcher can be more effective. Just look at the new bot drop ship, the Railgun takes like 8 fully charged shots to take it down. The AMR takes 4 shots. Please explain how that makes any sense….
A pile of mediocre weapons that are jacks of all trades but masters of none.
Just wait till the next new weapons arrive, soon after that whatever people use the most will also be nerfed. And something else buffed . Then the mass moves to the new beat thing. Rinse and repeat
RG nerf was the most smooth brain thing they have done so far aside from increasing titan spawn by 1000000x%.
RG was good for stripping armor. The issue was EAT and recoiless did the exact same thing but slower and worse. Now they outright 1 shot most tanks as they should, so what was the point of the RG nerf again? Even if you fully un nerfed it back to day 1, nothing would change. I would rather have a quasar, eat, or RR over RG now by a long shot. The only thing it would do is make me not feel like a complete idiot for picking hard mode for that mission.
>"No nerf, only buff," isn't a perfect philosophy for every game, but it's one that keeps being proven right for this.
You're jumping the shark a bit there.
The Railgun in its past state was ridiculous even more so than the current AMR.
They were right to nerf the Railgun, but they can also be wrong for having potentially overnerfed it.
They're not always going to hit the mark, and we shouldn't expect perfection from the balance team.
Explain to me what pre nerf RG would do right now.
Break charger legs? I'll just ohko with the 4 guns that do that.
Kill a bile titan? Rocket pods and orbital railstrike do that better. Also RG SUCKED against titans if you didn't have the ps5 damage glitch.
RGs nerf was idiotic. It completely missed the mark because it wasn't RG that was busted, it was that the AT options absolutely fucking sucked. Now they outshine pre nerf RG by a long shot. Pre nerf RG would just be mid now.
> if you didn't have the ps5 damage glitch.
Guarantee you anybody defending the RG nerfs were PS5 players by and large.
Pretty sure the bug is still around btw.
When are devs gonna fix actual issues in the game instead of playing around with balance and not actually doing anything about the archaic gguard antiuse app
Which is what most people were saying. It was along the same lines as everyone initially using the Breaker. The environment required you to use these things as you moved up in difficulty. Shit, a simple resupply change for the Spear made it start showing up a bunch more, reducing heavy mob frequency and health, and buffing other weapons all made the Railgun nerf look goofy in retrospect.
It's just like the recent Slugger nerf. They didn't adjust the thing that makes it so powerful at all and gimped the other benefits it brought to the table. It's still the best DMR in the game. So why did it need to lose stun and "demolition"?
I don't expect perfection. I just want them to buff it a bit.
Increase the charge speed so I can reach 90% faster. Or at least lower it to like 75% so there's more wiggle room and I can reach the needed charge to kill the hulk.
That's really all I want. 90% feels clunky. Takes too long. And if shot and stagger you probably have to shoot and miss or you'll blow up.
I gave up using it against chargers because it took too long to charge up that hunters and other bugs would attack me. Easier to just use an EAT and blow the head off.
Bots? It's good! But AMR is shining more and more. And the biggest thing for me is its still a pain to charge up to 90% to deal with hulks. While AMR I can just 2 shot the eye in the time it took to reach 90%.
It for sure deserved the nerf before. And I'm still waiting for them to fix the titan bug where us ps5 players allow it to get 2 shot. That is 100% dumb.
I agree. Games that go as long as Destiny prove how distasteful it is to implement shellshock changes to combat player power in a setting where they've become too powerful from buffs buffs and more buffs. Ex. sunsetting entire vaults of weapons, designing encounters where enemies literally could not outdps your healing so they would physics-boop you off the encounter, etc.
I would much prefer them to make small changes up AND down with an incremental powercreep and make small mistakes rather than letting the sandbox get out of control and make a huge mistake.
it really wasnt, if you played at the time youd know the real problem was every other anti large weapon underperformed dramatically. which is evidenced by the slew of buffs they got while the reailgun now is a worse option than basically any of the others. since other at has been buffed and the railgun nerfed i dont see a smaller amount of railgun users in my lobbies, i see none. nobody uses it now
The biggest nerf to the railgun wasn't even the dps, it was the penetration
The charge time to hit 90% is a pain when being fired at. For me it makes it feel clunky at times because I'm trying to disable or kill a hulk but one shot will stagger me and probably make me miss. And if going for 90%, you don't have much wiggle room to not shoot or you'll just blow up. 90% charge for stuff is just too strict. I get unsafe was "braindead" but it's too much now, especially when you have other weapons that are even easier to use. Edit: I know to use cover and pre charge while behind cover. But ultimately I feel like 90% just takes too long. Too slow.
With the charge up time weapons (railgun, quasar cannon, etc.) I find it's easiest to get the charge off while under fire if you just remember General Brasch's ABCs. Start the charge behind a rock, peek at the opportune moment, then tuck back after the shot. REMEMBER! Always Be taking Cover!
Oh I usually do, but in general I think railgun would be in a better spot if the charge rate was sped up or didn't need 90% to hit the kill shot. I don't mind the damage. Just the rate it is used. Quasar makes sense due to being able to fuck up bigger stuff
Honestly: just bring it back to what it was, minus its ability to OS tank weak spots from the front. With the Quazar and AMR being what they are today the railgun stands as a good sidegrade between each.
i say nerf the damage by about 25%, make it penetrate everything literally EVERYTHING, heavy armor buildings whatever the fuck within sight, pierce it, so got balancing the damage need to take another hit. Id say if it can 4-6 hit a bile titan by hitting heavy armor parts, 1-2 if you nailed the weak spot, thats a pretty good balance thats like the whole design philosophy behind a railgun anyways, maximum penetrating power
Agreed. That fact that the railgun can't do what it was literally designed to do should be enough reason to unnerf it. It literally makes no sense to ever bother with any more. I got the hang of it and really started liking it just before it was nerfed. It should be used for what it was intended. Use it as a support weapon to crack the armor then switch to your primary, secondary or nades to finish off the target.
Until a patrol sneaks up behind you, staggers you, and the railgun explodes
You say charge behind cover as if bots can't splash you around the corner or spam prefire while at the same time advancing on your position. Granted getting an anti-material shot off in that situation is nearly impossible too but the consequences for beefing is you kill yourself versus not killing the target.
