Now I haven’t been able to play actual Virus, but I have spent quite a bit of time on the weapon test area, and I want to share some suggestions for improving some of the guns.
1. Double Barrel and Sonic Shotgun have far too much ammo in their reserves. This does not complement their power well, and I can quickly see the two guns dominating TU Virus much like they did in GMT. I believe the following would be much more balanced. The first number is the clip, the second is the ammo reserve.
Double Barrel: 2/6 or 2/8
Sonic Shotgun: 6/12, 6/18 or 6/6
2. This is incredibly nitpicky but it’s bugging me a lot. The Tommy Gun has a drum mag, so why does it hold less ammo then the M41A? Unless the drum mag is to remain cosmetic only, the ammo count should be reversed.
Tommy Gun: 60/60 or 50/50
M41A: 25/75 or 30/90
3. The ammo reserve count caps at the tens place, rather than the hundreds place. This is a bit confusing for the M41A especially, because it has 120 ammo in it’s reserve but it only looks like it has 20.
4. Another really nitpicky one, but IMO, the Sci-Fi handgun looks incredibly generic and boring. Perhaps some more colors or lights can be added to it?
5. This is probably a bug, but crossbow bolts can stick to survivors. Since the explosion doesn’t harm them, I can see some people abusing this to create no-risk suicide bombers if you will. Which is actually kind of awesome, but probably not desired.
Assuming every shot a player fires hits, with your idea the double barrel would kill 5 infected and the sonic would kill 6 (on average). If we say the average player has 33% accuracy that’s about 2 kills on a shotgun, which makes them almost useless. I agree with the Tommy gun 50/50 change, and the m1a 30/90 change though.
Shotguns are suited for close range. Assuming this, accuracy should not be an issue unless the player can’t even hit something right in front of them, in which case that isn’t really the weapons fault.
At close range, the Double Barrel shotgun is capable of one hit kills, even without the double shot. This can kill up to 8 to 10 Infected depending on how much ammo is given the player.
The Sonic Shotgun takes two shots to kill an Infected at close range. This means up to 6 to 12 Infected can be killed with this gun. On top of that, the gun still has the push-back mechanic, which can still be used without any ammo.
With that in mind, I think these stats are perfectly acceptable.
EDIT: Added another option to the Sonic Shotgun to match it with the Double Barrel.
I agree with points 2-5. I’m still iffy on shotguns because you typically don’t want to get close to Infected in virus which makes their power less and their accuracy worse, thus requiring more ammo.
Personally, I disagree with this. To me, shotguns are a very risk/reward weapon, where you do indeed want to get close to infected. The power of shotguns at that close range is what makes them incredibly effective, and the fact that only a couple shots or less can kill at close range is why having a lot of shotgun ammo makes them overpowered. With so much power and so much ammo, they are essentially melee weapons. Almost any other weapon in the game you need to worry about running out of ammo for, but shotguns only get to that point if the user is constantly engaged with infected (e.g. they’re the last survivor). Either they need to be nerfed in power to encourage dealing damage at a distance with other weapons while using shotguns as a close-range finisher, or they need to have less ammo in order to force users to switch out weapons and encourage shotguns as a last resort. That’s my take on shotguns, at least.
I do find myself using shotguns over any other weapon, both in GMTower and TU.
Plenty of ammo makes corner camping an L-shaped hallway pretty easy, just wait for them to sprint down it, take aim and watch them one-shot with the double-barrel’s secondary.