This, in combination with Elemental Shelling, finally lets you play as a true elemental (and status?) gunlancer. Weapon will still have its issues and it also wont cover your bad weapon usagement XD. But nonetheless you can follow the trail and even catch the tail of the elemental saed CBs. Thanks for this interesting redesign.
Here is a Chinese GL player. I found a very interesting phenomenon when using your mod. You mentioned in the text description that the dragon cannon (which seems to be called wyvern fire in English) will consume all the heat bars. Super full shot can also do this effect, but this situation only occurs in the training ground. In the actual hunting process, neither the dragon cannon nor the super full shell can consume heat, and the instrument is always in black. No matter whether I hit or not, the message is translated by software. Because nexus does not support Chinese, I do not know whether my expression is accurate
I can guarantee you I would never include a crypto miner in any of my mods. Don't check it, that would be copyright infringement and I would have to ban you from my mod.
You made the heat gauge something fun, which is seriously impressive. It seems to be working with Sunbreak, although I think it may need to be toned down with how the expansion buffed shelling and the gunlance in general. The idea is solid though, and Sunbreak is better for it.
This seems pretty interesting! I wasn't play monster hunter games when the OG heat gage was a thing, but I hear it was pretty flawed, though had potential if they did something like what you made in this mod.
Looking at the way red/black heat works, doesn't that mean you want to try balancing between them for each attack type, so that you're slapping/poking in black and shelling/full bursting in red? The heat decay numbers seem a bit low on the attacks if that's the intention, especially if you're playing full burst lance, which should give you 35 heat with every burst. Artillery buffing heat & reducing decay seems like it'd make it extra hard to get back into red from black, and no one plays GL without artillery (besides early game)
Is there files or settings we can change on our own to modify these values to experiment with changing heat gen/decay?
Also, I assume wyvern's fire gaining additional damage from heat is based on the raw amount of heat, not which color it's in?
Love the mod and the depth it adds to the gunlance! just one thing, any chance we could have the mod remember its size and position settings? I dont like having to change it every time :c
Saving position and stuff was implemented, but I did a huge stupid and now the script overrides the saved settings every time. I've had an update lying about, but I can post it now.
I love how the mod adds so much to Gunlance that felt missing, but do you think you could do natural decay/cooling? The yellow and orange bits on the bar almost never get used except at the beginning of the hunt, and even then I find that I can just shell at camp to get to red. It will also fix when I have just whipped my weapon in the air to get out of black to engage a monster again. It just feels like it should naturally tick down, even if you make it an optional feature. Just a suggestion i love your mod.
Edit- Nvm made this before update i no longer have any complaints
Is there a way to add a locking mechanic back to the bar? The black bar is a great idea and I actually applaud it, but I believe what gunlance lacks is the actual incentive to use the gun part of the weapon. With said black bar we get a generous buff to melee, but to really make use of the red bar buff we're going to be stuck playing slaplance for a majority of the fight, maybe to get one shelling combo out before going back to slaplance.
If it's possible I'll be excited as all hell to use the mod again, but for now I think I'll wait. You're talented as all heck, and I appreciate the work you put in for all of these mods you've created thus far!
The reason I removed the locking mechanic was because it removed the incentive to swap around your moves. In GU, you'd go into red and use wyvernfire then ignore the bar until you could wyvernfire again, which I felt was counterintuitive; It removed the point of swapping between moves, since cooling the lance was unnecessary, and you'd be back to spamming one or the other. I personally want to avoid the locking mechanic for this reason.
I can, however, see that there might be an imbalance. I actually ended up nerfing the cooling mechanic (all cooling is halved) because it was otherwise impossible to get a wide sweep without returning to red first. Maybe that was a mistake, and I'll look into testing it and maybe rebalancing it some other way.
