On a meta-genre level, assault rifles (or whatever is their closest equivalent in the particular game). While not as flashy and heroic as super-shotguns, BFG, rocket launchers, chain guns, and fantastic plasma/ray guns, assault rifles in nearly every shooter are the most universal weapons during the entire playthrough. Ammo is abundant (and often carried by enemies), a lot of it can be held in reserve at all times, large amount of ammo in a clip, decent headshot damage, rate of fire that allows either focusing a single target or spraying bullets across multiple foes, decent accuracy at all ranges except the largest sniper distances (even then, there's often a scope option), and many handy addons like silencers, grenade launchers, and drum magazines. There's a reason it's the default infantry weapon in real life.
- AMID EVIL:
- The Axe of the Black Labyrinth is the game's default FPS-standard melee weapon, and while it's not as flashy as the other weapons, it's far from being a mere ammo-saver, thanks to dealing good damage and having the ability to pull enemies to close the distance.
- The Staff of the Azure Orb is the game's equivalent to the second-slot pistol in most classic FPS games. While it's weaker and less flashy than the rest of your arsenal, it isn't so weak as to be only useful for conserving ammo. It also has the unique benefit of projectiles that home towards enemies, making it useful in a game where many enemies don't sit still and you only have one hitscan weapon, and is the only weapon that can effectively stunlock enemies.
- Apex Legends:
- Crafting takes players out of the fight and makes them wait around for their items to finish being made. It's also a source of must-have items such as recovery items, ammo, certain guns, and is a risk-free way to upgrade players' shields.
- It's arguably not as fun or fast-paced as actively seeking out fights, but biding your time and avoiding enemies when you don't have the drop on them is an easy way improve your odds to get Battle Royale victories.
- The R-301 Carbine in a nutshell. A very basic light assault rifle that happens to have little recoil even without a barrel stabilizer and great damage at all ranges, making it the perfect generalist weapon.
- Battlefield 2142: While it is more fun to storm the Titans and destroy them from the inside, it's much more practical to capture silos on the ground and destroy it that way, as a competent team will heavily fortify the Titan from the inside.
- A slightly risky, but good strategy in a match with one Titan's shields down, was for players on the losing side to go and capture silos on the now mostly empty battlefield, as the winning side usually had most of their members trying to board the Titan. Games could be turned around real fast when the other Titan suddenly had its shield down and was being boarded.
- In the same game, the standard sniper rifles compared to the unlockable. While the unlockable one has a high amount of damage that can kill light armored infantry in one shot, pierce bulletproof glass, and destroy explosives, the player is limited to three shots, compared to the five on the standard rifles, and the red tint made the scope unusable on weaker computers. Also, headshots are an instant kill with all three rifles, and a sniper that is skilled enough to land a head shot every time does not need the extra damage boost.
- Battlefield 3 has a staggering number of gun unlocks, but for the assault, engineer, and support, the default weapons can still throw their punches with the best of them. In particular, the USMC starting weapons are all based off of the M16/M4 series, and as such have the fastest reload in the game, and the second best stats for everything else.
- BioShock:
- In BioShock, you collect a stunning array of weapons, special ammo, and plasmids — but nothing is ever so useful as Electro Bolt + Wrench. Especially since enemies stunned by Electro Bolt (or Insect Swarm if you prefer) count as "unaware" enemies for some reason, which means the Wrench Lurker tonics that are supposed to be used for playing stealthily and attacking enemies from behind will kick in even if you stand right in front of the enemy in plain sight and smack them right in the face.
- In terms of efficiency, though, Telekinesis is king, as it has the lowest resource cost of any attack in the game save the Wrench — no ammo, and the smallest EVE cost of any plasmid, and can act as a shield and protect you from grenades to boot. And it still does good damage, of course.
- In terms of play-speed, the Revolver/Pistol (with damage upgrade and anti-personnel rounds later on) can kill all splicers in 1 headshot. While other weapons have better overall damage (Crossbow) or better rate of fire (Machine Gun/Tommy Gun), the Revolver has just the right balance so you don't have to stop moving to fight every single enemy you meet.
- You can make the Wrench so powerful on its own that eventually you won't even need Electro Bolt, you can just run in swinging wildly, killing everything while regaining health with each hit. You'll only have to take out a gun or a plasmid when fighting a Big Daddy or the final boss. Note that a lot of people that do this are the same people who complain about how easy and repetitive the game is.
- BioShock 2:
- All of the tonics that existed in the first game for the wrench now exist in this game for the drill, allowing you to make the drill powerful enough to make the other weapons obsolete. The game even encourages you to do this with a new tonic that cuts EVE consumption by a large amount while only allowing you to use the drill, plasmids, research camera, and hacking tool. Of course, that tonic really starts to shine when you get the Decoy 3 plasmid, which makes the drill obsolete, and at the end of the game when you get Summon Eleanor.
- Sofia Lamb rose to power by being an in-universe example of this: while Andrew Ryan was attempting to win the war by using the pheromone control system to Zerg Rush the enemy and Frank Fontaine was trying to win through elaborate strategies and confidence schemes, Lamb simply kept her head down and waited. Because she'd managed to take over the penal colony she'd been sent to, she'd ended up with an impregnable fortress that most of Rapture didn't even know existed, so all she had to do was keep herself occupied until Ryan and Fontaine killed each other - and then sweep in with an army of her fellow inmates and take over the ruin.
- BioShock Infinite has quite an amount of impressive weaponry, but the fact that the most damaging ones are either subjected to insane ammunition restrictions (maximum number of bullets for the revolver? Twenty-four, thank you very much), quite complex to use (like the parabolic-trajectory Volley Gun), or both:
- That means you'll be playing most of the game with the humble Machine Gun/Triple R as your primary baddie-killer, due to fair damage, good precision (especially after upgrades) and ammunition for it being scattered all over the place.
- The Undertow Vigor is one of the few non-offensive Vigors and is relatively simple (use to push enemies away, hold to draw them close). However, pushing enemies away is tremendously effective at killing mooks given you're in a Flying City, and holding enemies in place is excellent at taking out the Heavy-hitters as it draws in Snipers or enemies with rocket-propelled grenades, and stuns bigger Mooks. It's also invaluable for fighting Lady Comstock, since she keeps reviving the mooks you kill. The intended method is to burn them to death so as to not leave a corpse for her to revive, but that doesn't always work. Since she's restricted to a certain area of the map, you can just move all of them outside of that area and kill them there, and she won't be able to revive them. When she runs out of mooks, she will literally stay still and let you shoot her to death, provided you stay outside of her designated area yourself.
- The Broadsider Pistol starts off as a fairly weak weapon, good against minor enemies, and most players ditch it later on for better weapons. Still, it's accurate, fires incredibly fast, has a high critical damage multiplier, draws fast and is very cheap to upgrade. Right gear and upgrades, and when you get to Soldiers Field the Pistol will have 31 rounds in total, and provide solid performance at all ranges.
- The Huntsman Carbine, your basic all-around gun in the game. Does well at nearly every range, performs nearly as well as the Sniper Rifle (only losing out on magnification and raw damage), decent damage and a fast rate of fire, like the Pistol. Most players carry it alongside their other favourite weapon because it's a brilliant all-rounder, and if you upgrade it fully, it'll become the only gun you'll ever need.
- In BioShock, you collect a stunning array of weapons, special ammo, and plasmids — but nothing is ever so useful as Electro Bolt + Wrench. Especially since enemies stunned by Electro Bolt (or Insect Swarm if you prefer) count as "unaware" enemies for some reason, which means the Wrench Lurker tonics that are supposed to be used for playing stealthily and attacking enemies from behind will kick in even if you stand right in front of the enemy in plain sight and smack them right in the face.