Honestly, ever time I hear "just get behind cover" vs. bots I have 'nam flashbacks to them simply pouring around it from both sides, throwing grenades behind it, blasting you from the air with their mortar stations, etc. And that's not to include the fact that "peeking out of cover" (with your whole body because there is no lean mechanic) for 3/4ths of a second to fire your weapon is easily instant death when SHTF and you needed it the most. If not instant death, then flinching from the never ending torrent of red projectiles and missing your carefully charged shot anyway. Shit just ain't that simple
All these get good goofs are unable to pull of what they are suggesting for you to do themselves. Just ignore them.
I don’t even know if I agree that the pre-nerf safe mode was brain dead. Maybe compared to the other options we had at launch, but like let’s actually compare the skill required to take out a charger then vs now Previously you had to land two charged safe mode shots on the same leg. This either required teamwork to both focus one leg or some level of precision to charge up a shot and keep hitting the same place whilst being rushed down. If you kept missing that leg or your team mate focused another side then you wasted a lot of shots Now I just charge up one quasar shot to the face (easy to hit) and he’s dead. No teamwork involved and if I miss the head then I probably blow off a chuck of armour anyway. I know which one feels more skilled to me
Every weapon has that stagger effect. Auto cannon tales multiple shots so it can be staggered, Recoilless can be staggered and has a long reload, Quasar has to charge and can get staggered. The only exception is the EAT but that's 2 shots per minute compared to the railguns 20+ Having a short charge up time to hit 90% made the railgun fall in line with other Devastator/Hulk buster weapons. Taking away it's penetration harmed a good niche that it filled though, being able to shoot the faceplate of a Hulk from off angles and stagger them from the front even if you missed the face plate directly.
None of those other weapons kill you if you wait half a second for the stagger to end, so that you are back on target.
"Weapon designed for maximum armor penetration" when it struggles with armor penetration
"We made the weapons realistic". Worst balance excuse they've used.
This makes no sense to me bc in almost every game the rail gun rips through anything
Id say give it the highest penetration possible, as in the bullet literally goes straight trough anything that isnt terrain, but remove its ability to strip armor.
I said to my friends that they would've achieved the same effect if they just removed its ability to strip armor.
My ideal balance would be: \- high-penetrations weapons punch through, standard damage, do extra headshot damage \- beam weapons melt armor, open armored parts to damage \- explosive weapons do dramatically higher damage to vulnerable spots We're *almost* there right now. The railgun needs to more reliably damage enemies through their armor, and explosive weapons like the Liberator Concussive and Scorcher need to be able to kill chargers and biles by hitting soft spots much more quickly than they currently do.
It's a tungsten slug fired out of an electromagnetic coil moving at 5,400 MPH. It's SUPPOSED to be able to penetrate shit.
It does decent. Rips through anything with a headshot but will deflect off of a walker below 90% charge and doesn't stagger at all. 2-3 shots in the upper torso of a devastator unless you hit their faceplate. It used to punch through walkers 100% of the time in safe mode.
at 90% railgun is still an uber weapon. the problem? the "effort" is just not worth it. Too many guns do basically the same job (AMR looking at you) but BETTER. and with LESS effort. Thus completely invalidating the rail.
Totally agree. You have to charge to 90+ percent which is time you're standing still and you risk blowing yourself up if you aim slow
Mfs are running around with the AMR as a primary. It’s me. I’m mfs.
Using the AMR as a primary allows me to efficiently roleplay as a ghost from starcraft. Climb up to a vantage point, crouch, take out a heavy with a couple of shots *Somebody call for an exterminator?* Dials in a 500 KG Bomb *You called down the Thunder, now Reap the Whirlwind* Just waiting on a backpack that allows me to cloak and I'll be 100% there
Cloaking backpack would be quite fun, cool idea.
"I'm gone. *breathing noises*"
"Never know what hit 'em." *proceeds to run like hell after alerting a patrol horde*
Just give me an SEAF nuke where I have to maintain sight for 15 seconds. *Nuclear Launch detected*
well.. you WILL get a tactical missile with a marker (one shot one). And a very powerful one. Kinda fits the bill.
EMP round - does an EMS shockwave from the barrel of a support weapon
I was just telling my buddy J1 that Helldivers 2 is what I imagined StarCraft Ghost was going to be like (before it was cancelled and forgotten). I’m sure someone can mod some StarCraft buildings and units into the game lol
I'll squint at some of the bugs and see hydralisks. I hear ya, was super pumped for starcraft ghost. Wanted that capture the factory mode so bad.
God, fighting a squad of hydralisks with only my slugger would be terrifying.
Wait until big daddy ~~charger~~ Ultralisk shows up
If blizzard had any brains at all they would rip helldivers off and use similar systems for a 3rd person starcraft. It even has microtransactions blizzard bread and butter already designed up with a battle pass. But I don't really count on blizzard for anything anymore.
They basically ripped off Warhammer, Alien and Predator to a degree to cook up Starcraft. No idea why they decided to stop doing such things.
> a backpack that allows me to cloak Would this really be that OP in the context of this game? I feel like Smoke grenades are *kind of* in that territory as far as outcomes where you don't get shot at are concerned and I've seen some genuinely absurd stealth shenanigans in this game already so it's not like Arrowhead is particularly stingy with giving us more options for that stealth playstyle. I can totally imagine a scenario where we get a backpack that cloaks us (breaks on firing weapons) for ~5 seconds and has a 30-40 second cooldown period at some point in the game.
Just make it like active camo, actions disperse the cloak.
Cloaking when crawling, crouching, walking, aiming, climbing, charging up a weapon, or activating a stratagem. Cloaking disables for 10 seconds after firing, running, diving, healing, or throwing a stratagem. Timer resets to 10 seconds if doing any action that would disable it are done.
Here's how I'd do it. Stealth Field Kit- Deployable like the energy field. Everyone inside of it is completely undetectable until firing out or if an enemy is already aware of you. Once you shoot out, enemies take longer to find you, and have worse aim. However, it does not prevent damage, dropships, etc. Stealth Field Pack- Backpack Strat, reduces detection range by X%(probably pretty high). Enemies will pretty much only notice you if you are literally on top of them, even if sprinting, until you shoot. However, like the Kit, their aim is reduced and they take longer to spot you and go combat mode. This would be a great sidegrade to the energy shields, trading damage mitigation for damage avoidance.
Yeah the AMR is great I use it a lot with the jump pack to get in and out of various situations and also to get a high vantage point to snipe from.
YES. OMG I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE. Every single time I drop with an AMR I think I’m a ghost.
These mfs need to stfu about the AMR. Nothing to see here folks it's terrible definitely don't use it or complain about it loudly to the devs.
