So, who here was taken a back when finding out from last stream about lascannons basically being utilized as snipers just like Space Marine, despite the fact that they said previously that it would not be this way...? Tbh, I really would love to see them own up to this and make good on their word. If you desire snipers; implementing scout marines and the like seems to me to be the logical out, I'm just saying... Anyone else have similar views...? Edit: Apologies, but I fucked up the title somehow, it was suppose to read: "Lascanon adjustements" or something like that..
I totally agree. They did make it quite clear Lascannon would much harder to wield versus other infantry than it was in THQ's Space Marine, and that it would be a primarily anti armor weapon, yet that's not what we saw in Friday's Twitch feed. There's also the worrisome fact that Devastator's heavy bolters are apparently the "go to" unit to take out Rhinos and Predators. So what we see in game play currently: Lascannon's are anti infantry sniper units and Heavy Bolters are anti armor units, will Tactical units also be Psykers? If we're throwing traditional roles and balance out the window, why not go all out? I think someone @ Behavior needs to check TT rules and read a few 40K novels. Lascannons need to be 90% anti armor, 10% anti infantry as far as being able to score kills. Heavy Bolters need to be 99% anti infantry/anti bunker, infanty supression and 1% versus armor. Someone from another post brought to light the fact that on average a lone Devastator w/heavy bolter takes an average of 7 turns in TT to take down a Rhino. What we've seen in game is 10 to 15 seconds of sustained heavy bolter fire to take down a Rhino. The discrepancies are quite clear. Granted, it's only pre Alpha, so we don't really know... but we should voice our concerns regardless.
We don't have enough info to complain about it, maybe it's really dificult to aim with the lass cannon and he needed 5 shots to hit him and he waited 2-3 seconds between shots, it could have been easier to kill him with a heavy bolter then, also it was just a 6vs6, they didn't need to keep sustained fire on a choke point or something like that... I guess if what you guys want is to make the lass cannon totally useless against infantry it should do 99% of people health so you have to hit them twice... IMO it's more about making the heavy bolter a much better anti infantry choice and I think that they acomplished that already with the supression system, extra points if you have a delay between shots with the lass cannon. BTW ask a mod to change the title.
An easy way to move the lascannon away from the anti-infantry role is to do this: Give it a reload time of ~5-15 seconds. Give it 4 or less shots in reserve, preferably only 1-2. Have it gain severe cone of fire while moving/turning that settles (not snaps, settles, it should take a second or two) when holding still. This would make it extremely awkward and inefficient to use against infantry targets compared to just about any other weapon, while still being very strong against vehicles. The trick to using it against moving vehicles would be to aim ahead of them, hold still to let your aim settle, then pull the trigger when they drive across your crosshair (because lasers are hitscan). This also means you now technically have to "lead" with a hitscan weapon. You've got to aim at a point where they will drive across after your aim stabilizes, because if you try to aim directly at them while they are moving you will get a cone of fire from turning. Of course it would still be "possible" to shoot infantry with it, it's just not a good idea because any infantry that is moving would be hard to hit, the reload time makes it a very slow way to get kills, and you run out of ammo fast.
we must ask in the next stream to see how weapon work on different target and form different direction.
It's too early to judge the lascannon right now. We didn't see many frags with this gun. We should wait some more imo, besides I doubt Brent would f****k this one up, he's perfectly aware of the issues concerning this weapon from THQ SM, we talked about this several times.
At this stage people should be more impressed that weapons work remotely right at all. Balance comes after you get everything in the game and you get rid of wonderful bugs like pistol shots hitting people through walls, sounds causing the game to crash, falling through holes in the world, etc. It does no good to try to balance things at an early stage because you'll end up having to go back and redo everything for something else to work. People flipping out over things they don't remotely understand is why more companies don't show off the early parts of production.
I wouldn't consider having an adult discussion via asking questions of the devs and voicing our concerns as "flipping out".
To compare it to building a car from scratch your concerns are like bitching about it not having spinning rims when just the chassis has been assembled. Balance is one of the last steps, save your worries about it until then.
