I'm not really a fan of the level/challenge rating system in the game. I think a far better system would have been to have weapons with fixed damages and then having the iconic/named weapons having a bonus stats such as damage, fire rate etc.
All weapons should be quite viable in terms of lethality with stat losses depending on the state, say from ill-maintained, averagely maintained, well maintained and cherished. As an example, even if you have high tier subdermal armour and look like the Terminator when escaping Cyberdyne, head shots should cause dizziness and accuracy penalties.
Yeah, I understand that it's partly supposed to be an RPG but RPGs are intended to simulate combat so make the RPG function as a simulation and not just swapping out weapons every other few seconds because it has a slightly higher DPS count.
You could make Crafting an actual worthwhile by renaming it Maintenance and dividing it into different sections such as Light Weapons (Pistols/Sub Machineguns, Shotguns/Rifles, Heavy Weapons/Grenades with each branch being further divided into halves etc), The perks would be themed on maintenance of your weapons/consumables so you'd get stat bonuses for keeping your weapons well maintained. It would be greatly more meaningful if you found a weapon you liked, be it the appearance, sounds etc and to give that specific weapon bonus stats the longer you use it so you could have a dual proficiency for that weapon, one for that type of weapon and the second for that specific gun only.
Post edited December 25, 2020 by Chaos_Marine