Hunter's fury build and the Backfire - initial thoughts, flaws, and fixes.
Keep in mind that this is written from a dps, meta, smg, and solo position; things will significantly change once you start adding additional players and/or defensive/utility variation, or change the difficulty. I will also preface this that this post and ideas have been made before the PTS is available, things may obviously change or be different in practice, but this post is to address what I feel are design and conceptual flaws on paper with the new Backfire smg that I can see from the information so far provided.
Massive has made this new gear set and these new exotics coming in TU11 to try and shake the meta and make a very different style of gameplay viable. The build, that seems to be dangled in front of us, provides a significant amount of raw power and synergy, to encourage us to play it. It is exciting and I know many of us are excited to play with it, however my concern is that the build will only have 1 real viable primary weapon in the meta, and this post is to assess and address that concern.
The build and the weapons:
The build seems to be designed to be 4p Hunter's Fury, the Memento, then a choice of a Sokolov chest running Obliterate or Glass Cannon or the named chest with Perfect Glass cannon. This build maxes out at 135-150% weapon damage from talents and gear set bonuses alone, while also maintaining strong additional utility from the set and backpack. The build wants to run either the new Backfire smg or the Lady Death smg. With either the secondary priority stays relatively the same: all weapon damage cores, crit hit chance (CHC) as close to 60% as possible, and as much crit hit damage (CHD) as possible. With the Backfire you'd also want to use your gear mod slots to slot in bleed resist to counter the drawback, with Lady Death you would just put for crit hit/damage. By nature, this is an up close, very aggressive, very bursty build, while also having some utility and survivability baked in. The main variation becomes which SMG to choose.
We all know Lady Death. It is a very high damage, incredibly bursty weapon that has interesting utility in it's speed boost, and lends itself well to the build in question. It's amplified damage is easy to generate and, with the build, the numbers from it will be absurd. It is a cannon and essentially slots in perfectly. It's main weakness is getting pinned down or being in a position where you cannot move to gain the amplified damage stacks, as well as its relatively low magazine size. Both are fairly easy to solve with a Banshee pulse or other similar crowd control.
The Backfire is slightly more complicated. The main benefit of the weapon is, that at max stacks, it provides 200% CHD which is an extremely high amount of additional "raw stats". The gun also comes with a drawback in that the higher the stacks, upon reload, you will be bled for 0.5% of your armor per stack over 10s, which leans itself towards wanting to put bleed resist mods in your gear to make that negligible.
The main problem with this weapon is that it is not a bursty gun; it is a high sustained, slow building weapon. Getting the max stacks alone will take 4 magazines of ammo (the gun has a 56 round magazine), and even once obtained the buff only lasts 10s. This isn't a gun designed to rush in with, and to lose that buff is to lose a majority of the weapon's damage output. The gun desires long, sustained combat, but there is a very real possibility that by the time the weapon reaches it's max potential, combat may be over or almost finished. There isn't really any way to fix this currently in game; additional weapon handling could help but it comes at the cost of lowering the damage more, and the gun already falls behind because of having to use mod slots for bleed resist.
So why bother fixing it?
The why is easy; new exotics should be fun and impactful, should open up new and different and exciting ways to play the game. Unfortunately several of the last few exotics added made very little impact to the overall game/meta except in niche uses. This new Hunter's Fury build seems like it will be the outright strongest possible build for an smg, and if the Backfire cannot work well with it, then it just becomes another low impact, niche exotic. I can see a lot of potential in the Backfire, and I like the precedent it sets with exotics having very strong effects while also having drawbacks, and I would love to see it compete in the meta and to see more like it in the future. However with the Backfire, despite the benefit being very strong, it is time consuming and hard to activate, similar to how the Chameleon originally was (and to a point still is) but less fundamentally impactful when activated , unlike the Chameleon. So I feel a fix is in order.
So how do we fix it.
I believe there is an easy solution. I believe the Backfire should read,
"Dealing damage to enemies adds a stack of 1% Crit Damage. Stacks last for 10s and are capped to 200. When having 2 or more of the same core attribute gain 1 additional stack per damage dealt, each core attribute type may only be used once."
What this would look like in practice is that, say, with a 6p red build the additional stack would only activate once, giving the Backfire 2 stacks per damage dealt. If you were to add 2 armor pieces you would gain another stack, totaling 3 per damage dealt. Finally a pure hybrid 2/2/2 build would gain a final stack, giving 4 stacks of the crit buff per damage dealt. I feel that this not only makes getting a max stack more manageable, balanced, and fun but also fixes the problem of the weapon being high sustained, slow build by removing the 'slow build' part of it and allowing the gun's natural power to compensate pure red damage lost.
Where this fix would really shine is in the build discussed above. The Memento backpack provides 1 of each core attribute, meaning, that sacrificing 1 core red attribute for either a defensive or skill one will activate the additional stacks without sacrificing too much damage and making the build fall far, far behind the alternative. I believe this would change the comparison of the Lady Death and Backfire versions of the build from, "High damage, burst vs. High sustained, very slow building" to, "High damage, burst vs. High sustained, survivability, utility."
I believe overall this change would make the Backfire much more viable and balanced now and in the future, encourage and provide benefits to players running hybrid builds, and would set a good precedence for exotics with this drawback design for the future. I am excited for the new exotic and the new opportunities it provides, and I feel this change would provide even more.
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