The Nykorev in Unturned 3 is, to make it short, a horribly bad gun.
It is one of the higher tier guns, as it comes from the likes of deadzones, airdrops, and horde beacons. With the semi-recent changes to LMGs, the other two LMGs were changed to new roles effectively. The Hell’s Fury became a CQB monster with impressive durability, and a voracious appetite for ammunition. The Fury also gained a very small amount of vertical recoil to make it feel better to use, but that’s besides the point. The Dragonfang got chosen to be the raiding LMG of the bunch, a choice I personally didn’t agree with, but was well executed balance wise. The Dragonfang required high caliber ammunition, did low damage for a high caliber weapon, but still had relevance is PvP as its damage output is insane, if the user chose to throw away high caliber like that.
However, the Nykorev is a somewhat sad case. Before the rework LMGs were basically the poor PvP raiding machines. The Nykorev was relevant, in that niche role. The Nykorev received something like a durability buff and an accuracy buff, and that was about it. It was mentioned as to be a suppression LMGs, but it does not perform well in that role at all.
One thing suppression requires is the ability to fire for a long time. That is something the Nykorev can actually do rather well, the best out of every gun in the game. The Nykorev has a 200 round box, and with a rather slow firerate it takes 28 seconds to empty its magazine, and with adpative chambering, that time is 24 seconds.
That’s somewhat where the advantages end. While the Nykorev is a very durable gun, with a 15% chance to degrade, firing a whole box will wear the Nykorev on average about 30%. For a machinegun intended to suppress, this isn’t very good. Suppressing requires slinging out bullets just to make sure the enemy doesn’t peek for fear of getting hit, and when your gun starts losing damage about 2/3 the way through your second belt, there’s a bit of a problem.
The next thing about the Nykorev that’s poor is the recoil. The Nykorev has actually insane recoil, with 50% more vertical recoil and over 4x more horizontal recoil than the famous Maplestrike. This makes keeping the bullets on target quite difficult, and with the damage output the Nykorev has, (which I’ll get to in a second) this insane recoil is a bit of a slap in the face.
Now, the damage. A gun can have good damage output one of two ways in Unturned 3.0. It can have relatively low damage per shot, but fire incredibly fast, like the Banshee. The other way is to have a very low firerate but be rather punchy per shot, like the Hecate or the DMRs. All other guns can be found in the middle of this balance spectrum somewhere. ARs like the Maplestrike fall in the middle, and the Herstal and Kreigs are in the middle but closer to high damage low firerate. Some guns play with this balance more than others, like how the PDW has AR tier damage with SMG firerate, or the Grizzly with sniper rifle damage but DMR firerate. However, the Nykorev gets the butt end of the balance. It features SMG levels of damage with AR firerate. And with the poor durability for suppression, expect the damage to go lower and lower the longer the firefight goes on, if using the Nykorev to suppress.
For example, assuming a target wearing military tier armor, a Calling Card shreds the Nykorev in damage output.
Even a Cobra can kill faster than a Nykorev, and the Cobra can be found much much easier than a Nykorev ever could be.
Even more insulting, the Sportshot, a gun infamously known for being trash tier, if it was fully automatic, it would barely compare to the Nykorev, which just shows how low the damage output of the Nykorev is.
And when the Nykorev is compared against any AR it just makes you think, “why in the world would I ever use this gun?”
And that’s the Nykorev’s problem, it’s just not relevant. It’s a rare gun that’s a big and bulky SMG at best.
In Unturned 3.0, there is no suppression mechanic like there is in other milsims. The only suppression is threat of death, and with the Nykorev having such poor damage output, it has no suppression value. If somebody can pop out of their cover while being hammered by a Nykorev, and kill the Nykorev user faster with an AR, the Nykorev has no value.
However, the Nykorev could be made relevant again. Back to the damage output spectrum, I’m going to go more with higher damage lower firerate, but without touching firerate. The Nykorev’s ability to shoot non-stop for half a minute is a suppression advantage, and making it fire faster would hinder that.
A minor change I would do is to buff the Nykorev’s durability by changing the degrade chance from 15% to 10%. This would make it so only 20% durability would be lost per magazine. This would allow quite a bit more ammunition to be fired without the durability being moderately insane. After all, the gun is supposed to be suppressing, so it shouldn’t punish players for shooting a low, minus ammo.
Next is recoil. The recoil for the Nykorev is a bit ungoldly high, so I propose to tune that down a bit. This will make the gun more usable while not being recoiless.
Current:
Recoil_Min_X -4
Recoil_Min_Y 4
Recoil_Max_X 2
Recoil_Max_Y 6
Proposed:
Recoil_Min_X -2.5
Recoil_Min_Y 3
Recoil_Max_X 1
Recoil_Max_Y 4
And finally, damage. I propose the Nykorev be changed to 50 base damage to players. This is rather high to say the least. However, due to the Nykorev’s rather low firerate, its damage output is comparable to, even slightly greater then, ARs.
However, a point could be made that the Nykorev will become the new super AR, which is possible, but the low firerate means missing even one shot would cause damage output to plunge. And with 50 damage per shot, the Nyorkev would probably gain some suppression value. Each bullet would pack a punch, and getting hit by one would put that player out of the fight for a moment to heal up, or maybe even downright kill them.
Also, with 50 damage, the Nykorev would almost beat out the PDW, but it doesn’t quite do it. So the Nykorev won’t be some incredibly OP super gun if it had 50 damage per shot.
These changes to the Nykorev won’t have major change on the overall balance of Unturned 3.0, but it would also make one of the most painfully bad top-tier guns feel like it belongs there.
