I know it's been mentioned before- but guns are TERRIBLE! :(

After reading through this thread, and my own experience with guns, I would actually go an opposite route;

Increase base energy regeneration.
Slightly increase gun energy usage
Melee weapons should require energy usage.
Guns should do 25% less damage than melee as a general rule.
*Dash should have invincibility frames.

The idea is that you fire in quick bursts, rather than try to sustain a long infinite stream of bullets. while this makes the "downtime" of guns occur more often, the period of standing around between downtime is meant to be shorter so that you can use a gun as your primary weapon if you wish to do that. Melee weapons should require energy usage as well as it is slightly lame that I can dual wield short-swords with some kind of ranged magic on them and effectively simulate a gun. Dash having invincibility frames would open up some tactical play as we have a good method of closing or creating distance and evading damage, albeit at the expense of energy.

Do all of that and Starbound suddenly has a much more "active" feel in combat.

 

A good two cents. This is the main problem with guns in my opinion, they have no stopping power. They should have some variable of knockback.

 

i extremely strongly disagree. knockback is exactly what you DON'T want guns to have, as it's the #1 way to make guns OP. just look at the bows, it's literally impossible for non-ranged enemies to even come remotely close to you without swarming you.

so no, knockback is not the answer, not even remotely.

 

I'm in full support of this above all. I think its a good starting point to tweak things if needed.

 

i wonder how long it takes for people to realise that in almost every game melee weapons do more damage then ranged weapons
TF2
Zelda
Doom
Terraria
Minecraft
Call of duty
Halo
Binding of Issac
Street fighter
and the list goes on

 

There is literally no situation that calls for a gun in this game.

I don't use guns, pretty much ever, and I'll explain why, starting here:

Unintended mechanic, Bartwe has already said he wants minibosses and ALL bosses to be able to break blocks to keep people from doing this.

Get used to using a one handed sword and shield--that's how you kill minibosses without cheesing terrain, a tactic that the development team has already said they want to get rid of.

Guns won't work for this outside of cheesing.

Literally no reason to do this. You kill faster and safer with a strong one handed weapon and a usable tech than you do killing one to two enemies (I found an uzi capable of killing 2 once!) before your energy is depleted.

Further, the two handed weapon will knock them around, cover everything above and in front of you with it's attack, and generally just be easier.

AND if you have a slow and powerful two-hander, switching back to melee when they get close to you can, quite easily, leave you unable to attack.

For lulz is the only reason to do that.

NPC guns generally do little damage as well, but it adds up. If you get into a gun fight with them it takes 2-3 times as long to kill them while they're shooting you the entire time. Meanwhile, if you rush through five or six bullets to hit them in the face, you ONLY take the damage from five or six bullets, after which they switch to melee and you just swat them back a couple times, killing them faster while taking less damage.

Let's cover other places people might think guns work well:

Birds? Maybe until you get gravity bubble. Guns can kill one or two birds, and if you're getting attacked by groups (which happens a lot in this newest build) you're out of ammo, have no techs to run away with, etc. Meanwhile, if you have gravity bubble, you just fly up and kill them with swords in their face.

? ? ? Any place else?


So let's recap--Only place guns are good? Cheesing bosses by abusing terrain. (Technically there's also the bone dragon but that's only because the bone dragon has a completely broken hitbox that makes melee more or less impossible. That'll be fixed eventually, as well.)

Everyplace else? They do less damage, take longer to kill, can only kill one or two enemies before leaving you dry, and leave you open to more damage.

There's, literally, never a good time to use guns. Damage needs to be upped, or energy consumption needs to be dropped. Possibly both.

 

I have read the entire thread, and I merely want to bring this up for your consideration:

On either an alpha or beta planet, I found an axe. It is described as a tier 2 axe. The stats are as follows:

DPS: 126
Swing speed: 2.77
Swing Damage: 45

Definitely on a beta planet, I found a plasma pistol on a merchant and I thought it would be totally sweet [on account of it being a super awesome futuristic plasma pistol], so I bought it without looking too hard at the stats and was promptly disappointed. The stats are as follows:

DPS:14
ROF: .57
Damage per Shot: 25
Energy per shot: 76

So while wearing my gold helmet, I can fire this thing twice over the course of four seconds and do a little more damage than my axe did in half a second. At that point I could no longer use it or any gun, nor could I use a tech to get myself out of the sticky situation that would come with it.

