AmusedApricot

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).

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.

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!

Ah yes, sorry. When I say "buffed" I mean "reduced" in this case haha. Sorry for the confusion!

Haha I don't mean to insult! Tbh outside of the top top players, most guns are relatively usable, it just depends on a lot on personal preference.

It's hard to give numbers on these sorta buffs because the numbers don't really mean anything if you don't understand the systems. It was just a reduction in the multipliers for the vertical and horizontal kick, but not an adjustment to the pattern itself. The horizontal recoil was buffed a little more than the vertical. The high mag size with worse TTK is a combo that is better for non high skill players, and horizontal recoil is the hardest to control, so it made sense to me to improve it on that axis!

Something about the soft, warm, understanding smile really made me laugh

Sorry for the confusion. When we talk about rate of fire, what that really means is once you pull the trigger you have to wait 1 / RoF seconds before the weapon can fire another shot (the "shot cooldown" I'm referring to is this delay). Say you have a weapon that takes 2 shots to kill, and has a 1.0 rate of fire (1s between each shot). It's inaccurate to say that the weapon takes 2 seconds to kill someone (has 2s TTK), because the "cooldown" only starts AFTER you've fired a shot. When you first open fire, you fire at time 0.0, then 1s later you fire at 1.0 and kill the target. That means 1s TTK. That's why we don't count the shot cooldown on the first shot, cause you've already paid the shot cooldown sometime before the fight starts!

I actually nerfed the P2020 hammerpoint damage multiplier when I increased the damage numbers, so it should have roughly the same hammerpoint damage. I think hammerpoints are stronger now due to lower average armor values though, so it's something we're keeping an eye on!

It's really not. It's slower than the R99 and the Prowler, and on par with the flatline/R301 for 200 total health. The volt kills <100 shields targets faster than ARs and is close to other SMGs, but 1.0s TTK for 200 health is only a moderate TTK for an SMG. We are still gathering data and looking at feedback from sources of all sorts of skill levels, but we will adjust quickly if needed! There's already a stopgap nerf for the Devotion coming out ASAP!

I don't want to be rude, but I think you have some incorrect data at some point that leads to error. These numbers don't line up / aren't correct. I'm guessing you're RoF assumptions are wrong maybe?

Example: The Volt has a 12.0 rounds per second RoF, and does 16 damage. It takes 13 shots to kill a non-fortified non-low-profile target at 100 shields. We don't count the first shot's cooldown in TTK, so that leads to a 1s TTK on 100 shields targets.

Edit: I'm looking into what info we can share out publicly, so hopefully the wonderful folks that do this data work have less guess work to do! No promises, but I'm looking into it!

Give it a shot! The extra round helps more than you'd think!

I'm still looking at the Sentinel, but I wanted to see how sniper ammo adjustments, and more importantly the new evo only meta and lower armor, would change things. I'm expecting snipers in general to be more used since you actually get meaningful benefit from poking people even if you don't kill someone (e.g. the charge rifle has gotten more play since evos were introduced for damage farming purposes). It's high on my "next guns to potentially tough, watch closely" list, don't worry!

Also yes, Hemlok and Triple Take are gonna be extra spicy :)

There is a horizontal shift to the righte and then back to the left in the middle of the flatline pattern, it's tricky. You can learn the timing with some practice though!

I think you may be mis-attributing what you're feeling. Almost every weapon in Apex has some amount of recoil pattern randomness (and the R301 has more than the flatline). If you aren't playing at a very high level with exceptional recoil control, the randomness is probably not what you're feeling, just a more difficult and erratic pattern. The spitfire, for example, has very little recoil randomness. It has some double shots in the pattern where one shot kicks only a little bit into the second, then the second kicks much more into another pair, which gives it a more erratic "chunky" feeling, and the pattern has some sudden shifts which are difficult to control, but it's not due to recoil randomness.

np! :)

Yes! We want different weapons to have different power curves accessible by loot -- some weapons start stronger but can't grow in power that much, while other weapons have a much wide progression curve. In general, I think that leads to good looting gameplay and interesting decisions, and it gives interesting strengths and weaknesses to weapons. Take the flatline vs the r301, for example. The Flatline does more damage, has a larger effective mag, etc. but at the cost of more difficult to control recoil and different loot transition options (heavy ammo vs light). While we want the R301 to be more of an accessible weapon, one of the intentional weaknesses of the flatline is the more difficult recoil control, which makes it higher skill weapon. We want to lean into that weakness as an interesting aspect of the gun, so it doesn't allow you to mitigate the recoil using barrel stabilizers.

It's hard because there are valid counterpoints and arguments, most things aren't just a "this is the definitively correct answer". There're also technical reasons and prioritization reasons behind things that are hard to explain to people / that are usually not accepted well. On reddit with me vs everyone is not really a good place to have these discussions. Overall, I've learned that it's really just not worth trying to have game design arguments with the faceless void of the internet. I know it's valuable to a lot of people though! So I try and post from time to time, I just don't usually go into multiple levels of responses.

The wingman is limited by lack of long range optics, and mostly by very low bullet speed (and some other stuff). The wingman's projectiles are significantly lower than AR and sniper projectiles. Wingman shots at range tend to be less accurate, the faster fire rate just is a little more forgiving with this. This doesn't make the wingman unusable at range, it just increases the skill required to be effective. It's definitely possible that the wingman is still too effective at range (especially for high skill players), but on the same note even SMGs push the limits of their range pretty hard in the hands of a very strong player. In general the data shows that the wingman is outperformed at long ranges almost all skill levels. It has unique strengths at medium to medium long range with its mobility, but I believe those strengths are generally earned due to the difficulty of using the weapon effectively, and weapons like the G7 and the Hemlok still generally outperform it in these scena...

This is deep in the weeds at this point, but it's worth the example to show that we think about this stuff, I promise! Things are usually done for a reason.

There are good combat reasons why guns aren't that accurate in hipfire. Hipfire accuracy is fundamentally about a stronger tradeoff between movement and accuracy. In titanfall it's about constant movement, so hipfire is accurate because you don't want a big penalty to movement (note: I didn't work on titanfall). In Apex we want the tradeoff between movement and accuracy. In general, the further the range you can effectively fight, the higher the mobility penalty (e.g. snipers have slow ADS movespeeds, and very bad hipfire, you need to be more stationary). Because of the relatively slow projectiles in apex and the recoil, it's hard to hit people at range that are moving. If someone could be sniping you from far away and also just AD strafing it'd be almost random if you got to hit them or not. We impr...

It has a magazine that you reload, so it comes with a full magazine on the ground by default. You can have ammo in the magazine of most guns without having any ammo in inventory, you just use the inventory ammo to put ammo into the magazine when you reload, if that makes sense. The LSTAR is the only weapon without magazines (currently), so the ammo in the gun is always only what you have in your inventory.