L4D2 Weapon/Gimick Balance/Favouritism Discussion

**Lyramion** · 11-29-2009 07:42 AM

Disclaimer: This is soley personal oppinion / experience / rants. Please add your own!

- In VS Melee weapons are the new Shotguns. In L4D1 I would almost exclusively use Shotguns to quickly dispose of Hunters and then Pistols for far targets. In L4D2 I find myself doing the opposite. Have a long range Primary weapon and a melee weapon for short range. Despite my beginning dislike for melee weapons their advantage becomes very clear in a VS game - you can just rush ahead while slicing away zombies with ridiculus speed. More speed leads to less Infected attacks leads to win.

- Magazine Weapons > Shotguns. In L4d1 like said I was all over Shotguns. Now in L4d2 they are still strong at close range but the one thing that kills them now for me is the reload. L4D2 has the habbit to toss tons and tons of common infected at you. Realoading your whole mag at once is a big advantage now.

- Ak, M16, Scar: A nice little love triange to chose from. The M16 being the middle ground, while the AK is the all-end in power. Personally I find myself picking up the Scar whenever it´s possible. Clip size of 60 is nice but of course you are stuck to the burst fire. The main reasons for picking it are similar to the melee weapon. it´s accuracy while moving forward is just that great compared to the other rifles. The quick bursts also let you make sure one zombie is dead before you move to the next one - while with the other rifles you often have to wait a splitsecond to check if they really do trip over and die. Of course if you should be lucky enough to obtain laser sights, even the AK has razor sharp accuracy.

- Grenade Launcher: It´s great how this seemingly overpowered weapon was added into the game. A danger for you and your team. Often you find yourself out of luck being in narrow corridors and only having limited ability to help your teammates. I still like it tho for it´s area clearing effect. In VS even firing it at your feet when you are totally stuck IS an option. Better getting yourself unstuck and taking 5ish friendly fire damage than being stuck in a horde of zombies for 10 seconds an giving the enemy team the chance to follow up.

- Snip0Rs: The Hunting Rifle is still not a real choice for advancing at any pace. It seems to appear more like a Tier 1.5 Weapon tho with some early spawns around the maps. The new scoped rifle with 30 Bullets IS really useable tho and has no obvious backdraws compared to the hunting rifle. In VS it´s a choice to take when the ammo on your primary weapon is empty

- Bile Bombs: Oh the love... oh the hate. Used without care this thing can kill off your team. Used right it can save you. There is a simple fact about it: When there are not enough existing zombies in the world to get drawn to it - the director creates a whole NEW load of them. So even if the achievement might make oyu think "oh bile bomb is great to use on a tank!" NO IT´S NOT!. When a tank is on the field all normal horde spawns stop. Only the zombies already standing around are there, unless you get hit by a Boomer. So when you bile a tank in VS, a good tank will just retreat and when the bile wore it will come after you, with new common infected - that didn´t exist before. They will block your kiting path and get you killed.

- Pills < > Adrenaline: When possible I gulp down the pills and carry the Adrenaline around. L4d2 just made the events, so that on shot of Adrenaline is the difference between getting thru and failing hard. As mentioned elsewhere: Adrenaline makes you immune against being slowed down by common infected hits. It removes your right click melee fatigue. It makes you heal yourself / revive teammates in half the time (3 instead of 6 seconds). It makes you run FASTER than normal speed. So many benefits to be had.

- Defib: Nothing more annoying than all your hard work being neutralized by 2-3 shocks of electricity. Giving up a healthpack for it, is going in more risk for more reward. Able to completly revive a teamate is super awesome - then again that one healthpack could have stopped you from being slow and having gotten in a dangerous situation. Nonetheless I usually do not hesitate to trade in a fresh medpack for a defib. Sadly those pesky chargers often run the death bodies down somewhere out of your reach.

**Mixa** · 11-29-2009 08:07 AM

Originally Posted by Lyramion

- Bile Bombs: Oh the love... oh the hate. Used without care this thing can kill off your team. Used right it can save you. There is a simple fact about it: When there are not enough existing zombies in the world to get drawn to it - the director creates a whole NEW load of them. So even if the achievement might make oyu think "oh bile bomb is great to use on a tank!" NO IT´S NOT!. When a tank is on the field all normal horde spawns stop. Only the zombies already standing around are there unless you get hit by a Boomer. So when you bile a tank in VS, a good tank will just retreat and when the bile wore it will come after you will new common infected - that didn´t exist before. They will block your kiting path and get you killed.

Pretty much all Lyra's points were exactly what I thoughts, but this point is clearly the one everyone MUST read.

About rifles, I personally like M16 best, it offers the fire power while mobile, and for me it seems better at picking stuff off than SCAR.

