Your Ideal Arsenal

anything retarded

Really the only downsides to the SPAS 12 was the inability to fire 3 inch shells in the standard models and a catch that interfered with switching from semi auto to pump action (most serious users filed it off with no down sides). The US Coast Guard had a demo team that had SPAS 12s with hundreds of thousands of shells through them with no decrease in reliability. Most of the stories about unreliable SPAS 12s were over used movie props that never had proper maintenance done and had corroded buffers, leading to cracked receivers that rendered the guns nonfunctonal.

TL;DR dumb ass Hollywood libs can't into basic maintenance and guns beat themselves to death because of it.

Farcry 2 and Return to castle Wolfenstein (?) were the only games that I remember having this tbh..

pic 3 is pretty fucking cool, Deus Ex HR hand a gun like that

Awww, the first one looks like Wall-E.

I see. Maybe I was wrong to compare it to the Delo.

Cawadooty did as well.

Mecha dildo

The SPAS is like an old Nissan Skyline, put it in the hands of an idiot and they will destroy it in the best of conditions, put it in the hands of anyone that respects it and it will run laps around even newer options.

Whatever machine gun sounds the most satisfying to reload
Shotgun
Grenade launcher
Whatever handgun sounds the most satisfying to reload
Easily carried missile launcher that sounds satisfying to reload

All I can think of.

Wasn't one of the downsides that it jammed a lot when firing in semi-auto mode? Also some issue that required you to flip the gun to load it properly.

It's compact as fuck. That's what it was made for.

And some toasts for that jam :^)

The semi-auto function worked like ass most of the time, weight balance is awful, disassembly was unnecessarily complex. A subpar gimmicky product.
Source: Fired both the Spas 15 and the 12. The 15 is far worse, weight was retarded, specially with the tiny folding stock.

I would very much like more games where I can use a 20mm anti material rifle against people

Only on low pressure rounds like less lethal, reduced recoil loads and blanks. that's why the gun was made dual pump/semi auto. The flipping was most likely to swap the catch from semi to pump and back, or old schoolers that learned to reload by watching instead of feel.

outrageous handguns, katanas being used in the future by cybork dorks, bullpup anything cuz its scifi as fug

WHAT'S THE POINT

When it comes to non benelli semi autos, ammo is a huge factor in reliability and performance, along with how well maintained the gun is. We're these range rentals or someone's private guns?

ALL OF THEM

Got a special place in my heart for German weapons, especially for the G3 and other roller-delayed guns

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Stakegun and Triple-autoshotgun.

I want a rifle-sword hybrid. The stock would be shaped to double as a hilt and there'd be a long blade running over the top of the barrel. You'd switch between holding it as a sword and as a gun.

And it probably would never work in reality.

Everything.

To keep it sane I'd limit the number of cartridges that appear

With just this you can have a large range of guns without over complicating the mechanics or have the player encounter piles of .455 Webly they'll never use. Everything from cheap hunting rifles (.22, .308), normal pistols (9mm, .45 ACP) shotguns (.410, 12 gauge), revolvers (.357 magnum, 45 ACP via moon clips) shotgun revolvers (.410, .45 ACP via moonclips), modern rifles (5.56, 7.62x39, .308), accurized rifles (.308) and WW2 designs (all sorts of SMGs and pistols that take .45 and 9MM. US government officially converted lots of Garands to .308, and there are apparently reproduction Kar98K and Lee-Enfelds out there) can be accomplished with just these 9 (or 10 counting 40mm)

So a gunblade?

You could also just stick a bayonet to a rifle.

Bayonets need more love.
Spears are for war, swords are for when your spear is put of reach.

We /k/ now?

Medieval Style:

War Hammer
Bastard Sword
Hatchet
Curved Dagger
(Preferably to have all of them on one's self in combat)

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For a horror game: I'd have a character who is restricted to one weapon for the entire game and the ammo he starts with is all he gets for the whole duration.

He comes across a tunnel and hears bizarre noises echoing from inside and wants to check it out. wisely, he runs for a gun store. The only problem is that he's living from paycheck to paycheck and the only weapons he can afford on such short notice is one of these.

For the Raven: he only has one magazine for it and must manually insert single cartridges into it when he has to reload.

He can give the gun store clerk a rubber check so he can get a better weapon but you'll get a bad ending.

So kinda like the sword gun from Farscape?

