I hate that in QC that if I fire railgun I’m defenseless for some time
In quake I like it very much that a player using rail at the incorrect range/situation is left holding their dick so I can shoot them in the face. The solution is to swap weapons rather than shooting as switch time is faster. Ultimately it is a great balancing mechanic for long range weapons. The same behaviour is there for rockets but in that case it is not as noticeable because a situation where you wanted something else and fired a rocket instead is much rarer. eg you shoot a rocket at long distance and the swap time, even if it were as long as rail, is not important because the other player isn’t going to get in your face. The same way that using rail at is ok at long range.
Why wouldn’t one switch weapons to shoot even though the gun is on cooldown?
Why wouldn’t you change weapon? The easy answer is because “we” made the game that way and from a balance perspective it works really well. When all the weapons behave the same way this isn’t a huge issue imo. It could be messaged better, via audio (very distinctive reload click, perhaps the same across weapons) visually (weapon model, HUD ammo changing and possible also a HUD “timer” to show the refire for new players). I never really came across players that did not understand what was going on, even 20 years ago. Even in “realistic” games like CS where the slow fire AWP needs to be reloaded players don’t really question this behaviour. At a base level they simply think that the low rate of fire is the trade off for high damage without seeing the bigger picture. Refire and rail is an elegant solution to the infinite range problem. Its like peas and carrots.
Because this is the spitballing channel lets pretend we want refire to play a role as well as allowing players switch off faster.
One solution is allowing swapping off after shooting but not allowing shooting (again) of a “used” weapon until it is reloaded. For example – shoot long reload weapon – swap to another weapon – when swapping back to the first weapon the refire animation/sound/etc needs to be played.
This does not have quite the same impact as shooting rail at close range because the downside (left holding rail) is removed as soon as the player switches. but it does put limits on weapons and forces the player to “reload”. It would also open up weaker weapons being possibly more useful in a string of weapon swaps, culminating in something like pulse which has a very fast refire time. After this chain when the player switches back to rockets, rail, flak, etc refire occurs before they can shoot that weapon again.
It does not achieve the same result as making the player wait, but it does let them change and it has its own draw backs. These draw backs might be too large. They might cause awkward combat due to needing to manually time switches off weapons or cause players to end up with “empty” quiver. Perhaps this could be circumvented by holding weapon binds to change or double tapping binds (problem with wheel). It also creates a situation where a player needs to keep track of what weapons are not “loaded” and swap back to them. This could possibly be addressed by automatically reloading all weapons after the player is out of combat for a set amount of time… in a perfect world playing off hand animations of them reloading while they move.
Longer refire is not possible with shorter switch times and trying to balance everything around one variable (switch) may be challenging or just flat out impossible. From memory you couldn’t turn the