[2020] Weapon Wednesday R-301 | September 23 2020

Just needed some hopups to rotate out, and it was less used than double tap. It has its fans (myself included), but in general the added versatility axis isn't as important to most people. It'll probably rotate back in at some point!

It's not random recoil! It has a tiny bit randomness but it's mostly a stable pattern. The thing with the Anvil pattern is that the first shot has very low recoil, and it takes longer than usual to move back down the pattern. The idea is that if you shoot with some intentional small delay between your shots, you can actually keep firing with very low recoil, you just gotta master the timing. Once you start firing faster though you hit more recoil! The later shots have more recoil too and some horizontal movement, so it gets a bit harder to control the longer you fire quickly.

Double tap doesn't really decrease TTK, what it does is increase "burstiness", or how much damage you can do in a short window. This has advantages in situations like peek battles, or other situations where once you start hitting someone they're gonna go into cover. The downside is that the range is a bit reduced, since the recoil makes the second shot go above the first (for most players). For something like the R301, it having 2 bullet burst isn't really that meaningful -- 2 bullets of r301 isn't enough damage for the "bursty" benefit, and the R301 already has the recoil range limitation naturally because it's full auto. The Anvil sort of already gives the R301 the bursty quality. We could do like a combination of anvil + double tap, where you get a double tap of the anvil thing, but it still changes the r301 in basically the same way as the anvil compared to the base r301, so it'd mostly just be flavor (and it'd take audio work and be too similar to double tap imo).

Some hopups improve* TTK, like turbocharger or skullpiercer. But yea, selectfire prowler actually has worse TTK than burst prowler, but burst is harder to use for most people so its still preferred a lot of the time. (although there was a buff to burst prowler recoil in 6.0, so it's getting more attention these days)

EDIT: said increase ttk which is inaccurate

lol yea that sorry. edited

Yes obviously. It was picked up less when normalizing for that, and when it was picked up it was actually used much less (probably partially because double tap auto switches to double tap). "Versatility" just isn't as valuable to people, and long range capability is generally just not as important in Apex. It has its fans, and like I said it might come back, but yea.