secondary fire for indiviual weapons?

[WiFiDi]

with the issue of having to remove weapons such as single shotgun on most classes, I believe ive brought this up before a long time ago but i think revisiting it at this stage would make sense. As i feel this would make it easier to adjust the classes in the future and now.

currently FF is removing weapons to lower the amount of weapon slots. the problem i see is your losing alot of functionality of previous weapons they had a purpose after all. this idea should help alleviate that and make it possible in the future to keep weapon slots down without losing functionality and the ability to add functionality to a class without having to make a whole new weapon or completely change an existing one. it will open the door exponentially to how much firepower or abilities you can pack into 3 slot or 4 slot system. instead of having individual weapons for everything. and since shift is a key that is unused i think using it here would be a good idea.

so ill explain how basically the current class specific specials will move down to shift while the weapon specials will move to right click this is to make it easier to use. each weapon would have the potential for one though not all have to have one.

for those that don't unique a secondary fire option immediately or ever. we can either make it so nothing happens or they have soldiers current class ability. which you can just do with q anyways or maybe it could be reload for some weapons either way its more a placeholder to make it so the button does something no matter what when you press it.

super shotgun since this is probably the most obvious change im going to start with it.

weapon: super shogun
primary fire: 2 ammo
secondary fire: 1 shot (the equivalent of the single shotgun)

that means soldier, medic, heavy, engi, spy, all loose 1 weapon slot without losing the functionality of the single shotgun. thus making the the classes more versatile without adding tons of weapon slots making it harder to switch between weapons. pretty sure they all had a single shotgun before this even if they didn't i don't think it would be a bad thing that they now have one as they still draw from the same ammo pool and it is a niche weapon to begin with.

class sniper

]now lets move to one that requires some moving stuff around.
ideally id like the sniper rifle changed from what it currently is but for now lets talk about implementing it how it currently is. you could add a secondary fire type but that would force shift to scope and could also make the sniper even more powerful so think the best thing for now would be to make the sniper special ability something else and make the sniper rifles secondary fire zooming in.

weapon: sniper rifle
primary fire: regular fire
secondary fire: scope

Heavy weapons guy

this is another change i see when you added over charge you had to get rid of reeving the gun secondary ability well i miss that so what this would allow is to have both overpressure and revving of the gun at the same time. while the overpressure would move the shift because its a class special i think honestly it would fit better there its never really felt like a secondary fire ability but rather a side ability anyways so pressing shift wouldn't be a big deal.

Class: hwg
shfit: overpressure (aka fart)

weapon: Heavy assault cannon
fire one: regular fire
fire two: reving gun

the demoman

the demo man is simple to remove 1 weapon slot that is currently taken up by 2 weapons

weapon: pipe and detonator launcher
Primary fire: pipes
Secondary fire: detonators

this is just the stuff off the top of my head you could probably come up with all sorts of crazy ideas for each class to make them more unique and functional. an airblast (like in tf2), tagging shot, burst fire for nail gun, could even give the spy a wrist tranq instead of having a sperate weapon slot, etc...

theres my idea what do you guys think me personally i think it would add so much to the game though it would be a bit of a change the long run rewards are very high and worth it.

[squeek.]

It's been discussed on the dev forums before, but it's hard to justify adding yet another key that needs to be bound, which we probably have too many of already (2 grens, dropitems, use, attack2, crouch, jump, discard...).

It definitely would make it really easy to combine/consolidate weapons without losing any functionality, but it'd also add quite a bit of new complexity that might make it even harder for new players to get familiar with (3 weapons with alt fire on some of them is probably less newb-friendly than 4 weapons with no alt fire).

[WiFiDi]

Originally Posted by squeek.

It definitely would make it really easy to combine/consolidate weapons without losing any functionality, but it'd also add quite a bit of new complexity that might make it even harder for new players to get familiar with (3 weapons with alt fire on some of them is probably less newb-friendly than 4 weapons with no alt fire).

think if you use wasd which is the most common setup you actually don't do anything with your pinky finger except crouch so adding shift to that means that your pinky has 2 buttons to press instead of 1. things like concing or trimping are often new concepts to players that ive noticed struggle with. pressing mouse 2 or shift aren't new concepts they're buttons you have to press. unlike concing, trimping, and bhop you don't have to have timing and coordination to function remotely correctly.

it could also go on the middle mouse button which would make it potentially more accessible as its in the same location as the mouse.

as for being newb friendly

Originally Posted by squeek.