Attractive looking, wrecks armor and helmets especially, doesn't get stuck in people, metal or metal-sheafed haft good for defense, gives you huge muscles. Ideally would have a spike or something at the tip to open up options for a faster or sneakier attack when needed, think some indian variations have that. Incarnation in the first dark souls is on point, very satisfying to use (in PVE).

I loved that thing but it always seemed to take way too much fiddling to convert from sword to rifle and back.

That was mostly because they had two separate props for sword/gun mode and had to hide the switch with camera cuts.

I would like it if more devs would actually pick guns that were relevant to the setting/theme of the game, instead of just randomly picking a bunch of hollywood/unicorn guns because they look cool.

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Whipped up a shitty mspaint graphic to demonstrate what I mean and how it's different from the other gun+blade concepts.

Any games with satisfying plasma guns?

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new vegas

fallout 4 has a plasma flamethrower which is cool, too.

Didn't say I was the first person to come up with the idea, just that unlike gunblades and bayonets I've never seen it in a game. Doesn't mean no game has ever included them, of course.

youre a cunt

All of them

Come up and get me

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Anything with a double barrel

Instead of wanting gay scyfy shit, or shit that every game ever has like op here's my list including vehicles

1. Pancor jackhammers

2. Mortars, not convention but ones with big ads payloads

3. Mother fucking biafra babbies

4.japanese lunge mines

5. That Davy Crockett because fuck you

That's a couple good ones

I always liked mountain combat, especially around the time of the world wars. A huge effort was invested into it by so many countries, with special gear to the point that they were bordering on their own combat branch. It tore all the mechanization and tech out of combat and made it about miserable people shooting at small miserable dots on the next ridge over. Also mountains are pretty. Too bad so many mountain troops were trained to the point that it was extremely tempting to send them everywhere but mountains. What the fuck were you thinking Romania, Crimea is the flattest shit goddamn.

Also I look at things like Big Dog, and I wonder if the old "this gun needs to come apart and be carried by like 6 mules, tops" will once again be a design criteria for the shittier environments.

here's my original idea, do not steal

Shiiiiieeeeeeeet

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Fallout's energy weapons are too fucking ugly to be satisfying.

Looks, why else? A better question is why no fucker ever puts the fucking stock down.

My nigger.
Better than the katana in every way, yet cheap enough for a peasant to own.

I don't care how impractical they are, or even if it fits the tone of the game, if I made a game, I'd put in a Pile Bunker every time.
There's just something about using man-portable versions of large machinery on person sized targets that just makes me happy.

Flamethrower

What kind?

M2-2 is the classic, but I'd like more modern ones, or even sci-fi versions.

So long as it's not purely gas propelled, then I'm okay with it.
Unless it's the Pyrocitor, the only good Gas Flamethrower

Meme meme?!

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:^)

Does he carry a bag of cylinders?

Why can videogames never get the sound of guns cocking to be as satisfying as they are in real life? They always sound rattley.

Because the stock folded up on top is a huge part of why it looks so tacticool.

Console Crysis had the same thing.

bullpups are shit m8

Energy weapons. Games like Quake and Turok have given me an immense boner for ridiculous energy weaponry of all sorts.
Lightning guns, plasma guns, weapons so powerful they pose just as much of a threat to the man firing the damn thing.

Depends on the genre.

If it's a fantasy game, I want staves. Magic staves that shoot spells and quarterstaves that you hit things with.

In games with guns, I like rapid-fire guns. SMGs and assault rifles. I also like energy weapons, especially if they're also rapid-fire.

Depends on the setting and type of game. In terms of game mechanics I'd want to try another area instead of just pursuing 1:1 modeling and animation fidelity alone. The weapon durability or jam mechanics seems to wind up as annoying in most games that has them. I want to see how a terrain or environment based durability and malfunction would play out. IE: A turn based using isometric grid tile game, if a character crawls through a patch of mud with a rifle, it can have a high chance of causing a rifle malfunction (rifle type and model is also a variable) or jam that has to be cleared. Melee weapon would not be affected. Melee weapon would take 'ammo' in the form of stamina to use it. Using and holding a rifle in a combat position would also take some stamina, but depends on the weight and position. Prone with a bipod, negligible stamina, high and ready while moving eats up more stamina.

