I also notice 3/4 the of the sides to sport Heavy Bolters all the time, everyone else are just free kills, nick someones with it that they die as opposed to needed 20 rounds to drop most things with a bolter. But the fact that the netcode sometimes makes people warp to safety, when i use the basic Bolter i sometimes need an entire clip just to kill someone (i play from Europeà, is it lag, bad hit detection, crosshair warping over the screen, i don't know i ussually hang in the top of the scoreboard in other FPS games, but this game hooboy...when i play during daytime so most likely with other EU people i do on average a 15-25 kills, when i play when NA starts to get online it starts to drop down to 2-4 kills per game. Most likely its just bad latency/hit detection goes out of the window. If they don't do anything about this, they are going to be in for a very rude launch failure.
The bolter takes too many rounds to kill. I've said this before. There are too many insta kill weapons to make the bolter a viable selection. An enemy can almost decap a point before you can drop them with a bolter. Has happened multiple times in matches I've played this patch. The weapon needs a damage or ROF buff. Melee units run in almost a straight line to attack when they find you have a bolter because they know they can close the distance. Allowing them to leap the last 5 meters to attack now has not helped that situation in the least.
I think the bolter performs really, really well...once you get some mods for it. That's its biggest issue in my opinion, it really doesn't start to shine 'till you get some mods. Modded I would take it over any other races baseline shooting weapon.
14 shots to the head of uncapping enemy, thats so nice. It means you can only kill 2 enemies at most with bolter before you have to reload, standart issue magazine assumed. Drum magazine makes it 4 enemies, which is super nice. BUT it feels like youre shooting peas, not HE rokets Bolter is ok, just not as good as we LSM want it to be.
I'd like to note that there are bolter upgrades to be had. I've got a master crafted bolter, which claims less recoil...so I'm assuming there are better bolters out there. I will say they are definitely less effective than they once were. I feel heavy bolters are on point now. Everything else just needs to be brought up.
Remember, mods are scarce, but armor and wargear are not. So everyone is running around with unmodded starter weapons against fully armored opponents. As people get shinier weapons, they will spend more points on those and less on armor stacking, so it will get easier to kill them.
Almost every single one of the basic faction ranged weapons take far too long to kill, the bolter especially is complete aids since it means that our only capture class is basically useless and it becomes a better strategy to take 25 Devastators, 5 apothecaries and 2 tacticals to capture points and not much else, especially since the stormbolter is a joke and the plasma gun is basically just slightly better than the Bolter, barely worth anything vs melee classes or a heavy bolter though. The bolter has been fucking abysmal for over 6 months, literally over half of the mods for the Bolter are shit, all of the scopes are worthless now as they have the same accuracy as without a scope so they're basically just a glorified set of binoculars on top of your gun, barrel mods are all worthless because Stalker/extended barrel is the only one that statistically buffs your damage at range while the others just make it easier to hit if your aim is awful or you can't control recoil and even when you take the extended barrel, it's still about 12 shots to kill at 40m. In addition, Stalker Magazine needs tweaking as well, it's far too slow firing to be useful for anything other than stealing kills, even people who are standing still for the first headshot can roll away and survive another body shot, I'd like to see Stalker magazine be semi-automatic while still firing at a decent pace, think of the Stalker bolter from Relic's Space Marine, deadly but low magazine and overall capacity (10/40) and high damage & decent rate of fire to compensate. It also needs extended range, the Stalker magazine in-game at present is only dealing 90 damage up to 15m or so, at 80m+ it's dealing like 30 damage, it's ridiculously low for a sniper's weapon. I'd also recommend magazines with specialist ammo so I can pick Vengeance bolts for higher penetration, Kraken for higher damage fall off, Dragonfire for AOE explosion on hit? and Hellfire for Poison ailment + regular damage? Would need to tweak that for the Chaos side of things as they shouldn't get access to some of these specialist shells if the concept of asymmetrical balance even means anything to EC anymore.
IF there was an added mod that increased overall damage, it would be worth it. New receiver that fires shells at higher velocity, or as stated earlier, ammunition that has a higher damage threshold.
Agreed. Stock bolter is a vastly inferior weapon. You need the drum magazine and a muzzle brake to compete. Brake so you can sort of hipfire and mag so you can actually down something without a reload. It's a good enough gun, I can gun down 2 ish people per clip with good aiming and positioning and the bolt pistol finishes off. It makes my Apothecary useful. All the tac is good for is capping or disabling vehicles with melta bombs. Two things the average pubbie seem to loathe, so a very underused class. I think more people should try the plasma gun really, but I doubt they'll retain interest long enough to unlock a 20k req weapon for a class they hate.
