Is the Clockwork assault rifle REALLY that bad?

[trya]

I mean most of my friends are bad-mouthing it. it's pretty good, with frost armour, crystal bullets, and ichor shower, I shredded the twins. took like 20 seconds.

 

[ppowersteef]

Not bad at all, it's pretty good for experimenting with different bullets while been ammo efficiënt and accurate.
Overall a great weapon to start Hardmode with. Only starting to get outclassed by the Megashark, but it can carry you to that point.

 

[Coleyohley]

I frankly don't believe it only took 20 seconds, even in classic mode, but regardless, Clockwork Assault Rifle is actually worse than Phoenix Blaster against most hardmode enemies, boasting only 4 more DPS at base with Crystal Bullets but being much more impacted by enemy defense due to having lower base damage. Against the first phase of the Twins, Ichor will remove all defense from the bosses but in second phase it will leave Retinazer with 5 and Spazmatism with 13, which is enough to make Phoenix Blaster slightly outperform Clockwork Assault Rifle.

Granted, Phoenix Blaster  is a powerful gun, so being only slightly worse than it isn't so bad at the end of the day, but the fact that it  is slightly worse is very disappointing.

 

[Mille Marteaux]

i mean its fine? nothing is really bad in this game outside of trying to outright defeat bosses with tools. phoenix blaster still wins overall but some people are against turning on autofire. if you're an autofire purist you probably just use the CAR

i think its probably the easiest weapon to use from the wall of flesh. it's not the best because firecracker exists but it's definitely cool.

i think its best use is just the three bullet burst is nice for keeping stuff off you with explosive bullets, but every gun can do that so it's not special.

either way its a ranged weapon with a damage stat that fires multiple shots at once and has decent accuracy. use it if you want to use it. stop worrying about using the "best" weapons and use what brings you joy.

 

[Coleyohley]

i mean its fine? nothing is really bad in this game outside of trying to outright defeat bosses with tools. phoenix blaster still wins overall but some people are against turning on autofire. if you're an autofire purist you
probably just use the CAR.

There are several weapons I  would call outright atrocious (Sleepy Octopod comes to mind), but yes, you can kill most bosses with most weapons if you have enough practice and patience. I recently fought the Twins with Shadow Armour and a Minishark (it was very fun, actually, and did much better than I expected).

 

[Mille Marteaux]

There are several weapons I  would call outright atrocious, but yes, you can kill most bosses with most weapons if you have enough practice and patience.

honestly after you make your first pearlwood sword there's no going back, you forget what it means for a weapon to be bad when you're swinging an exceptionally sharp piece of wood going "this is pretty alright actually"

 

[Asternove]

The consensus that the Clockwork Assault Rifle is subpar hurts my SOUL.

 

[Mille Marteaux]

The consensus that the Clockwork Assault Rifle is subpar hurts my SOUL.

thats just what happens when a game has this long to cook and players like to crunch numbers. sometimes fun can be lost in a search for optimization and realistically the difference in practice is pretty nominal unless you're playing the highest difficulty levels where the difference in dps could actually mean the difference in life or death.

however, at that point it's not just phoenix blaster vs clockwork assault rifle. you're also comparing it against the onyx blaster, the uzi, as well as every bow available to you at that point in the game.

by nature of being a ranged weapon with multiple options for usable ammo, CAR is a perfectly competent weapon that helps bridge the gap between you and early HM enemies.

it's also random if you get one, while the phoenix blaster is pretty much guaranteed as long as you loot the dungeon properly. you can keep fighting the wall over and over for one, but on super high difficulty levels that may not be an appealing option.

 

[Dapling]

Clockwork assault rifle is fine. It’s not terrible but it’s not particularly great either.

thats just what happens when a game has this long to cook and players like to crunch numbers. sometimes fun can be lost in a search for optimization and realistically the difference in practice is pretty nominal unless you're playing the highest difficulty levels where the difference in dps could actually mean the difference in life or death.

