I've been working on my rebalance mod for a few weeks as of this writing, and although I'm very happy with it now, it took a lot of experimentation and testing to get to this point. In particular, there were some ideas I had that didn't work out at all.

Just for fun, here's a recap of all the failed experiments in my quest to make Left 4 Dead 2 more balanced.

I strongly believe that the M16 and SG552 deserve to have their reserve ammo buffed to 400, but to keep a long story short, L4D2 requires that all assault rifles have the same amount of reserve ammo. The AK47 definitely doesn't need an entire extra magazine, so after some testing I decided to keep things vanilla with 360 spare bullets for everyone. I'm interested in returning to this idea because there may be workarounds, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

One of the first buffs I had in mind was increasing the hunting rifle's reload speed, which is about 3.15 seconds by default. Unfortunately, I discovered the hunting rifle has an animation glitch if you change its reload speed -- your character's hands will jitter because the game plays a sort of "recovery" animation after 3.15 seconds, regardless of how long the reload actually took to complete.

As far as I'm aware in my testing, the hunting rifle is the only weapon in the game that has animation glitches when you change the reload speed, so I had to keep it vanilla. Its military counterpart had its reload speed nerfed to compensate.

The hunting rifle's 10% faster firing speed is one of my favorite features in this mod, but that was originally a change given to its military sibling.

I planned to give the marksman rifle a much larger damage nerf -- compared to vanilla, it would require at least one extra bullet to kill Hunters, Smokers, Jockeys, and Chargers. I would then balance this out by increasing its firing speed to make it the "spam" weapon, while the hunting rifle would feel slow and powerful by comparison.

Unfortunately, in practice this ended up feeling like a buff to the marksman rifle. Being able to spam your shots faster canceled out the damage nerf because Special Infected time-to-kill barely changed, and the 30-shot magazine meant the poor hunting rifle couldn't compete against hordes of Common Infected.

Therefore, I decided to keep the marksman rifle closer to vanilla and give the hunting rifle a faster fire rate instead. This helped it succeed in its intended role as a Special Infected killer, now balanced out by being the rifle with a smaller magazine.

The magnum was first tested with a 6-shot magazine and 100-damage bullets. I wanted to make sure it could still kill a Charger without reloading because I didn't want it to feel too weak -- but when I realized that it could now effortlessly kill Spitters in one hit, I decided that was too much of a departure from vanilla and I changed it to the current 7-shot version.

I also wanted to nerf its reload, but there's a problem: the magnum has two reload speeds (empty and non-empty), and modifying the game's weapon scripts will set both reloads to the exact same speed, which is not the case in vanilla. The dual pistols act the same way, so all the handguns had their reload speeds kept intact.

I also also wanted to nerf the magnum's incapacitated accuracy, but it is unaffected by the game's incap accuracy code due to a bug that was never fixed. This is especially weird because the other incap debuffs apply correctly when you're down. Since I couldn't nerf the magnum in this way, I just got rid of the accuracy debuff for the dual pistols to compensate.

I'm still angry about this one. I wanted to nerf the duration of the bile jar's distraction cloud to 15 seconds at most. There's a line of code in the game that can be easily modified, and it appears to control the length of time a bile jar lasts for... but it exclusively controls how long bile gets applied to zombies, and solid surfaces are unaffected. This renders the nerf useless, so I had to keep the bile jar completely vanilla. Shout-outs to Valve for hard-coding the bile jar's most overpowered attribute.