After playing with the NF AR yesterday on escort, I've been wondering, what did you guys intend for it when you rebalanced it? Did you want people to be able to get multiple kills with it, or did you want a one clip one kill rifle? The reason I ask is because you can get about one kill per clip. The rifle is still as accurate as it was in 2.12, but it's lethality has been cut by about 3/5. I think if a little time was spent on tweaking the ROF and damage for the NF AR (making it possible to engage multiple targets with one clip), we'd end up with a rifle that's more fun to use. Certainly, this would have to be done in step with BE AR and CR (which I've yet to play with), to avoid unbalancing the rifles.
You should try the BEAR. It doesn't have that acronym for nothing; it kicks more ass than Paul Bunyan.
The NF Assault Rifle is basically a tube with crosshairs. I feel slightly annoyed by this each time I play, but it passes.
between the BEAR and the NFAR, there are supposed to be no major differances according to the game manual's weapon appendix (http://www.empiresmod.com/help/weapons_appendix.htm) but the strange thing is, it appears that the BEAR is more powerful than the NFAR, even though the NFAR has a higher damage and firing rate with the same accuracy (not saying that it is over powered by any extent). It is probably just psychological because of its bulk in contrast to Alceister's description :"The NF Assault Rifle is basically a tube with crosshairs." which I do find to be very accurate.
The NFAR does approximately 9% more damage per second, however the BEAR has 15% more ammo and is slightly more accurate. I just realized upon looking at these numbers that the 10% infantry damage upgrade should significantly impact the short range lethality of the NFAR, decreasing the average bullets it takes to kill an opponent at full to 4, rather than 5, and 5 bullets for an individual with an HP upgrade rather than 6. Admittedly, other factors play in so it is not as clean an improvement as that might indicate, but it still seems like an important distinction.
I think the NFAR is intended for close quarter autofire luck and mid range burst fire. If you conserve ammo with it, it usually beats the BEAR imo. As for "what is intended" there are only 2 ways to find out: 1. make ludicrously false claims about infantry weapons 2. put a lot of beer in the thread
They created the stats system so that we'd know the truth about how these things work. Even if the scripts are virtually equal, if there's something strange that's skewing one to be more powerful than the other, the stats should show it.
Never noticed a difference between nfar and bear. I normally use this weapon to rush the enemy rambo like. Only the nfar crosshair in zoom mode is a little bit better. But for far range shooting there are better weapons and in my opionion the zoom mode could be removed.
Recon, use NFHR more over long distances and NFAR for short distance and use bursts when firing over medium distances. Problem solved.
I almost always play NF and I have used the NFAR for a very long time. With my experiences with the the BEAR, it is able to kill faster but has a lower capacity. I prefer to use the HR (new buff ftw) and keep a Double Barrel for close encounters, a similar solution to that provided by Weedy.
