The concept of the Urn is interesting, but the cost per summon risks making it too awesome to use. I'd recommend adding lesser rituals, which wouldn't necessarily destroy the urn.
Rather than having jade ingots and bricks, it should be more like actual jade, and be a gem, both for realism, and because it'd put an inconsistency in the game, which is that only metals require smelting for now.
What point does melee weapons doing instant damage have to do with anything? I'm not sure if the OP forgot that you have to be close to your target with a melee weapon? I'm not trying to be rude here, but the point still confuses me to death. That's kind of like going, "well my idea of insta-nukes do instant damage and melee weapons do instant damage so why is my nuke so overpowered?!?!" Because... it's... it's a nuke? I know that's an extreme example, but notice how saying that didn't save the nuke idea by even 1%.
The tracer would only have an effect in multiplayer. Sure, mobs could be programmed to come at you from farther away, but a.) it's still a not-so-fitting gun that will still be hated by many, and b.) I'll just switch to the crossbow so I can pick off unaware mobs from afar with hardly any problems, leaving this gun still an unbalanced add. Like I said many many many many times now, if the crossbow is so quick and long-ranged, why add another ranged weapon? The OP would be better off suggesting something different.
Also, if this weapon wasn't a gun, I'd still not support because the balance/reason issues are still there.
In the case of melee, yes, it's not relevant to the suggestion.
As for PvE, that problem is common to ranged weapons in general, but, as you point out, that makes adding a gun (At least in the same format as this one) pointless, as the existing ranged weapons already fill that role well enough, and a weapon that does so even better is hardly a wise idea to add.
It seems like every time I bring up a good point it gets lost and forgotten.
The OP compared melee weapons and ranged weapons in the most illogical way I've ever read in my life. Don't take this the wrong way AMPPL50, but you upvoted him. Why? That weird, weird comparison had absolutely nothing to do with my point. I don't think the OP even knows a single point I'm making in this thread. There's comparing apples and oranges, but that was comparing a German-Swiss cookie to an alien clown covered in sulfuric acid and whale blood.
You're doing it wrong man. Modern/future gun or not, the problem still lies in the balance. Don't be so quick to just jump on the support wagon because something sounds "fun". It needs to be balanced too.
Because he has a point in that melee weapons are instantaneous, althrough the flaws created by it don't make much sense to be mentioned here, to the point that, in hindsight, I've removed that upvote (Or tried to, considering how weird the forum can get with it). Then again, that may just have been my brain going out to lunch.
Considering that one of your complaints is caused by the very fast projectile, it could have a tracer effect, which could reveal where you've been shot from, allowing you to do things such as building a dirt wall to protect yourself from further fire, or the exact speed could be mentioned in the OP, and compared to the crossbow and bow's arrow speeds, as "somewhat faster" is hardly the same as "effectively hitscan", but it's not explained which one of the two it is.
Do diamond swords no-scope shoot people from 60 blocks away..?
No, but crossbows can. In fact, one of the flaws of the suggestion (And one you pointed out, and I agree with, althrough we differ in the conclusions taken from this, as you seem to consider it too powerful, while I consider it to be too weak) is that it overlaps with the crossbow too much.
What's with this fixation on you wanting a gun or some gun-like object in the game? Why is that so important? Pretty much what Calico said. Why does "gunpowder has few uses" need to equal "there needs to be a gun to fill the void". That's like saying "I don't think paper has enough uses, so we need to have paper airplanes!! >=["
What makes you assume that a weapon that shoots fireballs is necessarily the same as a gun? Why couldn't it be like a blowgun, or a bullet-firing crossbow? After all, what would matter is that it can shoot fireballs, not that it's actually a gun.
As for wanting something like that, because it's the most obvious use of gunpowder that cannot be replicated with TNT and Redstone.
The real question is: What's with the tendency to treat gun suggestions as if they were trying to turn Minecraft into a CoD clone, as opposed to valuing the suggestion purely on it's own merits? What I see is that, when anyone puts any suggestion, they're not given constructive criticism and just told that "It doesn't fit because guns are not medieval" (Meanwhile, they were invented in the late Middle Ages, and became very popular by the end of it), or "This will turn Minecraft into CoD" (Without explaining how), or "This will make the game less family-friendly" (Again, no explanation how would adding a gun intrinsically do this), or, worst of all, "This is OP" (And reading the suggestion actually shows a crappy weapon that is too expensive for what it can do) without explanation.
