Alien Swarm update nerfs Tesla Cannon
Look, there’s something you should know. It’s about Tesla Cannon. Valve did something to her. It’s not nice.
- The Vindicator’s grenade explosion effect should no longer crash users running a GTX260 graphics card.
- Fixed a bug where marines would continue to be buffed by the Damage Amp if they were standing in it when it expired.
- Fixed ammo usage on the Tesla Cannon to properly decrease 4 times a second instead of 2 (doubled clip size to account for this).
- Rebalanced Tesla Cannon’s damage to encourage it to be used more as a support weapon.
- Tesla Cannon will now use ammo slowly even when it isn’t damaging something.
- Fixed Unicode text chat
Hey, that’s my graphics card! Thanks Valve, old buddy, old pal!
But… but what about the damage amp radiation? It probably produces damage amp fallout that stays there for years, at least! Valve, that’s stupid.
Wait, stop. I didn’t mean that. I was wrong to say you were stupid. I’m stupid! You’re very smart, which is why you’re going to put down the Tesla Cannon…
Oh god noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
[protracted heaving sobs]
[gentler sobs, sound of Tesla Cannon discharging intermittently]
The Tesla cannon had a base damage of 10 before the patch, and now it has a base damage of 1. We tried it out at lunch, and basically it does much less damage now. Before, a light tickle with the Tesla Cannon would cause an alien to slow down, and a sustained beam would make it explode. Now, it seems like you need to train your beam on an alien for an awfully long time before it pops. It’s basically good at slowing down great mobs of aliens, but not as good as the flamethrower.
I’ve no idea why they doubled the clip size and doubled the rate of ammo consumption, though. Does that seem redundant to you? It’s like showering salt on your low-sodium beans, or something.
