Everything you need to know about the new shocklance

With the release of the new PTS patch today came the first new weapon in a long time, the shocklance. The shocklance has been in previous tribes titles and traditionally it was a very short range high voltage weapon that would stop any enemy in its tracks if you managed to hit them in the back with it, this of course took a lot of skill to perfect.

Before we go any further the information below was taken on the PTS servers and could be completely different to what you see in the final release as stated by HiRez.

The new shocklance is a hitscan weapon that works almost identically to the phase rifles – currently it has the same activation sound as them also. It does not have an ammo clip but instead use energy from your jett pack.

If you hit an enemy in the front it will take 700 hit points off them.

A massive 1400 hit points for a back shot, which will 1 shot any light and medium classes and two shot a heavy class.

The biggest problem with this is its ease of use, I have taken a video of my second go of this weapon and I was hitting a lot of the shots, I would hate think of what this weapon could do in the hands of someone who has spent more than 30 seconds with it.

Overall I like the idea of a shocklance but ultimately I think that it will need to have its damaged and range shortened if it’s ever going to be seen in comp play as it is very over powered.

The other thing that we have to consider is this weapon is going to be available on every class which will almost wipe out the holdout shot gun from the roaming defense load outs. Which in turn is going to mean that it is no longer going to be viable for offence players to run anything other than heavy classes (some might think this is a good thing) but in reality all it is doing is cutting out even more diversity in the game. It also scares the hell out of me to think what a good infiltrator would do with this weapon.

Only time will tell if HiRez will adjust this weapon but in the mean time I would love to hear what your feedback is. Leave your comments in this forum post. Comment here