Look to Battletech to balance Fusion Rifles (Destiny)

by telemachus, Sunday, June 07, 2015, 17:18 (3698 days ago)

So I posted this on reddit, and I'm not sure it even got looked at... maybe it could generate some discussion here.

For those of you who don't know this is battle tech

A weapon called the PPC (particle projection cannon) is a high damage all or nothing shot, with long recycle times with high heat. A unique aspect of this weapon in battletech is that it has a minimum range in addition to its maximum range. The lore goes that the weapon has safeguards in place that inhibits the field that holds the charges particles together to keep close discharges from damaging the mech it is equipped on.

Given the formerly one hit kill close range overlap of the Fusion Rifle and Shotguns, I've been thinking of a way to bring the FR to its former glory, and give it a place within Destiny. Give it a minimum distance that starts to do damage within the damage falloff of the longer range shotguns. This combined with removal of the damage and some percentage of the spread nerfs could give the FR a deserved niche within the game.

In terms of getting the mechanic to fit in with the game lore is that my understanding is FR's are essentially are a weaponized fusion reaction, current science has been using magnetic fields for fusion containment. Why couldn't the FR spew out plasma created from the fusion reaction of the weapon and then only switch on the magnetic containment fields to shape and give a vector to the shot? Not unlike Cortana's upgrade of the Covenant's capitol ship plasma weaponry in the book Halo:First Strike, the addition of tighter magnetic fields gave it much more destructive power compared to the their plasma mortars. Given the relative strength of ourselves and our enemies the unguided plasma is just a tickle.

The bigger question is, are Destiny's weapon damage models capable of doing this? Ultimately, would doing this have another far more drastic consequence in terms of the weapon meta?