@OnionBubs : what's the matter with the kaboomstick?
Do you want the long story short, or...ah, hell with it.
*inhales deeply*
So let's go back to the early days of KF2. It's still Early Access and TWI has just brought out the first major update: Incinerate 'n' Detonate.
Demolitionist has released with four weapons: HX-25, C4, M79, and RPG. The perk is in a sorry state at the moment because Firebug completely outperforms it at its major role, bosses have 50% explosive resistance, and most things have trouble killing a Gorefast with splash damage. The only exception is what was at the time known as Zed-Time: Nuke. But leaving all that perk kit balance stuff aside, note that arsenal above:
there are no good anti-trash weapons in the Demolitionist's starting arsenal.
This is a nod to KF1 as per its intended balancing situation:
as a perk with extremely potent anti-HVT capabilities and group damage that does not have to aim, Demolitionist gives up the ability to deal with trash where self-defense is concerned, and is meant to rely on sticking near teammates that have competent anti-trash kits (namely Firebug, Commando will do in a pitch; SWAT also counts but wasn't released at the time).
Balancing a game where aim is the main dividing line between skilled and lesser-skilled players is a tricky act.
Please note that at the time Demolitionists could
not carry both the M79 and the RPG at once; this would be patched in later because enough players finally complained that they gave in.
Right now, the best loadout for Demo is (RPG + C4). Keep that in mind because we're coming back to it.
Then, TWI announces their latest idea: crossperks. Some weapons will get bonuses on two perks, blah blah you know the drill. Demolitionist gets one in the form of the M16/M203, crossperking with the Commando, giving it something of an anti-trash weapon for self-defense. A rapid-fire hitscan weapon on Demolitionist.
It's not good. The damage per shot from the bullets is bad, the grenade is lacking, it still couldn't be carried with the RPG--but that's the whole point.
If you want self-defense as Demo you have to give up a lot of your kit to have that capability, and ultimately you're going to be far less useful compared to a Demo running a dedicated anti-HVT loadout. The only end-game Demo weapon that could be run in tandem with this was the Seeker Six, which was absolutely, laughably awful for many years and was an easy mark for Demos getting kicked in pub servers since you automatically knew they wouldn't be doing their job.
See, TWI created the Demolitionist with the intent that the RPG and C4 combo was the
de facto weapon for Demos doing their job. They knew it was incredibly strong and that it had to be a sticking point for perk balance because of how strong it is.
With the RPG, not only is it the primary disposal weapon for Fleshpounds, but it also has a specifically-coded 400% impact damage bonus against Scrakes. It's slow to fire and reload, holds one round at a time, and has virtually nothing in the way of self-defense outside of getting Zed-Time and firing a Nuke at your feet. Which does have its upsides but also everyone near you will hate your guts if they have to aim at anything.
To this day, the C4 remains underappreciated amongst the larger part of the playerbase, and TWI has some of the blame to take on that, because the game does an incredibly poor job of communicating C4's built-in strengths and weaknesses. But it also remains the ultimate combo tool for disposing of HVTs because of how well it works with Demo's kit and combos with the RPG to let you burst down FP and QP packs before they can even rage.
The years pass by, Demo gets a kit rework and has its general capabilities increased, but one thing remaining constant is that it never had competent self-defense weapons. The best thing Demo got was the addition of the Desert Eagle and .500 Magnum as a tagalong sidearm for the RPG + C4 combo, allowing it to instantly take out some trash enemies and Rioters although the gun has a low clip size and a long reload. So TWI had a decent enough track record on sticking to that point for balancing, even as non-generalist perks kept inching more and more towards generalist kits, which was a bad idea and one of the starting points for the game's decline.
Until the HRG concept started rearing its head. Many of the HRG weapons exist to fill gaps in a perk's given loadout
. You can probably tell where this is headed.
It's by this point that TWI's vision for the perk started running against a growing discontent within the playerbase: most players don't like using the C4, and most players don't like being limited on options. (Which is a bad mindset to go into this game with since the entire concept from the beginning was about limited loadouts designated for specifc roles, but players have always had it.) And TWI had a choice to make at this juncture: appease the pub playerbase that doesn't care about balancing or perk roles, or stick to their guns on Demo's balancing?
They chose poorly.
Thus we got the HRG Kaboomstick, an on-perk version of one of the game's legendary weapons from the pre-2018-Summer-Sideshow days. The Kaboomstick is one of the shining examples of how not to balance for perk roles in the sense that it fills in literally every hole that Demolitionist has other than it not being hitscan, I guess:
- It fires what is effectively an upgraded HX-25 payload. A single shot from this will dispose of multiple trash Zeds and heavily damage anything it doesn't kill.
- It has two shots in the magazine, allowing the wielder to easily compensate for a missed shot or a non-kill shot on medium Zeds and the like, or to just blast away at more incoming trash
- The gun synergizes perfectly with the best weapons that make use of the LLLLL tree, which is Demo's meta skill tree
- Much like the Boomstick offperk pre-2018, the reload is fast enough that it doesn't require you to run the tac reload skills
- The reload can be reload-cancelled very nicely to allow spamming of both primary- and alt-fire
- The Kaboomstick has insane CC capability that no other Demolitionist weapon can lay claim to, namely the absurd knockback/gunhit values that mean anything that isn't killed will stagger
- The shotgun jump from the alt-fire gives Demo mobility that it is not supposed to have
- Dodge-tanking Fleshpounds, QPs, and bosses by shotgun-jumping is finally possible with this thing
- Allows Demos to body Scrakes by spamming the shotgun at chainsaw distance, since the stagger and shotgun jumps combined with the pure damage this thing puts out makes Scrake takedowns incredibly safe, if not necessarily efficient
- The gun works very nicely at close-to-medium distance, which is where Demo is supposed to be at their most vulnerable
- Because it reuses HX-25 damage coding, it is impossible for Demos to take damage from the Kaboomstick payload, making self-defense brainlessly easy
- This thing generates DoW, even if the DoW bug means half of them are just literally horrible graphical and audio nuisances without any tangible damage on Zeds
- It being a close-range weapon with splash damage that doesn't hurt the wielder means that the user doesn't have to worry about aim, positioning, or anything really
- Guess what: it weighs just enough for you to take the ultimate self-defense weapon on Demo with its strongest primary, the RPG, allowing Demos to run both close-range and distance-weapons full-time
- This thing is so strong that Survivalists take it every other round and they don't even get Nukes, it's just that good
- All of the above also leads to it being the ultimate kiting weapon for Demo
The only downside to this weapon is that you cripple your combo ability (and thus anti-HVT burst ability)...but in exchange you still get an incredibly powerful but incredibly-safe-and-easy-to-use self-defense multitool on the perk that absolutely wasn't supposed to have that. And so another perk falls to the game's inevitable power/feature creep.
No, it's not necessarily Demo's best option because it removes some of Demo's pure counterplay against FPs and QPs, but since most players frankly aren't good enough to understand C4 combos, it's basically a free upgrade to the perk for probably 90% of Demo players, even where 6P HoE is concerned.
I'd like to see the pick rates on this thing because I would bet good money that most pub Demos take this thing. It absolutely dumbs down the perk and removes most of the risk it would otherwise have, and the game is worse off for having it. It's almost as broken as old Hemoclobber on Berserker.
The last thing this game needed was to make chaotic perks even safer bets than they already are, because where default difficulties are concerned, they can do most of what the precision perks can. Just safer and easier.
And "safe and easy" should not get bad players through a difficulty called "Hell on Earth."