I know I look and talk like I’m especially prone to this but I also consistently run builds like this in post golem:

I feel like eventually I progressed past the point of optimizing the fun out of the game into complete “build insanity/anarchism” after a while. I was using a ranger weapon on this build for reference.

I have occasionally tried to reverse this but every time I do that I just fall back into optimizing and despite more and more thorough and redundant experimentation it ends up just gravitating towards the same thing every time.

So basically, I find using weapons which are weird and aren’t super impressive or “top tier” (like clockwork assault rifle, and my favorite weapon in the game, proximity mine launcher) is a great way to “pseudo optimize” while still playing the game in new and fun ways, so maybe I should start preaching that instead of the optimal solution (as I see it) all the time. It’s probably been long enough for me to put the latter to rest.

 

[Mille Marteaux]

I feel like eventually I progressed past the point of optimizing the fun out of the game into complete “build insanity/anarchism” after a while. I was using a ranger weapon on this build for reference.

I have occasionally tried to reverse this but every time I do that I just fall back into optimizing and despite more and more thorough and redundant experimentation it ends up just gravitating towards the same thing every time.

there is a balance to be maintained. if you try to go too far off-meta you'll just have a bad time, but it can better open up understanding of what makes certain parts of the game tick, what makes a weapon actually bad and not just suboptimal, etc.

there has been a recent trend in gaming discussion in general where if something is not completely, 100% optimal, people will call it "bad" without any nuanced discussion or further investigation, and this is the easiest way to invalidate maybe 80% of the experience you have with playing a game.

at the end of the day, a game is just a toy, and last i checked we don't care about "hot wheels highest DPS" google searches. just sit down and have a good time with it. use a golem fist to get terraprisma and get totally pranked by sun dance. who cares.

 

[Dapling]

there is a balance to be maintained. if you try to go too far off-meta you'll just have a bad time, but it can better open up understanding of what makes certain parts of the game tick, what makes a weapon actually bad and not just suboptimal, etc.

there has been a recent trend in gaming discussion in general where if something is not completely, 100% optimal, people will call it "bad" without any nuanced discussion or further investigation, and this is the easiest way to invalidate maybe 80% of the experience you have with playing a game.

at the end of the day, a game is just a toy, and last i checked we don't care about "hot wheels highest DPS" google searches. just sit down and have a good time with it. use a golem fist to get terraprisma and get totally pranked by sun dance. who cares.

I actually don't really mind silly terrible builds like the one I posted, don't get me wrong. Most of the times I tried to reverse it were due to peer pressure when it was first happening and to keep my knowledge up to date once I stopped caring about how people were telling me to play the game. I agree with all the other stuff you said though.

 

[Xylia]

I frankly don't believe it only took 20 seconds, even in classic mode, but regardless, Clockwork Assault Rifle is actually worse than Phoenix Blaster against most hardmode enemies, boasting only 4 more DPS at base with Crystal Bullets but being much more impacted by enemy defense due to having lower base damage. Against the first phase of the Twins, Ichor will remove all defense from the bosses but in second phase it will leave Retinazer with 5 and Spazmatism with 13, which is enough to make Phoenix Blaster slightly outperform Clockwork Assault Rifle.

Granted, Phoenix Blaster  is a powerful gun, so being only slightly worse than it isn't so bad at the end of the day, but the fact that it  is slightly worse is very disappointing.

Yeah, but unless they changed it recently, you have to rapidly click to use the Phoenix Blaster. The CAR is a hold button to fire weapon, and I can see that being attractive to some people that don't want to wear out their fingers or their mouse buttons.

I have used the CAR in the past against Twins and it performed just fine. I don't recall if I used it against Prime, though.

 

[Esther]

I personally find CAR a good temporary weapon until I have something better, but that is pretty much it.
(I also have a special appreciation for it because it helped me learn how to use L-3 Nozzlenose in Splatoon, due to the two weapons having basically the same rhythm in their firing rate)

 

[Dapling]

Yeah, but unless they changed it recently, you have to rapidly click to use the Phoenix Blaster. The CAR is a hold button to fire weapon, and I can see that being attractive to some people that don't want to wear out their fingers or their mouse buttons.