- Blood has lots of fun and creative weapons like a spray can/lighter combo, the voodoo doll and the Life Leech staff, which looks awesome to boot. However, more often than not, the good old shotgun, Tommy gun and bundles of dynamite are much more plentiful in supply and deal far more consistent damage while the flashier weapons tend to be situational at best.
- The Borderlands series:
- In Borderlands 2, when weapon manufacturers were more sharply delineated, several manufacturers gained novel attributes, such as Torgue weapons being always explosive or Hyperion weapons gaining accuracy as they were fired or Tediore weapons exploding when thrown or Dahl weapons turning into burst fire mode when you aim down the scope/sights or Maliwan firearms always having elemental damage or Vladof guns increasing in fire rate the longer you held down the trigger:
- Jakobs weapons, however, changed very little from their previous incarnations in Borderlands, being simple, relatively dull designs based on old-fashioned weapons, such as the Thompson M1928A1 and the Colt Single Action Army,... and as a result they are always useful in some capacity. Jakobs weapons are never elemental (save for a few weird unique or legendary guns), don't fire in bursts or automatically like Dahl or Vladof guns, but their weapons simply do more raw damage with good accuracy than anything else in the game. They might not fire rockets or elemental beams, but Jakobs guns simply do the "shoot bullets and kill people" thing so well that it hardly matters. There's a reason many players consider them the best manufacturer out of all the 8 companies in the game:
- Jakobs sniper rifles also have a hidden increase to critical hit damage compared to other sniper rifles: most will add the weapon's damage on top of whatever bonus that weak point gives. Jakobs sniper rifles add 4.2 times the weapon's damage. Their Gatling Gun assault rifles count too-they may not be elemental or have cool Maliwan finishes, but they are far more accurate than any Vladof spiniguns and while they only fire in three-round bursts, you can still fire fast enough to deal out massive damage and still hit targets reliably. Although they do tend to burn through your ammo quite a bit, the fact that the gun is permanantly on burst fire mode makes sure that you will still have a reasonable amount of bullets left, compared to the other full-auto rifles from the other manufacturers.
- Their revolvers are considered by the fanbase to be among the greatest weapons in the game. Why? Jakobs doesn't seem to do anything special other than having excellent raw damage, until you realize that they fire at the same speed that you can click your mouse. This immediately makes them awesome, as loaders, bullymongs, mooks and even bosses can be taken down in seconds if you click as fast as you can, coupled with the huge amounts of damage. But they excel most as a backup in "Fight for your life" mode, as you can simply spam a hail of bullets at whatever wounded you severely, then get back up on your feet again to fight another day. Special mention goes to Maggie, which is powerful enough to be a primary weapon, especially with the "Dastardly" prefix, which increases its already massive damage.
- Dahl weapons, too. They don't look like the chunky slabs of metal from Torgue, or the elegant and graceful Maliwan guns — they just look like guns with camo paint jobs. They can have elemental capacitors, but it's not all that common. At the same time, however, Dahl guns have a reasonable rate of fire when not zoomed, a devastating burst-fire mode when they are zoomed, and very low recoil, making them able to quickly and accurately inflict damage. Just be careful with round count.
- Borderlands 3: Both Dahl and Jakobs are still under this trope, but they made slight improvements. The former have alt-fire modes (Burst, Auto, and Semi-Auto) so you don't have to zoom in while the latter's bullets rebound to nearby targets upon a critical hit.
- In Borderlands 2, when weapon manufacturers were more sharply delineated, several manufacturers gained novel attributes, such as Torgue weapons being always explosive or Hyperion weapons gaining accuracy as they were fired or Tediore weapons exploding when thrown or Dahl weapons turning into burst fire mode when you aim down the scope/sights or Maliwan firearms always having elemental damage or Vladof guns increasing in fire rate the longer you held down the trigger:
- UAVs (as well as their differently named counterparts) in Call of Duty are among the least exciting killstreaks/scorestreaks in the entire series but also among the most widely used. They do not require many kills to earn and simply ping the minimap for enemy locations, which is incredibly useful for strategic purposes. In hardcore modes, UAVs also enable the minimap for the team they're active for.
- In a game that manages to shove a machine gun, sniper rifle and rocket launcher (among other things) into a single weapon, one gun in Classified: The Sentinel Crisis combines incredible accuracy, stealth and the power to kill most Mooks with a single bullet. That gun... is the silenced semi-automatic pistol.
- In Command & Conquer: Renegade, the most useful GDI tank is the plain medium tank, as opposed to the Mammoth. Also, the elite version of the sniper is a huge overkill in the hands of anyone that is good at sniping, so a good player will stick to the cheaper basic sniper. Similarly, as awesome as things like the laser or tiberium weapons are, and as fun as the explosives can be, until the very last levels, many players stick to the simple, plentiful autorifle. Sure, it's the most basic weapon in the game (even the starting pistol has the unique features of being silenced and carrying infinite ammo), but its accuracy, speed, and control is such that the weapon can carry experienced players through entire levels.
- In Counter-Strike Although high powered machine guns and sniper rifles are very impressive; the most effective weapons are usually basic assault rifles (such as the AK47) and pistols (like the five-seven).
- Also basic flashbangs are usually the difference between life and death.
- In Crysis 2, there are many different ways to kill C.E.L.L. operatives, whether by using a gauss rifle, a rapid-fire taser, and throwing them skyhigh. But the most effective way to kill them? Attach a silencer to your starting pistol and use stealth mode. Aim for the head and you can take out groups of enemies without being detected. The best part? Each shot only uses ten energy, and combined with Nano Regeneration and Stealth Entrance, you can go an entire level undetected. This is less effective on Ceph, however.
- Deep Rock Galactic:
- The weapon overclock system allows you to upgrade your weapons beyond the limits of standard upgrades. Overclocks come in three varieties: Clean, Balanced, and Unstable. Whereas Balanced Overclocks tend to boost some stats at the expense of others and Unstable Overclocks either risk Crippling Overspecialization or drastically change the weapon's function, Clean Overclocks usually give a modest increase to one or two stats with no downsides, making them reliable in any situation.
- The Dash perk. Compared to recruiting a glyphid to fight for you or granting yourself a death-defying, potentially round-saving last stand, the Dash perk is fairly simple: it gives you a speed boost for about two seconds. Far from being useless, though, it's one of the most widely applicable perks in the game; from crossing large distances quickly to catch up with your team, to ignoring the slowdown effects of sticky goo and other terrain hazards, to repositioning during a tough fight, there's almost nothing a well-timed Dash can't help with.
- The Descent games have always had many kinds of awesome, flashy and hyperdestructive weaponry, but due to huge energy consumption and rarity of pickups, you'll probably kill most enemies using the laser - the weapon you start with (albeit suitably upgraded).
- Deus Ex has several "basic" weapons that retain their functionality and usefulness through the entire game.
- The humble pepper gun is a weapon that is located on Liberty Island, in a place you're more-or-less guaranteed to run by (straight ahead from the exit of the island's dock), and retains its useful nature of disorienting enemies for several seconds. Not that great if you're confronted by the Elite Mooks (MJ12 commandoes, which No-Sell the effect), but a solid emergency weapon if you need to disorient a crowd of enemies for a few seconds... and it has an incredibly-useful backup purpose: it can stop laser tripwires for several seconds as you move through. All this for a measly one square of inventory space, and you've got a backup weapon/device that will last you through the entirety of the plot if you're careful with your ammo.
- The Stealth Pistol is a mandatory pickup given to the player by Sam Carter during their first visit to UNATCO, and retains several benefits over the base pistol (namely having an integrated silencer). It is also one of the mainstay weapons for the game, since headshots are one-hit-kills against almost everything, and the gun can be easily modified into a baby sniper rifle. 9mm ammo is abundant in nearly all areas of the game, making this (along with the Assault Rifle, which can be picked up at the end of the first mission) standard setups in every player inventory, regardless of playstyle.
- It's not a flashy way to play; but the number of areas that can be cleared by hiding in the air ducts and shooting people with pistols or the crossbow is amazing.
