Originally Posted by
Flying Dice
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but 95% of the time when I get slugged it's during a general push on a cade by a guy hiding behind one, and it gets followed up with grenade spam. CQC isn't really an issue as long as you're not dumb and are decently robust, since any xeno that has any business mixing it up with PB marines is just as dangerous as they are and it's a lot easier to juke the shot when you're up close. The situation of "I see shotgun unga around corner, I run up to shotgun unga, I ded" doesn't happen if you have a brain. The dangerous ones are the ones that you don't see because they're concealed behind a cade with 6+ other marines and xenos also on-screen, and they generally nail you from 5-10 tiles away.
The issue I have like that is something like the one I'd imagine you'd have if they brought one-hit neuro back, added damage to it, and every round randomly made half the sentinels look like other castes. It's the same issue I have with most of the other cheesy marine weapons (namely offscreen SADAR, UGLs, and the combination of CAS/OB calls mixed with a ton of metagaming fake lases): you often can't reasonably identify that the threat even exists before it kills you. You can look at any xeno and know from the sprite exactly what it is and what it can do. You can obviously distinguish flamethrowers, sniper rifles, SADAR tubes (if you see them onscreen rather than getting gibbed from 30 tiles away), teslas, HMGs, sentries, the APC, &c.
It's actually very similar to the main issue I have with the scatter spitter sentinel. A marine can reasonably expect to win a close-in fight against a standard sentinel, but the scatter spitter has an identical sprite and can (if RNG plays nice) floor a marine with one or two PB spits. That's close to zero counterplay, beyond the same advice that powergame-y marines give of just not getting anywhere near one at any time, which obviously ain't realistic. It's also the same issue that pre-rework boilers had, where random grunts had zero way to know that an acid cloud was about to hit, leading to the usual and understandable salt about getting gassed out if they reacted even a second too slow or got blocked.
tl;dr: As usual, it's not necessarily an issue with the weapon itself as long as you aren't playing dumb, it's an issue of not being able to accurately identify threats before they kill you. TBH I think that the correct approach is to remove knockdown-stun from slugs against anything except young/mature T1s and young T2s. I'd be fine with it keeping the vision impair and maybe having a slow or short standing stun, but a spammable zero-warning ranged knockdown was annoying when it was sentinels corner-peeking with one-hit neuro and it's annoying now.