About doublegunning

The only 2 things that i think needs done about double gunning is fixing quick swap, and make it so the blunder cant 1 shot from full health. Even without those fixed, its absolutely possible to hold your own against double gunners with sword and pistol.

@waffleafflux Thing is with CSGO every gun can kill you if you know how to use it, in Sea of Thieves it's only Blunderbuss or a combo with it.

The ONLY problem I have with doublegunning is the Sniper+Blunder combo. The blunderbuss is a heavy damage weapon, with 10 pellets each dealing 10 damage for a total of 100 at point blank. The sniper is a flat 70 damage per hit. This means that an accurate sniper needs only to pull out a blunderbuss and spray it in the general direction of the opponent and pray that at least 3 out of 10 pellets hit, and it’s a guaranteed kill.

The amount of overkill damage with the combo is what makes it broken to me. Other combos have much more balance to them imo, whereas this particular combination uses the two highest damage weapons which cover each other’s damage greatly to an effect of requiring way less strategy as long as the first hit lands. If you can hit one bullet, there’s no reason to use any combo other than this because being accurate with one shot is enough to guarantee the kill with the other, even with poor aim on the second shot.

With a sniper pistol combo, you need to at least hit both shots directly, rather than praying that a wall of bullets can graze the enemy (9/10 times it does)

The blunderbuss’ balancing weakness is it’s damage falloff outside short range. But this weakness is made moot with the Sniper’s 70 dmg which allows the blunderbuss to be used much more hastily and effectively without worrying about the spread reducing damage, as only 3 pellets are needed to finish the enemy off after the sniper hits.

This can be achieved with a pistol replacing the sniper, however the pistol’s damage being only 50 means half the blunder’s pellets must hit for a kill, which means the user must be far more careful when shooting or else not enough pellets will hit.

Combos using the cutlass require you to be in the cutlass’ range which puts you at a great risk of any ranged weapon users.

Combos using the pistol suffer from the pistol’s low damage

Combos using the blunder suffer from it’s short range.

Combos using the sniper suffer from it’s slow aim and reload.

But the Sniper needs to only aim once and fire and not worry about reloading, because the blunderbuss’s weakness has been made irrelevant due to the enemy’s critical health after the first shot.

So the two weaknesses of the guns get countered by each other so hard that it makes it just a superior combination, it’s why everyone uses it. The best way to counter the enemy’s speed and ease of attack when they use it… is to use it yourself. You can’t beat the benefits of carrying both a long range, high damage weapon, and a short range, instant-kill-capable weapon that pair better than bacon and eggs together.

What I would say should happen is rather than nerf any of these weapons, as each is fine on it’s own, is to restrict players to only carrying a singular heavy weapon. Sniper and Blunder are heavy weapons. Pistol and sword are light weapons. Low damage weapons can be used in tandem together, or with a high damage weapon. But never allow both high damage weapons at once. The potential for overkill means the damage safety net is so ridiculously high that the effort required is completely disproportionate to the effectiveness of the combo.

Rant Over.

I actually thought I was gonna get a bucket with boiling hot water over my head for this thread.
Genuinely surprised by the based responses and how many people see this as a fundamental problem in PvP too.

Now let's hope that someone at Rare notices this and at least will consider doing something about it.
One can only hope.

In a game as janky and unreliable as SoT, the blunders ability to one shot someone from full health is just insane.

Damage should be nerfed and capped at 99% of your HP at the bare minimum. It feels terrible to one shot people with the blunder, it feels terrible to be one shot with the blunder.

I will die on this hill lol.

@Hamtad I don’t think the one-shot ability is at all the problem here personally. The issue with the blunderbuss is it’s damage at range. It’s entire purpose is to be a lethal point-blank weapon. It’s counter? Stay out of point-blank range. However, because of the way the pellets spread, it’s damage is high enough on average to allow players to effectively spray in a general direction and still do significant damage, which opens up the window for a sniper round to finish the job.

If we theoretically take away the one-shot ability, there’s no real way to do it without making the gun useless for it’s intended purpose while still leaving it useful for the sniperblunder combo. Making it do only 99% just means you’ll need to heal every single scratch from splash damage at all times or you’ll have the same problem. Any less damage, and the gun becomes a questionable choice when you could choose a gun with much more range that only does slightly less damage.

There’s two reasons people use the gun. For close range high damage instant kills, or for doublegunning with a sniper.

Removing onetaps hurts the first guy’s ability to fight off others, including the second guy. But it doesn’t hurt the second guy much at all because he can still do his combo for the intended effect, he just needs one more pellet to hit (assuming the player they’re fighting is always full health which is rare given all the splash damage from ship combat)

I understand the frustration, but I seriously can’t justify clipping this gun’s very short and gimmicky wings. The issue is not in the gun, it’s in how it’s paired with others.