I have used the CAR in the past against Twins and it performed just fine. I don't recall if I used it against Prime, though.

All weapons have autofire now as they added an autofire setting in 1.4.4 that works on everything.

 

[Xylia]

All weapons have autofire now as they added an autofire setting in 1.4.4 that works on everything.

Ahh. That's good to hear, at least.

I suppose that would give the PB an advantage now that the CAR can't use auto-fire as a reason anymore lol.

 

[Asternove]

Ahh. That's good to hear, at least.

I suppose that would give the PB an advantage now that the CAR can't use auto-fire as a reason anymore lol.

I think natural autofire weapons are a bit faster though.

 

[Coleyohley]

Yeah, but unless they changed it recently, you have to rapidly click to use the Phoenix Blaster. The CAR is a hold button to fire weapon, and I can see that being attractive to some people that don't want to wear out their fingers or their mouse buttons.

The 1.4.4 update added a setting that enables autofire on all weapons; normally, I would consider this an accessibility feature and ignore any performance bonuses it gave to weapons as a result, but Re-Logic  specifically changed the stats of Phoenix Blaster to make the gap between automatic and manual fire to be significantly smaller (they increased the damage and slowed the firing speed), so as far as I'm concerned, this is fair game. In fact, this change to its stats is what  made it stronger in hardmode than Clockwork, as the increase to base damage means a lower percentage of its dps is lost to enemy defense.

I have used the CAR in the past against Twins and it performed just fine. I don't recall if I used it against Prime, though.

I'm not saying it's bad against the Twins, far from it, just that it's worse than Phoenix Blaster against them and I find that fact quite disappointing.

 

[Xylia]

I'm not saying it's bad against the Twins, far from it, just that it's worse than Phoenix Blaster against them and I find that fact quite disappointing.

Considering how much earlier you get the PB, the CAR should be better or at least a side-grade.

Really, all you'd need to do to get an early PB is to kill the Evil Biome Boss a couple times to get an evil pickaxe, armor and a weapon, get some Hellstone, make yourself either a greatsword or a flamarang and get 10 more bars left over, kill Skeletron and grab a Handgun and make yourself the PB.

The CAR, though, requires killing the WoF which is significantly later in the playthrough. It's kinda weird that it performs worse.

Hopefully they look at it and give it something that would make it do slightly better.

That, or shave 1-2 more points off the PB's damage. It is a bit too good IMO. I actually stopped using it because it because of that lol.

 

[Dapling]

Really, all you'd need to do to get an early PB is to kill the Evil Biome Boss a couple times to get an evil pickaxe, armor and a weapon, get some Hellstone, make yourself either a greatsword or a flamarang and get 10 more bars left over, kill Skeletron and grab a Handgun and make yourself the PB.

Technically you don’t even need to kill the evil boss. You can kill less than half of boc’s creepers (including in master mode where the droprates are nerfed, where you need to only kill 8/20 of them) and then on average you’ll have enough tissue samples to craft an evil pickaxe without even finishing the fight, which means you can underprepare for the boss and still get the reward even if you fail, which is silly.
This is significantly harder in corruption though. For some reason eater of worlds doesn’t drop nearly as much (you need to kill 40/72 of segments in master)

 

[Coleyohley]

Considering how much earlier you get the PB, the CAR should be better or at least a side-grade.

Really, all you'd need to do to get an early PB is to kill the Evil Biome Boss a couple times to get an evil pickaxe, armor and a weapon, get some Hellstone, make yourself either a greatsword or a flamarang and get 10 more bars left over, kill Skeletron and grab a Handgun and make yourself the PB.

You don't actually even need to kill the Evil Boss, you only need to kill a certain number of segments, then either die or leave. In Master Mode that's on average 8 Creepers or 40 Worm Segments. Honestly I'm surprised they nerfed Reaver Shark while still keeping this in the game.