Usefulness of "Reflection" weapons

Forgive me if this has been discussed before, but I don't recall any recent topics on this subject.

I was thinking about the "reflection" attribute and its merits.

I know what the attribute is supposed to do, but have never really noticed much of a benefit by using such weapons.

Even a maxed out reflection weapon doesn't seem to be of much use other than the standard damage bonus which comes with the '+4...+6' or whatever.

In theory it would be very beneficial to have a reflection weapon say, on wave 15. However, with the increased difficulty level and the sheer number of Skaarj on that wave, the benefits of the reflection weapon are all but nullified. BTW, could anyone give the numbers for the percent chance the weapon gives you to reflect damage? Just curious.

It would make more sense to have the "reflect" attribute applied to all types of damage (bullets, rockets, etc.) except for melee damage caused, for example, by trying to hug a brute.

Anyhow, that's my two bits.

I haven't debugged them (IOW, I haven't sat and watched a server spit out log file lines telling me certain things), but I know the math is currently not unlike the math for poison, which is busted, and I have debugged. For example, Poison 1 works exactly like it's supposed to. Poison 2 doesn't do *any* poison damage. Poison 3 & 4 do damage but not the amount of damage over time that they're supposed to.

Reflection should work more logically in the next release.

Actually, I have found that reflection +7 and +8 (max+1) have some pretty good bounce-it-back-at-them with the energy from queens, skarj and such. Lost track of how many times I have seen the bugs kill themselves because of it. Just wonder who gets the credit for that.

Nuisance item though... the sounds get stuck for like forever and you cannot hear that stupid nali or titan behind ya, then SPLAT!

Spacey wrote:

Actually, I have found that reflection +7 and +8 (max+1) have some pretty good bounce-it-back-at-them with the energy from queens, skarj and such.

Same here. A reflecting shield +7 really saved my butt once because it reflected almost all of the skaarj blasts. Don't really notice the effect much on weapons lower than +5.

Yeah, perhaps Reflecting's bonus range could be reworked from, say, +1 to +4, 60% to 90%. Because until it gets up there, it really sort of sucks.

Or, what else you could do is have it, upon failing to totally reflect the projectile, lower the damage a good amount.

Or you could rework reflection so that it *always* reflects (that is, sending a projectile back), but the projectile's damage is lowered by the amount you take. So, an 80% reflect weapon would cause you to still take 20% damage, and reflecting 80% back with the projectile. A 40% would make you take 60% damage, and return 40%. Using this method, it makes me think of a souped-up Protection weapon. An idea just came to mind, also; when a projectile is reflected, scale it down by however much you took. So a 40% projectile would be 2.5 times smaller than normal.

Eh, but whatever.