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DEV NOTE: State of Weapons for Season 7
Season 7 brings changes and improvements that will permeate across the whole weapon arsenal in different ways. Season 7 includes a shift in META balance between weapon categories and raising the lowest time-to-kill to a healthier level, to a revamp of the visual recoil system to liven up the shooting experience alongside many more balance improvements.
Visual Weapon Recoil Improvements
As mentioned on BattlefieldComm at the start of this month, your weapons are about to feel more impactful on a visual level with Season 7.
We wanted weapons to feel more unique and powerful when it comes to firing them, as such we have made changes to how visual recoil is handled within the game and tuned them to the vision for each weapon.
It's an effort to create a more vivid firing experience, which will provide more visual emphasis on the weight and power of a weapon as you fire whilst aiming down sights.
Of course, this visual improvement will not compromise your aiming experience, as our main goal is always to provide you with fluid, reliable and high-quality gunplay. Feeling and controlling recoil while bursting will be more intuitive and visually rewarding without affecting your accuracy in artificial ways.
In this first iteration, we have implemented different archetypes and tried to have as many different handling characteristics as possible, pushing the system to make the most of it and we will tune and polish wherever necessary to give you the best possible experience.
Headshot Multiplier Rebalancing
One of the other big updates coming in Season 7 is a rebalance of the headshot damage multipliers. These changes will bring a rebalancing of our weapon categories, particularly SMGs, Assault Rifles and LMGs, and how they perform at different ranges.
We are compressing the headshot multipliers, which results in the characteristics of these weapons mattering more and with this change we anticipate seeing a better equilibrium between them when it comes to usage rates and competitiveness.
SMGs
This weapon category will now benefit from a 1.55x headshot multiplier. They are now stronger in Close Quarter Combat and at performing headshots due to the higher multiplier and improvements to their Aim Down Sight movement speeds. Their optimal efficiency will stand toe-to-toe against ARs when it comes to pure firepower under 30-50m with the same potential 3-headshot-kill range.
It needs to be pointed out that the PP-29 has received less improvements this update, since it was already a high performer and belongs to a different archetype than most other SMGs. This weapon will still benefit from the headshot multiplier changes. On the other hand, Vault SMGs have also received extra improvements to their bullet velocity.
Even with this increased headshot multiplier, SMGs should not outperform other weapon categories at longer ranges due to damage drop-off, bullet velocity and accuracy.
ARs
Assault Rifles will now benefit from a 1.9x headshot multiplier. This means that, in general, they will no longer have a 2-headshot-kill range in Close Quarter Combat and instead require 3 headshots. Which we anticipate is going to be less likely to take place within a single full-auto burst due to the nature of recoil and dispersion.
This change will raise the lowest possible TTK in that Close Quarter Combat area, which was previously too low and leading to frustration by our players, as well as putting too much balance in favor of Assault Rifles. However in most cases it will not affect their performance at mid or long range, where the archetype of Assault Rifles naturally sit.
LMGs
LMG’s will now benefit from a 1.9x headshot multiplier. Similar to above, this now removes a 2-headshot-kill scenario across the roster and addresses instances of extremely low TTK.
This will drive LMGs away from Close Quarters Combat and more into the mid and long range, but will remain at a similar power level when compared to Assault Rifles. In addition, dispersion has been slightly reduced for the following Vault Weapons: M240B, M60E4 and Type 88.
And there are many more changes taking place across several weapons and archetypes, which you can find out by scrolling down.
Before we hand things over to the Vehicles Team to share what they’ve been changing for Season 7: Turning Point, we wanted to thank you for your continued feedback in regards to weapons.
Keep it coming and we’ll continue to tune and polish where possible in future updates!
// Battlefield Weapons Team.
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