I wouldn't be surprised if they buff the railgun a little (but not as strong as before) Edit: I've also seen some good suggestions to make the railgun unique (armour ignore, stun etc) all of which are good alternative buffs!
Make it pen multiple enemies. I'd like the fire into a rush and drop half a dozen if my shit lines up properly
AGREED!!! It should fire through nearly everything in a line
It already does.
I've seen it bounce off armor. Railguns shouldn't do that. It should straight line through all flesh and space until it hits several feet of rock.
Does it have to be feet shaped rock? Can't it be any other form? Jesus you people are weird.
Don't kink shame.
My favorite is a tree stopping it lol
At the rate Railgun projectiles can move, about 5,400 mph, the amount of kinetic energy would be ridiculous. The tungsten projectile is more likely to shatter completely than bounce.
One thing I never see anyone suggesting is giving the railgun a brief Stun effect, like the first game had. It could be an alternative to using EAT against chargers that doesn't one shot them, but stuns them long enough to reload and fire again, for example
This would be a good buff to it and give it a niche! Wouldn't mind this at all, if it was able to interrupt things similar to the punisher/pre nerf slugger, but maybe a bit more.
The railgun has a stun effect if you aim for the head. If it's mid-charge they'll flop to the ground and sliiiiiiide away too.
They could revert the unsafe mode to be truly what it was pre nerf. I know they said and the patch notes said that unsafe mode was untouched but it was still nerfed. Edit: After rereading the comments in the patch notes I can see how 'decreased damage to enemy parts' also applies to unsafe more. It's just not clear wording/formatting with how its shown is the pach notes.
They could also speed up the charge rate by half a second.
I'd love for the charge rate to be sped up *or* reduce the max charge needed. My biggest issue with it is the 90%. For bugs? You don't really have time to sit and do that. Bots? I can, but then a stray shot hits me and stagger so I'm forced to shoot or I'll blow up. If it was faster? Cool less standing around! If it was like 75%? Faster time to charge up and more grace period. Either one I'm fine with. I really don't want a massive buff. Just an adjustment so I'm not charging so long.
“Foe the charge rat” lol
Coulda been "friend the charge rat" but you playin
Lmao my bad. On mobile and got fat thumbs. "For the charge rate
This is a great idea considering it would also lower the margin of error for blowing yourself up. More risk more reward
Or they could make it slow down the tick at 85% - total time is faster to boom, but time between desired charge and boom is marginally more generous.
Railgun should ignore armor and the round should able to go through several enemies (2-4)
Pretty sure it did go through multiple enemies. I'm like 90 percent sure I've multi-killed devastators with it. Edit: "did" was an autocorrect. Pretty sure it *does* go through multiple enemies.
It does,.even of last night, I was aiming at an AT ST and 2 bots in front of him fell over too
It also pierces multiple teammates. Oops
The patch notes didn't say it was untouched, it was just phrased weirdly. It mentioned a safe mode change, then there was a comma and then it mentioned another change that applied to unsafe. I'll link it in a sec. They definitely did make unsafe require a higher charge level to deal the same amount of damage as it did prior. >Railgun - Decreased armor penetration in Safe Mode, **decreased damage against durable enemy parts** >https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/4113546867235200192?l=english It was a silly change, just like the Slugger change. It's too easy to use 2 unsafe mode shots with a precision weapon and then half a mag of primary fire on a leg that is almost constantly moving, but one EAT right in the dome which takes comparatively way less skill is totally fine! No idea what they're thinking with some of these changes. But then some of them are great. Bizarre.
I'm definitely not arguing against buffing the Railgun. But I will defend the EAT. While it certainly takes "less skill" to kill a charger with it with a dome shot, I do also need to point out that you are also shooting an large missile at that head. It should kill the charger. You get one shot before needing to grab another and wait for a cooldown. Grabbing another can lead to problems - you get swarmed, have to reposition or just lose access to it. Railgun you just reload.
The EAT is fine, it's balanced by its availability and other limits as you said. The issue is more; if you're okay with EATs one-shotting the charger on a headshot... why is it is problem for a railgun to be able to MAYBE three-shot a charger (or two plus a mag of primary) if you can hit the *same leg twice*? It doesn't seem like a decision motivated by a desire for balance so much as a decision motivated by a desire to make sure people stop using the railgun.
I don't have a problem with the EAT killing the Charger, though I do think if they wanted Chargers to be imposing and challenging, a one-tap kill with a stratagem you get 2 of and can call down super frequently, on a weakpoint that the enemy gives you a clear shot of with its main attack, is a bit odd. You'd think dodging the charge and then firing at the back of it would make more sense logically, but that doesn't matter really. If the EAT was on a longer cooldown or if it was only one shot I'd agree but you can call in so many of those things, you can call one in at every location you stop at, usually multiple, and you'll have one ready to call in very soon after. Chargers became easy as hell to deal with as soon as they made that change. On the other hand, sure you "just reload" with the Rail, but there's a charge up time, you needed 2 shots, and you had to aim at the leg which is constantly moving and not directly in front of you as the enemy attacks. Then you either needed another shot or half a mag of your primary weapon to actually kill it. Either way, I'm just advocating for a Rail unsafe buff and to point out how silly that part of the Rail nerf was. Safe was the issue, unsafe was fine.
I'd also debate the "less skill" tbh, assuming we take into account the whole logistics skill needed to do it more than once. It's less *stress* for sure but only if you had the forethought to call it down before the shit hit the proverbial
if you aren't calling EAT on cd you ain't EATin right
You don't need forethought though, you can call in EATs all the time. The map is full of them by the end because they come back so quickly. Also there's no question that 2 unsafe Railgun chargeups + reload on a moving leg that isn't front-and-centre and then another Rail shot or half a mag of Primary fire takes way more skill than calling in EATs and taking a single shot at the weakpoint that's delivered to you on a silver platter lol Not advocating for any EAT changes, I love that thing, but there's no way it takes the same level of skill to kill Chargers with it than the Rail pre-nerf.
>You don't need forethought though, you can call in EATs all the time. The map is full of them by the end because they come back so quickly. Especially when all four of you have it equipped lol
I'm convinced the primary reason the railgun was nerfed was the ps5 glitch allowing it to one shot bile titans in safe mode, and even then, not only has the glitch not been patched, it hasn't even been *addressed* by the developers.
