T3 Weapon: Bolt Action

[Rosgath]

I've considered this concept and I do agree that there is design space for a "one big shot" type effect, but I don't think that increasing weapon damage on the shooter's end is the right approach. It makes it too easy to abuse and works almost too well with the rapid fire nature of the current M1 landscape is made.

We do have items like Headhunter which add a solid amount of damage to a headshot, but that requires a headshot and actually kind of favors high fire rate anyway as you want to keep it on CD as often as you can, so I figured I'd work something up that might work with both.

Here's a Mockup of the idea I had:


It ends up at around 210 damage every 1.5 seconds, and Transcendent Cooldown should reduce the CD further to bring it down to something like 1.15s, which can be quite a bit of DPS if you take the time to line up your shots each time.

I pitched the damage lower than Headhunter, but the scaling is the same. I did this because the Cooldown is much shorter than Headhunter's Cooldown, which I think is justifiable as it doesn't also provide healing like Headhunter does.

 

[Stark Trist]

I've considered this concept and I do agree that there is design space for a "one big shot" type effect, but I don't think that increasing weapon damage on the shooter's end is the right approach. It makes it too easy to abuse and works almost too well with the rapid fire nature of the current M1 landscape is made.

We do have items like Headhunter which add a solid amount of damage to a headshot, but that requires a headshot and actually kind of favors high fire rate anyway as you want to keep it on CD as often as you can, so I figured I'd work something up that might work with both.

...

It ends up at around 210 damage every 1.5 seconds, and Transcendent Cooldown should reduce the CD further to bring it down to something like 1.15s, which can be quite a bit of DPS if you take the time to line up your shots each time.

I pitched the damage lower than Headhunter, but the scaling is the same. I did this because the Cooldown is much shorter than Headhunter's Cooldown, which I think is justifiable as it doesn't also provide healing like Headhunter does.

Really interesting to think about how this would change the player's shooting patterns. I feel like it would encourage shooting a single bullet toward each nearby enemy in rapid succession.

That sounds really quite interesting as a shooting behavior but also really difficult to use in most cases. Switching between targets is really challenging and in most cases you've only got ~2-3 enemies visible in any given moment of a team fight.

Breaking line of sight (LOS) is really important when fighting gun characters, so players tend to get really good at avoiding LOS as a general rule.

I really like how this item can combo with Split Shot as you tend to get at least 1 shot off on several people on the enemy team. It only would trigger once, but that's still potentially quite good.

Might also be interesting with mystic shot as well... hrm...

Thanks for putting some thought into this design space. It's really interesting to read your thoughts on mechanically how an item could reward methodical shooting.