Yet another thought I had. No idea why I'm still posting these, not like the devs care (at least, no one important) at this point judging by their completely detached response to any criticism of the Optimization Station. Not to mention implementing such a divisive mechanic right before the notoriously long Swedish winter holiday period. But, enough of that, back to my once-beloved gear set, Ongoing Directive:
- 2+ Pieces: 10% Weapon Damage
- 3+ Pieces: 20% Weapon Handling
- 4+ Pieces: Rules of Engagement
- For each enemy you damage with a grenade, gain 15s of Hollow Point Ammo, up to a maximum of 30s.
- Hollow Point Ammo: Grants 20% damage amplification.
- Killing an enemy refreshes 2s of Hollow Point Ammo.
- Chestpiece Talent: Parabellum Rounds
- Increases Hollow Point Ammo damage amplification to 35%.
- Backpack Talent: Trauma Expert
- Increase talent refresh on kill to 5s.
- Apply Bleed to all enemies you shoot when Hollow-Point Ammo is active.
So, Hollow Point Ammo gets changed from a special ammo type to a buff, which is activated by damaging enemies with a grenade. No more silly limitations by your magazine. The duration of the talent can also be increased by damaging more enemies with the same grenade, and you refresh some of that duration with each weapon kill. The chestpiece increases the damage you do as it did before. The backpack increases the talent refresh and adds Bleed to your attacks when the talent is active - the backpack had to be genuinely useful.
Throw a grenade, then kill everything in the room. Nice and simple.
Lol, thats what Hollow Point Ammo is already, is is a buff wtfSo, Hollow Point Ammo gets changed from a special ammo type to a buff
To make it a bit stronger, they gave bleed, because bleed is a really weak status effect compared to the other ones.
The bleed is there just as an extra, and to maintain the hollow point ammo to the player. Since you need to kill someone with status effect, bleed is applied so the Hollow Ammo can keep activated.
Also, I don't understand how is this stronger than the current one (I believe you want it to be stronger?).
Having to hit a grenade is way worse than killing with status effect, because you run out of grenades, and enemies can easily evade grenades. Also, anything that is on kill is hard to maintain, specially on Legendary 4 players. So now you have to kill to gain a small increase of 2 seconds, instead of refreshing all your ammo like the current set.
Because some enemies are immune to status effect, take more than one magazine to kill because of armor, bleed is useless in higher difficulties even though the idea is to make player "self sufficient" generating ammo, time buff lets you use all weapons instead of mainly LMGs only (since you get a magazine worth so shotgun and rifles are bad choices)Originally Posted by MemoriesLP Go to original post
Hollow-Point Ammo is an ammo that get filled when you kill something under a status effect. My proposed change removes the magazine limitation and makes it work on all weapons you have without having to go through any shenanigans, since it's now a character buff like Tip of the Spear.Originally Posted by MemoriesLP Go to original post
My goal isn't to make it stronger, per say - in theory, OD can already dish out somewhat silly amounts of damage. But the main problem with OD is that you can't keep that rolling in group play - someone is bound to take your kill, which makes getting the next one even harder.
Thing is, unlike the current Ongoing Directive, my proposed change doesn't crutch on the player getting kills to get the base buff. Even if you don't kill anything at all, you can still throw a nade and hit something every 30s to keep the damage buff up. If enemies avoid your grenades, use a Frag, Cluster, or Incendiary nade from the specializations, all of which damage enemies and have fairly large radii. Killing things will let you add back 2-5 seconds of duration to keep the buff rolling, but it's not a requirement to start it - that's the important part.
And Bleed in OD just felt tacked on without any deeper purpose. It's first and only purpose was to squeeze more damage out of the set - it procs a status effect to get more Hollow-Point Ammo, and it procs Sadist. The damage Bleed did itself was pitiful and it didn't inhibit an enemy in any meaningful way, even with the old backpack talent. So I've removed it almost entirely - no more useless 15% Status Effects or status effects required to proc the set. It remains as part of the backpack if you still want that bonus however.
I like your suggestions for the most part, a few tweaks that I'd make to the list personally:
1. Make it proc from enemies effected by your grenade, rather than damaged by, so it can be used with flashbangs and foam grenades.
2. Instead of +2s buff duration on kill, killing an enemy while Hollow Points are active causes the enemy to drop a grenade. This way if you're leaning into the build playstyle effectively, you won't be left without grenades and a useless gear set.
3. Change the backpack talent to significantly increase grenade damage and effect duration instead of the buff duration/bleed.
This way people would have the option of running the set chest piece with an exotic/high-end backpack to lean into the increased gun damage, or finally get a use for a Mad Bomber chest and potentially have an actually viable grenadier playstyle with the set backpack. If people still wanted to use their Sadist weapons with this set, they could run Demo for the frag grenades or use Ridgeway's. This would also open up potential use cases for weapons like The Darkness (or other Eyeless guns) with flashbangs and another use for Pyromaniac (or other Ignited guns) with incendiaries.
The intent to use a damaging grenade was that it would just be too easy to use a Flashbang to get two enemies for max stacks (let's face it, the Flashbang is arguably the best grenade in the game next to the Incendiary grenade). But concede that it's overly difficult to hit even one enemy with a damaging grenade, let alone two. It would be best if Hollow-Point Ammo proc'd on just hitting an enemy.
Dropping a grenade with every kill while Hollow Points is up might be a little much. The first kill should definitely drop or send a grenade to your inventory, however.
Eh, not too interested in making the backpack do something for grenades. You must understand, the only point of the grenade is to give an excuse for you to start up the Hollow-Point Ammo buff. A grenade, much like bleed, is completely useless for actually dealing damage. Attempting to buff that damage is only going to result in a backpack no one wants to use (and don't we all have experience with that one already). It'd be better if the backpack talent focused on the actual means of dealing damage - in this case, more uptime and a potential source of more damage by using Sadist.
Your comparison with other status effect-based things doesn't exactly make sense since the set doesn't revolve around status effects anymore - just because you start the process with a flash, frag, or fire grenade doesn't mean any meaningful amount of enemies you shoot will be blinded, bleeding, or on fire (aside from those initial ones hit by said grenade and the one every five enemies you kill based on the weapon talent, both of which apply to any other build). Now, Ridgeway's Pride would make sense, but it's still a mostly useless exotic if you actually want to use the thing for armor regeneration (and you're also giving up a good source of multiplicative damage in exchange for losing Parabellum Rounds).