For energy based weapons, I want it modeled closer to how a laser would work in reality. Too many energy beam weapons look slow as fuck, even slower than kinetic based weapons. Something like vid related.

Pic related is my vidya game raifu. I don't think it's the best gun from, well, what it's from. But it's the one closest to my heart. Mostly because I love turning dudes into meaty chunks.

That was a pretty cool energy weapon, to be honest.

are you aware pic 3 is literally just a glock 18 with a fancy flashlight case built around it?

for fuck sake burgers, what are you doing?

If it was literally just a Glock, it wouldn't be able to fold in half. It's a carbine that uses a Glock parts. There are other carbines that integrate the Glock's grip and trigger group instead.

It is a great idea that's been done several times before. If you already have a Glock you can drop it in to something with a stock instead of having to buy a completely new firearm. There is nothing to make fun of here unless the thing is unreliable.

my nigger

No more, no less.

Double the gun, double the FUN

After al this precoius time of my youth spent with this game, I just realize this poor dude has some serious issues with his left index finger…

*all this precious time

Red Dead Redemption is one of my favorite games because it features this rifle. I had the opportunity to shoot one and I can tell you, being able to jam 5 rounds in at a time with no regard to neatness would be super helpful in a combat scenario. Kinda wish an actual WWI game would come out with this as a usable weapon.

I could never get into two guns at once. Hearing about how ineffective it is in reality was part of it, but I wasn't really a fan even before that. I'm not really a pistol guy anyway. I like SMGs and assault rifles, which require two hands to use.

I like the Hotchkiss Universal far more as a folding gun that whatever that third one is.

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Swords with actual slicing, like the first video they showed of MGR, that shit looked so perfect. I would have passed way too much time slicing watermelon.

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Enjoy reloading in combat

Is that the spear that killed jesus?

Meme?

A bit too over-the-top for me.

Literally every type of sword ever
Fuck man you're saving space on not having monsters and magic and shit, give me a veritable encyclopedia of medieval weaponry. Fucking everything. Not just swords but explicitly every sword possible in the era should at least be in there, and a wealth of other shit.

Wands, Staves, Books, Orbs, and enchanted Jewelry (bracelets, rings and such) for magic users. Each having distinct pros and cons.
Boomerangs and Whips.
All sorts of valid ranged weaponry, and by valid I mean "on par with melee and spells"
Ridiculous hammers.
Cursed weaponry.
Fucking balance.

Laser everything ranged.
Shields, for christ's sake. Domes or bubbles or regular-looking shields that block lasers, whatever.
Melee as last-resort weaponry, not as a first pick.
Everything is fucking instantly lethal.

DoD:S had a K98 and it was godly, if I remember right it was really good in competitive play as well

Specifically I fucking love constant beams that do more damage the longer you hold them on the target.
I love punching holes in things, too, so probably a laser "bazooka" that shot a half-foot thick laser beam that left people looking like swiss cheese would be awesome.
Laser shotgun that uses a visible spinning crystal to spread the beams, and when you switch modes to "slug" you pull out the crystal and fire 8-12 lasers all at once in a straight line.
Slug-throwers still being a thing, and having immensely devastating effects if fighting inside of a space ship.
Electro-nets.

This is fucking perfect 2bh

i wouldn't know, i've never fired one, but i do find them very cool -looking-

Let me guess: You've never shot a bullpup in your life.

You forgot the best part being in that you shove your fist into it.

Love mine.

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Good shit user, Tavor and KSG reporting in.

no he's right, they're shit. No true American should support that godless yuropoor/jew design.

i've only fired a few funs, and don't own any, but i think these look COOL MANG

Even when they outperform Amerdumb guns in every way?

The trusty trash pike is the only weapon you should ever need

Neato, dude. I'm still interested in getting a KSG for a shotgun. How are you liking yours? Figure it'll be a decent buy because I'm a manlet, though I've heard about the shells ejecting into your arm.

Worth the dosh?

youtube.com/watch?v=hCkiM6VVzzk
Who cares

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Pretty reliable bugger, great to handle, the shells ejecting into your arm is just a meme, if you hold it like you're supposed to you'll have no trouble.

Seems like you've got some contradictory requests there.

how expensive is AUG food?

TNG's got you covered.

As expensive as AR-15 food or food for this.

Just depends on the price of 5.56/.223

BAYONETS
A
Y
O
N
E
T
S

I remember modding a Nerf gun to do that.