The blunderbuss losing its ability to oneshot makes it too risky and dangerous to warrant using, as well as hurting people who don’t try to oneshot with it. For those who are fighting and using its damage outside the ohko range, it makes it so the highly inaccurate spread needs to be even more lucky to deal adequate damage most times. But most people don’t use it for that purpose, so all you’d do is hurt a bunch of people who weren’t part of the problem, make the gun kind of pointless, while still allowing the overpowered meta to function.

@klutchxking518
Loving the light/heavy weapon split idea and that would be an amazing update to this game. It's infuriating when a sniper hits a shot, then quick-draws and clicks without aiming and I still die. 3 pellets is incredibly easy to hit. As you said, both weapons have their strengths and weaknesses, but the two cover their weaknesses too well. Any nerf of either weapon would hurt them in their other combinations and it's not good to hurt, for example, sword/sniper players just because sniper/blunder is so good. It's also not good to just force players to have a sword. That's just overkill.

I still think sniper shouldn't be so good at close range

I think rather than just limiting double gunning a better fix would be to change how the blunderbuss works. Instead of 10 pellets at 10 damage, make it 20 at 5 and increase the spread when not aiming down sights. This way it can still get the one hit kill but you have to be close and ADS, and it reduces the chance that you will be two shot by an Eye of Reach (except if you're close, at which point you've accepted the danger).

I think there's enough of a consensus to warrant some changes towards the current meta (EoR/blunder). It's always baffled me how two heavy weapons can be paired together. Most shooters out there don't allow that and if we go down the shooter route, shooters have high damage for melee weapons due to the risk of getting close. Agree with comments above by Klutchxking, the game will benefit in the long run from a meta shake up or maybe even no real meta at all. Tools not rules should mean all tools are viable, not exploits and OP meta's should stay.

People will defend this till they are red in the face because "Double gunning is so viable and fun, it's a legitimate strat" The only times I run into double gunners are either people using an aimbot, or are so incredibly toxic that the only interaction I have with them is them spamming the chat or repeatedly using slurs. I think I've met more toxic players now than I ever have before in the game because of the number of players pulled in. Double gun may not be the problem but if it isn't then toxic players who just use it to call other people in the game "bad trash players" are. I've always felt it should be removed and I know rare loves it as a feature so much that it never will. I wish this game had some other thing that at least made it so I didn't have to deal with crews like that. But they seem to make no effort for this and only push content for streamers, who love the pvp push and meta and the sweaty content style. I'm partially in a bad mood as of writing this simply because I just ran into a brig crew advertising an aimbot and using it over and over to double gun and instant kill our crew using cannons and repairing our ship to spawn camp us and harass our crew and the other brig we were allied to. Then when we sat on the brig they stood around calling both crews trash, saying slurs, and just general extremely toxic behavior out of literally no where. This game manages to put a bad taste in my mouth so often now.

@oonoseyoo I hope you got some footage of this crew and reported them. They don't belong in this community. You're right in that most toxic players will use double gun, toxic players always go for the meta for quickest kills rather than playing a game to be challenging or difficult. Don't tar all double gunners with the same brush though, there's a lot of wholesome members of the community who double gun out there.

@a10dr4651 It's true, my crew is working on a report now but I'm sure they have a ton of different accounts already and use VPN to skip any kind of punishment. But I have met a few wholesome, extremely skilled players who use it. It's just so aggravating that toxic players use it as a go to, and this says something about it's current implementation in the game.

@oonoseyoo I completely agree, I've been in that situation myself. Double gun is very easily exploitable through 3rd party methods aswell. I hope Rare have some changes coming, I don't think it needs a massive overhaul, just a few adjustments to damages, timings and cleaning up the animations so they can't be bypassed.

@personalc0ffee said in About doublegunning:

@machikane said in About doublegunning:

So we copied them.

I had never double gun'd in my 400 hours until that point. And yet i instantly picked it up. Just need past FPS experience. It was that cheesy.

And therein lies the issue. You just have to play fps or be good at it and that skill carries right over into the double gun play style.

I don't think that makes the point you THINK it makes... A combat game where you use non-physical weapons is going to mirror an FPS, regardless if the time to kill is large or small all around. If you know how to aim and shoot accurately, you're usually bound to have high success. It's the consequence of making a game where you are even allowed to shoot guns.

You can't have an argument against double gunning when the skill required to be efficient at it is already high against the average mindset of playing this game. You can't "nerf" someone that's just good at what they can do, if you haven't played an FPS, Sea of Thieves is the worst FPS you're going to play in comparison, so without pre-existing skill, you're going to be behind, you're going to be frustrated, and you're going to need a better game.