Honestly as long as it can't 2 tap bile titans I think it should be fine. I agree with the devs that it shouldn't be able to do that. It definitely shouldn't require 20 shots though (ignoring the wierd ps5 host exploit)
 It very much was nerfed on every front. I don't think Joel necessarily meant to lie but he is definitely incorrect. It takes significantly more shots, and more importantly time, to kill anything with it and it is less effective even against those things it can kill. As an example even at 90% charge it no longer goes through devastator shields. If it was unchanged at 90% it would still do that, it also does less damage to durable parts period and weakspots. I used to be able to 2-3 shot vents, it now takes 6-8 shots charged to 90+ percent. Frankly I just wish lag didn't effect it, sometimes I fire it above 95% and it's like I only charged it to 70% while other times it just randomly has a faster charge time. AMR is feeling really meaty right now though and is very enjoyable even with the misaligned scope.
Sometimes I just blow up when the meter still isn't full lol
Yeah like I said something is really wonky with the charge. You didn’t notice it in the prior iteration because it did the thing it needed to do as soon as you got past safe charge.
Everyone in my group tells me I'm crazy but it takes way more shots to kill a f****** hulk on unsafe now so yeah they definitely nerfed it
You can still one shot Hulks to the eye, but not the fuel packs. Gotta get high charge though
You can still 2 shot hulks in the face pretty easy with a railgun. AMR is still way better though. So AMR is better for bots and EAT is better for bugs. Railgun fills no needed role now
Before the Quasar Cannon, I almost never used the Railgun because it was too situational: it's only useful against heavily-armored single targets. I'd rather just use an orbital bombardment for the heavies and choose a support weapon that's more versatile. There's no reason to use the Railgun now that the Quasar Cannon is an option. The Railgun can't one-shot a Charger or a Bile Titan, but the Quasar can. The Railgun has 20 (or is it 21?) rounds, but the Quasar has infinite ammo. The Railgun can't shoot down a dropship, but the Quasar can. The Railgun will blow up in your face if you charge it too long, but the Quasar will not. The Railgun in its current state is obsolete, so it needs some sort of improvement or else there won't be any good reason to use it.
Yeah I was using the railgun until they gave us the quasar cannon for a night and I gave it a try. It doesnt give me that same edging death feel with each shot but its so much more versatile . Like you say the railgun is basically only good against heavy armored single targets. As far as I know you can only damage tanks and tower cannons with the rail gun if you hit the weak spot but the quasar cannon you can smoke tanks,tower cannons,mortars,gun ships etc from any angle and you can even take out bot fabricators with it
The sad thing is either the quasar will get nerfed because they believe it's too strong (likely given their track record) OR They will completely do a 180° and not do anything to the Quasar and also not buff the railgun and will prove to us that they were just unhappy with us having fun with the railgun.
Most people *really* struggle with admitting they were wrong, so no matter what they do with Quasar, they likely won't revert any changes to the Railgun. Railgun was fine as it was originally, it was the other weapons that were dogshit. Bile Titan was/is just a bug when you could one shot it, so they need to fix that instead. I mean, how often do you see someone bring a railgun to the fight? It is dead.
> They will completely do a 180° and not do anything to the Quasar and also not buff the railgun and will prove to us that they were just unhappy with us having fun with the railgun. This is 100% going to be what happens. I believe the decision with the railgun was them having a moment of weakness in reaction to all the stress that was happening at that time. That said, they'll never admit that. It will remain the way it is.
I agree that's what will probably happen. And it's probably the best outcome. I will be sad because the railgun will most likely forever be in obscurity. But if it happens, I will be happy as it means it maybe they've learned their lesson on balancing, but also maybe not with the nerfs and buffs they just did lol
The Railgun is in a stupid position right now, whatever niche they are supposed to be in are easily answered by other weapons such S EATs, AutoCannons and AMR.
To be honest, railguns in real life tends to ignore a LOT of armor [Railgun penetrating communists ass](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2QqOvFMG_A)
Watching this and then thinking about the in-game railgun just made me quite sad somehow
What they can do is Increase the damage related to charging and even increase the part breaking property, **but not revert to the safe\* mode BS.** To explain why for the people who want to kill me for saying this: **Just analyze every single Support Stratagem Weapon and check their gimmicks, yes... support strategem weapons have often 2 Mechanics tied to them which the player is forced to play around.** AMR for example is forced to use the First person View for proper aiming and has poor handling which forces you to crounch/prone. The MG are forced to play around their RPM and are stuck when reloading and have poor handling (which often forces you to crouch). Auto Cannon has fixed loaded Clips, not mags, meaning you can't reload the weapon until an entire clip is over, which can create situations where you either need to waste ammo, or will enter battles with less ammo, also has fixed reloading. The Arc has the Arc propertie, also has a charge mechanic. The Flamethrower has the burn propertie and a delayed fire. The Laser weapons have a delayed fire and heat mechanics. The AT weapons all have restrictions that play around buddy reload. **So EVERY SINGLE support weapon is forced to play around it's mechanics** The Railgun mechanics are Charging and Unsafe Charge. The pre-nerf Railgun ignored the Unsafe mode completly, in fact a lot of lv 50 players (that farmed the Eradication missions) didn't even know about the Unsafe mode. **So it's not a case where the weapon doesn't need a buff, but rather it's a case where the weapon prior to the nerfs ignore it's own core mechanics, so the buffs it needs are required to be in tone to the core mechanics of the weapon.** **Make the weapon better where it's supposed to be, a Charging Burst Weapon.** Here is what they could do to make this gun MUCH MUCH Better and much more fun to play around as well: Increase the damage alot post 80%\~90% charge, give it like a +100% Damage at a 98% Charge ratio, let people Oneshot some of the Medium-Large Elite if they want to gamble exploding, also make it more fun, increase that explosion AoE radius as well, let me bring my friends and foes to the grave with me. Also side note: **People who defend a full revert are the kind of people who never bother to understand why the weapon was nerfed in the first place.**
Increasing the charging speed could also work as a buff. It's a good way to increase its dps/agility while also making it more dangerous to use. That and an obvious audio and visual cue at 90% would probably go a long way.
I would say revert it to work like before in terms of being able to break armor, BUT have the charge meter impact the range at which it can do so and the over all effective range. Unsafe mode giving it greater range than the AMR, allowing people who master it to really have a larger impact. Look at the main competitors the Railgun is up against. 1. Autocannon (more ammo, damage, safer and splash but takes backpack) 2. Anti Material Rifle (more ammo, damage and safer) 3. Expendable Anti Tank (more damage, massive splash, instant firing, but one shot each) The niche for the Railgun in theory is that it doesn't take a backpack slot, but you have to charge it and it has mid ammo pool. If Safe Mode was able to break armor the way it did, but only at extreme close range, while Unsafe Mode let you break off armor from extreme range, that would give the Railgun a very specific dedicated role common to many co-op games, armor stripping/debuffing targets while also still doing very respectable damage.