- Throughout the game you'll get access to rocket launchers, plasma rifles and nanotech swords. But when you're stuck in a situation where you have to fight your way out, the Sawed-Off Shotgun is one of the best weapons in the game, able to dish out a ton of damage at close range while not limiting your mobility like heavy weapons tend to do (and it doesn't take up a whole lot of space in your inventory.)
- The tranq darts are also extremely useful against soft enemies. The only requirement is to stay hidden while they run around and finally collapse. The tranq darts and stun gun are both necessary for a Pacifist Run in the first game.
- Deus Ex: Invisible War:
- The pistol is one of the game's best weapons. It's highly accurate, has little recoil, does solid damage with headshots, consumes very little Universal Ammo, and its alt-fire is a unlimited-use flashlight that consumes no ammo or bioenergy. Its unique variants are even better, even if they don't fire spiderbombs or set people on fire—they just have higher damage, one has a redlight that enemies can't see, and the other replaces the flashlight with a sniper scope.
- The Toxin Blade is a semi-hidden weapon found in a place you're nearly guaranteed to visit in the second mission of the game (the first visit to Seattle, during the sidequest to assassinate the politician), under a pillow in a location that's mandatory to visit in the sidequest. Unlike most weapons in the game (which require universal ammo and can run out quick unless the player is judicious with their playstyle), the Toxin Blade does damage over time, has unlimited durability and is the easiest way to "hit-and-run" enemies throughout the plot.
- You can invest in flashy biomods such as building drones that break down nearby bodies to restore health and intercept rockets, run super fast and jump super high, or turn invisible to organic or mechanical enemies...but some of the most useful biomods are the passive biomods. They're always active, consume no bioenergy, and when maxed out allow you to carry more stuff, fall from great heights uninjured and completely silent, hack any electronic device, and effortlessly take out electronic security (without it blowing up in your face) with a baton.
- Same thing applies to the prequels Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: The Fall. Miniguns, laser rifles, rocket launchers... but the entire game can be completed using nothing but the silenced pistol - when it's completely maxed out, a series of fast headshots can bring down even bosses. In The Fall, pistol ammo is more common and cheaper than rifle ammo, which doesn't really start showing up on the regular until towards the end; unless you don't mind killing or knocking out a few cops for their guns.
- Similar is the stun gun, which is even the same size. It's low-key looking even compared to the other non-lethal weapons like the PEPS or tranquilizer rifle, but incredibly useful besides. It's a silent short-range weapon that can rend unconscious any human but a boss with a single body shot, stuns bosses and robots, and will even temporarily disable a camera without setting off an alarm. It can't be upgraded at all, but never needs to be because it's just as effective on the 8-foot armored cyborgs with miniguns as it was on the unarmored guy with a pistol.
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided continues the series' trend of having the humble pistol be among the most versatile weapons in the game. Fully upgraded, it is a silent, pinpoint precise, fully automatic weapon, capable of dealing with all but the toughest enemies. Used with EMP ammo, it can even temporarily disable bots, turrets, and cameras without attracting attention.
- Mankind Divided adds the smoke grenade to the panoply of throwables in the franchise. They cause absolutely no damage, but are useful to both stealth players looking for a way across open areas and combat-focused players needing to disengage and regroup.
- While both Human Revolution and Mankind Divided allow players to sell unwanted inventory items to merchant NPCs, the latter game introduces a whole class of items which have no utility other than being sellable. However, at 120 to 200 credits per item if sold to the right merchant, selling them can be a more lucrative means of getting money in game than finding credit chips.
- While later games in the series have made it a bit flashier with the introduction of the Social Enhancer augmentation, there are combat and/or stealthy sections in every game which can be bypassed simply by having the right dialogue with the right NPC.
Otar Botkoveli: It is like I am always telling him, you can get a lot accomplished just by having a conversation. - Dino D-Day: Human characters are perhaps the most effective in the hands of a skilled player, but it's hardly as fun to shoot someone like in any old first-person shooter compared to mauling them to death as a dinosaur.
- The Doom franchise:
- In the first game, Doom, you will probably use the shotgun a lot more than flashier weapons like the rocket launcher, plasma rifle, or BFG 9000 due to the fact that shotgun ammo is very plentiful and a single blast at close range is enough to kill weaker enemies (sometimes you can even kill two or three weak enemies with a single shot if they're clustered together).
- In Doom II, this trend is averted with the Super Shotgun. The single-barrel shotgun remains for dealing with medium to long-range monsters, while the double-barrel shotgun fills the role of short-range-stopping-power awesomely. Ammo remains available enough for the weapon, and for a lot of cases, it can be used as the standard gun. A very handy feature of this weapon is that few monsters can withstand all of the buckshot from the weapon without being stunned in pain.
- As Doom³ went for a more horror themed approach, many of the fights you get into are short range ambushes; once again, the humble shotgun is the weapon of choice for wandering through corridors. In firefights against ranged enemies, the machine gun is usually your best friend due to high accuracy and moderate damage.
- Brutal Doom and Project Brutality have the normal slug-chuckers compared to the energy weapons and monster weapons. While you can't roast demons to a crisp or melt them into a pile of goo, regular weapons like the assault rifle, pistol, and the 3 shotguns allow for quicker kills because now you can aim down the sights for an easy headshot and they (and their ammo) are much more common to find than the energy and monster weapons. Grenades and land mines are also pretty boring but give you more breathing room as they can pulverize large groups of clustered foes. The demon tech rifle from the latter may also count-ammo is relatively plentiful (the lesser energy spheres that heal you also serve as ammo), it burns foes with hell fire or acid, and its alternate shots allow Doomguy to launch a heavy blast that brainwashes enemies into attacking their allies or shrinks them for a quick stomp.
- In a meta sense, the original Doom engine can qualify due to how it was designed. While not spectacular looking today, the Doom engine persists because of its advantages under the hood: 1) Being easy to develop with, and 2) Being moddable as Hell. Doom modding is usually seen as a great entry point by aspiring developers wanting to break into the business and despite the engine being over twenty years old, the community is still alive and kicking with very popular mods still being made like Real Guns Advanced 2 and the Samsara mod. Maps are very easy to read in editors thanks to being drawn out in a 2D format, and with the advent of formats like Universal Doom Map Format, by using some creativity you can have effects like "linedef portals" that create fully-featured realtime portals into other sections of the map, making the engine seem like it's rendering a 3D environment in a game engine that is still 2.5D.
- Duke Nukem 3D:
- The good old shotgun and chaingun. The shotgun has surprisingly good range and power, and the chaingun will mop up larger baddies (or large mobs of smaller bads) in very short order. The pistol is surprisingly useful throughout the game too, with plenty of ammo, decent range and a high fire rate that that makes it perfect for picking off weaker lizard troops and slimers, as well as stunlocking turrets and sentry drones.
- Pipe bombs are also extremely common, powerful and versatile, perfect for quickly clearing out groups and setting traps for enemies to wander into.
- The Far Cry franchise:
- The M4, and later, the AG36 in Far Cry aren't brilliant in any particular category, but their balance of accuracy, firepower, range, firing rate, and widely available ammunition makes them extremely useful throughout nearly the entire game (except for the final few maps where they often get replaced by the OICW). It doesn't require über-superheroic efforts to complete the entire game relying only on these two.
- In Far Cry 3 and onwards:
- air drop becomes one of the most practical skills you can possibly get. Moving around the territory becomes so much faster that you'll be using it to literally drop onto a ledge next to you that you don't feel like climbing. It's not a flashy combat skill, and it's not as cool as riding your own car or helicopter, but it's the best transportation mode you have.
- Also the bow. In a world where everyone and their grandmother has a gun, a regular bow is the best weapon you can carry around, and forms the holy trinity of 3 guns you'll need in every given encounter (bow, assault rifle and sniper rifle). The arrows are reusable, one shot equals one kill, grants more hides from animals, completely stealthy, and can be upgraded with fire/exploding arrows that effectively grant you a pocket RPG with 50 charges.