Ehhhhhh... We already have enchantments for fire arrows so this new fire charge weapon feels redundant. Regardless, it's stupid easy to kill mobs from a distance with or without fire
Fire charges have other properties apart from just setting entities on fire, such as setting blocks on fire (Which would make it a great forest-burning tool), and not being affected by gravity.
This happens for a few reasons: A.) Some people have convinced themselves they understand game design, but don't. B.) Some people think, "It's popular and a lot of people want it, so therefore it should be added! Popular = good!" C.) A lot of users here are kiddies, and get all bubbly and overexcited when something "cooool!" pops into their head, without thinking about the framework of balance. Or they think "duuuude it's just a gaaame!" which is what a lot of kids say when they want something they want in a game (rather than something they don't want.)
No, it doesn't "need" more uses. People want more uses. Those "plenty of people" don't seem to understand that "need" and "want" are, in fact, not the same thing. We have TNT, fireworks and splash potions and fire charges - at least two of those are things are extremely useful. If players are thinking guns are a good idea just to give gunpowder an extra use, they better make sure they don't enter game design.
Fireworks are useful, but TNT is too weak to be useful by itself (Althrough it thankfully no drops all the blocks it breaks) and non-renewable. Same with splash potions, which are also very lacking in uses, as most mobs aren't designed in a way that incentivates using them (For instance, Harm would be much more attractive if armor were more common in mobs, and Poison is useful pretty much only to get Music Discs), while fire charges are just consumable Flint and Steel.
Of course, it'd be easier to simply make those uses better:
Sand could be made renewable so using TNT in large scale doesn't involve stripping beaches of sand (And TNT itself could be made cheaper. For instance, it's output could be 2 or 3 TNT blocks instead of 1).
There could be more mobs that make using splash potions worthwhile (More armored mobs, more beefy mobs that can make using poison on them worthwhile, more glass cannons that are affected by Weakness, or more fast mobs that ).
Adding a handheld way of firing fire charges (Which may or may not resemble a gun, but does avoid adding a blatant one) instead of adding a new weapon that further throws the tattered remains of balance off (After all, if combat is already unbalanced, adding a completely new weapon that has to be balanced when the current ones already have enough problems AND overlaps with one of them may not be a good idea, specially when the most obvious way to do so goes against the short-mid-range, high RoF profile that's probably he only niche in the game that doesn't exist, which the fire charge launcher could at least fulfill).
It doesn't matter what kind of gun it is. It doesn't belong in Minecraft. Many have stated that repeatedly. I don't understand why people don't listen.
Because, in the end, it's an opinion, rather than a fact, and thre's also plenty of people who feel that the lack of them is weird in a game in which gunpowder not only exists, but is naturally occuring and needs more uses.
2. No. Many of the suggestions that made it into the game are harmless. Guns are more harmful to the game than you think.
Parents allow their young children to play this game. This game is used in schools for educational purposes and many disabled people who can't use their hands/arms have devices that are used to help them play this game. Now, if they add guns, that will cause problems amongst the parents and teachers. In turn, that will cause issues with Mojang. Parents won't allow their kids to play the game, Minecraft will no longer be used in schools and disabled people will no longer get to enjoy the game. And after a while, the game's sales will start to slowly decline.
If they add guns, they might as well add scopes, bullets, bulletproof vests, swat gear, ghillie suits, and even more guns. Just turn the game into another version of Call of Duty or any other first-person shooter that currently exists.
3. ^ on top of that, will look very out of place.
You're using a bizarre slippery slope fallacy, as well as assuming that guns would seriously have any more effect than how much the game incentivates animal cruelty, not to mention that it's literally a game, and even kid-friendly games can have guns. Nobody is suggesting to do things such as incentivating the player to shoot baby villagers, add blood from gunshots, or anyhting that could be any more violent than what the game already has. In fact, one would argue that guns would be less violent than bows, as the latter keep their arrows stuck, showing injury.