I'm not going to propose any changes because honestly, I'm not sure what route would be best in making guns competitive. Just wanted to show from my experience how outclassed guns are by melee weapons.

 

I think there's two problems here. Melee weapons are TOO POWERFUL, not guns are too weak. If you shoot enemies on T10 planets with a T10 gun, they take about as long as it should take to kill. But if you use the T10 hammer you can one shot most T10 mobs and two shot some of the others. Melee weapons of all types really shouldn't do as much damage as they do. Especially the crafted ones. The other problem is that they drain energy too fast. Reducing it by half would be enough to give a good ammount of sustainability.

 

then you realize that skillful gun usage outclasses melee in all situations except if the melee gets the drop on the gunner.

 

Not really, you have shields, and techs like dash and blink that make the ranged benefit of the gun moot.

 

and thats the reason why range does less then melee =D

 

Please, name one.

Just a single situation in this game where ranged is better than melee, other than shooting through dirt fortifications and dealing with the bone dragon's broken hitbox.

I'll cut you some slack even, name one where they're equivalent.

If it's better in ALL of them, surely you can name at least one.

 

They arent that bad really, the 2000+ dps guns are rather usefull. What I dont like is the energy-cost for some of the legendary guns.

 

guns work fine for me.

 

that moment when you go back and read the conversation, and realize why it's idiotic to ignore the context of a post, because i very clearly wasn't talking about starbound.

except for in starbound, where range does no damage at all compared to melee, and is negated entirely regardless because of shields.

 

Actually if you are wearing specially made armor/whatever to deflect/stop bullets (more than likely low caliber), and say the gunman is shooting at you with a 9 mill, then yes you could beat them with a melee weapon. By more than likely going for a weak/lethal spot on the gunman.

 

welcome to my ignore list. you clearly aren't capable of basic reading comprehension, and are thus not worth engaging with further.

 

So gentleman!
Let us grab a 50.cal and a Massive hammer,
Now lets hit two humans with both.
Did they die?
Yes? Then I dont see why guns use so much energy to do lesser damage than melee weapons. Balance it might be, realistic it is not.

 

I'd say because Starbound isn't a game about realism. If Range did as much dps as melee, what would be the benefit to melee over range? This isn't a question about damage, it's a question about functional advantages.

Obviously range needs work. In my opinion some knock back or stopping power would help keep distance between a target and the player, something that melee wouldn't be able to do at from a distance.

Shields in their current state are a bit overpowered, and need to deplete energy just like everything else does. I think implementing those few things with tweaking could go a long way towards making gun play more "fun" and balanced towards melee.

As soon as melee closes in on a gunner, the gun is useless. If guns have nothing to help keep that gap between themselves and their attacker, then their effectiveness is short lived. Stopping power would help stave off an advancer, and energy consumption from damage to shields would keep someone from keeping their shield up forever and make advancing and shield use more tactical.

 

You probably misunderstood me, and that's my fault. Instead of using the term "knockback" I should have used "stopping power," like someone else did, but for some odd reason the phrase never even came to mind when I was writing that post.

I don't want enemies flying halfway across the map when they get struck by a pistol bullet. That'd be stupid. But I see no logic in watching a high-caliber hard kinetic slug rip into a creature half my size and watching it trot through that impact like nothing ever happened. Sniper rifles should stop them in their tracks. Close range shotgun blasts should, at the very least, push them back a good two steps. Riddling them with a hail of assault rifle bullets should slow them down and eventually halt or disorient them, as suppression does in real life. The same should work for machine pistols, but on a more limited scale.

I agree that grenade launchers seem to be in a good place. But as for rocket launchers, there is no reason why shooting a goddamn rocket directly into an animal's torso, alien or not, should not send it careening into a cliff face. I won't even bring up what it would actually do if Starbound had remotely accurate physics.

Obviously, none of us here can speak with any certainty as to the properties of weaponized lasers and plasma, as that tech is still incredibly limited and incredibly experimental. The best we could do is conjure up fantastical hypotheticals.

I'm not talking about giving guns the ridiculous knockback that melee weapons currently have (I'm looking at you, hammer), but with the speed demons we're currently fighting, there needs to be some way of keeping range that doesn't include the use of tech, which results in more wasted energy that could be used for the firing of the weapon.