Pistol Usefulness

[Lukethero]

I have heard a couple people now talk about how they liked the old days when you had to whip your pistol out and have to acurately and quickly take the zombies rushing at you. The sad fact of the matter is that nobody uses pistols anymore and just fill their mag slots full of bandages. Melee weapons make almost easy work of zombies for virtually no sound signature.

Now I am not sure how possible this is, but how about making it so that if you are carrying a large weapon like a SAW or a SVD, it removes your ability to carry a melee weapon on your back? This might be complicated due to engine restrictions, but they added melee weapons able to be stored on your back in the first place, so I would like to think it is possible. This way pistols actually fill their niche as backup weapons and atleast do SOMETHING. This meathod also serves to encourage stealth a little more so you do not have to give up your position using a pistol, or if you have an SD gun, not waisting that precious subsonic ammunition. An animation should be added to moving weapons from your toolbar to stop people from quick switching.

It might also help to buff the damage of the 9mm pistols a little, because it takes unrealistically high ammount of bullets to take something down. Preety sure the sounds on pistols are a little high too. I believe the sound reaches out to 700-800 meters, just like pretty much every gun (should test that).

Finally, it might be worth looking into allowing PDWs like the Bizon and the mp5k to your pistol slot. For such a rare weapon, the Bizon does really nothing well. Sure it has that massive mag, but why not just use the m4 and slap the supressor on? It does like tripple the damage, probably tripple the accuracy, and the ammo is so much easier to find. As for the mp5k, that thing has nothing going for it.

So yeah, I think this fixes some pretty big balance issues without completely ruining melee. Not sure if there is an easier way, this is just the only thing that came to mind.

[JackMcS]

Reading over it that seems like an cool idea for me too. ...according sounds: dont know if u have ever been near and/or far of anyone shootin... The ranges you can hear weapons are insane high! even pistols are heard nearly as far as M4 or AK for exaple! (maybe even further than the normal game makes it audiable - thats why JSRS makes it even more realistic) ;) And yeah! pls rise the dammage for pistols! thats hilarious shootin someone 2 mags in the chest before he passes out for exaple.

[blackflarez]

This is especially true on the US 434 server which has a plugin allowing the player to switch to melee weapons without animations. I believe the old Dayz UI/Epoch's current UI doesn't have this problem and forces the player to drop or store their primary weapons in order to use a melee weapon (which I think is more realistic and balanced). The easy access to melee has made zombies extremely easy and for me as someone who doesn't really like dealing with the glitch movement of zombies is kind of a luxury, however, this is Dayz and shouldn't be easy! The best solution I could think of is to revert the UI, quiet pistols and increase their damages as Lukethehero pointed out, and also to make zombies slower like I think they use to be, so that it is more practical to pull out the pistol and shoot them at the optimal 7 meter range on time as opposed to forcing to shoot them at melee range.