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OBOW: Pistols - 9mm +HP script

OBOW: Pronounced "oboe" (yes, like the instrument), it stands for "Overseer's Balance Overhaul for Weapons".

This is a script that rebalances the Pistols' stats, making them more useful without breaking game balance. I always found the pistols to be fun to use, but horribly lacking in killing power. Don't get me wrong, against Common Infected, they were good, decent weapons. But try using vanilla (meaning, unmodded) Pistols against a Charger and you'll see what I mean. To put things into perspective, this weapon did 240 damage per second if all your shots hit. A Charger has 600 health on Normal. But the Pistol/s have 15/30-round magazines, and it would take 17 shots to kill a Charger on Normal. This meant that if you only had a single pistol, you'd have to fire an entire magazine, reload, and fire two more bullets into a Charger (provided you didn't miss a single shot) to kill one. By then, whoever's been grabbed is either going to be dead, or very close. The worst part? Tanks have 4000 health on Normal, and 8000 on Expert. Basically, if you ran out of primary weapon ammo, you could very easily be overrun by Specials, and you had a snowball's chance in Hell against a Tank. I felt that this was missing out on a lot of fun-potential.

These pistols will be a solid backup weapon, effective against all targets. As the title suggests, this script's unique feature is stats reflecting hollow point ammunition. Why? Well, they'll gib Commons just like the Desert Eagle, killing them in a single shot. Basically, I just wanted the Pistols to gib enemies like an Assault Rifle, causing splatters but not killing them instantly. The issue was that to do that, I had to switch the ammo type of the Pistols to an Assault Rifle's, and then their ammo pool became limited (you could run out of ammo). The only ammo that gibbed and was unlimited was the Desert Eagle's, and those are coded to kill Commons instantly, regardless of their health. So, I found that these Pistols became too powerful.

That's when I came up with the current system. Instead of the vanilla system of Commons taking two shots to die, and having a piercing level of 2 (pierces into a second zombie), I made the gun no longer able to pierce, but it'll kill Commons in one hit. This kept balance against hordes, and you still get the fantastic Left 4 Dead 2 gore system (Don't worry if you don't want gore, it can still be turned off). The damage has also been raised significantly, so you can use these pistols against Specials and Bosses. Magazine size has also been raised to 18/36, since this mod was based off of a Glock. Lastly, fire rate and reload speed have been increased a tad.

Overall, the Pistols are their own weapon now while still being balanced, and you'll find yourself happily using them exclusively at times. They also make a good all-purpose backup weapon for those wanting to save their primary's ammo.

Here's the list of stat changes:

VerticalPunch - 2.0 to 2.2
SpreadPerShot - 1 to UNCHANGED
MaxSpread - 30 to 15
SpreadDecay - 5 to 10
MinDuckingSpread - 0.5 to X
MinStandingSpread - 1.5 to 0.6
MinInAirSpread - 3.0 to 0
MaxMovementSpread - 3.0 to 1.225
ReloadDuration - ? to 1.5 (Vanilla value unknown, since I had to add this line)
DualReloadDuration - ? to 2.0 (Vanilla value unknown, since I had to add this line)
DeployDuration - 0.5 to 0.3
DualDeployDuration - 0.65 to 0.3
PenetrationNumLayers - 2 to 1
PenetrationPower - 30 to 90
PenetrationMaxDistance - 0 to 1500
Damage - 36 to 65
Range - 2500 to UNCHANGED
RangeModifier - 0.75 to UNCHANGED
Bullets - 1 to UNCHANGED
CycleTime - 0.175 to 0.15
clip_size - 15 to 18
primary_ammo - AMMO_TYPE_PISTOL to AMMO_TYPE_PISTOL_MAGNUM

About the preview screenshot(s):
Disclaimer: I got them randomly off the internet. I am not the author, and I don't claim to own them. If need be, I'll replace them with something generic from Wikipedia or something.