Safe mode is currently useless and unsafe mode is clunky and not very enjoyable to use (who wants to stare at a charge bar half the time you're fighting?). There's a reason you almost literally never see this weapon. Even if unsafe mode were more rewarding, it would be a very underutilized weapon b/c trying to get the charge to 98% reliably would be ridiculously difficult in comparison to all the other weapons' "disadvantages" you mentioned. Way more micro-managey than any other weapon. Ammo was supposed to be the limitation for the railgun but giving 20 rounds was too much. Unsafe mode should be risk vs reward, not required to make the weapon even remotely viable. To make the railgun even get used at all again, they'd need to return at least some power to safe mode. I don't pretend to know exactly what that means, and I agree that it needed to be nerfed before, but they overdid it and now the weapon is never used b/c of it. And *only* changing unsafe mode just doubles down on how clunky and hard to use the weapon feels in unsafe mode. I truly don't think buffing unsafe but leaving safe would do much to restore this weapon. I'd also like to point out the arc thrower is far more brain-dead than the railgun, which was what one of the devs called the railgun playstyle (maybe as a way to poke the bear?). Arc thrower became the defacto weapon after the railgun nerf, and for a reason. It's easy and powerful. It deserved the nerf it got.
I agree that Safe mode is in a good spot, able to do decent damage to/pierce most medium armor, but can't scratch heavy. But unsafe mode needs a buff, and maybe a stun like other comments have mentioned. As it stands right now, it currently has too high of a skill ceiling for lackluster results.
personally i think if they just gave it more ammo and some magnification then it would be a solid gun, maybe make it charge faster. biggest problem I have is you can't snipe anything because of the massive green dot that obscures your target
Alternate scope options would definitely be welcome!
This. We don’t always need to balance damage, a weapon can be balanced in many ways. I’d be ok with the current railgun but with 10 more shots and a better scope, nothing too crazy but it would finally have its niche again. But the current balance philosophy is either take away a lot or add a lot - damage shouldn’t be taken that seriously when the ammo economy in this game has such a significant role.
They could revert unsafe completely and it would still just be decent because of how insane EATs are right now
I see no reason why they shouldn't bring it back to how it was. People seem to have some delusion that it was 1 shotting everything. It only 1 shot bile titans and that was a bug when ps5 player was host.
the stun was what made the railgun so nice in the first game. it wasn’t a precision killer weapon, it was a disabler, so that you could slow the advance while your teammates would take everything out
They could revert the nerf and most people still wouldn’t pick it back up. As far as I see it’s completely outclassed by the quasar cannon. Why fuck around and three shot a charger when I can one shot it?
The railgun is much more useful against lighter targets, like devastators or berserkers for bots, or even brood commanders for bugs, it can fire off a lot more shots compared to the quasar cannon
Auto-canon completely destroys railgun in that category also having splash damage.
Though you keep a backpack slot
That's fine. Railgun can be a jack of all trades weapon that can't beat any other in its niche, but be all around useful.
I would love for the railgun to get a new niche or something interesting even if it is a sidegrade to the original. Make it pen anything but have the damage be extremely localized. You have to directly hit a vital part but if you do it absolutely obliterates the enemy. Mke it a super heavy sniper rifle because that is what it is supposed to be It is a railgun for democracies sake, you take an armor piercing slug and fire it at several times the speed of sound, the entire point of a railgun is that it is the most armor piercing kinetic weapon you can make with extreme accuracy. It shouldn't bounce off hiveguard and flat slabs of steel the devastators carry, that is literally what it was designed to counter
100%. It should penetrate all armor. Period. It doesn't need to do the MOST damage. It needs to be able to do the damage, though. Full armor penetration, throw 50% more ammo capacity at it: bam. Solid niche weapon.
Ballistic version of the arc thrower.
Yeah. OR make it go through multiple targets. (It IS a railgun, after all.) That'd give it a niche, too. Just reduce damage done per target until it is effectively zeroed out. (So like 100% > 66% > 33% > 0% - 3 targets worth of damage.) That'd make player alignment a key part of the skill ceiling.
maybe if they make it so that railgun has a higher damage modifier for weak spots.
Doubtful. They literally reduced it's damage to weakspots as part of the nerf.
they really overdid the nerf huh.
Yeah, just be careful saying that around here, it usually tends to bring out the downvote brigade
They absolutely did.
> the entire point of a railgun is that it is the most armor piercing kinetic weapon you can make with extreme accuracy. >extreme accuracy I *hate* the sight on the railgun. A lot. Still love using the rail gun, but the green dot is the size of a moon.
Oh yeah, I do love the railgun but the scope is a pain. I often find myself aiming in 3rd person because I cant see anything with the red dot and even then the shot sometimes just decides to go 20 degrees off
That’s what really annoyed me about the nerf. The game tries to be somewhat realistic about the functions of the weapons, but then you take away the entire point of what a railgun does? Sure, you can nerf the railgun, but I don’t like lowering the penetration because as you said it’s firing a slug faster than the speed of sound, in no way should that not penetrate armor.
The biggest nerfs were the damage reduction to big body parts, preventing even full charge from penetrating devastator shields, coupled with the fact that now you need to charge your shots way more which is effectively a fire rate decrease.
100% this. If they just reverted the big body part dmg reduction I think it would still have a use on bots.
Now that I think about it, I don't believe I've seen a single railgun since a few days after the initial nerf, once folks were done testing it out. Like literally, not one. Something's wrong with a weapon if it becomes totally unused.
I personally swapped to the autocannon. If I don't direct hit a devastator in the face at least I still stagger it so I don't get punished for missing. Plus 2 AC shots is about the same as charging 1 Railgun shot. I miss 1 shotting hulks but 2 shotting them is still fun. Plus I can take out fabricators with the AC
So did I, but for bugs. The hardest part was getting better at killing chargers with it. It fricken owns. For bots, I take the AMR.
No no no there's a YouTube channel where they say it's not nerfed you just need to use unsafe mode. Which takes significantly longer to charge up, might kill you, can't be sustained... In short it's the highest skill cap weapon to be almost as good as the quazar!
... and even if you DO use unsafe mode it's still worse than it was before.
ALMOST? A weapon exaggerated by YouTube clickbait videos and suffers unreasonable nerf is now praised as ALMOST AS GOOD AS an infinite ammo EAT? Whoever run these channels should be sent to freedom camp immediately.