- Far Cry 4:
- There's a practical, if boring, completely non-heroic and unexpected, solution to nearly the entire last half of the game, although it requires some creative thinking. Basically all you need to do in order to dominate any outpost or fortress and defeat any battle (or tower) in the open world is find a working single-seat helicopter. Normally you can't fight from aboard with anything but a pistol, but the grenade launcher counts as a pistol too. Get into the helicopter with it, stock with 50+ rounds, and you become a rain of fiery death from above that is almost unstoppable and can clear an entire fort without even stepping on its soil.
- The secret ending qualifies as well. Yeah, defeating the tyrant is what you expect from the game... However, after you see the real endings, you'll agree that simply waiting 15 minutes in the beginning results in the best outcome for literally everyone you could possibly hope to achieve. Boring, dull, anticlimactic... And extremely practical.
- F.E.A.R.'s first generation games features a ton of weapons, including heavy caliber types like laser carbines, miniguns, grenade launchers, repeating cannons and rocket launchers:
- But if you want to live, you'll need a shotgun and an assault rifle in 2 of your 3 slots because these are the only weapons that have generous amounts of ammo. In fact, the most practical combo is the pistol-shotgun-rifle combo, which you can acquire at the early stages of the F.E.A.R. campaign.
- The VES Advanced Rifle from F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate deserves special mention for being a step-up of the original assault rifle in nearly every way. It's easily possible to use it exclusively for nearly the entire game (except heavy mechs and moments without Nightcrawlers).
- Inversely, the heavy caliber weapons become more practical once you run into Replica armor or Nightcrawler super soldiers. Attempting to defeat them with lighter firearms is excruciatingly difficult, bordering on suicide, even when done properly and with the Slow-Mo reflex-speed ability, to boot.
- Goldeneye 1997 has an impressively large arsenal of weapons, but the ones that remain the most consistently useful are your basic silenced PP7 and the KF7 Soviet. The PP7 has great accuracy, a high fire rate, virtually no recoil and can quickly (and quietly) take down enemies with well-placed headshots while the KF7 has plentiful ammo, relatively high stopping power, a 2x scope for precision shots and is readily available in all but a few stages.
- This also carries over to the game's quasi-sequel, Perfect Dark. Decades of technological improvement have done few favors for firearms; while they're definitely cooler in design and have nifty secondary abilities, nearly all the weapons in the game pale in comparison to the classic Goldeneye guns, which use ammo far more efficiently, reload much more quickly and don't require you to crouch to get good accuracy. Sadly classic weapons are only available via cheats.
- The Half-Life series has a variety of examples.
- In Half-Life, you gain access to a wide range of high-powered military hardware and a few alien/experimental weapons. But, even in Xen, your mainstay will be the trusty MP5 submachine gun you picked up early on. Ammunition is plentiful, reloading fast, firepower decent, rate of fire high, and the underbarrel grenade launcher adds more punch when needed. Better is Hive Hand - unlimited ammunition and shots that aim themselves. It is, nonetheless quite slow and to effectively use it, one must use cover a lot. If you master it, however, you can finish the game just with this.
- For those that are stingier with ammo, the Glock has the MP5 beat. The power of each shot is reasonably higher and it stacks with time during prolonged fights, and it's the only hitscan weapon that fires underwater.
- Half-Life 2 doesn't have much leeway in terms of awesome weapons. Even so, the somewhat meek MP7 (or SMG1) is probably the weapon you'll use the most for the same reasons as the MP5 above, plus it's quite a bit more accurate.
- In both games, for those close-up times, nothing can beat the equally unglamorous shotgun. And then there's the crowbar, trusty friend in eliminating headcrabs and breaking open vent covers and supply boxes.
- Half-Life: Alyx only has three primary weapons, but the pistol you get near the start remains your most used one. It's pinpoint accurate, has plenty of ammo and you can upgrade it throughout the game to add a three-round burst fire mode, extended magazine, and a laser and/or tactical sight for more precise aiming. You might have to break out the shotgun or SMG in the more hectic shootout segments, but for the most part your pistol and a steady aiming hand is all you need to handle whatever the game throws at you.
- Into the Radius has the humble SKS rifle. Compared to more advanced and modern weapons such as AUG, M16, Groza or AK-74, SKS is considered the most viable rifle despite being WW 2 era rifle. Not only can it take 10 and 30 round magazines (same as AKM), it can also mount a scope and comes with attached bayonett that turns the rifle into a spear, all while being semi-automatic and firing one of the more powerful rounds (7.62x39mm), it can easily carry player to the end of the game. Only downsides to it is that it cannot be suppressed or mount a grenade launcher.
- Halo:
- Halo 3 features Rocket launchers, energy swords, shotguns and gravity hammer. The most efficient weapon to quickly kill most enemies? Battle Rifle or Covenant Carbine, provided the player can consistently hit the head.
- The Plasma Pistol isn't very powerful with its individual unpowered shots, but with careful use, it can help immensely for stripping away pesky enemy shields and, from Halo 3 onward, can temporarily disable enemy vehicles with its handy EMP effect along with its semi-homing charged shot attribute make it an absolute life-saver when you don't have immediate access to a Sniper Rifle/Beam Rifle or any heavy weapons on hand.
- In the original Halo: Combat Evolved the simple pistol. It's accurate and surprisingly powerful, making it an unexpectedly decent sniping weapon at moderate range.
- And just for completeness, the Battle Rifle in Halo 2 is the do-all workhorse of both multi-player and single-player. Even more so in multi-player when Bungie toned up the accuracy a little.
- From the equipment in Halo: Reach, there's the Sprint upgrade, which lets you get behind cover or dodge enemy fire much quicker than normal. It's also useful for rushing up to an opponent to assassinate them, as well as an effective defense against someone else trying to do the same.
- In-story: fission warheads. The UNSC routinely uses them to take out Covenant armies or space stations, and even capital ships if they can get them close enough. At one point in Ghosts of Onyx, an entire shielded Covenant fleet gets obliterated by 14 well-placed HAVOK nuke mines. They're a primitive weapon system compared to the Covenant's plasma bombs and torpedoes (the UNSC hasn't even learned how to build pure fusion weapons), and quite expensive to produce, but their primitiveness doesn't stop them from working. The Covenant would probably be a lot more effective if they just replaced their plasma torpedoes with contact-detonated nukes.note
- The M82 from Killzone 2. I'm sorry, you mean you don't want an assault rifle that's essentially as accurate as a sniper rifle? But it has a rate of fire to match any other gun. And a high damage per shot rating. And an ammo capacity. And can be fired effectively on the move. And you can beat people with it. And it's your basic weapon. The only real problem with it is that if you run out, you can't salvage ammo for it from enemies.
- And the recoil forces successful shots UP. If you're hitting the chest, that means headshots. In multiplayer, the M82 is the common weapon found, giving you anywhere from 4 to 180 rounds per corpse.
- The pistols in Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 are weak and boring compared to the more powerful guns like an automatic shotgun or an assault rifle, but the pistols are the only weapons that have Bottomless Magazines and are also the only weapons that can dual wielded for extra firepower.
- Metroid:
- The Power Beam from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. (and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption to a certain extent) Unlimited ammo, crazy fast rate of fire, yet somewhat weak, you will be using it throughout the entire game. The charge shot sucks in any missile or health pickups that may be lying around too. Oh, sure, you can fire miniature suns, black holes or radioactive acid-goop, but those take lots of ammo (and in the case of the Phazon, health).
- The Super Missile combo also falls under this. It uses five missiles per shot, but spamming it in a tough opponent's face will bring him down quickly.
