what do you think of the new burst rifles?

[B_Montiel]

After a week of playing with new burst rifles, well, I quite got used to them and I would not necessarily say they turned awfully terrible. And unlike many here, I think that the stark is probably better than the BR-16 right now.

I play with high sensitivity, which in my case means that aim-fire-aim binary like behaviours are quite efficient. In other terms, stark more or less behaves like a long range slug shotgun now and it still packs an awful lot of damage when used as such. It was possible to use them like this before, but now it’s probably the only way to work the Stark nicely now. In the meantime, the rpm loss with the BR-16 totally disables it from such game style. So in my hands, it definitely feels weaker than the stark.

Bear in mind, they both lost hell lot overall dps with this nerf, to me it was absolutely necessary. It’s still above the regular full-auto M4/Timik.

But their vision of the nerf just turned their handling totally awkward and out of context in this game. More than anything else, that’s what I read in most of the posts here.

[Amerika]

I agree about the Stark feeling more powerful. However, I don’t feel like it’s all that much. And one thing I love about the BR is that you don’t ever feel like you’re going to run out of ammo yet I feel like I am going to all the time on the Stark since it only has 27 in the mag compared to the BR16’s 33. Right now I really enjoy both of them. As you said, and it’s how I’ve told me friends when I first started using them this weekend, they act like a long range shotgun. You can use the same tactics and you can swing out of a doorway and burst somebody with one shot then either finish them or cover depending on the situation. The guns now require a different style of play since, in the past, they were basically automatic weapons that you had to click more often.

The accuracy of them is insane though. You might have to time your shots more than with an M4 but you don’t have to do any sort of recoil or sway control and you have to ADS in far fewer situations making you more mobile.

[torsoreaper]

The one downside to the BR16, and I guess shotguns have this, is the long time between firing. If they drop to 1% HP on a burst and you were in an even firefight you will most likely lose. In those situations an M4 would have won out. But then the amount of times where I simply melted somebody before they could respond offset that.

I think what we really need is a TTK for each merc because everyone has different HP. On some people that extra burst because the opponent is at 0-20% health is life or death whereas on someone else exactly 2 bursts is enough and you probably have a better TTK than their full auto. This is the tricky thing about balancing shotguns or burst rifles. DPS doesn’t take into account the whole picture because the DPS comes in spikes, it’s not constant.