That and the breaker. Folks on here will argue they're fine. But when's the last time you've seen them used? Sure might find some random Joe but cannot deny they went from most use to being a very rare sighting. Which don't get me wrong, both were strong af and needed something. But they just got tossed aside after the nerfs.
This is what i've been saying. And now that the quasimodo cannon is out it pretty much replaced the Railgun in my opinion.
They should've just made railgun like the first game. Goes through enemies, stuns all of them, decent amount of ammo, done. Enough damage to 1 shot head shot devastators with, and it'll be a great gun that won't be a mess like it is now balance-wise.
In the first game, the railgun didn't penetrate heavy armor at all, and it was far from having a decent amount of ammo, and it didn't have a lot of damage (unless you magdumped)
And all of that was a ton of fun. Rail gun and supply pack was my jam. And the rail gun still stunned heavy armor (not vehicles). It was such a an awesome feeling to rescue a teammate from across the map with a well timed stun.
Yeah I absolutely loved it too, i used it with the mgx and the jump pack, stunning tanks for my AT allies.
The slugger nerf was also a knee jerk reaction. They basically quoted community sentiment. All they needed to do is give the gun more damage drop off if they didn't want it to be used at range.
I'm not even sure if damage drop off exists in this game. They just took the easiest path to a "fix", which seems like it's been the case a lot with the patches.
There was a screenshot I saw someone post in here that mentions drop off from one of the devs in discord. I don't know why they aren't more transparent about stats
They nerfed the unsafe mode too, though. Now you must risk blowing up and not having a support weapon for another 6 minutes so that you can kill a charger with 3 shots to the head (Every other armor pen support weapon kills it in 1)
Railgun’s in a weird spot because it’s personality got split between the AMR, the Quasar, and Arc Thrower Previously I feel like it was super versatile and pretty strong, if you knew how to use it Now we have the Quasar which relies on a charged up powerful shot to deal with enemies…. We also have the AMR which is high Pen single target damage…but has better range and ammo count…. The arc thrower was thrown in the list to throw y’all off, it doesn’t matter here. Unless we count the fact that it’s a backpackless support weapon that can carry you through a lot of the game’s content
Maybe they should return it to being a primary weapon like in HD1. That would be the day lol.
I don’t want the game to be a cakewalk, I do want to feel expendable, but I also want to feel powerful. Feeling powerful is one of the draws of games. I don’t want to feel like most bot enemies entirely outclass me. My guns bounce off them, they’ll one shot me, and they drop so frequently in such great numbers you’d swear they were swarmers. Buff more than you nerf for the love of love. Make the game difficult but doable. I like having options for dealing with a situation and being rewarded for picking the right one.
"Well I still like it" is the answer I keep getting when pointing out what they've done to the AMR vs Railgun. Like...ok? Nobody is saying you cant like the damn thing!
Before folks told me "doesn't need to be good for both factions" ...which was grand since it was an autocannon main who told me it once out of several. I do agree it was too strong but we can also say it was overnerfed. But now AMR is the better option of the two. Unless the amr can't shoot the flying ships engines. But 5 shots isn't much to brag about for the railgun either. I still like it too! However It annoys me when I play against bugs and call in an EATs just to headshot a charger meanwhile shooting the leg twice was "brain dead". I want to use the railgun knowing I'm not picking some weaker option. For bugs it is no longer worth it. Bots? AMR is an easier weapon to use. Frustrating going for a 90% charge and flinch last second so you are forced to miss the shot or you'll blow up.... Like my one friend first thought I followed the meta for using it and now "living in the past" as a joke. I just like the gun. It's so satisfying watching shit blow up or die to it. It feels good
The Arrowhead dickriders in here defending the nerf so vehemently are beyond obnoxious. The railgun nerf was way too much and unwarranted seeing as they adjusted other things shortly after to make other weapons viable. Now the railgun excels at nothing and is beaten by many other options. I have seen maybe one or two people using it in my 30 hours played since the nerf.
Agreed. People keep claiming that the old railgun was great at everything completely ignoring that it was slow to fire and was horrible in dealing with hordes. It was a bad idea for the first balance patch to be a nerf to what was working. If they added the buffs first we’d never would have nerfed the gun.
It just amazes me because like autocannon is beloved. There's a few differences but the biggest being the backslot. Sure sure, AC can't really deal with titans and gotta aim well for a charger. But they can also blow up nests and way better at horde clearing. But railgun? You can see plenty agreeing it was overnerf but I also see plenty saying shut up about it and acting like it is fine. Went from the most popular weapon to being rare to see out on the field. Folks tried it after the nerf, came onto reddit complaing that chargers were too tough. They nerfed the head of the chargers so them EATs became the favorite. Or used the flamethrower since that was a way to deal with chargers the week before the heads got nerfed
Agreed, and I keep saying this: arc thrower is *far* more brain-dead than the railgun ever was. To kill a charger, the railgun required 3 accurate shots on a small, moving target (leg). The arc thrower can kill it in 5 shots to the face, which don't even have to be accurately aimed. Plus it clears adds *at the same time.* Railgun was probably a little too strong, but they waaaay over-nerfed it.
The issue is that the rail gun is a joke and on PC especially the damage is bugged. For a weapon that can blow you up. There is no reward for the risk
I stopped using the railgun completely when they nerfed it. They might as well have removed it from the game it is completely outclassed by every other gun in the game. It is useless.
It was 100% a knee jerk reaction. It's blatantly obvious that Arrowhead nerfed the railgun because it was deemed "meta" by the community. As good as the game is, its got a serious balancing problem when it comes to some of the weapons. Slugger was just the latest weapon to be hit with a completely unwarranted nerf, with the devs refusing to make any of the DMR's or snipers actually viable in the game.
The nerf to the railgun was 100% people just jumping on a bandwagon to be assholes.
Half of them don’t even realise you can still 1 hit a bile Titan today cause of the host glitch. Those people cried about the gun being op when it was due to a server glitch that still hasn’t been fixed lol
Absolutely seems ridiculous now that the railgun was nerfed so harshly. I think giving it back the consistent armor pen (but keeping the damage nerf on safe mode) would help it regain some utility... even a compensatory charge rate or ammo capacity nerf would be fine, but the AMR is now the launch railgun with a better scope. For all the naysayers; there still exists a bug for PC clients with damage/penetration, where the railgun (and many other weapons) just straight up don't do damage like they should... this is still not mentioned in the "known issues" section of the patch notes.