- Even in the first Metroid Prime game you'll spend the majority of the game using the Power Beam, even though in this game the other beam weapons also have unlimited ammo. It can fire as fast as you can tap the button, has unlimited range and the projectile gets to its target much quicker than the Ice Beam or Wave Beam, and while the other 3 beams can exploit weaknesses in certain enemies (but be completely useless against others) the Power Beam can deal out damage to pretty much everything in the game. Plus it's the only beam that lets you use the Super Missiles mentioned above. The Power Beam eventually gets supplanted by the Plasma Beam as the main gun because it has nearly as good of a rate of fire, more or less works like a laser and is impossible to dodge, and one charged Plasma Beam shot will completely vaporize roughly half the enemies you'll come acrossnote . But you don't get it until you're about 3/4 of the way through the game.
- The melee counter for most of Metroid: Samus Returns. It's not that hard to master, but it's effective against most things you find. It becomes less practical later as enemies start developing ways to bypass the counter.
- The Space Jump Boots in the Prime trilogy gives Samus an extra jump to let her perform a Double Jump. An extra jump may seem like nothing special, especially in games where such a thing is a common ability, but a simple double jump can greatly assist in exploring the world and allow the player to access or create some nifty shortcuts that a single jump could not achieve.
- Also in the Prime series, the Scan Visor. Sure, it doesn't let you see things like the Thermal or Echo Visors can, but the Scan Visor is a valuable tool that lets you activate certain devices, scan enemies for weak points, and giving you more lore to understand the history and details of the game.
- The Power Beam from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. (and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption to a certain extent) Unlimited ammo, crazy fast rate of fire, yet somewhat weak, you will be using it throughout the entire game. The charge shot sucks in any missile or health pickups that may be lying around too. Oh, sure, you can fire miniature suns, black holes or radioactive acid-goop, but those take lots of ammo (and in the case of the Phazon, health).
- The UMP of Modern Warfare 2. It's a submachine gun class weapon (which gives it high mobility) with stats that rival most of the assault rifles. It's definitely one of the most popular guns in the game, and thus one of the most commonly used as well.
- The sling in Northern Journey is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a leather sling to throw rocks with. Despite being the starting weapon, it puts out decent damage against smaller enemies, has endless ammo, a good range if you know how to arc your shots, and receives an upgrade mid-game that keeps it useful until nearly the finale.
- Everyone has an ultimate ability in Overwatch. Naturally it is often a very flashy move that usually means you're going to totally wreck some faces. A few, however, seem somewhat lackluster in comparison, yet are far from worthless. Examples include:
- Widowmaker, a sniper who often has Improbable Aiming Skills and deals almost fatal headshot damage, has an ultimate that is just granting herself and the team infrared sight. Something you would expect on a support character. This ability is, however, far from worthless - never underestimate the power of good intel.
- Symmetra, meanwhile, is a Gadgeteer Genius who puts down sentry turrets, and while one might expect her ultimate to be a super-sentry turret, instead it used to be a choice between a teleporter that lets respawning teammates return to the front lines quickly, or a shield generator with a wide area of effect that gives teammates a handy regenerating health buffer. This was later changed to a map-spanning wall that both sides can walk through, but only Symmetra's allies can shoot through. It might not do any damage, but placed well it can severely mitigate opponent's damage potential.
- Soldier: 76. His abilities are not all that flashy compared to other Offense heroes, but are familiar to nearly anyone who has played a FPS before, which makes him easy to use. He can sprint, and while that's not as impressive as boost jumps or flying or even Sombra's invisibility (which also lets you sprint), it has no maximum duration and no cooldown. His primary weapon is essentially a military-grade assault rifle with decent range, decent accuracy in controlled bursts, enough damage to take down several softer targets in one clip, and also features an underslung rocket launcher useful for medium-range burst damage or taking out stationary targets farther off. Next, his Biotic Field allows him to create an area-of-effect heal which, while not as immediately powerful as a dedicated Support character, is unique among Offense characters in that it doesn't require that he damage enemies (like Reaper) or hack an existing health pack (like Sombra), and which he can even share with teammates. Finally, his ultimate ability, the Tactical Visor, does one thing; it makes it so you can't miss with the pulse rifle. That's it. But it's very effective regardless, and while overall Soldier's abilities aren't the most powerful or impressive, they do make him a flexible enough character to answer almost any situation. According to Blizzard these qualities also make him the game's most played character.
- Paladins
- Ultimates are special abilities that range from turning enemies into harmless chickens to calling down an artillery strike to conjuring a blizzard. Every ultimate has the potential to turn the tide of battle. Cassie, a Damage champion who wields a crossbow, has an ultimate named "Scout". All it does is increase her movement speed and send out her bird companion to reveal the location of all enemies on the map, but for a game like this, it's very useful, especially if there is more than one Flank champion running around.
- Among the mid-game upgrades you can buy, Cauterize was considered the most important, especially for damage dealers. It added a debuff to your normal shots that caused enemies to receive lowered healing for a second, which isn't as exciting as, say, charging up your Ultimate faster or recovering your own health with each shot you land, but dealing lots of damage to your enemies is meaningless if their Support just heals that all up. Most high-level games consisted of both teams racing to be the first to have Cauterize III (which, at its strongest reduced healing by a whopping 90%) before the devs realized that this item was so vital, anyone not buying it was dead weight for their team, so they just made it a universal mechanic to free up item diversity.
- Master Riding is an item that many players overlook - it gives a movement speed boost, but only while mounted, which sounds worthless, since unless you die a lot, you'll spend very little time mounted, so Nimble (which boosts on-foot movement speed) is more appealing. But unless the enemy team is severely underskilled, you most likely will die often enough that getting back into the fight as quickly as possible becomes important, especially if the Payload is almost at the goal and you have to cross the whole map to get there.
- PAYDAY 2 is a game all about heists, which means sometimes, boring is best:
- The Crew Chief perk deck provides benefits for the whole crew, namely extra health, armor, stamina, and damage reduction. Maximum health and damage reduction depends on the amount of hostages taken. Damage reduction doubles for the player if their health is below 50%. It has no outstanding benefits compared to the other perk decks, making this more of a Master of None class, but playing the game effectively is pretty hard (especially on Death Wish and beyond) without some of those bonuses.
- Almost every perk the Ghost uses is passive and/or uninteresting. Granted, Ghost perks can make-or-break the harder heists, and are absolutely essential for stealth, but watching people use the OVE9000 saw and blast doors with C4 can feel a bit unfair when you've got "reduced cleaner costs", "quicker ladder climbing speed", and "reduced silencer penalties". The skill tree revamp, however, made the ghost tree just as beneficial as the rest while maintaining its subtlety. ECM feedbacks now have a cool down instead of being a one time use, and can turn turrets into temporary allies when deployed. There are skills that can increase the overall effectiveness of any weapon that you can put a silencer on (which is almost any of them that isn't a special weapon or LMG) which can outweigh boosts in other classes in certain respects. Finally, able to dish out critical hits under certain conditions, such as maintaining a high concealment, or simply staying in cover for four seconds to gain this bonus, depending on the skills.
- Technician's drill upgrades. It is uninteresting and passive, but upgrading all of his drill perks earns you much faster, silent drills that can even self repair every other time they jam (and rarely be whacked back into commission), cutting chunks off heist times.
- The Mastermind's Forced Friendship skill, which lets you tie civilians faster and carry more cable ties, and acing it gives your entire team slight damage absorption for each hostage you have tied. It may not be anything fancy, but tying up people quickly and having more ties to work with means better crowd control that can help your crew out whether the heist is in stealth or goes loud.
- The Ghost's Duck and Cover skill; which increases stamina regeneration and can be used earlier, both by 25%, allowing the player to sprint for a longer period of time before tiring out. Acing the skill gives you dodge bonuses for sprinting and using zip-lines. The adjacent skill - "Parkour", lets you sprint 10% faster, and lets you climb ladders 20% faster, and acing the skill lets you reload and run in any direction. Sprinting is the most basic action anyone can do, but the player not taking these skills can also be the difference between someone reaching the escape zone in time, or being shot down.
