Railgun is great in Last Titan Standing IMO. Most players start off hiding behind particle shields and keeping their distance, so having the power and accuracy at long range pays off. For anything else though I agree.
As for the railgun, yes, if you land a fully charged shot it will usually strip the shields... but so does the TT in two shots, as does the 40mm in just a couple shots, and it takes a lot less time with those. In order to "fix" the railgun, they need to 1) remove the zoom, 2) make it instant-hit, and 3) increase ammo capacity.
Or at least some combo of the above (doing all 3 would probably make it OP). But seriously, I have never seen anyone but a Gen 3 using the railgun. There's no compelling reason whatsoever to pick up that gun if you're not chasing challenges.
I think I'm going to stop at Gen 3. Started using the plasma railgun, and omg what a POS. Seriously what were they thinking with this thing?
- Horribly underpowered? check
- Ridiculously small clip? check
- Can see charging from a mile away? check
- Stupid long travel time? check
I'm convinced it's some sort of twisted social experiment to see how many suckers will grind away just to get to Gen 4 (not this guy!).
I don't mind reasonable challenges, but challenges like this force people to play the game in ways no one wants to play it, and in ways that flat out brake game modes.. For instance, if you google the topic of the railgun, you'll find that the standard tactic (and only reasonable way of moving on) is to 1) play Last Titan Standing, and 2) camp your !@# off whilst trying to steal kills from your teammates after they've done all the work to wear a titan down.
First of all, Last Titan Standing SUCKS. It's boring as hell (probably because of this challenge...). Second, challenges like this clearly provide an incentive for people to to flat out NOT work as a team. I tried this over the weekend, and there were a crazy number of G3's in LTS, and guess what they were all using... and guess what they were all trying to do.
I'm not saying we need to go back to COD's "just get enough XP and you can prestige"... but build some intelligence into these challenges rather than just picking a gun and saying "okay you need to kill 50 titans with this". That's stupid. Especially with weapons that serve no real purpose in the game and would never, EVER be used were it not for the challenges.
And if you need to create arbitrary challenges to get people to use certain weapons or play certain modes, then maybe they're weapons/modes that shouldn't have made it into the game in the first place.
I like the CAR SMG - it's probably the only thing that can hold its own against the wildly overpowered (over-"ranged" to be precise) shotgun at short and medium ranges. A lot of people seem to prefer the Hemlock in terms of SMGs, but I just don't care for it. I don't know why.
I like the chaingun for my Titan, but the stupid "you WILL use this weapon if you want to regen" challenges are forcing me to use the 40mm cannon. It's not bad at all and has its advantages, but you can really pick at titans from across the map with the chaingun. It's a little harder to do with the 40mm.
I can't stand the Triple Threat. More power to the people who are effective with it, but I hate it.
I switch between Active Radar Pulse and Cloak depending on my mood. I play mostly Hardpoint, so ARP can be really handy. Cloak is good if you want to mindlessly sprint across the middle of the map... but I tend not to do that.
Hemlock with Starburst (5 shot burst as opposed to 3) rocks IMO. Not as good as a CAR or shotgun at point blank but it owns once you get out to medium range. I usually run a Starburst Hemlock with an AOG and satchel charges (for rodeoing titans as well as tripping up annoying shot-gunners).
The CAR is fun with the run&gun kit but not terribly effective outside of short range, hard to pick people off from rooftops and such.
On an unrelated note I despise the shotgun. It's become the noob weapon of choice and almost everyone I've seen using it has no strategy at all. They just run around like they're so OP and practically beg to be satchel charged or ass raped; no situational awareness at all. Not to mention it's just a boring weapon, it sounds and feels hollow, I feel like I'm manning an industrial 3-hole-punch.
The new matchmaking upgrade is really starting to annoy me. I like the idea of balancing out teams, but breaking up and entire lobby after every couple of matches kinda sucks when it already takes so long just to assemble a new lobby.
Why not do it COD-style? Just mix up the teams after each round and balance skill out within the lobby. When COD4 was released in 2007, one of the things it was very much praised for was how quickly you could get into a game from the time you fired the game up. 7 years later, we've taken quite a large step backward.
Is this in place now for pc? Last week I played and didn't see anything new. Must be an update.
**AS LONG AS** teams stay put for long periods of time.
I'm not going to regen. Don't see any point. My buddies that regen b*tch about having to complete this or that specific challenge to get the next level. I just want to play the game to have fun and give me the most specific loadout I want to win. I don't want to be "forced" to use some dumb weapon just to get an icon by my name. I try to fight back against the stupid rank up and un-lock system.
Fixed crashes on machines with 32 or more cores.