Shotguns I've found only usable against tanks, if you have 2 or more shotguns you still have that "clean a corridor ability", but they chew ammo fast, and can be really ineffective. Also against long range infected, its utterly useless, damage range is about 40-50meters even though the pellets seem to go much further. Melee / shotgun is bad combination. I like chrome over smg most of the time though.

**Morganan** · 11-29-2009 01:53 PM

You have spoken some truths. The only 2 maps I want a shotgun for anymore are dark Carn 4 for the hall clearing abilities in the tunnel of love and for the ending event and hard rain 2 and sometimes hard rain 3 to eliminate the witches. The shotguns imo are almost always a bad choice as they limit your ability to take a melee weapon, as I go with the simple rule that one needs some type of mid to long range killing ability, so if I go with a machine gun of some sort, I take a melee weapon, if I go with a shotgun, I use pistol(s). The AK is easily the auto-shotgun of l4d2 when you talk about brutalizing a tank. The AK makes it so the tank cannot even sit back and throw rocks anymore.

I agree 100% the boomer bile pickup item is close to useless against a tank. Another tidbit I see people either not understanding or not caring about, the real boomer bile overrides the effect from the throw-able. The only time boomer bile is good against a tank is if you have just killed the boomer and know you have a 30 second window to take that tank down and get rid of the gathered horde.

Other thoughts:

-The cemetery is not "dynamically generated", there are 4 different versions of the cemetery from which the director can choose from when the map is loaded for the first survivor team. The same goes for all "path changes", they are all generated and determined when the map is loaded.
-The charger most definitely needs some patch-love. Charging up steps is buggy and can sometimes result in the first step stopping your charge. Many times it's possible to force a survivor to be "stuck" requiring a jockey or smoker to pull him out of his location otherwise he cannot move. It's almost hit or miss when breakable/movable objects either stop your charge, or have no effect on it. I've charged right through chairs and railings one time through, and the next time been stopped by those very same chairs/railings.
-The spectator bug is incredibly freaking annoying in vs. games, especially in team auto-match games where one cannot switch sides. The piece of code in l4d1 where they stopped the team switching and being put in spectator mode upon map load didn't make it over to l4d2 yet.
-Is it just me, or does it seem unless the tank spawns either during a rolling crescendo event, or against a pathetically inept/previously injured/unfamiliar with the map team of survivors, it is even more useless then it was in l4d1? Everyone seems to use assault rifles now, so rock throwing is out of the question for the most part unless you want to loose 1/3 of your health for each rock you throw. Add a grenade launcher and explosive/incendiary rounds to the mix and sometimes I think the tanks only purpose is to make the survivors stop running through a level for 20-30 seconds so the other SI get an extra spawn cycle in.
-The rain effects in Hard Rain are one of the most well done effects in a video game I have seen. However it's frustrating as infected to try a coordinated attack, and right after you die, the hard rain begins, If 4 player infected attack on survivors during a rain event spells almost certain death for the survivors (unless they have crappy comps and cant run the game on max and thus don't see the rain effects)
-I predict it's less then one month before the no med config for l4d1 becomes the "no meds/defibs" config for l4d2.

**Lyramion** · 11-29-2009 02:30 PM

Many times it's possible to force a survivor to be "stuck" requiring a jockey or smoker to pull him out of his location otherwise he cannot move.

November 27, 2009 - Left 4 Dead 2 Update Released

Left 4 Dead 2

-Fixed issue where players could be stuck if caught in charger pound

This was very annoying but SHOULD be fixed. If it´s really fixed only time will tell. One way to get you unstuck was throwing a pipe to your feet and make you stumble

**Reaperassault** · 11-29-2009 08:43 PM

I'm big fan of the ranged weapon and melee as well. AK and laser is my combo of choice. For melee machetee, axe, frying pan are my top picks. The baseball bat spawns way too often for me.

**Lyramion** · 11-29-2009 09:08 PM

The baseball bat spawns in liek every saferoom - I can´t see it anymore lol

**Mech__Warrior** · 11-29-2009 09:48 PM

I often carry the Tier 1 shotgun at the beginning of a campaign because the SMG doesn't have the stopping power of an AR. Later in the campaign, it'll just boil down to what I want to use.

**Morganan** · 11-30-2009 03:25 AM

Originally Posted by Lyramion

The baseball bat spawns in liek every saferoom - I can´t see it anymore lol

The bat spawns in every saferoom to start the level in versus as long as someone is connected to the server who pre-ordered. Am I the only one who prefers to spawn as quite frankly anything else besides the tank other then in special circumstances?

**Lyramion** · 11-30-2009 08:27 AM

There are some pretty hard places to be tank. For example we had a tank on dark carnival in the animal shed. Big room and 2 large table rows to **** up the tank.

Then again it IS an option to lose control. A better Option than L4D1 because the tank isn´t glued to downed survivors anymore.