As long as I can hold it in one hand.

Would you hold hands with Wall-e?

shitposting aside is that a c93? how is it? I've always steered clear of Century arms because I've only been told bad things, but they have sure some neat shit.

I have a thing for rapiers and sabres. I just like one-handed swords and the honour that came along with duelling/combat with them in the age of guns, plus the fact that they are graceful weapons when used properly. Haven't really played a game that did these kinds of weapons justice though.

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What exactly is wrong with bullpups? I'm vaguely aware of some of the problems, with a natural tendency toward backheaviness and obnoxious receiver groups due to a fair few bullpups coming from the days of proto-fishgun plastic case design, which you can't do much with in the field. Magazine release is inherently less accessible if placed at the receiver, although only minorly, and it's not much more effort & time to move the left hand back to press it than to move a righthand finger forward to press a button or lever. Otherwise, excepting the Tavor which is Jewish garbage and had the external plastic case designed before the internals as I recall, and the early L85 being a piece of shit for production faults, what's the problem? If the design is fiddled with correctly, mostly by being balanced, you end up with full barrel length in a carbine length arm, or an excessive barrel in a rifle length arm for a better than average DMR.

A properly balanced bullpup layout seems like one of the components of an ideal infantry rifle, along with a cartridge along the lines of .280 British or .276 Pedersen. Also component to this are forged bolts & barrels, hand or very finely automatic manufacture milled internal components and a stamped steel exterior with an efficient layout both for field stripping & armory maintenance, in addition to making it rough enough to stand some bumps. The expensive parts should be the big or little ones you don't want to and can't afford to break in combat, the cheap ones are exterior stampings you can replace at the armory whenever you need to once they start getting a bit too worn and still soldier on past that point if necessary. An aesthetically ugly exterior arrangement like the Leader T2, no frills, just function. An underslung gas system of some sort is probably ideal to reduce muzzle flip and run the rifle reliably, assuming reasonable amounts of cleaning, although I'm not sure if a long or short stroke piston arrangement is more ideal, nor am I overly fond of the mechanical finagling that'd be necessary to get the striking surface for the bolt carrier to the side and forward of the receiver so as not to interfere with its operations. Slap some plastic on the grip surfaces for insulation from heat & cold in adverse conditions and you're golden.

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Very late reply. They were
The SPAS 15 was from my uncle, the 12 from some old fart on the range. They were both in good conditions, the 15 had little to no use because my uncle was a collector.

And yes, I know ammo is a huge factor on the reliability of the SPAS and other semi-autos, but being able to fire just a handful of cartridges of a certain brand is a deal breaker for me.

Leaving aside stuff like the Gewehr 98, German guns aren't all that great. Are often plagued with arbitrary design decisions that make it more complicated to manufacture with no real benefit, have poor ergonomics or weight distribution. More modern german guns are stupidly overpriced for no good reason either.

Different, often too complicated for a constant fielding rifle, trigger is always shit unless you go extra length of complicating it which returns us to previous statement. They're also less customisable for army needs, you can't easily turn one into a DMR or LMG most of the time.

Gentleman and a scholar

Not at all, really. An arrow can be pretty fucking lethal IRL, but you can block it with a shield. I wasn't very clear but I wasn't contradictory either.

I'd like shields that can take a certain number of hits before shorting out (or if the source is strong enough just shorting out straight away, damaging the user). They don't recharge automatically. You have to either get it repaired or take a few moments to shuffle around batteries or something. Without the shield, you're basically fucked if you get hit. Make shields a tedious near-necessity. You can forgo them entirely but die in a single hit, pack light if you just need a small margin of error or tank the fuck up with layered shields.

Join a fencing club/class. The real thing is pretty fucking fun and if you're with a pile of amateurs it'll be a blast. I did it when I was like 11 or 12 and it was cool as shit.

Also mirror-shields and lasers that ricochet until they hit a valid target. Have the whole ship be protected by some anti-laser tech that makes low-caliber/power lasers bounce the fuck off. The lasers don't dissipate until they make contact with a valid target (some "laser" lightning rods scattered in the ship, a shield, flesh, etc). Every shot is fucking pandemonium, everyone has to be super careful with their aim or else risk the wall behind the enemy reflecting the laser straight back into your men. Laser trick-shots around corners. This is a scenario where I could see melee combat being almost valid.

