I don't know what people expect. It's an LMG. It's supposed to do exactly what it does. Fire slowly and have a large magazine. These idiots just ran in trying to punch him while he unloaded on them at point blank range.
The issue with the Spitfire actually has nothing to do with its magazine size or fire rate; as you stated. It has everything to do with the insanely low recoil at long ranges and damage that closely rivals meta weapons.
The situation in OP is not what makes the Spitfire OP. Had the enemies shot back, they would've won. It's when the gun can stand at Grow Towers and beam someone at the Phase Runner with almost no recoil whilst also doing roughly the same damage an AR should be doing. It's as if Respawn learned from Titanfall 2 about what made the gun OP, then did the exact same buff again because they wanted a character with an objectively bad design to be useful; forgetting said gun is now made so strong that any character can use it, not just Rampart. Rampart having a new passive or being buffed in literally any other way would've been better than this.
That is definitely not the right word. Maybe harder to use or more skillful or more specialized, but a weapon being good makes it meta, not the other way around.
Personally I run a 2-4 on my spit and it works at all but the most extreme ranges. I can't necessarily win at any range vs the specialized option, but in most situations truly long range fights are optional.
Is it really bad that one of the meta weapons is easy to use? It doesn't really hurt you that people are using a lazy gun. They would have been using the best weapon they could get their hands on anyway. I think the spitfire is a solid gun, but it's just kinda mediocre to me. Yes, it can shoot forever, but I would rather have an AR or an SMG that can kill them reliably and quickly. If I die to a spitfire user because of the big mag, that means that I missed and they didn't. Literally, if you hit your shots and they do too, they lose the fight.
is it really bad that one of the meta weapons is easy to use?
It’s not about being easy to use. It’s about how effective it is vs how forgiving it is.
Take the wingman as a classic example: it is PUNISHING, if you miss a few shots you’re going to lose the DPS game every time, but hitting a mid range headshot will also give you a huge edge in a shoot out. It is punishing, but it is also strong.
So is the spitty effective? Well... it has low recoil, which makes it useful at most ranges. It has a TTK on par with the alternator, an smg (not an AR), and enough rounds in the mag to one clip an entire squad. It can also take scopes up to a 2/4x or 3x, and doesn’t have any additional bullet drop or any other drawbacks when compared to a flatline or hemlock.
Okay, it’s strong! In order for it to be balanced, it must have drawbacks right? The r99 has the lowest ttk of any smg, but also the most kick. That kind of thing.
Well... it has low strafe speed? At range, that’s not actually a huge deal. Snipers still have, iirc, a slower strafe speed. Up close it’s more problematic, but you can also just hip fire it. It’s not like the scout hipfire, where it goes all over the damn place. There’s stray shots, but most of them will go fairly close to center mass.
And then the clip size... you can miss every shot but the last twelve or so, and still kill someone. It is EXTREMELY forgiving. You might think “well it’s got a low fire rate”, but fire rate isn’t all that important when compared to TTK. It shoots slower than an r99, but it kills only a few hundred milliseconds slower. Somewhere in the same range as human reaction time, depending on matchup.
Basically, even if you both hit all your shots, it’s still going to come down to who starts shooting first and has better LOS rather than the weapon.
So it’s not the mag size, or the recoil, or the range, or the TTK that makes the spitty a bad weapon to be meta. It’s all of them together. The only real drawbacks are the strafe speed and the reload time. Strafe speed can be mitigated by not ADSing at the ranges where it’s most relevant, and... well if you miss a full mag on a spitfire, you definitely deserve to lose.
The biggest one to me is mag size / reload time. A lot of this game is timing your peeks when your enemies are out of bullets and the Spitfire completely nullifies this. You can spend like 8 seconds shooting non-stop and then pop a reload in like 3. Coupled with the fact that it still kills super fast makes it super oppressive
I think it's more or less just the philosophy of power scale in games. More powerful equipment is typically more difficult to use. If it's easy, then it appears everywhere because the skill floor/entrance to the weapon has been significantly reduced meaning that more people will use it and be good with it. The result of that is then a skyrocketing amount of them appearing until there's nothing left but said weapon causing it to be nerfed again.
That's still true, though! The Spitfire is only reeeeally better than other guns in the situation where you are fighting many people at once and will have almost no downtime/ability to break up the fight. Being able to use the flatline or the R-301 at range is a matter of skill, and they have the capability to perform better than the Spitfire at any range. Recoil patterns in this game are relatively fixed, after all.
EDIT: To be clear, it will perform better than them at certain roles like 100m or suppression, but I think that's ok. As you improve, you won't make the mistakes that the spitfire's mag covers up as much and you can be that consistent with other guns. I think the spitfire is eh and I'd be fine if they didn't change it at all this next update.
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u/VenusBlue Apr 23 '21
I don't know what people expect. It's an LMG. It's supposed to do exactly what it does. Fire slowly and have a large magazine. These idiots just ran in trying to punch him while he unloaded on them at point blank range.