The PEAC was a bad idea

[Scheveningen]

3+ years ago, I posted a thread on literal 9/11 requesting security get a disposable rocket launcher instead of the very oppressive ion rifle pre-nerf. This suggestion was sincere but with balance considerations to make the one launcher actually a "one-and-done" weapon.

The thread received a dismissal, scathing criticism, and the thread was later buried to inactivity.

2 years later, the PEAC was added. It was not very accurate, and was buffed to almost literally never miss on a direct click of a mob almost another year later.

Today, the PEAC is a turbofuck weapon that instantly shatters ribs, deals so much organ damage, one-shots mechs and IPCs to instant death, and is generally a better anti-antagonist weapon than anything else in the current game state. All it takes is one to break your ribs, and a follow-up reload and re-fire on the already-broken chest to overkill 1 of 3 possible organs that are likely to immediately instantly put a non-IPC into lethal. They will collapse from pain, vomit, and die from MSOF, heart or lung damage in 1-2 minutes. Not only this, but the PEAC has 3 or 4 extra cannon cartridges and, as long as additional ammunition is ordered, will never really wear out. You can pretty much put any person into serious pain or lethal condition from a single direct-fire shot, if they are not an IPC, in which case you're guaranteed to kill them instantly anyway. What's the price of this? Well, sometimes the PEAC can collaterally hit people behind the original target. This is sometimes good, sometimes bad. It also detonates in a small explosion after, but this is just usually additional burn damage (20-30?) on top of the 45 damage, armor-penetrating direct hit. The AT missile that comes from the PEAC will also delete windows fairly reliably, and cause breaches.

None of those downsides actually mean anything. Direct hitting your intended target with the PEAC will guarantee that they are dead. The only species that could feasibly survive it is a Diona, but I can't fathom anyone is theorycrafting to play Diona antagonist to survive PEACs because playing Diona antagonist by any other metric is an exercise in frustration due to how slow you are and very susceptible to being hunted down due to requiring light to survive. 

The PEAC isn't an anti-armor device, it's an anti-everyone device. It should be moved out of the security armory, it is way too good at instantly ending rounds and makes conflicts on the shipside essentially meaningless because nothing traitors can order will be able to deal with the threat of getting direct hit by the PEAC.

[kyres1]

In terms of what the PEAC is, it's not meant (and never was) (And really should never be) something that is fair to everything posed against it. At the end of the day, it is indeed a rocket launcher of sorts.

It goes over your shoulder and fires projectiles meant to disable, slow down, or damage objects, vehicles and synthetics that, both thematically and realistically, are completely impervious to any sort of conventional force capable of easily rendering a living person into a red mist.

The conclusion I made from that is, whatever the PEAC is, it should be loud, unwieldy, dangerous, liable to overkill and collateral, and capable of reasonably contesting the threats it is designed to ward off. The PEAC is all of these things. So, you have to consider these things are kind of expectations regardless of if it's a rocket launcher or not. There's not many things a person can perceive as satisfying to use or witness use of, that can contest the threats here, really at all. EMPs and ions, which the PEAC replaced, functionally accomplished all of this with absolutely none of the perks of it being the PEAC. It just deleted, and when it didn't delete the threats, it sufficiently incapacitated their armament, armor, electronics and etc. to the point where they were basically dead.

The PEAC obviously isn't the finest integration into day-to-day antagonist gameplay, but with the above said, it's certainly an improvement over what would essentially be quietly putting the antagonist on the ground otherwise. Another consideration is that the entire rest of the security armory, the crew armory, and whatever else you lump into defeating the antagonists is just as lethal and equally liable to end rounds early. So, we then have to question what we gain from de-escalating what we've given security again, and from that we get the age-old discussion of "why is this SCC vessel practically defenseless," which was even a prominent argument on the Aurora. It's sacrificing immersion for antagonists of all things, and that's kind of obviously a downhill spiral, given antagonists haven't been and won't be touched for indefinite periods of time. If anything, antagonists have received nothing but "nerfs", and the possibility of outright "buffs" to their kit is not something anybody agrees will make the game more fun.

 

tl;dr Game ending the antagonist is always going to suck, but it is very difficult to avoid doing this. May as well do it in a cool way. Deleting the antagonist is not always a bad play, either, speaking from the perspective of someone who at least tries to play antagonist consistently.

[WickedCybs]

I'm pretty sure I know where this take is coming from, and it happened during a round where sec already unloaded burst and las rifles on the antag in question.

The PEAC was more a nerf to what it replaced and it's not a great weapon. Almost any other gun in the armoury outclasses it unless you're fighting an IPC and even then you need multiple shots. It does fourty five force at range whereas a polymer loaded burst rifle outdoes that in one burst with deadlier results (fractures, higher chance of organ damage due to multiple projectiles) and it can keep firing thirteen more bullets. On the PEAC's side, reloading takes a small while, a miss is harder and you can just walk yourself to safety if it even did any lasting damage at all once the knockdown is done.

So if you're not using it against a synth it's essentially a spectacle weapon that scares people due to how big it is and the noises it makes.

[GeneralCamo]

1 hour ago, Scheveningen said:

one-shots mechs

I have personally used the PEAC to deal with a mech, and it took every round available to take it down. It was later revealed in that round that the mech in question was made with spare parts and had no armor, and if the actual combat mech was brought out I doubt the PEAC could have dealt with it, even if we actually had ammo.

