How to balance weapons for all difficulties

I was thinking a damage % increase per level. Silver, it increases all damage done by PC to 50%. Gold increases it by 100%. Scaling basically.

I tend to agree, but this would essentially be the same as a HP-nerf for enemies on silver and gold. I think Bioware shoud do exactly that, reduce the hitpoints of the enemies on higher difficulties, and balance that by making them faster and letting them dish out more damage. Hopefully that would lead to more tactical playstyles, instead of just shooting one another and seeing whose life is depleted first.

It already is tactical. I hate being tied hip to hip with my team mates. I prefer to run off. Decrease HP, but increase damage a little bit. I still want to lone wolf it.

There are two separate balance issues here, and they shouldn't get mixed up.

The first issue is that the weapons aren't balanced with respect to each other. This is just as true on Bronze as it is on Gold.

The second part is the enemy hit point scaling based on difficulty. Enemies take too long to die (from both weapons and powers) on Bronze too, but on Gold this is much worse, particularly with one of the underpowered weapons.

Saying that the "devs balance weapons around Bronze" just dumbs down the issue, I feel. The weapons aren't balanced. Gold enemies have too much health. Two separate problems.

I think that one of the main underlying reasons for both problems is that Bioware simply isn't very good at designing and implementing difficulty in games. A good, fair difficulty always comes down to giving the player a chance yet punishing them for their mistakes. That means that on higher difficulties the players should face more complex and varied - and therefore more challenging - tactical situations. Unfortunately Bioware's primary tool seems to be to increase the health of the enemies in order to prolong combat, therefore leading to more player mistakes in the long run. The problem, of course, is that tactically the game doesn't really get any harder, only more tedious, and it makes the players feel weaker.

To fix this, aside from balancing the weapons against each other, Bioware should nerf enemy health across the board, but specifically on harder difficulties. And then, to counterbalance the change in difficulty, they need to make the enemies more aggressive and give them more tactical options, but in a way that gives the players a chance to exploit their weaknesses. One example of this would be high-priority enemy units that buff/heal/resurrect/inspire/command/whatever others, but are themselves relatively easy to dispatch. I'd also like to see actual coordination between, say, melee and ranged units (such as sharpshooters specifically targeting players ambushed by dogs). That said, there's a fine line here: enemies that behave too intelligently can also be frustrating to fight, especially when you feel like they just gang up on you. Unfortunately it isn't trivial to implement good, challenging difficulty.

when the default pistol (predator) at level x still takes a dozen shots to kill an unshielded mook on bronze its not balanced,

bioware claims they balanced around bronze difficulty for level x weapons, meaning that a team of just started the game folks with level 1 weapons have virtually zero chance at success without good teamwork.... pugs are generally bad at teamwork...

hitbox detection is awful on host and practically non existent on a bad host, the bioware team needs to just hold its hands up and admit its screwed the pooch then start fixing the problem which in reality a 10% clip size adjustment and a 25% damage base modifier would go a long way to fixing.

the reason a lot of folks still play bronze is clearly down to the general feeling of not wanting to waste consumables when hosts are so often poor /laggy and dc's or ctd's are still way too common, the fact enemy health scales whilst weapon damage doesn't is just another poor choice, silver and gold enemies are about right in terms of movment speed and ai teamwork/powers use, but either they nerf hp on everything or they buff the guns and add in an upscaler for player damage output on harder difficulties

if they don't start fixing some of this stuff cheat lobbies will become far more prolific and the playerbase will shrink quite rapidly to the point of making the game worthless before the 6 month point /

all guns should be balanced around gold that way if you don't have many weapons at high level you can still contribute if you use boosters you'll be able to kill enemies reliably