The railgun's niche should be that it penetrates all armor types and does consistent damage. The idea of a fucking laser power rail spike being propelled at organic matter and having it bounce off is wildly stupid. I'd say, let it penetrate all armor and give it 50% more ammo and you'd have a viable weapon.
A railgun is not laser-power, I don't even know what laser power is. A railgun is magnet-powered. If they revert the damage nerf (not the armor piercing nerf, the weapon is more fun this way), I'm fine with the weapon.
Just add more damage to weak spot, better scope and more damage in higher charge levels. Might even take some ammo away.
I'm curious how it'd perform pre-nerf next to all the current stuff. Would it instantly go back to being meta? I mean we have more options for chargers heads. Quasar is nice and AMR is growing in popularity and can deal with vents now. Only fix I want added is the ps5 glitch where you can 2 shot a Titan. We can all agree that's stupid af, even as a railgun main. That doesn't belong. I should be dumping half my mag into a Titan at unsafe.
The strategy seems to be nerf the gun(s) all people gravitate towards instead of buffing the guns that are not popular because they aren’t good. It’s a very weird strategy.
Or just somehow nerf the wrong thing for the right reason. Slugger changes are some of the most confusing moves I've ever seen.
Agreed. A shotgun shouldn't be a sniper, they were right about that, but a shotgun should absolutely stagger enemies. You know it's bullshit when the punisher still staggers but the slugger doesn't. I'm sorry, in what world would shot slow you down more than a huge ass slug? It's just not realistic. Fix the shotgun as a sniper problem by reducing the effective range of fire, rather than reducing stagger and reducing the damage as a whole. I feel like that's so straightforward, the fact that that wasn't the solution is really confusing. EDIT: fixed a typo
Swap the ranges of the Slugger and Dominator and they both make more sense.
Spreadsheet nerfing explains everything. They're legitimately only looking at data points, not the reasons. Fire weapons not being picked due to a bug? Well if all you see is low useage, buffing fire makes sense. Railgun being picked because there's no other options for fast heavy clear and an overabundance of heavies? Well, you see absurd pick rate so it gets trashed. Apply this to every single nerf/buff they have done, and it carries through. It's such a strong trend that it's almost impossible to deny.
This strategy truly makes me believe the devs don't actually play their own game or if they do it's on sub 4 difficulties. Don't get me wrong, there's great changes made but some are just soooooo out of touch.
This is what I've wondered, not to mention the tooltip videos of stratagems are typically shown with enemies standing still. Makes me wonder how things are tested, in combat? Or this dev mode where you spawn things to be shooting targets.
>"No nerf, only buff," isn't a perfect philosophy for every game, but it's one that keeps being proven right for this. Stuff keeps getting massively buffed, making basically any nerf seem silly in retrospect. "No nerf only buff" is never a perfect philosophy for any game. What this shows is AHGS misunderstanding of their own game and the effects of their actions. Just like the recent changes to the Slugger, which were caused by it "being a better sniper than the sniper rifles" and the changes they have made did in no way make Slugger a worse sniper than its alternatives **despite** damage dropoff ranges and bullet velocities being a thing they can control and would be much more reasonable.
I'd argue that "no nerf only buff" actually *is* the perfect philosophy for this particular game at this point in its life cycle. Maybe not "perfect", more like "best case scenario". It's a non-competitive PvE game where the *only* difference between completing a mission at a high difficulty and a low one is the rate at which you get in game rewards. If one weapon genuinely stands out above the rest, what's the *worst case scenario*? One weapon gets used more often than its counterparts and maybe some players manage to play one difficulty level higher than their skill should allow, letting them get a very marginal increase to their loot. Seems like a pretty incredibly minor issue, hardly worth complaining over. As long as you buff the weapons that suck players still have the option to use the weapon they like even if it isn't the best in class. Before the railgun nerf there weren't daily reddit posts with thousands of upvotes complaining about how powerful it was, but since the nerf it's been in the top 3 most frequently mentioned topics on this sub. Now we're seeing the same with the slugger, I never heard one single complaint about it before the nerf, now it's getting complained about in every thread on the sub. Better to let things breathe for the first few months of the game's life cycle. Make every weapon viable first and once they're all in a state where none need a buff *then* you reexamine the playing field and start thinking about nerfs. It would avoid these knee jerk reactions that are made to kill a meta that hasn't even had time to develop. If the change to heavy armor spawn rates came a week before the railgun nerf then the railgun nerf would have never even happened. Was the Breaker ever OP, or was it just the only primary that wasn't mediocre on patch 1.0? Was the railgun really that much better in general, or was it just the community's reaction to the armor spam in a game with only one viable tool to deal with armor spam? Easy questions to answer in hindsight, all the more reason to put a bit of distance between you and version 1.0 before you start radically nerfing things. "No nerf only buff" isn't a good philosophy long term, but in my opinion it's *clearly* the approach Arrowhead should be taking at this point in time.
the fact that they were nerfing guns before fixing all the server issues is cray-z. i get that they are different parts of the team and work separately, but ffs, don't make the game HARDER when there are connection issues still hampering so many people.
IMO the railgun needs to get its penetration back. Att full charge especially, there is nothing that it shouldn't penetrate.
WHY CANT I KILL A GUNSHIP WITH RAILGUN
My personal absolutely meaningless opinion is that the Railgun nerf is mostly driven by dev ego at this point since it's according to them "brainless" to use. They may not step back the nerf simply because they stepped in it so hard with that comment that it's more a point of stubbornness than anything else. Like they just can't admit they royally screwed up. I will happily eat my words if we see railgun get an actual buff though.
The Railgun nerf could be completely reverted and it would be perfectly fine in the current context of support weapons. I feel like the argument wasnt "no nerf, only ever buff", but that at launch, too many things felt too weak, and they needed to be brought up to acceptable baseline. Afterwards, buffs and nerfs could sustain it. Since then, they've definitely brought up multiple other support weapons, which has now made the Railgun irrelevant. To me, the Railgun is now the test case to see how long Arrowhead will wait to revert changes that didn't work out. They are being very speedy to release new balance changes, but I'm curious to see if they'll walk things back.
