How 2 suppress in Eternal Crusade. Shoot 1 heavy bolter round at an enemy. Wait for them to not be suppressed anymore after like 5ish seconds. Shoot 1 more heavy bolter round. How 2 properly suppress. Shoot a burst at the enemies. They will hide behind cover and wait. Shoot another burst when they're ready to pop back out. Repeat. How YOU think suppressing works. SHOOT FOREVER UNTILL OVERHEAT. GUN OVERHEATS. ENEMY POPS OUT AND SHOOTS YOU IN FACE.
Sigh. I'm having a hard time comprehending how people actually like this weapon, because for me, it's the absolute worst part of the entire game, both on the firing and receiving end. Firing the heavy bolter still fills over half your screen with this massive bloom that nearly occludes your actual target and ruins your spatial awareness. I'm not sure if there's some hidden system for bracing the way there was in Space Marine (I liked their version), but I sure haven't been able to find it, and so for me, the gun is almost too situational to be of any use. Even if you get the jump on them, unless you're given only one person to focus on, you're going to get executed because you can't redirect your fire enough to handle multiple targets (or even see them properly, for that matter). As for the suppression, if it isn't removed or dramatically improved by launch I'm probably going to have to quit altogether because it gives me motion sickness. Having your entire screen swim around like you're underwater, freeze your character, and make it impossible to see seems kind of overkill to me. What ever happened to just impairing your bullet cone when you're suppressed? Is making people physically ill from the ridiculous effects really so important? For me the issue with the weapon isn't that it's OP/UP, it's that it's unpleasant. It's an oversituational, frustrating, nausea-inducing artifact of older builds that ought to be revamped altogether. Gaming is filled with functional examples of how to make a chaingun work in a game like this. TF2, Gears of War, Space Marine, Firefall, etc. I wish the devs would just base the design on those instead of pursuing this dead end.
You seem to think that the heavy bolter is supposed to be used like an assault rifle and all you do is shoot at people to kill them. Well you're wrong. Killing them is a possibility, but not the goal of the role. It is a support weapon. You sit back, put it up on some cover, and suppress every enemy you see. If the suppression isn't strong enough, the entire weapon becomes useless. When you suppress enemies they're supposed to realize that they can't do anything. So they hide in cover and wait for it to go away. By that time, your team has advanced on them and shoots/melees them in the face while they're unaware of what's going on. Getting suppressed is SUPPOSED to be an unpleasant experience. You don't like getting suppressed? GOOD. You should strive to find the Devastator, flank them, and kill them. I'm also not having any problems with seeing my targets while firing.
Really then it should feel a bit more rewarding to suppress an enemy with a Heavy Bolter. In Battlefield players gets assist suppression points for firing at the enemy if someone kills them, the points depending on how 'suppressed' they were. Understandably the light machine guns offered the most suppression points because they suppress the most.
I am under no such illusions. When you use a heavy machine gun/chaingun in any other game, including Space Marine, it is a support weapon. But the suppression is a natural effect based on the fact that you're putting out a wide spread of action-interrupting damage. In some cases this is also manifested as an increased bullet spread when hit, to decrease the accuracy of those being fired on. But in no other game are the suppression effects so intense that they completely halt the other person's gameplay. And they certainly aren't intense enough to cause motion sickness. The closest thing we have to compare is something like a flashbang or concussion grenade, which blur the screen or cause a whiteout. But the dizzying screen swimming and stunlocking are absent, and for good reason. Anyway, my point is, there are a lot of ways to make the heavy bolter into a great, suppressing heavy weapon. My argument is that the current implementation is really offputting and doesn't even fit the role you're describing. It's more of a stun weapon that freezes people so they're vulnerable to assault without doing any real damage. I don't think that's a niche that warrents inclusion. As for the bloom issue, that's a personal complaint. You don't have to agree, but I'm not the only one who's brought it up.
I like this idea, maybe if there was a radius of suppression that was in effect for when someone ended up killing the target. I was playing with this weapon a little yesterday and I do understand its role very well (I was often the gunner on mobile infantry hard points in the army) but, as Fragmagnet mentioned, if it's not doing its job, it does feel useless.
Oh you're talking about the actual bloom. Yeah the bloom in the game is insane so I turned all the post processing off. Thought you meant the muzzle flashes. But yeah 99% of the time, suppression based off weapons doing a lot of damage and interrupting actions doesn't work. And people just ignore it. Forcing them to acknowledge that they are being shot at by a big scary gun, and ruining their accuracy, works every time just as it should. But you already get points for teammates killing targets you have suppressed. Do people even read the main post?
Yeah I haven't gotten around to it yet. I mean, it is the muzzle flashes/shells going right through the aiming reticule that bother me, but the bloom is what makes it intolerable. As for your second point, I don't find that accurate at all. In Planetside, for instance, you don't do much aiming outside your scope, so if someone's hitting you with a weapon that jerks you out of it, that's a very effective means of suppression. But hell even in TF2 if a heavy is covering a corridor, he's suppressing it. For EC it'd probably be best to combine improved damage and decreased aiming accuracy on the receiving end to get the best of both worlds. The whole idea of suppression is basically scaring/forcing people into hiding. The most effective way to do that is for them to naturally be avoiding damage. I don't feel artificially adding all these artificial stunlocks and visual effects is even a good representation of the concept.
The problem with making a weapon that scares people into hiding due to high damage. Is that if it's a machine gun with mounted accuracy (really really good accuracy), suddenly you stop using it for suppression, and just use it to kill people and now you're OP. If you try to balance this by making the accuracy on the machine gun worse. Players will realize that it's inaccurate and of no real threat due to the low chance of actually being hit. So they don't hide.