I personally had a breeze with the mod myself; I shell up to red, use wyvernfire while in red, then slap around in black and shell to maintain black. If I wanted to get into red, for instance to wyvernfire with all hits landing in the red, I'd lay off the shelling to allow for cooling. I guess it feels counterintuitive to use moves that aren't at their max power, which stops people from cooling while in red, or heating while in black. In the end, it comes down to playstyle; However, I do think rebalancing it to force you out of black more often could be a smart move.
I mainly balanced the mod around charged shelling, since that allows you to spend a lot of heat in red, overflowing into black, yet spending the shell with red damage. I originally had an idea of making the different shelling types have lower heat production for their most powerful moves, such as normal having less heat per shell or long having less heat on wyvernfire, but then it felt impossible to get out of red without standing still and spamming shells, especially if you had artillery equipped.
One way of balancing I could think of is forcing the gauge down by hitting red, so that hitting red at all gives you a lot more time with maxed shelling. Another way would be a nerfed locking mechanic, such as being able to lock the gauge for a few seconds by reloading. For now though, I think I'll mainly look into the cooling moves and rebalance them a little.
Those are a lot of valid points, and I get where you're coming from. Not being locked into a specific playstyle is one of the key aspects that gunlance can afford to pull off.
I definitely agree that there may be some adjustments needed for cooling. Could there possibly be a way to add decay to assist in dropping the bar over time? There's no doubt that increasing heat is achievable with ease, but the decrease is really the key issue. Personally why I decided to comment was because of my testing with Normal shells, and having those full bursts really push the bar further and further, it only really ended in slaplancing more than necessary.
The reloading lock could be a potential solution in theory! Honestly whether you decide to rebalance it completely or leave it as is, I still thank you for this mod as gunlance doesn't nearly get enough modding love.
I meant to reply sooner, but yea wow it really does make much more of a difference with the tweaks you implemented! Wyvernfire resetting the bar was a nice touch, as well as dropping from black leaving you with a much larger gap to start with in red. The full bursts feel waaay better in terms of gauge increase, and the additional touch to Ground Splitter was interestingly done.
I'm gonna keep saying it because I mean it, you're awesome. You may not even need to tweak much else past what's already done, unless you feel the need to touch up anything else / implement any other sort of changes. Thanks man, honestly your mods are hype as hell and I look forward to what else you got cookin'!
So, figured I'd weigh in with my thoughts on this discussion. While I understand your rational on why you decided to remove the lock, I feel your solution isn't much better.
In terms of GU, there was the problem that shells were so underpowered that their only effective use was to get the heat gage built up, at which point you just wanted to lock it and only use slaplance (at least if you wanted to get the most out of the weapon and maybe approach being almost as effective as the other weapon types rather than having fun with explosions). Obviously this wasn't ideal, but the blame mostly laid with the lackluster shelling damage compared to the melee damage making the latter clearly better than the former. The other contributing issue was, I suspect, the degree of punishment for overheating. Not only was your gage set back to yellow (with no buff), it got locked there, preventing you from rebuilding the buff until the lockdown expired. None of the other weapons with meters or gages suffered from this manner of punishment, meaning it was just safer to lock it down, then ignore it in favour of playing how one liked.
As for the method you've implemented, in some ways it is just as bad, though in this case due to being overly restrictive in playstyle. By separating the strongest physical zone and the strongest shelling zone, you haven't encouraged a playstyle that implements both, but rather one that alternates between the two, likely in short bursts as it straddles the line between red and black. While one technically doesn't need to stick to using moves only when they get the strongest buff, it doesn't change that said buffs strongly encourage it, particularly with the disparity between them. There's also issue that because of how the gages are set up, there's little to stop a player who wants to just use shells or just slaplance from spamming the other attack type with no care for if they land or not, just to shift the gage to the far end of the relevant section for having the best buff of their desired moves. Except even in this, slaplance is favoured, as they can take advantage of blast dash as a mobility option to keep heat up while almost exclusively using physical attacks to actually deal damage.
