A small buff to Railgun?

As a long time Railgun user I'm troubled to see less and less players choosing Railgun over other point damage weapons. EC is not far behind even in terms of damage per hit (needless to talk about DPS) while having 8 second less cooldown and ability to hit multiple targets at once. Railgun already has so many weaknesses; long cooldown, no arc = hit waves and much less damage at close range. With all these downsides the current damage per shot isn't rewarding enough for most players to choose Railgun. Yes, some shooters still use it but I think it should be more viable option to other ships as well.

So I have two alternative suggestions that in my opinion would help to balance this;

1) Buff Railgun damage by at least 10 %. Best way to do this would be adding one extra crew talent on Dr. Buzzkill's talent tree. This would make the risk more rewarding when you are able to land a successful shot. Damage would be more balanced with super long cooldown.

2) Increase Railgun projectile speed so it would be easier hit targets from distance. Currently the unlimited range is almost unusable because from very far away it's very hard to avoid waves without any arc. Higher projectile speed would help this. Two ways to do it; change bhurt cannon projectile speed talents to increase projectile speed for all point damage weapons. Alternatively you could add some new Dr. Buzzkill talents to increase projectile speed specifically for railgun only. In my opinion Railgun projectile should be in line with Sniper so we would need a total +40 % projectile speed from talents. This would get the speed from 40 up to 56 similarly to sniper with all Bhurt talents.

What do you guus think? Leave your comments below or vote

 

Ask yourself this: is railgun really one of the worst weapons? No, it's definitely above average or it wouldn't be used so often in nightmare. Buffing it would just mean the other 2 slots are used even less . I say focus on buffing the items that actually need it: standard mortar, frost, lube, standard Cannon, tri torps and maybe some others.
I guess basically I'm saying that an item doesn't need a buff just because it's no longer top tier lol.

But, if I had to see a buff I wouldn't mind a cooldown decrease, which would allow the weapon to be used more on non-shooter boats

Edit: also it sucks that it takes forever to level up Buzzkill I guess that's why you mostly see railgun at later end of game

 

Thank you for your reply Ian and I understand your opinion too. For sure there are other items that also need a buff and indeed some items need it even more than Railgun. Let's wait for other responses and if everyone seems to think it's already balanced then I will accept the result and stop complaining

Just to clarify the damage buff option; +10 % damage might sound like a huge buff but actually it isn't since the base damage for railgun is so low. Here I have an example of lvl 50 epic railgun that currently does 2460 damage. As you can see, the base damage is only 1302 so the 10 % buff would make that Railgun damage go from 2460 to ~2590. So it would effectively be only +5 % buff to total damage.

 

Damage Reduction upto 70% at close range(30% of total damage) is Ridiculous..50% reduction would be Acceptable end-Game

 

Wave penetration. Can you limit it to one wave, altering the projectile after piercing the first? Or is this just a crazy idea?

Or, since it's a magnetic projectile weapon, a second or two of projectile deflection when you fire, to accompany your shot.

But the rail gun is probably just fine as is. Maybe these could be legendary perks.

 

I thought about this, maybe automatic 50%damage reduction every time it goes through a wave