- Transporter, in the Enforcer tree, is considered a mandatory skill for almost every build since it lets you throw bags farther and, when aced, move slightly faster with them when wearing heavier armor. This helps out greatly with the ubiquitous bag-moving that is required.
- Another Enforcer skill, Fully Loaded, has the amount of ammunition you can handle increased by 25%. Acing the skill grants you a 75% increase in the ammo that you receive from ammo boxes. It also grants you a 5% chance of getting a throwable when picking up ammo, with the chance increasing as you pick up more ammo. This, combined with the skills at the bottom of this tree, which improve ammo bags in a variety of ways, can mean never running out of ammo for any weapons, such as the Thanantos .50 Sniper Rifle.
- The Locomotive 12G shotgun. Given a massive buff from the notoriously mediocre incarnation from the previous game, this shotgun packs a punch, has a decent ammo pickup rate, and has all-round decent stats. But the main attraction is its knockback; this is used all the time to hide bodies in stealth, by simply blasting them across a low wall, into water, or generally anywhere else where they won't be found by pesky guards.
- The CAR-4, for those who don't consider it Simple, yet Awesome. It is a highly versatile all-rounder assault rifle with a good blend of accuracy, power and stability - though the fire rate could be higher. It is available at level 4 and easily affordable at $95,000. It can be fitted with a lot of different mods though still performs well without many of them, has clear iron sights, and it can achieve a good concealment value so stealthy builds can get use out of it.
- The two piece suit. While wearing a fancy suit makes you a Glass Cannon, it is also pretty much the only "armor" that gives the most concealment for stealth. The suit also has the most speed and stamina, which lets you zip around the map at hyper speed (and even more so if you are using speed enhancing perks and/or get "inspired" from another player) for a long time before tiring out. It also provides the best dodge value, making it useful when going loud as well.
- From a practical standpoint, the latex gloves the whole crew (save for Jacket and Sydney, one wears bandages instead, and the other wears fingerless gloves) wears. Not only do the gloves conceal fingerprints, they also act like a second skin so that the crew isn't hindered when holding onto something.
- In any Stealth heist where there is a camera room, watching the cams. It doesn't get more boring, as you're standing in one place doing nothing but staring at the screen while people are actually outwitting the guards. But since cameras automatically mark any visible guards, by doing this, you just made the heist a hell of a lot easier.
- Compared to the massive powerhouse of the Bulldozer, the electric stun master of the Taser, and the speedy and kick-happy Cloaker, Shields seem boring by comparison. However, the mundane tool of a portable shield is what makes the unit so effective; multiple shields blocking a narrow hall can make the shield outright dangerous and they can serve as a literal shield for other special units coming in from behind.
- In a similar vein to the above, Snipers. Not as immediately impressive or threatening as the other units, but in the right situation, they can be more deadly than a Bulldozer. Snipers can lock down hallways and entire streets by themselves, and take away the health and armor of even the tankiest of players.
- Perfect Dark's most practical weapons are your Falcon 2 (which fills much the same role as Goldeneye's PP7, though you also get a scope for it in some missions) and the Laptop Gun, which is a fairly ammo-efficient automatic weapon with a scope and good accuracy, plus in a pinch you can set up a trap by converting it to a sentry turret.
- The AR34 is a solid all-around choice too, with good stopping power, accuracy and fire rate. The secondary mode is comparatively dull - it just keeps the scope zoomed at all times - but that also makes it a solid ambush weapon.
- Prey (2006) has an impressive amount of very original weapons of creepily biological construction, like an acid-spraying shotgun, explosive crabs used as grenades, a gun that launches those same crabs (no, really) and a bow made of spiritual energy that can kill the soul of enemies. And yet, the weapon you'll be using most of the time is the humble energy rifle with sniper attachment you begin with, because of its good mix of damage, fire rate, and precision. The fact that it regenerates a small amount of ammo if the reserves are low doesn't hurt either.
- Quake is much the same way about the shotgun as DOOM. Though the max for shells is half that for nails (200), you need several times more pickups of the less plentiful latter. This basically forces you to use the shotguns often, saving the nailgun for more dire situations. Fortunately, the shotgun is every bit as versatile as in DOOM, if not more so thanks to its higher rate of fire (if you have the right cover you can destroy a Shambler with barely a scratch) and that the plentiful pickups restore either one or two fifths (almost half) of the max amount. Also, ammo for the grenade and rocket launcher are readily available from dead Ogres on top of plentiful map placement, and their reserve is quite large at 100.
- Quake IV has the Machine Gun. One of the two weapons you can fit a flashlight on, a scope (with which you get high damage semi-auto fire), a large clip (can be doubled in single player)... perfect for cleaning up mooks at low ammo cost,
- In Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, the AK-74. It's the most no-nonsense of the three available assault rifles, with no attachments at all if you don't pick one with a near-useless bayonet at the mission start, but it takes up the least real estate on the screen, lacks the M4's ridiculous muzzle climb, and is considerably accurate when fired in short bursts of 3 rounds or less. It's also readily available right from first batch of terrorist mooks the start of the second mission, and can be picked at the briefing screen from the third mission and on.
- As for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a few rules are prevalent, though they may vary slightly from game to game.
- By the end of Shadow of Chernobyl, you can be tooling around with a suit of Powered Armor, a number of artifacts that turn you into a Nigh-Invulnerable badass with a Healing Factor and an infinite Sprint Meter, and an experimental Gauss rifle with no bullet drop at all. However, you'll probably be hanging on to that humble double-barreled sawed-off shotgun for a good ways into the game, because it can use shot (useful for the incredibly hostile wildlife) or whole rounds (slug or dart, very useful on humans) and is lightweight for the amount of damage it can put out with ammo that's found just about anywhere. At most, you'll replace it with a more reliable and easier to aim pump-action model by the time you're midway through the Zone.
- This shows up in Clear Sky as well. You can carry a revolver grenade launcher, but Scar's old silenced sniper rifle (which you can get very early on if you know where to look, it isn't even a Guide Dang It!) is lighter and far more effective, if a bit less ostentatious, when fully repaired for a surprisingly affordable price.
- In the first two games, having one slot of pistols and another for long guns makes assault rifles more practical overall. High magazine capacity, good rate of fire, and most have serviceable accuracy and most can take a scope. Call of Pripyat changes things up by letting you freely wield a pair of long guns (or two pistols), making the more specialized weapons more accessible. You can still get around with the pistol/long gun combo just fine, however, as it still works well, especially if they're both specialized or unique weapons. A March/Storm combo is a fearsome loadout indeed.
- For all three games, there are "realistic weapons" mod packs available. With them, no matter the game, the diminutive and lightweight AKs-74u, usually the very first gun chambered for rifle ammunition that you'll come across, turns into a valuable secondary or even primary depending on the opposition. Sure, it can't mount a scope or a grenade launcher, its iron sights are so broad that attempting a headshot from more than 30 meters away is a dream feat, and its upgrade trees in CS and CoP are bare-bones at best, but it's one of the most lightweight two-handed weapons in the Zone, a few well-placed bursts will down most stalkers if you use the correct ammunition, its handling ensures that you can easily drop a full mag into anything that gets into your personal space, and short of a Pseudogiant or Chimera, nothing will survive 30 5.45mm rounds, be them head or body shots. No matter how small, the "Suchka" is still an assault rifle, no matter what Hollywood and the devs for Call of Duty may think, and it deserves respect.
- You also can't go wrong with the LR-300. It's a solid workhorse of a rifle with decent stopping power and accuracy, and it's the lightest assault rifle in the whole game. It's also got the other rifles beat in terms of extras, capable of fitting an underslung grenade launcher, a scope and a silencer. You can nab one fairly early on seeing as they're commonplace, and it will serve most players well through most of the game, or at least until they can get their hands on the FT-200.
