Vanilla Reloaded is a weapon balance mod that aims to rebalance the game's existing arsenal into a more interesting state. The goal is not to drastically alter the existing weapon balance, but instead to tone down some weapons that have become overcentralizing, while buffing some weapons that are currently underperforming. In some cases, weapons have been changed to emphasize what makes them unique from the rest of the cast, further diversifying the options available to the player.
The R8 nerfs to Sledgehammer's stagger were perfect, no additional changes necessary.
R8's addition of a backstab multiplier to Knife gave it the perfect amount of power against Giants and other enemies where Knife prevously struggled, no additional changes necessary.
The Bat is a well-rounded melee, however it is largely overshadowed by the Sledgehammer. While the R8's Sledgehammer nerfs have let it shine as the melee with the highest stagger ability, we decided to additionally increase its light damage, to truly let its light attack shine. We've slightly reduced its light attack stagger multiplier to keep its stagger reasonable.
Breakpoints affected: Bat will now be able to kill a Striker with a light attack to the occiput.
While the recent buffs worked wonders for Spear's usability, Spear still felt to be the most underperforming of melee weapons. We have substantially reduced Spear's stamina usage and slightly reduced its charge time, allowing players to better utilize the playstyle of adopting defensive positions interspersed with quick repositions. We have additionally given it a minor buff to its light attack damage, allowing it to hit some important breakpoints.
Breakpoints affected: Spear will now be able to kill a Striker with a fully charged attack to the body and a light attack to the body. Spear will now be able to kill a Shooter with a light attack to the occiput.
The Pistol is already a well-rounded weapon with a solid identity. Previously, the major drawback of this weapon was the inconsistency of its 3-shot kill on Strikers, but the recent patches have already addressed this. However, its power level is just slightly low for our intended balance-point, so we've increased its damage to slightly improve its breakpoints across the board.
Burst Pistol seems to have entered the game in a fairly underwhelming state. We've buffed its damage to make its breakpoints a bit more forgiving, and lowered its burst delay to make it more spammable. We've slightly lowered its ammo to compensate.
HEL Revolver was definitely overperforming at high level play. The main attraction of this weapon was its insane uptime with reload cancel, incredibly good ammo efficiency and an incredibly fast time to kill, to the point that the overpenetrating qualities just became icing on the cake. We've substantially toned down the ammo efficiency of the weapon, encouraging players to lean into its overpenetrating capabilities in order to get good value.
The Machine Pistol already has some fairly impressive stats, we opted to give it a slight damage bonus, while also tweaking its falloff, so that it has a similar damage profile at range but can be even more devestating up close.
The R8 buffs to HEL Autopistol's damage ended up not being as big of an issue as expected. While in the base game its damage nearly competes with some other automatic weapons, given that we've massively buffed most other automatics we feel happy leaving HEL Autopistol's damage untouched.
Despite its recent buffs, the Bullpup Rifle still felt that it was significantly underperforming. We opted to take a rather extreme route when rebalancing it, we gave it some incredible stats, but then reverted its reload back to a lengthier value. Hopefully, the weapon's incredible power will now feel it justifies its long reload.
The recent buffs to SMG have put it in a decently good place. We've shifted some of its power away from its precision multiplier and substantially increased its raw damage, which should help the weapon feel much more consistent, and also improve its performance in more hectic scenarios.
We've reverted the PDW's previous damage nerf and given it a bump to its precision to make headshots feel very impactful.
Carbine has been repeatedly buffed to the point where it simply outshines the majority of other similar weapons. We've toned down its damage to a much more reasonable level, but have also given it more ammo to compensate.
The DMR is already a very well-rounded weapon, with stats that make it highly effective, coupled with its great match-up in to Shooters, this made it an exceptional choice in solo play. However, its low ammo made it suffer in team environments. We've given it a slight decrease to its bullet cost to make it slightly more efficient.
We've found the Double Tap Rifle to be a generally well-rounded weapon, which already has a fun avenue for skill expression through its one-burst on Strikers. We've slightly buffed its damage to improve its match-up against more diverse enemies.
The Assault Rifle was arguably one of the weakest weapons in the game, as such we've given it some significant buffs to its damage output. We've shifted its damage and precision multiplier to a point where headshots become incredibly rewarding, and adjusted its bullet cost and shot delay accordingly. We've additionally given it a buff to its range, so that it noticeably outranges the SMGs.
The vanilla Burst Rifle is just sort of "alright". We've decided to change up its feel quite significantly, slowing down its fire-rate so that it feels much more distinct from Carbine, but increasing its ammo to compensate. Since it is now able to one-burst much more consistently (and can even one-burst on host) we've slightly lowered its ammo to compensate.