[Scheveningen]

13 minutes ago, GeneralCamo said:

I have personally used the PEAC to deal with a mech, and it took every round available to take it down. It was later revealed in that round that the mech in question was made with spare parts and had no armor, and if the actual combat mech was brought out I doubt the PEAC could have dealt with it, even if we actually had ammo.

I've seen this differently, given that all mechs contain code in them to allow penetrating shots to injure the pilot. The PEAC anti-tank missiles are highly penetrative and ignore all worn armor, and for the most part will always hit the pilot. That's the point anyway; to kill the pilot, you're not going to completely obliterate the mech itself- and yet the EMP effect will massively cripple it as well as severely injure said pilot.

The energy shield mod on it will soak all projectiles, however, including the AT missile. Frontal assaults won't work there.

 

47 minutes ago, WickedCybs said:

I'm pretty sure I know where this take is coming from, and it happened during a round where sec already unloaded burst and las rifles on the antag in question.

The PEAC was more a nerf to what it replaced and it's not a great weapon. Almost any other gun in the armoury outclasses it unless you're fighting an IPC and even then you need multiple shots. It does fourty five force at range whereas a polymer loaded burst rifle outdoes that in one burst with deadlier results (fractures, higher chance of organ damage due to multiple projectiles) and it can keep firing thirteen more bullets. On the PEAC's side, reloading takes a small while, a miss is harder and you can just walk yourself to safety if it even did any lasting damage at all once the knockdown is done.

So if you're not using it against a synth it's essentially a spectacle weapon that scares people due to how big it is and the noises it makes.

Where the take comes from is myself using aim intent to guarantee direct hits every single time someone comes into my visual range with the PEAC. Basically, you can't go wrong with it. If you can guarantee hitting dead-on due to how the PEAC's accuracy is 4, you're not going to have issues instantly maiming people in one shot. It is an extremely powerful target softener that often finishes the job on its own.

[Boggle08]

On 21/01/2023 at 15:16, kyres1 said:

The conclusion I made from that is, whatever the PEAC is, it should be loud, unwieldy, dangerous, liable to overkill and collateral, and capable of reasonably contesting the threats it is designed to ward off.

I feel like the environmental damage when the shell detonates needs to be more consequential. Using a PEAC inside of the Horizon is like getting into a rocket launcher fight aboard an aircraft carrier. It shouldn't easily break floors, that would be too much of an advantage, but it should absolutely eviscerate any consoles, engineering subsystems, machines, windows, walls, and airlocks that get caught in its wake.

If every impact results in a damaged section of the ship, the thing the ISD is supposed to be protecting, then every shot made will require more thinking, precision, and care on the part of the user. This is a gun that should be balanced around shooting once, with a specific purpose in mind. If regular use of the PEAC is consistent with what OP is describing, it sounds more like a primary weapon that starts and ends fights the same way stun combat works on other servers: Instantly, and with no hope of retaliation if you get tagged even once.

 

[Carver]

My only issue with the PEAC is that when it was buffed the single use anti-tank rifle that antags can purchase never got a parity buff. I don't mind stuff like this being strong, but I like consistency across tools that are meant to serve the same purpose.

As it were, the PEAC is really fucking awkward to use which discourages casual use - and God forbid you miss and hit someone or something else.

[Confused rock]

20 hours ago, Boggle08 said:

I feel like the environmental damage when the shell detonates needs to be more consequential. Using a PEAC inside of the Horizon is like getting into a rocket launcher fight aboard an aircraft carrier. It shouldn't easily break floors, that would be too much of an advantage, but it should absolutely eviscerate any consoles, engineering subsystems, machines, windows, walls, and airlocks that get caught in its wake.

If every impact results in a damaged section of the ship, the thing the ISD is supposed to be protecting, then every shot made will require more thinking, precision, and care on the part of the user. This is a gun that should be balanced around shooting once, with a specific purpose in mind. If regular use of the PEAC is consistent with what OP is describing, it sounds more like a primary weapon that starts and ends fights the same way stun combat works on other servers: Instantly, and with no hope of retaliation if you get tagged even once.

 

I'm not sure how good an idea that could be, because it'd work both ways- if it sprayed out shrapnel on impact, that'd dissuade regular use BUT it'd also make it more effective. It makes me kinda wish the PEAC was an actual rocket launcher, because if we gave it backblast, that'd be a great way to make it more destructive with no extra combat benefit.

[Gem]

the PEAC was "silently" (as in 3 hours before it was merged) tweaked in PR 15297 to do less damage to organic targets but more to mechanical targets.

[Boggle08]

4 hours ago, Confused rock said:

I'm not sure how good an idea that could be, because it'd work both ways- if it sprayed out shrapnel on impact, that'd dissuade regular use BUT it'd also make it more effective. It makes me kinda wish the PEAC was an actual rocket launcher, because if we gave it backblast, that'd be a great way to make it more destructive with no extra combat benefit.

There's a lot of ways to peel this banana in the long term. We could make it so you need two free hands in order to insert a new shell into the PEAC, requiring the operator to either drop the weapon to load it, or have someone stand next to him as a loader. We could allow the shell to retain it's momentum and penetrate through certain objects. Hell, it could even be used as a tool for breaching reinforced areas using special shells. I saw an officer several months ago try to bore through telecomms using the PEAC, and it barely did anything four rounds in.

I agree with Kyres, a gun like this shouldn't feel impotent, and it'd suck if turned into a planetside 2 situation where trying to use the AP/Anti-personnel option on people is a stupid idea, only because the resistance tables say so. We should be balancing it around being a mobile emplacement weapon that uses collateral damage, clunky logistics, and a need for coordination to offset it's sheer power.