To better encourage switching between the two somewhat freely, they should share a section of gage where they have the strongest buff, either removing the black gage section (and possibly buffing physical damage of the red section) or reducing the size of red and black drastically to make room for an overlapping section. This would then encourage players to try and stay within the optimal buff zone while giving a greater room for them to mix their combos of shells and melee, since instead of trying to straddle a line, they'd be trying to stay within a zone that can probably take a handful of shell or a handful of slaps depending on which end your on. That said, while it's not mentioned in the mod description, it sounds as if filling the gage just has the player get stuck at the end until they use melee attacks to lower it. I'd argue that it's worth bringing back some of the punishment from GU in the form of filling the gage causing it to reset to yellow, but drop the aspect of it getting locked there. This would help encourage people to be more careful about overheating, but wouldn't leave them stuck with no bonus for a prolonged period of time. If that seems too harsh, you could maybe justify the blast that sends it over getting extra damage due to the gunlance forcibly venting the extra heat (if the animation for the steam coming out of the gunlance from the Hail Cutter attack could be triggered that would be great, but I realize that might not be easily done or viable depending on how it's set up), and that might result in some tactical usages where you actually want to trigger the overload for a powerful attack, even if it means having to rebuild heat gage.
Still, I think that you shouldn't entirely overlook the potential benefit of having locking the gage as an option. While it was implemented poorly in GU, it could be handled better so as to enable certain combos focused on one attack type or the other being viable (or just to enable playstyles built around only using one side or the other of the gunlance, even if that's less optimal). One key thing that reinstating the gage locking could do is provide a reason to bother with Wyvern's Fire. What I refer to is the fact that Wyvern's Fire is actually a DPS loss on Normal and Wide shelling, compared to just shelling normally for the same period of time it takes to get the attack off, while on Long shelling lances, it only breaks even with using the standard shells (I suppose in this mod, if you reach the black range it will deal slightly more compared to standard shell in red gage with Long shells, and might have a chance of breaking even with the other shelling types, but I don't recall how much of a DPS loss it was off hand to compare). Making it so that it provides a lockdown of the gage, even if it's not for as long as the ability is down for, would provide a reason to actually bother using it, as it lets you either spam shells or melee attack without worry for a short period after. In turn, this would then improve the viability of Hail Cutter as an alternative to Ground Splitter. Since while Ground Splitter would get your gage into mid-red quickly, Hail Cutter would allow you to keep the gage locked down in the red for a larger period of time (due to reducing the Wyvern's Fire cooldown). You could also add a short lockdown on ground splitter, but I'm not sure if it's needed.
Admittedly, I might be somewhat biased on my views. I'm personally the sort of gunlance player who prefers a pure shelling playstyle despite realizing it's not optimal, and use the physical attacks primarily for purposes of positioning, and leading into specific moves like full burst and quick reload. I also happen to dislike ground splitter compared to hail cutter, but recognize the move is vastly superior due to providing the "buff" that brings shelling damage back to pre-rise base shelling damage levels, and have long thought that it would have been better handled by just bringing back the heat gage and making ground splitter function by setting the gage to the strongest buff level and locking it there briefly, so it would at least provide hail cutter players with a method of achieving the buffed damage, even if it's with less ease (I also wish elemental gunlances replaced the fire damage on shells with the damage type of their respective element, but that's not really relevant to this mod). As it is, while this mod is close to providing that, it doesn't quite manage it in the current form, so my reaction is understandably tinged with disappointment. Still it seems likely to be a vast improvement to the base rise implementation.
You need to be able to lock the bar or else you spend 90% of the hunt in the black bar also not going through the entire red bar with one full burst would be nice to.
Refer to my reply to Daftenevan's comment in regards to black gauge/locking. In terms of full burst, I agree that it shouldn't heat so much, and I'll look into balancing it.
23 comments
Thanks for this interesting redesign.
