I personally think that BR5 should be the focus on balance, there should be some sort of base level of maximum performance that each factions gear should be balanced around.
Like there should be classes of weapons that follow balance rules.
Example being that at BR 5 each faction should have access to a jack of all trades gun - as in a classic assault rifle, with medium damage per shot and not too crazy dps as close range, but still having great power at medium to long range.
From this foundation we can add more diverse types of guns for BR5 as in:
Semi auto
SMG
MG
select fire rifle
etc
and then look how you would balance out these types of weapons so that they perform overall equal to the baseline of a BR5 Assaultrifle while having pros and cons to them.
Selectfire weapons compare perfectly well to assault rifles because they have smaller magazines, are harder to controll but down/kill in one shot instead.
But the other classes of weapons? I think they don’t shine in BR5.
Like why take a semi auto at BR5, when selectfire rifles deal the sane damage and perform often even better in semi auto?
Or why take a MG? Just for the magazine capacity? Well MGs have very bad reload speed, so there is already a great drawback to those guns, also MGs usually dont kill/down in one shot unlike selectfire weapons, so they are often obsolete anyways.
- dispersion
- movement speed penalty
Yeah, MGs are as a class only really powerful on a bipod, which isnt necessarily a bad thing, but that means that the “use case” in which a assault rifle gets outclassed by MGs is very specific. So its still better to simply use ARs instead. - which is the core of balance problems:
Why would you pick gun A, if gun B is 90% of the time the better option?
So what I am trying to say is balance has got to start somewhere, it needs a foundation from where you can compare other weapons to. I think BR5 is a great fundation, naturally, because most factions have a solid complete arsenal already.
