Heavy Weapons

Part III

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Ok, I’m sure by now, thanks to my good friend Fearless Jack, you have read, and enjoyed my two previous works, and works by others, which were inspired by my “getting to know it” weapons guides.  So without further adieu, I give you the guide to the most quirky, most devastating and the most underrated heavy weapon of all time - The Venom.

Introduction:

Being purely fictional in its historic state, the venom made its initial appearance in the latter portions of Wolfenstein SP. However, the multiplayer version of the game adopted it mainly because Wolfenstein MP lacked a heavy machine gun. Good idea !!

The Weapon:

It carries an initial 500 rounds of what seems to be 7.62mm long rifle cartridges. Another 1500 can be carried given you run into a generous LT, or a cache of ammo packs. For the first 50 rounds or so, the rate of fire is blistering, and will promptly mow down anyone, or anything in its way. After that though, get a little greedy on its substantial firepower and it will slowly overheat, and in the process of heating up, will drop your rate of fire to something of that similar to a .45 ASCAP pistol.

Yeah, it’s a quirky gun, and controlling it's self destructive heat cycle is the key to mastering this weapon.  Be careful not to bite off more than you can handle; sure you can mow down 4 enemies at first, but when that stream of baddies keeps coming, your gun slows down, and guess what? You’re up a creek without a paddle buddy.

Another tip for firing is that when the gun heats up and you need to leave fast, the control scheme will lag your weapon changing, thus slowing you down. To counter this, either don’t let your gun heat up to this level, or use the ‘drop weapon’ key to drop your weapon and switch to your pistol, then pick up your venom and get the heck out of there.

Accuracy is about as varied as its rate of fire. For about 25 rounds, it’s dead on, or pretty good, depending on range, but after that, anything more than 12 feet away is relatively safe from the wrath of your venom.  This may not be the most effective weapon outside, but inside (i.e. War room, FDA, warehouse, etc.) it’s about as deadly as a 12-gauge shotgun.

The Good:

Awesome rate of fire, good ammo capacity, excellent stopping power, and lots of noise. (W00t!)

The Bad:

Very temperamental, lethal to newbies and 56k’ers alike, overheats at the worst time, and you can never seem to use up all that ammo.

The Ugly:

In intense firefights, the gun will overheat, leaving you helpless, and will subsequently lag your weapon change time if you’re not careful.