Similarly, a game with guns doesn't have to become a CoD clone at all (In fact, the fact that there's plenty of non-shooter games with guns on them should be a giveaway).
As for fitting, the description implies that it's some sort of muzzle-loading gun, likely a musket or even an arquebus, and those existed in the Middle Ages, and, in fact, would actually fit more than most of what Redstone does (And, even then, one could link guns and redstone so it gets to not fit), or jukeboxes.
Sooooo guns are fine because bows "shoot" things and guns "shoot" things..? Huh..?? Yes, let's add something that's a complete upgrade from bows and muck up the balance of ranged weapons by adding bullets.
This argument of "you don't have to use it" doesn't change anything. There's a thousand things in the game I don't have to use, that doesn't add weight to something in the game being good or not. If an insta-kill infinite-ammo sniper is added to the game, me not having to use it in singleplayer doesn't make the idea not a horribly stupid and overpowered add. Being bannable in servers also doesn't save the idea. The idea shouldn't touch the game to begin with. It doesn't fit (which I'll explain) and it shreds the game's balance.
You didn't have to specify the gun was terrible. Because I did. I don't know what point you're trying to prove with "server choosing to ban" stuff. Didn't have much to do with what I was talking about.
I really thought that would be obvious. Arrows take time to reach their target. Crossbows do this faster, but are balanced by having slower reloading. Then there's guns, with instant travel bullets that punches arrows right in the face and makes bows useless. Sure, guns could be tweaked to be more balanced, but why does it need to be there? Why do we need a straight upgrade from crossbows? It's too much.
Yes, I know guns existed in medieval times but that still doesn't make the idea a good add. We have swords, throwable potions, shields, arrows, flint & steel and TNT that are all well-balanced. Do we seriously need to throw bullets in this? Is it that hard to hunt down mobs from a distance.
Is it really an upgrade over crossbows? Read the OP. It essentially paints an awful weapon that is easily worse than the crossbow or the bow at everything but range, and the Crossbow already has a lot of range (Not to mention that it can also pierce mobs and shoot fireworks, while the bow, when enchanted with Power V becomes a murder factory that makes crafting the crossbow pointless because it's much weaker. On top of this, most mobs can't even see you beyond 16 blocks, and Ghasts see you from 100 blocks away). If anything, the gun as written in the post seems like it'd need a buff to be worth using, rather than making bows and crossbows obsolete.
As for combat as it is; no, it's horribly balanced. Shields are too powerful, TNT and Flint and Steel are impractical jokes (Barring PVP in faction servers, and that's only due to TNT cannons, while Fire is bad at burning things down because it got hit too hard with the nerfhammer), splash potions are very impractical to use, and bows are hideously powerful for their cost, and enchanting them simply makes them hideously powerful (For starters, it increases it's damage to 250% of it's original damage when enchanted with Power V, while the Crossbow only gets tripled damage at short range at most, or 6 times if you only use arrows and you get mobs to nicely line up for you).
1. No not "tough luck". Do (cross)bows shoot bullets? Nooooo. You should have thought that one out.
2. *facedesk* Wow congrats, you just used one of the most hated, invalid arguments of all time. "If you don't like it don't use it!" Dude, no. If an idea is bad, it's bad. Going "you don't have to use it! =D" doesn't save the idea from being garbage. Seriously, that's an awful awful argument. Guns aren't for Minecraft and never will be, no matter how good you think you can argue it.
If servers have to ban something so terrible, then mayyyybe the idea is pretty bad to start with and shouldn't touch the game? Before you respond, please use the search function and take a good look at all the other gun threads that have been hated and locked. Maybe take some game development courses too.
While you have a good point in 2, 1 comes off as nitpicking, considering that, mechanics-wise, the only difference is that one would logically stick out of your body, while you'd be unable to discern wether a player has been recently shot with a gun or not.
Hmmm, if you guys have ever heard of the quiverbow mod, I think some of the weapons would be pretty cool to see in the base game. Well thought out, balanced, using vanilla materials and even having some slight lore behind their construction. I think they'd be perfect.