We found that after increasing the range of the Pistol, the Rifle struggled to have a unique identity. While being a longer range variant of the Pistol was certainly a valuable option, we decided to give the weapon a very unique place. The Rifle will now be able to two-shot Strikers at extremely close range, allowing for an extremely effective and efficient but risky playstyle. We've additionally changed its stagger multiplier to be more in line with other weapons and improved its reload cancel (and its reload cancel time now actually matches the magazine-in animation).
The combination of reduced reload and a clipsize of 4 which the last patches gave Sawed-Off has resulted in the weapon being incredibly potent, having insane burst damage as well as a respectable uptime. We've reduced its clipsize back down to 3 to give the weapon more notable weaknesses. We've also lowered its stagger to a more reasonable level and also increased its spread so that it is actually less accurate than its non-sawed counterpart.
While HEL Shotgun is certainly a powerful weapon, it is also incredibly unique, and so, while considering possible changes to it, we endevoured not to disrupt this weapon from its highly specialized niche. We opted to slightly reduce its damage and clipsize, in order to tone down its rather polarizing damage per clip, while keeping the other elements of the weapon intact.
Slug Shotgun has decent stats and a valuable 20 damage breakpoint, but just suffers in a few too many areas to truly shine. We've given it a little bit more range, a little bit more ammo and a little bit more fire-rate.
As part of our changes to many of the automatic weapons, we've slightly increased the precision multiplier of the Heavy Assault Rifle in order to reward player accuracy slightly more. While this doesn't change many breakpoints for this weapon, it'll hopefully still make it so that headshots feel more impactful while in team scenarios. We've additionally increased the falloff start range to be slightly higher than the machineguns that Heavy Assault Rifle directly competes with, slightly increased its damage, bumped its ammo significantly and given it its old recoil.
Short Rifle is perhaps one of the worst weapons the game has ever seen. Despite having good efficiency, its damage and breakpoints are so incredibly underwhelming that it struggles to be effective. We've substantially increased its damage and tinkered with its range to give it a much stronger new breakpoint; it will now be able to headshot + bodyshot Strikers out to ~10m. This should hopefully make the Short Rifle much more effective at short ranges and also pushes its old effective range out substantially. We've adjusted its bullet cost and clip size to account for its new stats, and opted to only slightly increase its stagger multiplier, in order to ensure that a single bodyshot continues to fail to stagger Strikers.
Moved to Special Weapon category.
The Main Weapon category was incredibly over-filled with automatic weapons, so we have moved the Heavy SMG to the Special Weapon category. As a result, it has received a large overhaul to its stats.
Shotgun has decent stats which already make it an effective weapon. We've slightly increased its damage and stagger specifically to improve its reliability against Chargers and Giants while decreasing its precision multiplier to keep its other match-ups mostly the same.
Combat shotgun has a dispropotionately large ammo pool, to the point that it dominates most of the efficiency stats, including those regarding boss killing - a role it is not at all specialized at. We've toned down its bullet cost so that it has a more reasonable ammo efficiency.
The Scattergun disproportionately trivializes most boss enemies. We've toned down its damage and added a tumor multiplier to reduce its power in these encounters, and have also increased its bullet cost so that it requires more thoughtful use.
The Choke Mod Shotgun sits in an awkward spot, it currently feels substantially overshadowed by its other competitors in the 30 damage tier. It is noticeably outranged by the HEL Rifle, and lacks it overpenetrating utility, and it has less ammo than the High Caliber Pistol. The only advantage it has over these two weapons is its rate of fire but even that still feels underwhelming due to its relatively small clipsize. We've made some substantial changes to it, dramatically increasing its damage but also its spread, opening up the possibility for it to spread its damage over multiple enemies. In order to keep its match-up against boss enemies unchanged we're also added a tumor multiplier.
Revolver is a solid option into smaller enemies but disproportionally suffers into larger enemy variants. We've swapped its damage with that of HEL Gun in order to improve its matchup into these larger enemies. We've additionally given it a longer range flashlight, as it previously had the shortest possible flashlight range, despite being a medium range precision based weapon.
Despite being the more controlled version of the Machinegun, Arbalist still struggles to be efficient against most enemies, and greatly loses out on effectiveness in chaotic scenarios. We've increased its damage to give it a new 1+1 breakpoint against Strikers which should enable it to find play as a hyper efficient option when used in a controlled way, while also slightly increasing its effectiveness in other situations as well.
Despite being a weapon that should be highly effective when bullet hosing, Veruta still struggles to compete with other waveclear weapons. We've increased its damage to bump it into the next breakpoint brackets.
