[SUGGESTION] Arc with or without overheat/cooldown

I pray to god ARC's primary wont have that overload crap, it absolutely ruins shaft fights

The arc will overheat and require a little cooldown period. This is absolutely required to balance the weapon.

A. Make it consume more ammo
B. Make it have less max ammo

Anything but cooldown/overheat pls!

You may start a poll on this, but I won't be overhauling a weapon right before release for 1 person. The overheating works very well in its current state, it would be a shame to throw that away for a few Quake fans.

First of all, I apologize for calling it a "crap" feature, I realize there's some amount of work put into it and I did not mean to belittle whatever efforts were put into making of it. Anyway, I decided to make a poll for the community to decide as suggested. I will obviously vote against overheat as it is my suggestion after all, now to elaborate on that a bit:

I don't know what the entire weapon balance plans for the new version are, but if the rockets are still as strong and easy to use as they were in previous versions then in my opinion it would not be balanced at all especially while considering the facts:

-Arc is not a very good combo weapon, at least not as reliable or forgiving for human error.
-You can smash combos with rockets and mortars, against this Arc is in most of the situations quite useless.
-It's relatively easy to knock an arc/nex user off his/her balance and aim with splash weapons, both in ground and in air (rocket's detonation)
-Air control strips off most of the situational effectiveness of Arc.
-The shaft arcs?
-1v2 situations (TDM/FFA/CTF) aren't probably gonna go too well for Arc users, unlike with any other high tier weapon.
edit: -I did not quite figure out the overheat time and how fast it recovers if you stop firing moments before overheat, or if it quite acts anything like that in first place. I also don't know if it's a thing displayed in the HUD/crosshair, if it is/will be then there's a dilemma for people with custom HUDs.

I spent almost and hour with woky a while ago playing with some wip version of your (Mario) arc settings, I don't know if you remember but you were lurking there and I also then made this same complaint, because I felt it genuinely impacted the weapon's efficiency and usage during our playtest. I don't know what other changes you made afterwards, but apparently the overheating is still there and it still raises a red flag for me. I understand and agree that overheating is applicable for secondary fire mode, but not for primary. I don't speak for every LG/Quake fan out there anticipating it to be included in Xonotic, but I would personally rather run around a map collecting ammo boxes (less ammo or more ammo consumption) continuously than have an overheat punishment in the middle of a deserved opportunity.

I will go without,because the LG in quake is without too,and it works well.

I also don't know if it's a thing displayed in the HUD/crosshair, if it is/will be then there's a dilemma for people with custom HUDs.

It's a ring around crosshair, like Nex and MG.

My thoughts:

I would not remove overheat feature now, because the weapon will not replace MG in 0.8 yet. It will be in the game though (probably used by pickup servers). There will be enough time to test it out propely and use the best settings when Arc replaces MG.

Turn overheat off, increase knockback on other weapons and/or lower arc damage if arc is for some reason dominating (which I doubt). If I ever would host a cup / event again, that's how I would do it.

Why? Because you cannot balance overheat so the gun remains useful for 10% acc pub players while not making it overpowered for 30% acc cup players. In fact, I would not be surprised if it ends up totally useless for casuals and noobs again (especially if the balancing is done based on pickup games). But what do I know, let's reinvent the wheel again!

I would consider the Arc gun an experimental feature of 0.8 that enables server admins to play around with the settings in order to find out the best balance for it. It will be released with an overheat "feature" per default in 0.8, let's see how it works out and if an alternative setting without overheat turns out to perform better in terms of overall balance, then we can use this experience for the next release, when the Arc gun will become an official part of the vanilla weapon set (at least that is the plan afaik).

I will go without,because the LG in quake is without too,and it works well.

I will go without,because the LG in quake is without too,and it works well.

Then i would probably explode.

How about letting it hit live as the devs intended and actually see how it works, outside a test tube environment, before picking it apart? Personally i'm no big fan of charge up/overheat type mechanics either, but if the choice is piss for damage, miniscule ammo or overheat i guess i can live with letting go of the trigger every once in a while