Fang92 wrote...
So we are balancing guns around optimized loadouts and extra equipment consumables? .........Why?
You aren't. Equipment and consumables add percentage bonuses in the first place, and there's no major discrepancy between weapons when it comes to available bonuses. You are balancing against 3 things:
1) Other weapons. The Typhoon then and the Piranha still make other weapons fully obsolete. If other weapons are nothing but a penalty to the player, then balance is clearly broken. There are two ways to balance this: buff the weaker weapons or nerf the more powerful ones. Purely considering weapons only, there's no inherent way to know which is the better option. Thus, you turn to the other two for guidance:
2) Power strength. Weapons are not the only tools for defeating your opponents, so you balance the game to have the relative ability of everyone reasonably close. Weapon classes get greater utility with weapons while power classes get powers to make up the difference. That does not mean that everyone has to be the same. Some classes may specialize in offense, killing things quickly, while others may specialize in defense, keeping enemies from throwing a wrench in the gears of your killing machine. Different does not mean deficient. However, you must keep these relatively in balance unless you want to make many classes obsolete. Unfortunately, the horrible imbalance of weaponry has made weapon classes the go-to for Platinum. Still, you could just buff powers to the level of weapons, right? That would satisfy the second condition as well. Well, there's the third condition:
3) Enemy strength. Nobody wants to play a game where you press the A button to watch everything in front of you explode in a shower of blood and sinew. That isn't a fun game. The game must offer a challenge (how much depends on the player's preference) to be entertaining. This is the reason we have multiple difficulty levels in games, and why ME3 MP has different challenge levels (though it is a tragedy that the game offers credits by difficulty level the way it does). Thus, you must balance the strength of your opponents against the strength of the tools you use to defeat them, else the game pretty well falls apart. This is part of why it's clear the that Piranha needs the nerf it will get tomorrow: the enemies, even in the highest difficulty, are absolutely hopeless before the power of this weapon.
The Typhoon needed the nerf it got. Does it need any more nerfs? Probably not right now: it's so buggy and tempermental that its innate weaknesses are amplified quite significantly. Is it ever going to be a gun for everyone? Of course not. If any gun is the end-all-be-all, it clearly needs a nerf. Is it unusuable? Clearly not, judging by the monstrous DPS it can put out (in practice, not on paper).
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