>>321944
>How badly unbalanced were the weapons?
Really unbalanced, particularly the newer guns. The last few months/year of S4 was a real clusterfuck of balance. From all angles. Unrelated to specific weapons, they tried things such as damage fall off from range and limited ammo on all weapons (which could actually lead to draws in DM if the map had no death pits and neither side brought melee weapons). Neither of those went over very well with the playerbase.
They also had this weird fixation of releasing strong weapons with limited ammo, as if that would balance them. You had things like bombs, rocket launcher, mk2 versions of weapons, and homing rifles. Bombs and rocket launchers were especially bad because of their wide range and high damage. Ammo didn't really matter since you'd usually die quickly anyway. IIRC rocket launcher's alt fire did around 90 damage and you had 5 shots. Bombs had the annoying "feature" of exploding immediately if the user died. This lead to people throwing bombs and then throwing themselves off the map for an early detonation. Homing weapons weren't actually homing, they just had very generous hit detection which made them impossible to dodge at close-medium range. Mk2 weapons were often just straight upgrades to the normal version (for example, the mk2 turret gave massive damage reduction while in turret form. Didn't save them from wallshooting