DONT DOWNLOAD
Looking at the way red/black heat works, doesn't that mean you want to try balancing between them for each attack type, so that you're slapping/poking in black and shelling/full bursting in red? The heat decay numbers seem a bit low on the attacks if that's the intention, especially if you're playing full burst lance, which should give you 35 heat with every burst. Artillery buffing heat & reducing decay seems like it'd make it extra hard to get back into red from black, and no one plays GL without artillery (besides early game)
Is there files or settings we can change on our own to modify these values to experiment with changing heat gen/decay?
Also, I assume wyvern's fire gaining additional damage from heat is based on the raw amount of heat, not which color it's in?
Edit- Nvm made this before update i no longer have any complaints
If it's possible I'll be excited as all hell to use the mod again, but for now I think I'll wait. You're talented as all heck, and I appreciate the work you put in for all of these mods you've created thus far!
I can, however, see that there might be an imbalance. I actually ended up nerfing the cooling mechanic (all cooling is halved) because it was otherwise impossible to get a wide sweep without returning to red first. Maybe that was a mistake, and I'll look into testing it and maybe rebalancing it some other way.
I personally had a breeze with the mod myself; I shell up to red, use wyvernfire while in red, then slap around in black and shell to maintain black. If I wanted to get into red, for instance to wyvernfire with all hits landing in the red, I'd lay off the shelling to allow for cooling. I guess it feels counterintuitive to use moves that aren't at their max power, which stops people from cooling while in red, or heating while in black. In the end, it comes down to playstyle; However, I do think rebalancing it to force you out of black more often could be a smart move.
I mainly balanced the mod around charged shelling, since that allows you to spend a lot of heat in red, overflowing into black, yet spending the shell with red damage. I originally had an idea of making the different shelling types have lower heat production for their most powerful moves, such as normal having less heat per shell or long having less heat on wyvernfire, but then it felt impossible to get out of red without standing still and spamming shells, especially if you had artillery equipped.
One way of balancing I could think of is forcing the gauge down by hitting red, so that hitting red at all gives you a lot more time with maxed shelling. Another way would be a nerfed locking mechanic, such as being able to lock the gauge for a few seconds by reloading. For now though, I think I'll mainly look into the cooling moves and rebalance them a little.
I definitely agree that there may be some adjustments needed for cooling. Could there possibly be a way to add decay to assist in dropping the bar over time? There's no doubt that increasing heat is achievable with ease, but the decrease is really the key issue. Personally why I decided to comment was because of my testing with Normal shells, and having those full bursts really push the bar further and further, it only really ended in slaplancing more than necessary.
The reloading lock could be a potential solution in theory! Honestly whether you decide to rebalance it completely or leave it as is, I still thank you for this mod as gunlance doesn't nearly get enough modding love.
I'm gonna keep saying it because I mean it, you're awesome. You may not even need to tweak much else past what's already done, unless you feel the need to touch up anything else / implement any other sort of changes. Thanks man, honestly your mods are hype as hell and I look forward to what else you got cookin'!
In terms of GU, there was the problem that shells were so underpowered that their only effective use was to get the heat gage built up, at which point you just wanted to lock it and only use slaplance (at least if you wanted to get the most out of the weapon and maybe approach being almost as effective as the other weapon types rather than having fun with explosions). Obviously this wasn't ideal, but the blame mostly laid with the lackluster shelling damage compared to the melee damage making the latter clearly better than the former. The other contributing issue was, I suspect, the degree of punishment for overheating. Not only was your gage set back to yellow (with no buff), it got locked there, preventing you from rebuilding the buff until the lockdown expired. None of the other weapons with meters or gages suffered from this manner of punishment, meaning it was just safer to lock it down, then ignore it in favour of playing how one liked.
As for the method you've implemented, in some ways it is just as bad, though in this case due to being overly restrictive in playstyle. By separating the strongest physical zone and the strongest shelling zone, you haven't encouraged a playstyle that implements both, but rather one that alternates between the two, likely in short bursts as it straddles the line between red and black. While one technically doesn't need to stick to using moves only when they get the strongest buff, it doesn't change that said buffs strongly encourage it, particularly with the disparity between them. There's also issue that because of how the gages are set up, there's little to stop a player who wants to just use shells or just slaplance from spamming the other attack type with no care for if they land or not, just to shift the gage to the far end of the relevant section for having the best buff of their desired moves. Except even in this, slaplance is favoured, as they can take advantage of blast dash as a mobility option to keep heat up while almost exclusively using physical attacks to actually deal damage.