- In Starship Troopers, aiming down the Morita sniper's sights decreases its rate of fire, but makes it more powerful. It can bring down a baby plasma/tanker bug with 25-30 shots.
- Star Wars first person games such as the Dark Forces Saga games or Star Wars: Republic Commando offer a variety of extremely interesting weapons. However, even with that variety, several recurring weapons patterns turn up.
- Dark Forces offers very fun, splashy guns like the concussion rifle, the plasma cannon, and the fusion cutter, just to mix things up. However, the most commonly used weapons are often the first three picked up: the blaster pistol, the blaster rifle, and thermal detonators. The first two are a Sniper Pistol and the classic Stormtrooper rifle, respectively, and the third are grenades in all but name. Most of the enemies faced are Imperial troops carrying ammunition for blasters anyway.
- Later games, part of the Jedi Knight series, obviously allow the lightsaber to predominate, but even in the face of acrobatic slashing, Force powers, and so forth, the utility of the blaster pistol or blaster rifle is rarely diminished, thanks to their accuracy at range and speed, respectively (and again, the ubiquity of their ammo).
- Finally, Star Wars: Republic Commando offers a number of interesting attachments for the Swiss-Army Weapon given to the commandos, as well several fun secondary guns plucked from enemies or supply caches. The fandom's favorite weapons, however, are the melee strikes, the basic rifle/repeater mode, and also the shotgun during the attack on the captured Republic Cruiser.
- System Shock drops you onto a satellite loaded to the brim with military grade weaponry from land mines to experimental energy shields to a plasma gun and a railgun. However, the most useful are the relatively plain Magnum pistol, Skorpion submachine gun and the Flechette. The magnum can be acquired as early as the first floor, ammo for it is ridiculously common and it does solid, reliable damage right up to the final stages of the game, while the Skorpion and Flechette are rapid-fire death machines that will shred the biggest and most heavily-armored nasties in very short order. The Laser Rapier is also an exceptional melee weapon that can take out virtually anything in one or two hits and has surprisingly good range.
- The remake has more of a standard progression, starting you with a melee weapon and a pistol and having you work your way up through the magnum, shotgun, submachine gun, assault rifle and finally high-powered experimental weapons. The Assault Rifle remains a practical choice for much of the game though, as ammo for it is quite plentiful and it uses both flame-generating magnesium ammo (for live targets) and armor-piercing rounds (for heavily armored cyborgs/androids). The Magpulse (which can be found as early as Level 1) is a reliable choice against mechanical critters and likewise has plenty of ammo to find, though it's completely useless against mutants. Energy weapons like the Sparq Pistol and Pulse Rifle make a good fallback too, as long as you have a few spare batteries on hand or know where the nearest charge station is.
- System Shock 2, with its RPG Elements, had one or two, especially if you were playing the OSA. Cryokinesis is one of the starting powers and though you get amazing, highly destructive
spellsabilities at higher tiers, this is still the most-used due to its low Psi-point cost, robot-damaging ability, and scaling of its damage with your PSI stat. The wrench you pick up at the very beginning? Still useful right up to the endgame for whittling down immobilized enemies before you deliver the coup de grace. With Adrenaline Overproduction and the right OS upgrade, it becomes a killer.- The wrench is also the only weapon not to suffer from wear and so requires no maintenance, in addition to needing no ammunition. It's also a silent killer that won't attract enemies in nearby rooms. Did we mention it requires no skill training whatsoever, unlike the resonating crystal mace that requires SIX points in exotic weapons for equivalent performance?
- The laser pistol doesn't do very much damage and doesn't cause huge explosions, frequently requiring you to whittle down enemy health, but carrying two around is a winning strategy as you'll never run into enough enemies to discharge them both before reaching a charging station. Concentrate on using them and you become effectively ammunition-independent. Not a bad choice if you're playing an OSA character, as psionics have relatively few good options for dealing with robots and sentry guns.
- There is much to say for the standard pistol as well. While far from the strongest or flashiest weapon you'll find, most builds can use it straight out of the gate (and for the few that can't, it requires the barest minimum of cyber modules to learn how), ammunition for it is cheap and plentiful, and between the three types of ammunition it gets (standard, anti-personnel and armor piercing) and having a three-round burst fire for bigger targets, you've got a versatile weapon that will come in handy in almost any situation. It only really becomes obsolete if you get your Standard Weapons skill up to 6, and even then the Assault Rifle does only marginally more damage than a tricked out pistol (10 damage per round versus the pistol's 8; 12 if you install both of the rifle's modifications).
- In Team Fortress 2:
- In general, you can unlock a great many side-grades for the primary/secondary/melee weapons of each class. These often serve to change up the core gameplay style of that class, tweak their effective sphere of operations, or just look flashy. Thing is (and much to the game's credit), when most professional and competitive players need to pick a loadout? They use the "vanilla" starter weapons more often than not. Not as flashy, not as neat or novel - but always solid, dependable choices for any situation you can expect that class to get into. Except for the melee weapons anyway. Aside from the Spy and Engineer, who use their melee weapons in different ways than the other classes do (and to a lesser extent, the Sniper, who lacks an easy sidegrade option apart from maybe the Bushwacka), default melee weapons are generally obsolete and will be replaced with something that better fits the class role. In addition:
- The Pyro's default Flamethrower suffers from a bit of a case of Master of None, and players often find themselves using the more specialized Degreaser note , or sometimes the Backburner note . But even then, it still gets used fairly commonly for its balance between W+M1, comboes, and airblast potential.
- The Heavy's Shotgun secondary weapon isn't a bad one by any means. It offers him a measure of firepower while on the move, and greatly improves his survivability if caught out alone. The thing is, it's generally accepted that a Heavy should never be alone because they work best providing fire support or area denial in conjunction with their team, and they need protection from Snipers, wayward Soldiers, and Demomen. So it's better to just keep that Minigun's superior DPS at the ready. In addition, the Heavy has the Sandvich as an alternative secondary, which not only allows him to heal to full if he has a moment of safety, but can be thrown at any teammate to heal them instantly.
- The Soldier's Shotgun is a fair weapon and does see use on the battlefield, but many Soldiers will prefer to either equip the Gunboatsnote so they can Rocket Jump with impunity and get the drop on foes, or stay with their team and deploy one of their Banner weapons to provide potent, aura-based buffs to their team.
- The Shotgun itself can fall prey to this among more skilled Soldiers, who prefer the Gunboats to Rocket Jump for that extra mobility. Given that the Shotgun is best used as a Finishing Move of sorts after doing big damage with rockets, the Shotgun is extremely plain and anticlimactic when compared to airshots, in which the Soldier hits a jumping/midair target with a rocket. While lacking the same spectacle, the Shotgun is generally considered more reliable to finish off weak players.
- Prior to the class update, the Engineer class of Team Fortress 2 had three rather plain weapons: a shotgun, a pistol, and his wrench. However, in spite of their plainness, they weren't any less effective at dispatching foes. His shotgun is a reliable standby that can deal a respectable amount of damage up close and is used by a default secondary by three of the main combat classes besides. The Engineer's pistol is just like the Scout's, but literally has more ammo available than any other weapon in the game (the minigun and flamethrower both carry 200 rounds according to their ammo indicators. The pistol? 212.) and was still half decent at damaging targets from farther off than the shotgun. Finally, the wrench is a humble tool, but it can construct, repair, and upgrade the Engineer's buildings, including health and ammo Dispensers, Teleporters}} to move teammates, and powerful Sentries. It is also handy for cracking heads open, because damage delivered from those same Sentries raise the Engie's crit rate, and only the two toughest classes in the game can avoid being beaten to death with one critical swing. Even before the update, Engineers were ubiquitous even if they were not as showy as some their fellow classes. The only true downfall of any Engie is boredom. Two Engineers can completely lock down the 2fort map and prevent most means of speedy Intel recovery, but most defenses are broken because one of the two engineers feels bored because no one ever makes it far enough to him. Even after the update, many Engineers still happily stick with all-stock, unless they're playing pure defense (in which case they tend to prefer the Wrangler and Rescue Ranger) or pure offense (in which case they almost always utilize the Gunslinger).