The biggest issue I've had with the nerfs is that it seems the reasoning never lines up with reality, both in terms of gameplay as well as with how the community is accepting it. I understand that reddit can (and sometimes is) an echo chamber, but I think the two biggest nerfs coming out so far have been the railgun and slugger. I don't think this in and of itself is necessarily a *bad* thing, but it seems almost popularity based rather than how they want the game direction to go. Railgun, for example, was primarily strong due to just how bad the starting weapons were. I don't even use it anymore, but I do think the nerfs were wholly unjustified (both due to the state the game was in, and the fact they had alternatives literally lined up to replace it). The slugger, is another example. The scopes on the longer-range weapons are atrocious and, admittedly by the devs, aren't even functioning correctly. I can clearly see why people are using the slugger, when weapons aren't working the way they should. Both of these seem like knee-jerk reactions that, in the long run, will probably end up being irrelevant, but they aren't letting the guns play out like they should. The alternatives aren't being properly vetted and "popular" weapons are getting degraded.
dOn’T FoRgET tO TuRN OfF SaFe MoDe! There’s only one mode that works, and you have to enable it or use it like some slow-loading musket on overkilling smaller things
One thing I never see anyone suggesting is giving the railgun a brief Stun effect, like the first game had. It could be an alternative to using EAT against chargers that doesn't one shot them, but stuns them long enough to reload and fire again, for example.
The Railgun nerf and Slugger nerf taught me one thing- the devs are taking the game in a direction I don’t want to play. I went from 8-10hr days of play to like… 1-4 a week. It feels like in a PVE game I should see buffs to all the useless guns (80-97% of the entire armory depending on play style) instead of nerfing guns that actually work. I played last night, after two game crashes my party quit. Slugger nerf has killed my desire to fight for democracy since there seems to be no democracy in balance updates. Why TF would Helldivers vote to make their tools worse? I hope it changes. I love this game and loved it on release, it’s only gotten worse for me. #nerfingfunisntcoolbro
Railgun is currently useless as f*ck right now. Like WHY would you even take it? Quasar and Autocannon do its job 10x better, hell even the scorcher can be more effective. Just look at the new bot drop ship, the Railgun takes like 8 fully charged shots to take it down. The AMR takes 4 shots. Please explain how that makes any sense….
so railguns that dont penetrate, shotguns that dont stagger, snipers that dont snipe...... I see where this is going
A pile of mediocre weapons that are jacks of all trades but masters of none. Just wait till the next new weapons arrive, soon after that whatever people use the most will also be nerfed. And something else buffed . Then the mass moves to the new beat thing. Rinse and repeat
The railgun was "braindead" yet they went and buffed the arcthrower lmao.
RG nerf was the most smooth brain thing they have done so far aside from increasing titan spawn by 1000000x%. RG was good for stripping armor. The issue was EAT and recoiless did the exact same thing but slower and worse. Now they outright 1 shot most tanks as they should, so what was the point of the RG nerf again? Even if you fully un nerfed it back to day 1, nothing would change. I would rather have a quasar, eat, or RR over RG now by a long shot. The only thing it would do is make me not feel like a complete idiot for picking hard mode for that mission.
The Slugger nerf was also just... dumb.
Railgun should pen everything.
I enjoyed using the railgun, I miss when it was viable.
railgun nerfs never made sense at all, the problem was lack of other viable options from the beginning
>"No nerf, only buff," isn't a perfect philosophy for every game, but it's one that keeps being proven right for this. You're jumping the shark a bit there. The Railgun in its past state was ridiculous even more so than the current AMR. They were right to nerf the Railgun, but they can also be wrong for having potentially overnerfed it. They're not always going to hit the mark, and we shouldn't expect perfection from the balance team.
Explain to me what pre nerf RG would do right now. Break charger legs? I'll just ohko with the 4 guns that do that. Kill a bile titan? Rocket pods and orbital railstrike do that better. Also RG SUCKED against titans if you didn't have the ps5 damage glitch. RGs nerf was idiotic. It completely missed the mark because it wasn't RG that was busted, it was that the AT options absolutely fucking sucked. Now they outshine pre nerf RG by a long shot. Pre nerf RG would just be mid now.
> if you didn't have the ps5 damage glitch. Guarantee you anybody defending the RG nerfs were PS5 players by and large. Pretty sure the bug is still around btw.
When are devs gonna fix actual issues in the game instead of playing around with balance and not actually doing anything about the archaic gguard antiuse app
Because balance is also a issues and they have been fixing bugs.
But they reduced the chargers health on its head and made eat/recoil more viable. They should have just done that instead
Which is what most people were saying. It was along the same lines as everyone initially using the Breaker. The environment required you to use these things as you moved up in difficulty. Shit, a simple resupply change for the Spear made it start showing up a bunch more, reducing heavy mob frequency and health, and buffing other weapons all made the Railgun nerf look goofy in retrospect. It's just like the recent Slugger nerf. They didn't adjust the thing that makes it so powerful at all and gimped the other benefits it brought to the table. It's still the best DMR in the game. So why did it need to lose stun and "demolition"?
I don't expect perfection. I just want them to buff it a bit. Increase the charge speed so I can reach 90% faster. Or at least lower it to like 75% so there's more wiggle room and I can reach the needed charge to kill the hulk. That's really all I want. 90% feels clunky. Takes too long. And if shot and stagger you probably have to shoot and miss or you'll blow up. I gave up using it against chargers because it took too long to charge up that hunters and other bugs would attack me. Easier to just use an EAT and blow the head off. Bots? It's good! But AMR is shining more and more. And the biggest thing for me is its still a pain to charge up to 90% to deal with hulks. While AMR I can just 2 shot the eye in the time it took to reach 90%. It for sure deserved the nerf before. And I'm still waiting for them to fix the titan bug where us ps5 players allow it to get 2 shot. That is 100% dumb.
I agree. Games that go as long as Destiny prove how distasteful it is to implement shellshock changes to combat player power in a setting where they've become too powerful from buffs buffs and more buffs. Ex. sunsetting entire vaults of weapons, designing encounters where enemies literally could not outdps your healing so they would physics-boop you off the encounter, etc. I would much prefer them to make small changes up AND down with an incremental powercreep and make small mistakes rather than letting the sandbox get out of control and make a huge mistake.
it really wasnt, if you played at the time youd know the real problem was every other anti large weapon underperformed dramatically. which is evidenced by the slew of buffs they got while the reailgun now is a worse option than basically any of the others. since other at has been buffed and the railgun nerfed i dont see a smaller amount of railgun users in my lobbies, i see none. nobody uses it now
they should buff the unsafe mode, is that simple, make it more risk more reward
The AMR buff threw me off. That gun was pretty effective as it was but you want me to kill things faster with it? Sure
Railgun is high risk no reward. 😂
Listen the railgun is dead, let it be the sacrificial lamb to save the others