We had a tank in Parish in the Carlot. The survivors waited downstairs for the tank to jump down and crossfire it. We lost the control of the tank once and I ran it towards the cemetery. AI would take over and we had enough time to rally up all 4 of us as other Special Infected. AI tank did decend and we managed to down them all on the 5V4

**Morganan** · 11-30-2009 11:40 AM

Weird, when we tried to let the AI take over the tank, he just dropped over dead. There are still idiotic tank spawns... Dead Center 3 where he spawns outside the security doors that start the event, while the survivors are on the other side. The choices are crawl through a vent and loose control, or drop down and try and come up from behind and loose control because you have to go through half the level to catch up to them.

**Lyramion** · 11-30-2009 03:41 PM

Sometimes the tank spawns are horrible balanced, too.

One time our team got a tank on some open swamp area in the swamp campaign. Our enemy team got it right in the bridge event. ugh poor them

**Mech__Warrior** · 11-30-2009 11:36 PM

Yeah, the tank is definitely a nightmare if the AI director decides to spawn in outside of your safe room. That happened to me several times.

**Avs** · 12-01-2009 04:02 PM

On Shotguns: I never used them in L4D1 because I considered the UZI to be all around better. In L4D2, I also use the MAC10 Silenced over the shotgun because its better than the UZI, which is better than all the pump shotguns. Reload time on shotguns is faster mainly because the last chamber reload is non-existant in L4D2. However, the max ammo carrying size for shotguns is way less than a MAC10. I still find automatic Shotguns generally superior for fast clearing of infected with all shots well placed. That being said, I prefer the automatic rifle over any weapon except for certain map locations where a shotgun makes more sense.

On Rifles: I like the AK 47 because it fires a little bit slower, which gives me more control with the best stopping power. With this thing I can cut through infected at range to kill special infected beating on my teammates. I like the M16 next because while it has a bigger clip, its faster firing and also fully automatic. I do not use the SCAR unless I have to, mainly because I like having the option of burst and full auto for flexibility.

- Grenade Launcher: It´s great how this seemingly overpowered weapon was added into the game. A danger for you and your team. Often you find yourself out of luck being in narrow corridors and only having limited ability to help your teammates. I still like it tho for it´s area clearing effect. In VS even firing it at your feet when you are totally stuck IS an option. Better getting yourself unstuck and taking 5ish friendly fire damage than being stuck in a horde of zombies for 10 seconds an giving the enemy team the chance to follow up.

Grenade Launcher: Probably the most useless weapon unless in the hands of someone who can cure world hunger with a loaf of bread. The GL's best ability is its explosive knockback that stumbles any special infected. Otherwise, its damage is really poor, unless scoring a direct hit. Its a great weapon to blow up hordes attacking a bile bomb, or freeing your teammates attacked by SI, but otherwise subpar compared to other weapons. Its rare enough that people will use it as a gimmick weapon when its found, but its also crappy enough that most people will fight over it, and many are against using it in versus (mainly because people don't understand what its actually good for, which is disrupting special infected so you can kill them with a magnum or teammates).

Snipers: The Hunting Rifle is now the most useless weapon in the game if avoidable. A 15 shot clip is nothing compared to the 30 shot military sniper that does the same damage. On Versus, the 30 shot sniper is a great clearing weapon with huge penetration, and one shot one kill for common infected. Also, Range > all.

Bile Bombs: I like this over the pipebomb because it lasts much longer. Nevermind the spawning of zombies, just combo it with a molotov or penetrating fire and kill the swarm to clear a LARGE area of infected. Use it on a tank too, but only for those who are going to hunt it down. A tank can run away if it wants, but if you guys are close enough to hit it with a bile bomb, it isnt getting away if everyone is trying to kill the tank instead of run. Otherwise yes, dont bilebomb a tank if you arent committing to the hunt.

Adrenaline: Best 2ndary ever. Because you become like Jesus with this drug, it basically is giving you the same survivability that pills would give you, and possibly more! You should always have your best survivors carry this because they're going to be picking you up, while you carry all the pills.

On Melee Weapons: My preferences are Katana, Axe, Guitar, Machete. I almost exclusively use those because of their attack speed, range, and the kung fu you can combine with those. I lasted for 1 entire minute on expert with the alarm going on the evac event for Parish using only a guitar, and melee attacks. Perfect timing, lag compensation, and melee range and you'll like Melee weapons over pistols for 60-70% of the situations. I use melee for covering hallways and doors from hordes, and mainly to conserve ammo if you find a neat gun.

**Morganan** · 12-01-2009 05:18 PM

Heh, a buddy of mine said this, so I cant take credit for it..

"The grenade launcher is either the best weapon by far if used properly, or it's like the infected having a 5th player if used improperly."

**[tR]Greasy_mullet** · 12-01-2009 08:53 PM

Shotguns just feel weak to me since L4D1. Not sure whats going on there but somethings not right. Perosnally using Scar or AK every chance I get.

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