I think that taking the approach of that mod would be the only way to actually add a balanced gun, as strictly going by the more typical formats tends to create the same archetype of gun (Fires slowly. Deals lots of damage. May or may not be accurate) that overlaps too much with already-existing weapons, as well as possibly providing new uses for the less useful materials. The only changes I'd make from the mod would be to not use craft to reload, as it'd be a bit uninmersive in vanilla; as well as using more intuitive crafting recipes (I know the mod's recipes reflect the guns' mechanisms, but in vanilla, it'd come off as strange. Then again, it could be made so that weapons like that one are made at the Smithing Table, assuming it is used to make new gear and the GUI is more user-friendly).
Historically, several different shot configurations were used, from simply solid shot to "buck and ball", which consisted of a single large bullet shot alongside several buckshot pellets or outright buckshot, to even more fantastic loads, such as primitive rifle grenades (Which didn't exist IRL, but let's roll with it).
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Make me.
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The concept of the Urn is interesting, but the cost per summon risks making it too awesome to use. I'd recommend adding lesser rituals, which wouldn't necessarily destroy the urn.
Rather than having jade ingots and bricks, it should be more like actual jade, and be a gem, both for realism, and because it'd put an inconsistency in the game, which is that only metals require smelting for now.
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In the case of melee, yes, it's not relevant to the suggestion.
As for PvE, that problem is common to ranged weapons in general, but, as you point out, that makes adding a gun (At least in the same format as this one) pointless, as the existing ranged weapons already fill that role well enough, and a weapon that does so even better is hardly a wise idea to add.
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Because he has a point in that melee weapons are instantaneous, althrough the flaws created by it don't make much sense to be mentioned here, to the point that, in hindsight, I've removed that upvote (Or tried to, considering how weird the forum can get with it). Then again, that may just have been my brain going out to lunch.
Considering that one of your complaints is caused by the very fast projectile, it could have a tracer effect, which could reveal where you've been shot from, allowing you to do things such as building a dirt wall to protect yourself from further fire, or the exact speed could be mentioned in the OP, and compared to the crossbow and bow's arrow speeds, as "somewhat faster" is hardly the same as "effectively hitscan", but it's not explained which one of the two it is.
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No, but crossbows can. In fact, one of the flaws of the suggestion (And one you pointed out, and I agree with, althrough we differ in the conclusions taken from this, as you seem to consider it too powerful, while I consider it to be too weak) is that it overlaps with the crossbow too much.
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What makes you assume that a weapon that shoots fireballs is necessarily the same as a gun? Why couldn't it be like a blowgun, or a bullet-firing crossbow? After all, what would matter is that it can shoot fireballs, not that it's actually a gun.
As for wanting something like that, because it's the most obvious use of gunpowder that cannot be replicated with TNT and Redstone.
The real question is: What's with the tendency to treat gun suggestions as if they were trying to turn Minecraft into a CoD clone, as opposed to valuing the suggestion purely on it's own merits? What I see is that, when anyone puts any suggestion, they're not given constructive criticism and just told that "It doesn't fit because guns are not medieval" (Meanwhile, they were invented in the late Middle Ages, and became very popular by the end of it), or "This will turn Minecraft into CoD" (Without explaining how), or "This will make the game less family-friendly" (Again, no explanation how would adding a gun intrinsically do this), or, worst of all, "This is OP" (And reading the suggestion actually shows a crappy weapon that is too expensive for what it can do) without explanation.
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Fire charges have other properties apart from just setting entities on fire, such as setting blocks on fire (Which would make it a great forest-burning tool), and not being affected by gravity.
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Fireworks are useful, but TNT is too weak to be useful by itself (Althrough it thankfully no drops all the blocks it breaks) and non-renewable. Same with splash potions, which are also very lacking in uses, as most mobs aren't designed in a way that incentivates using them (For instance, Harm would be much more attractive if armor were more common in mobs, and Poison is useful pretty much only to get Music Discs), while fire charges are just consumable Flint and Steel.
Of course, it'd be easier to simply make those uses better:
Sand could be made renewable so using TNT in large scale doesn't involve stripping beaches of sand (And TNT itself could be made cheaper. For instance, it's output could be 2 or 3 TNT blocks instead of 1).
