Reloading skill could use a rework

[Crotchfire]

"What would ya say... ya do here?"

Reloading: "I have people skills!"

 

I've played a while now, and it only just occurred to me that the reloading skill has quite literally never mattered to me, until I thought about how it never mattered to me.  If its at level 0... AND if you're extremely panicked, sure, it's a little slow to load those shotgun shells, but it really has so little effect on gameplay that I'm just scratching my head as to the point of it.  So as for alternative suggestions:

 

1.  Make it so that with a high enough reloading + metalworking (with maybe a magazine recipe?) one can craft some types of ammo.  We can already get gunpowder from existing ammo, after all.

 

2.  Replace it with Gun maintenance (i.e. gun condition degrades more slowly).

 

Now if there's something huge that the devs have planned for reloading, I'm all for it.  But right now, leveling up reloading has got to be the most underwhelming skill level up.

[Spikelord]

1 hour ago, Crotchfire said:

Replace it with Gun maintenance (i.e. gun condition degrades more slowly).

Heck That's not a bad idea

[nickodemos]

I can get on board with this thinking.

[Fenris_Wolf]

Adding a maintenance skill would be nice, but reloading is far from useless. Theres a pretty massive speed difference between level 0 and 10. If you want to see, try loading a 200 round M249 belt from ORGM, and time how long it takes at level 0 and at 10. Just don't try that panicked. Even with the vanilla shotgun there is a huge noticeable difference in the speed.

 

Reloading is my priority skill to level before anything else, even aiming.

[Crotchfire]

That doesn't really change my position, though.  Sure, you can introduce a mod that makes a vanilla skill relevant, but shouldn't a vanilla skill be relevant in the vanilla game?  And sure, you'll notice a difference in the shotgun's reload speed, but I've yet to find myself in a situation where how fast my survivor could reload the shotgun made a difference.

[Fenris_Wolf]

The mod doesn't actually change anything with how the reloading skill effects speed, its just giving larger magazine sizes to get a better measurement on the effects of the skill at different levels. Using it for timed tests is perfectly valid as the effect will be the same in vanilla.

You may not have been in a situation where that speed makes any difference, I'm sure many players haven't. Reloading is probably useless for 90% of the players, but so is aiming. It all depends on personal play style. Firearms are my primary weapon (playing both modded and vanilla) and basically all I use. The number of times having high reloading have been a lifesaver I can't count.

 

Different players are always going to find different skills more (or less) useful then another player. Most useless skills for me: Farming, Foraging, Cooking, and Electrical, in that order. Many players consider them high value skills, but I've never been in a situation where any of those were needed or helpful to my games.

[Sick Boy]

Hell even Reloading 3(which is more realistically reachable, even with ORGM) has a significant difference in reloading speed. And when highly panicked the reload penalty is extremely noticeable. I do not agree with your assessment of it being negligible. I agree it could use some finer tuning... Maybe a more all-encompassing gun handling trait instead of two categories for aiming and reloading so that way you can level them up rather evenly. That frees up room to include a gun maintenance trait for repairing and degradation. I like the idea of a maintenance trait.

[Josko]

On 4/13/2019 at 5:44 AM, Fenris_Wolf said:

If you want to see, try loading a 200 round M249 belt from ORGM, and time how long it takes at level 0 and at 10. 

 

That is what I Always do lol. When I find a M249 and the bullets for it, I just load it, speed up time, unload, and load it again until lvl 10 reloading xD

 

You also get xp for unloading in ORGM

[lemmy101]

In future builds, there will be no such thing as manually applied skill points, so you don't have the same kind of opportunity cost by choosing one thing or another. We can keep reloading skill but maybe also add gun maintenance skill, since skills will just level up themselves through xp gained doing that action organically there's no reason to remove or change existing skills because they are not seen as equivelent usefulness as others. Because of this we're hoping over the next few builds to vastly increase the number of skills to cover a lot more gameplay systems and stats.