It already exists and makes any lasers shit in Earth conditions. Called water vapor, dunno, maybe you heard of it or not.

Is that a PSL-1?

Oh gee willickers user, you sure learned me a thing or two about my desires in a sci-fi fantasy setting where we're not bound by earth logic. Shucky-darn, I don't know what I'll do now knowing that something completely made up for the fun of it can't actually exist in real-world conditions. That sure is a big ol' bummer!

True, but 'often' implies the problem lay in individual rifles' designs rather than in the basic ethic, and can be thus worked around. Still, considering the G11 was seriously considered for general service with an armorer-service-only clockwork action, having a few more irritating parts to work with seems reasonable enough if you can lean it out compared to the stinkers of the bullpup family.

That can't really be gotten around. Having a forward trigger from a rear receiver means heavy trigger pull unless you get really fiddly with it, yeah.

Also true. The AUG got around this by having purpose-built versions for these purposes, which is a good model for such.

How's the Christmas list rifle sound? More or less an upside-down gas system EM2 with more stampings & flat edges, a bit more ease of disassembly, and fewer unnecessary receiver millings?

Mechanically, that's not much different from having hit points that go down when you take damage, and then there's a point where if you take one more hit, you're dead.

I think his point was that a shield generator would be bulky, so forgoing it would be very risky but could confer other benefits as a trade off.

I suppose so, but I haven't seen the exact idea implemented in a game to my knowledge. You'd have to flush it out with various shield types and strengths, and why a player might forgo a shield entirely (maybe shields allow detection on local radar, with stronger shields being easier to detect and no shields rendering a player undetectable).

Yeah basically it's just health with a different name and trickier means of replenishment. Oh, well. I like the idea.

Bingo. Shields and batteries take up storage space and can slow you down, in conjunction with what else I said here (>>10500209).

Why, yes it is! I've only ever seen it in one game: Max Payne 2 where it is incorrectly identified as a Dragunov.

What's great about the PSL is that it's an actual AK derivative.

Yeah, I've seen that in games before. Like you get a choice of vehicles or suits of armor or whatever, with trade-offs to each. P.N.03 had the one suit where you died in one hit but had every special attack in the game or something.

Ah, so like mech games and vehicular warfare games do that sort-of thing? Neat.

I wish the Cold War never ended.

Like seriously, stamped and Milled steel is beautiful

Pretty much any game that gives you choices about your character or equipment does it. Otherwise, why bother giving you a choice?

It's this thinking that stopped the US adopting .280 British 65 years ago, now they are looking at adopting something basically the same.

Customization, yeah, but not the shielding thing specifically.

RE3 had some really fucking good weapons

And despite them being part of our history, they're prohibited even when limited to semi-auto only.

Yeah

Sort of. They're rather pussyfooting around with 6.8mm SPC and 6.5mm Grendel, the former of which is rather bad at being a half-intermediate cartridge for better range & punch and is more for giving 5.56 carbines more of the range they lose out on from a shorter barrel and a bit more stopping power in close while the latter has a bit less of the range issue- still has it- and many similar problems. That's as far as I recall, at least. Comes with being stuck to roughly 5.56 case dimensions & barrel compatibility.

I want a game about an upstart nation that has to arm it's self with whatever they can get and often have to use improvised weapons.

Forgot the best poorfag air to ground weapon

I want a game where my weaponry consists entirely of Chinese knockoffs, Khyber Pass monstrosities, and Colombian drug lords' Ork impersonations.

Well, to just fill out the standard FPS guns list;
Makarov
KS-23
I honestly don't know.
FN FAL
Some sort of old, single-action revolver.
WA2000
I really don't care.

i've always wondered what's with the extra bullets that guy has strapped to the front of his gun in the second image

Emergency Bullets

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that makes perfect sense, but considering everything else about that guy i don't think that's the case

there's some rad grenade launchers that would be fun as fuck in games

Taking single shots from a prone position. When prone, the magazine's too large and it gets in the way.

huh i never thought of that, i really need to learn more about guns

Good luck charms or somesuch, considering how personalized the rest is. I've been far more concerned about how he's plugged the barrel with small stones, or the hoop ring on the bayonet's cutting surface. Plus, the magazine is all kinds of weird, being way too long to be an RPK mag and kinda weirdly canted. Is it a local production?

