/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10740119
It might be the roughest weapon in the game. It's pretty good on the Mourningvale, when it's your only big hitter and overdoes the Shotgun in DPS, but it gets overshadowed by the Slag Cannon, Lance and Crystallizer when you enter the Eventide Wastes. By then, you won't find much use for it other than to save ammo for the other, better weapons.
The Slag Cannon is a Nailspitter made for large numbers of big targets; the Lance is a better single-target that you can combo with anything and use at any distance; and the Crystallizer is a better crowd-control weapon. The Retcher is comparatively a jack-of-all-trades (minus range), containing all of these features to an extent, but ends up being a master of none.
It's disappointing that its AOE damage is so weak. But they give you so much ammo for it that you might as well spam the alt-fire when necessary.
My proposed way to "better" it would be to decrease its total ammo capacity, give the player less ammo, and make the AOE do a lot more damage. But then it runs the risk of completely outdoing the Crystallizer's AOE feature.
It might be fine to leave it as it is. Optimizing a game with 9 weapons, all with altfires, is close to impossible; the fact that only one of them finds itself in a rough spot is commending.