There could be more mobs that make using splash potions worthwhile (More armored mobs, more beefy mobs that can make using poison on them worthwhile, more glass cannons that are affected by Weakness, or more fast mobs that ).
Adding a handheld way of firing fire charges (Which may or may not resemble a gun, but does avoid adding a blatant one) instead of adding a new weapon that further throws the tattered remains of balance off (After all, if combat is already unbalanced, adding a completely new weapon that has to be balanced when the current ones already have enough problems AND overlaps with one of them may not be a good idea, specially when the most obvious way to do so goes against the short-mid-range, high RoF profile that's probably he only niche in the game that doesn't exist, which the fire charge launcher could at least fulfill).
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Because, in the end, it's an opinion, rather than a fact, and thre's also plenty of people who feel that the lack of them is weird in a game in which gunpowder not only exists, but is naturally occuring and needs more uses.
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You're using a bizarre slippery slope fallacy, as well as assuming that guns would seriously have any more effect than how much the game incentivates animal cruelty, not to mention that it's literally a game, and even kid-friendly games can have guns. Nobody is suggesting to do things such as incentivating the player to shoot baby villagers, add blood from gunshots, or anyhting that could be any more violent than what the game already has. In fact, one would argue that guns would be less violent than bows, as the latter keep their arrows stuck, showing injury.
Similarly, a game with guns doesn't have to become a CoD clone at all (In fact, the fact that there's plenty of non-shooter games with guns on them should be a giveaway).
As for fitting, the description implies that it's some sort of muzzle-loading gun, likely a musket or even an arquebus, and those existed in the Middle Ages, and, in fact, would actually fit more than most of what Redstone does (And, even then, one could link guns and redstone so it gets to not fit), or jukeboxes.
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Is it really an upgrade over crossbows? Read the OP. It essentially paints an awful weapon that is easily worse than the crossbow or the bow at everything but range, and the Crossbow already has a lot of range (Not to mention that it can also pierce mobs and shoot fireworks, while the bow, when enchanted with Power V becomes a murder factory that makes crafting the crossbow pointless because it's much weaker. On top of this, most mobs can't even see you beyond 16 blocks, and Ghasts see you from 100 blocks away). If anything, the gun as written in the post seems like it'd need a buff to be worth using, rather than making bows and crossbows obsolete.
As for combat as it is; no, it's horribly balanced. Shields are too powerful, TNT and Flint and Steel are impractical jokes (Barring PVP in faction servers, and that's only due to TNT cannons, while Fire is bad at burning things down because it got hit too hard with the nerfhammer), splash potions are very impractical to use, and bows are hideously powerful for their cost, and enchanting them simply makes them hideously powerful (For starters, it increases it's damage to 250% of it's original damage when enchanted with Power V, while the Crossbow only gets tripled damage at short range at most, or 6 times if you only use arrows and you get mobs to nicely line up for you).
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While you have a good point in 2, 1 comes off as nitpicking, considering that, mechanics-wise, the only difference is that one would logically stick out of your body, while you'd be unable to discern wether a player has been recently shot with a gun or not.
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I think that taking the approach of that mod would be the only way to actually add a balanced gun, as strictly going by the more typical formats tends to create the same archetype of gun (Fires slowly. Deals lots of damage. May or may not be accurate) that overlaps too much with already-existing weapons, as well as possibly providing new uses for the less useful materials. The only changes I'd make from the mod would be to not use craft to reload, as it'd be a bit uninmersive in vanilla; as well as using more intuitive crafting recipes (I know the mod's recipes reflect the guns' mechanisms, but in vanilla, it'd come off as strange. Then again, it could be made so that weapons like that one are made at the Smithing Table, assuming it is used to make new gear and the GUI is more user-friendly).
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Crossbows already have a pretty flat trajectory, and Multishot+fireworks can do the latter fairly well.
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Historically, several different shot configurations were used, from simply solid shot to "buck and ball", which consisted of a single large bullet shot alongside several buckshot pellets or outright buckshot, to even more fantastic loads, such as primitive rifle grenades (Which didn't exist IRL, but let's roll with it).