To better encourage switching between the two somewhat freely, they should share a section of gage where they have the strongest buff, either removing the black gage section (and possibly buffing physical damage of the red section) or reducing the size of red and black drastically to make room for an overlapping section. This would then encourage players to try and stay within the optimal buff zone while giving a greater room for them to mix their combos of shells and melee, since instead of trying to straddle a line, they'd be trying to stay within a zone that can probably take a handful of shell or a handful of slaps depending on which end your on. That said, while it's not mentioned in the mod description, it sounds as if filling the gage just has the player get stuck at the end until they use melee attacks to lower it. I'd argue that it's worth bringing back some of the punishment from GU in the form of filling the gage causing it to reset to yellow, but drop the aspect of it getting locked there. This would help encourage people to be more careful about overheating, but wouldn't leave them stuck with no bonus for a prolonged period of time. If that seems too harsh, you could maybe justify the blast that sends it over getting extra damage due to the gunlance forcibly venting the extra heat (if the animation for the steam coming out of the gunlance from the Hail Cutter attack could be triggered that would be great, but I realize that might not be easily done or viable depending on how it's set up), and that might result in some tactical usages where you actually want to trigger the overload for a powerful attack, even if it means having to rebuild heat gage.
Still, I think that you shouldn't entirely overlook the potential benefit of having locking the gage as an option. While it was implemented poorly in GU, it could be handled better so as to enable certain combos focused on one attack type or the other being viable (or just to enable playstyles built around only using one side or the other of the gunlance, even if that's less optimal). One key thing that reinstating the gage locking could do is provide a reason to bother with Wyvern's Fire. What I refer to is the fact that Wyvern's Fire is actually a DPS loss on Normal and Wide shelling, compared to just shelling normally for the same period of time it takes to get the attack off, while on Long shelling lances, it only breaks even with using the standard shells (I suppose in this mod, if you reach the black range it will deal slightly more compared to standard shell in red gage with Long shells, and might have a chance of breaking even with the other shelling types, but I don't recall how much of a DPS loss it was off hand to compare). Making it so that it provides a lockdown of the gage, even if it's not for as long as the ability is down for, would provide a reason to actually bother using it, as it lets you either spam shells or melee attack without worry for a short period after. In turn, this would then improve the viability of Hail Cutter as an alternative to Ground Splitter. Since while Ground Splitter would get your gage into mid-red quickly, Hail Cutter would allow you to keep the gage locked down in the red for a larger period of time (due to reducing the Wyvern's Fire cooldown). You could also add a short lockdown on ground splitter, but I'm not sure if it's needed.
Admittedly, I might be somewhat biased on my views. I'm personally the sort of gunlance player who prefers a pure shelling playstyle despite realizing it's not optimal, and use the physical attacks primarily for purposes of positioning, and leading into specific moves like full burst and quick reload. I also happen to dislike ground splitter compared to hail cutter, but recognize the move is vastly superior due to providing the "buff" that brings shelling damage back to pre-rise base shelling damage levels, and have long thought that it would have been better handled by just bringing back the heat gage and making ground splitter function by setting the gage to the strongest buff level and locking it there briefly, so it would at least provide hail cutter players with a method of achieving the buffed damage, even if it's with less ease (I also wish elemental gunlances replaced the fire damage on shells with the damage type of their respective element, but that's not really relevant to this mod). As it is, while this mod is close to providing that, it doesn't quite manage it in the current form, so my reaction is understandably tinged with disappointment. Still it seems likely to be a vast improvement to the base rise implementation.
At any rate, thank you for making this mod.
Tracking and endorsed.