@wolfmanbush The frustration and complaints usually come from players unable to perform efficiently against enemies leagues better than them, and it keeps happening continuously. Sure we can all get over it, but we don't get anything exciting done in the game where we will also come out on top in, outside of the game's highest performers.

That's why I partially defend the double gunning playstyle, it ain't a crime, it's just a skill set very few onboarding players can come to terms with, especially when the devs falsely advertise the game's experiences. For some, you have to be good or seriously competent in order to seek success in whatever you want to do, which is a valid issue I think the core majority of the playerbase is confronted with every time they log on and sink to everything.

@bun-e-hopps double gun does have a degree of skill too it. Its not easy being highly accurate and hitting the animation cancels correctly each time. There's different levels of difficulty, the hardest part with double gun is the close quarters accuracy. There is certainly skill and its not easy to get a hold of but if you're decent at fps games the skills are transferable. Once you reach a certain point though no matter how skilled you are with sword+gun, the balancing doesn't let you compete.

The sword relies on more of a soulsborn type of play if you want to be competitive with it by predicting when you need to dodge which in itself is a high skill level. The sword is more than just M1 spam like most like to degrade it down too. The sword is just not rewarding however and can't match double gun in TTK. An average double gunner will beat an average sword user. A highly skilled double gunner will beat the highest skilled sword users. Its not balanced currently.

@foambreaker First time I've been abit jealous of consoles.

At this point I don't know if it will ever be addressed. A lot of content creators are double gunning, the vast majority of PvP centric crews are and understandably so. If you want to get the job done, double gunning is the answer.
@PersonalC0ffee I find it bizarre that in a fantasy pirate game, the sword and the pistol are the worst choices. Even in alot of fast paced FPS games, melee weapons are very effective. I was really hoping some form of rebalance may have come with season 8 or just after but that hope has long since passed.

@klutchxking518 said in About doublegunning:

The ONLY problem I have with doublegunning is the Sniper+Blunder combo. The blunderbuss is a heavy damage weapon, with 10 pellets each dealing 10 damage for a total of 100 at point blank. The sniper is a flat 70 damage per hit. This means that an accurate sniper needs only to pull out a blunderbuss and spray it in the general direction of the opponent and pray that at least 3 out of 10 pellets hit, and it’s a guaranteed kill.

The amount of overkill damage with the combo is what makes it broken to me. Other combos have much more balance to them imo, whereas this particular combination uses the two highest damage weapons which cover each other’s damage greatly to an effect of requiring way less strategy as long as the first hit lands. If you can hit one bullet, there’s no reason to use any combo other than this because being accurate with one shot is enough to guarantee the kill with the other, even with poor aim on the second shot.

With a sniper pistol combo, you need to at least hit both shots directly, rather than praying that a wall of bullets can graze the enemy (9/10 times it does)

The blunderbuss’ balancing weakness is it’s damage falloff outside short range. But this weakness is made moot with the Sniper’s 70 dmg which allows the blunderbuss to be used much more hastily and effectively without worrying about the spread reducing damage, as only 3 pellets are needed to finish the enemy off after the sniper hits.

This can be achieved with a pistol replacing the sniper, however the pistol’s damage being only 50 means half the blunder’s pellets must hit for a kill, which means the user must be far more careful when shooting or else not enough pellets will hit.

Combos using the cutlass require you to be in the cutlass’ range which puts you at a great risk of any ranged weapon users.

Combos using the pistol suffer from the pistol’s low damage

Combos using the blunder suffer from it’s short range.

Combos using the sniper suffer from it’s slow aim and reload.

But the Sniper needs to only aim once and fire and not worry about reloading, because the blunderbuss’s weakness has been made irrelevant due to the enemy’s critical health after the first shot.

So the two weaknesses of the guns get countered by each other so hard that it makes it just a superior combination, it’s why everyone uses it. The best way to counter the enemy’s speed and ease of attack when they use it… is to use it yourself. You can’t beat the benefits of carrying both a long range, high damage weapon, and a short range, instant-kill-capable weapon that pair better than bacon and eggs together.

What I would say should happen is rather than nerf any of these weapons, as each is fine on it’s own, is to restrict players to only carrying a singular heavy weapon. Sniper and Blunder are heavy weapons. Pistol and sword are light weapons. Low damage weapons can be used in tandem together, or with a high damage weapon. But never allow both high damage weapons at once. The potential for overkill means the damage safety net is so ridiculously high that the effort required is completely disproportionate to the effectiveness of the combo.

Rant Over.

This is the most elegant solution I've read so far on the topic of double gunning. Classify the sniper and blunder as heavy weapons and don't allow two heavy weapons to be equipped at the same time. Solves 99% of the entire double gun meta issue.

Brilliant post 👍

Yep. It’s silly OP in the hands of a good PC sweat.

@goldsmen [mod edit] shotgun should one shot players at full health pointblank