It makes it impossible to fight in space due to not being able to use jetpacks while shooting, you cannot use shields which is a huge downgrade for everyone involved, nukies can only use their eshield with a pistol or a meelee weapon, and sec can’t use the shields and shoot either. It also makes reloading a major pain, and some guns aren’t very intuitive on using them anymore. I’ve been seeing a lot of players fumbling to drop everything in their hands so they can double wield their gun, and by then they are already dead. More thought needs to be put in into such a mechanic, which, honestly, felt like it was rushed out because of the freeze.
It also ruined the unique identity of the L6 too. Like, now nearly every gun is just a worse L6, the tradeoff is gone.
I understand why this one was done. Out of the unholy trinity of last second PRs, this one had the strongest justification, but the med rework is going to rebalance combat anyways and make meleeing with things that aren’t the stun rod better because of things like limb decapitation.
Fundamentally, the gun rework is just not fun. Its cumbersome. The game’s intent-based combat system is already kind of goofy for new players to get used to. This is another barrier that furthers the skill gap between new players and robust long time players without actually making gameplay more fun for robust long time players. This isn’t going to stop insert robust player here from murdering all of sec, its going to stop the poor cadet facing them from even having a chance of getting a few shots off at them with their lecter. Like, anyone who regularly plays nukies and sees a new player try to handle the L6 knows exactly how this goes.
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Also, like, I understand a lot of work went into the wielding sprites, so I do have an alternate proposal that solves another issue. Let wielding your gun make it so you do not drop your gun when you slip or are stunned (The L6 will still require wielding for accuracy). This solves the issue of just slipping sec and taking their lecter being the optimal combat solution every single time by giving them an option to not drop their gun, while not making it a hard requirement. The sprites still get to be used so contributors don’t feel like their hard work was wasted. The L6 retains its unique identity and furthermore isn’t just grabbed and used to murder every single nukie the second its wielder is pied or otherwise slipped.
Its a really nice solution to all the problems caused by this PR and some longstanding issues with slip balance. As it stands right now, open carrying a wielded weapon is going to be more common in sec, which means stealing weapons is going to be much more common right now. This PR kind of makes the bad thing much, much worse. Its just a miserable change for sec players.
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You can equip jetpacks in the bag slot. So you can choose between having a bag, or extra dps and ammo that big guns have over handguns. Before this there was no real reason to ever use a handgun.
And why is that a bad thing? You can go full offense by wielding a big gun, or you can trade some offense for defense by using handgun + shield. Makes perfect sense both from a balance and realism standpoint.
There is a PR open that will make wielding automatically drop the item in the other hand. Make wielding automatically drop the item on your other hand by DrSmugleaf · Pull Request #27975 · space-wizards/space-station-14 · GitHub
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My biggest gripe is that this change intentionally slows down the pace of combat, which I think is a bad thing. Combat is at its best when its fast and fluid. Before weilding the benefit to leaving your other hand empty was extremely fast reloads, which felt fluid and cool to do. Now its a slow unweild, reload, then weild again, which is quite awkward.
I understand weilding being more ‘realistic’ but gunplay previously wasn’t imbalanced, and players had a lot of fun with it. The extra steps feel unnecessary and ruins the flow state of quickly switching guns or reloading. Even after players adjust their muscle memory to the change, I think there will still be a lot of demand to revert things to how they were.
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The bag is not really something that you can trade for a jetpack, all this does is make the mini jetpack and bloodred magboots king, while security, which only gets the regular jetpacks, suffer.
Your argument is that pistols should see more use, but pistols are useless against most armors. You can’t ever realistically kill a nukie with a pistol and a shield. The only one who benefits from this is the captain, with his antique laser pistol, because everyone else will have to either only use guns or do next to no damage with pistols.
That PR is just a bandaid fix for what feels like a very major downgrade of a PR to the game. Pistols had their use case for unarmored targets and for assasination, why should there ever be a push for making people have to use pistols against nuclear operatives or against security hardsuits?
You know you can wear jetpacks, right? If anything I think that’s one of the biggest pros of the change.
The reason people use jetpacks on their hand slot is because giving up their inventory to go out into space and fight antags is fundamentally not fun. Antags already have a huge advantage in space. I say this as an antag-gamer who abuses the hell out of space.
The PR was a huge quality of life reduction for regular security crew. Like, I’ve seen sec be even more empty than normal every shift as people don’t really want to mess around with the clunky combat anymore. Life is pure misery for cadets the moment a threat that requires real guns comes on the station. Other major antag players I know have admitted that this is 100% a buff for them (I mean, I always pick the L6, I’m used to dealing with this kind of clunkyness). But like, it isn’t an interesting or fun buff, it just means those moments where new or less combat-experienced players still managed to correctly operate their weapon and take you down are going to happen a lot less often.
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