The R8 rework of Burst Cannon into a 3-shot burst changed the weapon in many ways. While we will miss the raw power output of its 5-burst, it is much less polarizing and much more usable as a 3-burst. The only change that we have made is tweaking its clip size to be a multiple of its burst.
The HEL Gun is an extremely versatile weapon, being one of the best wave-clear options while also having a strong match up into larger enemies. We've swapped its damage with that of Revolver in order to slightly reduce its impact into larger enemy variants, while maintaining its power into smaller enemies. Additionally, we've reverted some of the changes to its charge time and ammo to hopefully improve the responsiveness of the weapon and give it a more reasonable ammo profile.
With our changes to Choke Mod Shotgun as well as HEL Rifle, we felt that the High Caliber Pistol sat in a good spot. The only change we've made is a slight bump in damage along with a corresponding decrease to its falloff start. This will ensure that the weapon has an almost identical damage profile at range, but will now be able to close the distance to consistently 4-shot Giants.
Its recent buffs made the Precision Rifle much more viable, though its clip size reduction in R8 was not needed and so we've reverted it back to 12. The only other change we've made is to substantially increase its precision multiplier, this should make headshots much more impactful against Giant Shooters and Hybrids and in order to keep its match-up against boss enemies reasonable we've also added a tumor multiplier. The net result is a slight improvement in its boss damage. We've also slightly increased its falloff ranges to reduce the number of awkward moments where you fail to kill even after headshotting enemies like Strikers and Scouts. The only other changes we would have liked to make would be to its thermal scope - moderately increasing the distance it can see through fog, as well as allowing it to see enemy projectiles. This would dramatically improve its usability against Shooters as well as Hybrids, both matchups where it should excel, but the inability to play around the enemy's attacks significantly hamper it.
The R8 nerfs to Sniper were extremely drastic and massively impaired the weapon's usability. We've reverted its clip size back to 3, returned its old reload and reduced its ammo closer to its previous value, while keeping its new shot delay and recoil.
With such a high amount of potential piercing, the HEL Rifle is able to achieve absurd efficiencies. We've toned down its ammo statistics to be more reasonable.
We've additionally added a piercing multiplier, which reduces the damage each time a shot pierces. We've picked this multiplier such that you can still kill 3 Strikers with a single shot, but only kill a Shooter or Charger if it is the first enemy hit. Additionally, when piercing enemies like Giants the further enemy will now require some follow-up damage after 4 shots.
No changes.
The C-Foam Launcher is incredibly difficult to balance. Perma-foaming doors and ladder-foam can trivialize some of the hardest content in the game, but without such environmental advantages it struggles to find value. We believe that the only way to address its power would be to change how it interacts with doors and ladders in a major way.
No changes.
While Burst Sentry remains an incredibly powerful option, the changes in R8 have somewhat addressed its previous dominance. We've only slightly nerfed its ammo and fire-rate to marginally reduce its power, and hope that the rest of our sentry changes will bring the sentries onto a more even playing field.
The HEL Auto Sentry is currently in a poor spot, its targetting system causes it to miss a significant portions of its shots and its overpenetrating abilities are currently not functioning. While it could vastly improve by addressing these issues (which are beyond the scope of this mod), we still would like to see it shift into a more supportive role. Currently, it has a relatively high base DPS, and is incredibly tool hungry, we've slowed down its firerate substantially and given it some extra ammo, so that now it functions as more of a utility sentry - slowing down and chipping enemy waves without being a drain on the team's resources.
After its slew of nerfs with the ALT://R3 patch, the Sniper Sentry suffered from extreme usability issues. While the R8 patch did somewhat addess this, we've still found it to be somewhat lacking, except in scenarios which very strongly favour it. We've given it slightly more ammo, as well as reduced its start fire delay (while toning down its bio-symbiosis start fire delay multiplier) to make it more usable in more scenarios.
Shotgun Sentry is in a dismal state, its current targeting causes it to miss a ridiculous amount of its shots. We've overhauled its targeting, so that it now aims at the bodies of enemies rather than their heads, decreased its maximum range (it often used to get stuck shooting enemies far beyond its effective range), split its damage over 10 pellets instead of 5 as well as reducing its spread (helping it hit the enemy it is targeting much more consistently). We've additionally redistributed some of its bio-symbiosis benefits so that it is more consistent without tagging, while not being quite so ridiculous with tags.
A massive thanks to Jish, for inspiring me to start this project and getting me through the early stages. Thanks to Rayalot72, Chill Dude, D4RKEVA, BLACK_DRAGON and Beth for their insight on game balance. And thanks to my dog Petra, for being a lil cutie.