(2 grens, dropitems, use, attack2, crouch, jump, discard...)..

as for those im not sure you have to use all of those to be reasonably effective or learn the game grenades are helpful frags but not entirely requried and drop items id bet i could go many many hours without doing it and do just fine. there use is much more limited than second fire option which is right on mouse 2 and shift which is used in almost all games pressing it they should quickly understand what it does. even then i think not using them doesn't' inherently mean you will be useless in a pub you could learn the game without ever using the keys with the exception of the demo man.

as for "discard" your weapon (i think thats what you mean.) having that makes little since in a class base game just deactivate the weapon when you run out of ammo you can't pickup new weapons so why have a button to throw weapon away at all. (assuming that's what your saying.) due to teh class base system since you can't pick up other peoples weapons scouts can't get rocket launchers. seems like an extra button to me that isn't really needed there found an extra button

some ui changes could help as well.

media: you have access to steam which means you could write up and article on it since FF needs things to tweet something like this would not only create some hype but also explain new mechanics you add in patches or what changes mean. the best part is because everyone has access to the changes you don't nesscarily have to write it some forumite like me could or preferably someone who can spell.

ui: in the weapon menu class selection i find one big thing missing is that when you hover over a weapon or click on it there is no description of the weapon that i can see which could be the place where you tell them there is an alternate attack. then there's the hint button which already exists just gotta add teh tool tips.

tl;dr: sorry for the rantish like post i didn't intend it even go on as i did nor forceful. i just feel like this adds so much depth and potential to all classes in teh future and present that passing it up because it might be a tad more complex to save some depth isn't good enough for me. to sum it up basically instead of removing depth of the game i think retooling into an easier format is the better option even if its a bit harder potentially. hell even if it was just tried in beta i think it would be worth exploring because i really don't think its that terribly hard to understand (even with all the other thing as the concept exists in countless other games.) and could add so much to the game.

[FDA_Approved]

They're not removing weapons purely to reduce inventory slots. They're removing pointless overlap that just confuses new players. FF classes aren't "losing functionality". They removed the single shoty which is largely pointless, and hasn't really seen a good argument for keeping it.

I really don't see why you need a single shot on your SSG. The only real purpose would be ammo management, and I don't really see why it's needed. SSG reloads pretty fast. You shoot people, and if your clip runs out you need to reload, that's kind of the balance of it.

I'm not sure what needs to change about the sniper. (besides fixing the seriously goofy hit reg.) I'd be all for redefining his role, but as he is he doesn't really need anything new, definitely not a new ability that necessitates putting scope on a new secondary fire to make room for other things.

Manual reving is fine as is. It would be nice not to have to spam click, but manual reving gets the job done and I think is readily apparent to anyone who plays the class for any short period of time.

Honestly I just think stacking multiple abilities on single weapons is kind of pointlessly complex and even runs the risk of being OP in some cases. It just makes sense to me from a balance stand point that you have separate tools for separate jobs, and you have to decide what's best for the current situation and switch between them.

[WiFiDi]

shotguns
last checked is it wrong maybe but the super shotgun had a larger spread making it less effective at long range but more damage. where the single shotgun had less spread making it more effective at range but less damage at least this is how i understood it. so you would not only be exercising ammo trade off but whether you wanted to hit something long or short range. and if its not maybe that how it should work. though im not sure how shotguns calculate damamge exactly is does it count the bbs that hit or just 1 hit registered.

revving
having to constantly click a button is much harder and potentially distracting to a player as hes of focusing on that and not the flag or whatever. revving was just adding a feature that was removed due to air-burst which i thought was useful to the class as a whole.

sniper
the reason the sniper is changed at all is because otherwise its class ability would be shift i am addressing a how that would be addressed obviously all classes have to looked at when implemented this system i just stated a few off top of my head. how it should/could be better, im not honestly sure yet. im not even sure its his gun but there seems to be limited interaction with him. he lacks thing to do for team other than snipe people. such as maybe a sensor grenade he can throw or separate tracking mechanic (loading a speical tracking bullet) so there is a trade off for wall hacking someone.

spy
having an arm tranq dispenser like that one mod instead of the tranq gun meaning it can tranq with any weapon though this may be OP.

future purposes
also alot of this is in the future its not what would it do now its the options it would potentially open up later down the road. such as pyro having secondary attack on flamethrower (which i think could help open the class up i feel now hes very 1 dementional and boring tbh spam flame weapons. demo man could have a different spin option applied to piples so they spin on there side like a top and ricochet off walls sideways while spinning. or a charged shot of some kind for his pipes to make them go further instead of unseperating the launcher like i had originally suggested. sniper could have something that triggers tracking dart aka wall hacks instead of just getting by shooting someone. which makes it a choice there are lots of things you could do plenty with potential of mixing up FF game play/adding more depth.