- Part of being a Medic involves using your Ubercharge to mount an invincible (or Critical Hit-laden) assault on enemies. The other part is what you do to get your Ubercharge gauge up: healing allies. Not the most exciting job in the world, but the presence of a Medic can prevent teammates from having to wait upwards of 20 seconds to respawn. Of course, it's not exactly boring, given that a Medic is outmatched by nearly every other class and also a prime target, but it's not exactly glorious either.
- More than that, the Medic's healing capability is absolutely indespensible for preparing to begin or repel a push. A team with two Medics going against a team with none will be so decisive the other team may as well not have bothered showing up.
- The Soldier can be seen as this, especially among the much more niche-specific classes available. His weapons are literally nothing new. Rocket launchers, shotguns, and melee weapons have been around since Doom, and everyone's seen what they can do before. However, the Soldier is quite tough, surprisingly mobile, and well rounded enough that a good team usually has at least two on hand. Soldier tactics are fairly predictable, but frighteningly effective at turning large numbers of enemies into Ludicrous Gibs. It doesn't hurt that his lines are also extremely entertaining thanks to Comedic Sociopathy. For example, when the Soldier kills an enemy Pyro, he might say something like "You cannot burn me! I am already ablaze with passion FOR WAR!" and " I just tore you a new chimney, Smokey Joe!"
- Pyro is also this, when they're not being used for W+M1. Pyro is a decently fast runner, pretty durable, and does great damage over a short range. But Pyro's best advantage is that their Flamethrower can airblast, meaning they have a leg up against Soldier and Demoman, as their main weapons can just be knocked back. Airblast even knocks back foes who are ubercharged. Pyro is also a great anti-Spy class; just make micro-bursts of flame everywhere you go and if you suddenly see flames where empty air seemed to be or a "teammate" catch fire, bingo.
- The Spy's stock loadout is considered to be the most versatile and reliable combination by a lot of players. The Revolver is the 3rd most accurate weapon in the entire game, can be 100% precise if you allow a small delay between shots and doesn't suffer from firing delays or damage reduction, allowing rapid shots to support the firepower of the team or quickly take out pursuers. The stock Sapper destroys buildings quicker than the Red-Tape Recorder and wrecks them outright rather than downgrading them. The stock Knife doesn't have any crippling downsides and allows the Spy to be more ambitious or aggressive. The Invisibility Watch, out of all the watches, allows for the furthest distance traveled, has the quietest decloaking sound and given how many ammo boxes will be scattered across battlefields, the Spy can recharge fairly quickly. Using all of these together lets the Spy quickly kill an enemy or disrupt a sentry nest, then move on to his next target.
- Over the many updates The Heavy has become this: essentially a mobile level 2 sentry with half-a-brain, Heavy provides area denial to other players with his high DPS and acts as a medium medkit with his sandviches at the expense of being the slowest class and reliant on medics and teleporters to get him from place to place. His strategies are largely stand here and shoot, move from point A to B while keeping your Medic alive, or on occasion use the Tomislov to get the drop onto unsuspecting foes with it's silent spin up. His boring playstyle coupled with his ease of balancing (just give him the occasional nerf or buff) may have been a deciding factor in the close loss of the Heavy vs Pyro popularity contest TF 2 had to see which class would get a new update "sooner" (being a small team working for Valve Software, this will take a long time).
- The shotgun, for every class that gets it barring the Heavy. Unusually for a videogame shotgun, its damage is quite average, but it averts Short-Range Shotgun and remains handy at mid-range and can still be annoying at long-range. One-hit-kills are unlikely, but two point-blank or three mid-range shotgun blasts can put down seven of the nine classes and leave a Soldier or Heavy limping, and it's a hitscan weapon in a game where dodgeable projectiles are all over the place. It's not as flashy as a rocket launcher or flamethrower, nor as powerful as a Level 3 sentry, but as a standby to whip out when those are unavailable or impractical, it gets the job done extremely well. The Scout's scattergun, just for comparison, is a slightly buffed version of the shotgun, and it's seen as one of the most effective weapons around.
- In general, you can unlock a great many side-grades for the primary/secondary/melee weapons of each class. These often serve to change up the core gameplay style of that class, tweak their effective sphere of operations, or just look flashy. Thing is (and much to the game's credit), when most professional and competitive players need to pick a loadout? They use the "vanilla" starter weapons more often than not. Not as flashy, not as neat or novel - but always solid, dependable choices for any situation you can expect that class to get into. Except for the melee weapons anyway. Aside from the Spy and Engineer, who use their melee weapons in different ways than the other classes do (and to a lesser extent, the Sniper, who lacks an easy sidegrade option apart from maybe the Bushwacka), default melee weapons are generally obsolete and will be replaced with something that better fits the class role. In addition:
- Tron 2.0 has many weapons, all of which drain from one pool of energy...except the vanilla Disc Primitive, which drains no energy, can deflect other discs with the right timing (and an upgrade allows it to harm enemies that catch the deflected disc) and can make use of the weapon upgrades (which add a drain that is a percentage of the weapon's drain) with no drain whatsoever. Sure, you could derez programs with some awesome weapon, but in the end, you'll go back to the humble Disc Primitive.
- Disc upgrades (Sequencer and Cluster) also use very little extra energy compared the the Rod, Ball, and Mesh weapons, and offer a great balance between firing speed, ammo cost, damage, and accuracy. The Mesh blaster may fire faster, the LOL (sniper rifle) may be more accurate and cause more damage, and the viral Ball weapons cause a lot of damage at the cost of accuracy, but the Discs are Jack of All Stats. There's a reason the biggest badass in cyberspace only uses a standard disc Upgraded to a Sequencer after his unfortunate fate and designation change, however.
- The End Times: Vermintide and Vermintide II:
- Kerillian, the wood elf archer, can equip a variety of bows with different functions across both games. Her Shiftbow can unleash a deadly hail of arrows that can mow down hordes in seconds, her Hagbane Shortbow uses arrows tipped with a lethal poison, the Volley Crossbow deals insane burst damage at close range, and the Moonfire Bow launches magical arrows that incinerate anything they hit... but the simple Longbow can potentially one-shot any enemy smaller than a Chaos Warrior with a single headshot. For sheer ammo efficiency and ability to deal with hordes and specials with frightening speed, the Longbow is the best bet in most cases.
- Kruber's special "Morale Boost" is a shout that knocks back surrounding enemies and gives temporary HP to any allies within earshot. It's not flashy but it can save the party if they're getting overwhelmed. In fact, Kruber is this trope - as he is a Badass Normal with fairly mundane equipment next to a fire witch, a badass Witch Hunter, a wood elf and a dwarf, but he gets the job done.
- As a Witch Hunter Captain, Saltzpyre's "Animosity" special has a similar knockback effect to Kruber's "Morale Boost" but also boosts allies' critical hit chance with their weapons. He also has three very good passive bonuses: "Witch Hunt" embues a damage debuff on tagged enemies making them take 20% more damage from all sources, handy for quickly eliminating Monsters and Chaos Warriors; his "Eternal Guard" passive allows Saltz to block light attacks coming from the front at no stamina cost; and his "Killing Shot" passive allows him to instantly kill any man-sized enemy with a critical hit headshot (melee or ranged). Boring compared to being a Bounty Hunter with a Sawed-Off Shotgun or a fanatical Zealot, but it's widely considered his best career choice. Yeah, any kind of party will benefit greatly from having a good Mercenary and/or a Witch Hunter Captain.