It almost looks like it's two magazines welded together in the middle, then covered in tape.

in one thread some one once claimed the stones in the barrel might just be a ghetto way to keep some debris out. as for the keychain ring on the bayonet that will forever by a mystery, unless maybe he had another little charm attached there and it broke off

So is it spares to load into the mag or to use as a chamber-loaded sniper rifle

Absolutely zero conventional hitscan weaponry combined with full 3-axis rotation in a zero gravity 3d space. Everything fires a projectile that moves through space slowly enough to be dodged if you're far enough away and have quick enough reflexes. Basically I want Strike Vector with no hitscans. God I miss when that game actually had people playing it.

Most likely. There's a mountain pass connecting Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Khyber Pass, which for about the past two centuries has built a remarkable culture of firearms manufacture. Quality ranges from "very good" to "hand grenade". Embed related discusses it a bit more, and provides an example that is decidedly of the latter quality.

Kind of. Like two RPK mags hacked up with a giant replacement spring for somewhere between two separate mags' capacity? How fucked would the metallurgy be on that thing?

I had that exact thought myself, but it seemed too dumb to post. Sure, it'd keep sand out, but the first shot's going to be fucked by the pebbles unless he clears them, which maybe isn't so much a problem considering he looks like an Afghani bushwhacker. But then, how bad could sand fouling down the barrel be if he isn't diving barrel first into the desert all the time?

I swear half the shit people in the middle east do to their guns only works because no one has told them it shouldn't.

nice quints. but yeah, you would think a place that has been in constant turmoil would have better general knowledge of firearms

I knew about Afghani workshop production, yeah. As I recall, they're still making 8mm Kurz out there. For that matter, I'm pretty sure some of them are still making black powder jezzails.

Are you saying that Jihadists are Orks with less of a sense of humor?

Well they ARE constantly fighting among themselves, they hate anyone and anything that isn't them and they've an obsession with explosives, they even have a silly catchphrase they love to scream non-stop.

exterminatus when

Oh yeah, and even if you think you've killed them all more just seem to spawn from the dirt.

a bloo bloo bloo they only keep making more terrorists because you blew the other ones up, if you stopped blowing them up they'd all become peaceful muslims

What if blowing up Muslims just disperses their spores and actually helps them reproduce?

i guess we just gotta make napalm great again

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see what my blessed weapons have to say to your bitch ass

not to go off the rails but in recent years the "paladin build has become one of my favorite styles, aint even a religious man, but playing as gods own holy ass beater sure is satisfying

Is that the patriot

Righteousness and religious zeal are addictive as fuck.

Pick one.

hell yea fam

ALL THESE POSTS AND NOT A SINGLE GATTLING GUN. IT'S LIKE YOU PEOPLE DON'T EVEN WANT TO BRRRRRRRRRT.

You fucks are a disgrace!

Boltguns always. They're fun.
Otherwise, no really specific things. If I had to, I'd toss in a PVG 42, because it's fucking awesome.

No, you have one fuse you get right. The other is just your standard flintlock firing system.

This and the SVD from OP

I don't have it sadly, but there was another picture of him before the war or some shit, with the clean rifle. Sure enough, there was a charm on the front.

I honestly dont think that guy is smart enough to fire from a prone position.

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Sig 552 reporting in

So, as for magicians, I think we can all agree that…

What else do sorcerers use?

I'd say shotguns. From the TOZ-34 to the AA-12 and many more, with buckshot, birdshot, slugs, darts, etc…

Dark Souls' rapiers feel underwhelming. The R2 in dak souls 3 though is pretty decent and you can variably charge the R2 and use it for spacing. Keep whiffing fully charged R2s and then go real close and pretend to whiff it, then when they run in to try and punish it you can let it go early and run them through.

I've been thinking about that lately and I probably will if I can find one.

DS3 rapier wasn't too bad. There were a couple of decent maneuvers which is why I used it the most but the spammy nature of the weapon took away from it all and made it rather dull.

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Summoned creatures to do the lifting for them.

Also how do you feel about runes?

hats and backpacks

Well, if you're playing D&D, their good looks.

The Harry Potter series basically made wands cool again so I have no idea where you're getting that besides personal bias. They're the rapiers/revolvers of the magic world. Quick and able to do delicate magical work, but probably weaker than most other magical focuses.

I'd dispute that. To me, they undermined what could have been cool magic scenes.

I'll always prefer staves.

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