Chaotic Dreams

First I'd like to say well done on a very fun and polished mod that truly captures the spirit of Chaos. I played on the servers for several hours yesterday and had a great time. With that said I think the mod could definitely benefit from a little more polish and attention.

The Melee System
I love the attention to detail and the choice of weapons but for general combat it does feel a little sluggish. When you're going against someone with a MUG you want to be able to finish them off quickly, not have to keep on circling round them to try and get the animations to connect. Also, the presence of the shield gun sort of destroys the effectiveness of the melee weapons, meaning you can rip through someone with one shot where as it takes several to kill with a sword. I think you shield either replace the shield gun entirely (maybe with a chainsaw) or tone it done, perhaps making it discharge upon close proximity with an enemy sword.

This is minor, but I think some cooler double damage effects for the swords would be nice, maybe with some sort of particle based purple glow.

The CPP
This is by far the least interesting and effective weapon. As others are saying I think you need to make this instant hit and also make it more visually interesting to use. What about some funky firework like hit effects?

The Claw
I think this is almost perfect, proxies not only are awesome to use but hilariously voiced "you little turd!". But why no purple glow for proxies fired with double damage?

The MUG
The model looks awesome, but is really let down by the 'fuel effect'. Just look at how cool the corresponding bio-rifle effect looks.

The Vortex
The effect looks very very nice, but the results of being sucked in aren't that interesting. I'd like to see just detached arms left, or a torso and an arm, or maybe a leg a torso and an arm. And why not use the electrical shock effect that bodies killed with the lightning gun exhibit?

Finally, the ending of the vortex is a little anti-climatic. No showers of glowing particles or gibs or flashes of blinding light.

The ERDW
The only improvement I suggest for this is a beam that would change colour every time the user killed someone, so the weapon effects would look a lot cooler, and you'd know when to run depending on the colour of the beam firing at you!

Oh, and you don't seem to be able to do headshots with this weapon for some reason.

Melle:
to replace SG,i second that
That they are too hard to connect you must think,melle is last resort and style,if you cant,dont

Claw:do rockets glow purple?

Vortex:and drop your fps by 5 every time it goes down?the thing ripping the body would be a bit annoying imo

I know projectiles don't glow but I see proxies as being an extension of the player, expecially if you are controlling one. Anyway it's just a personal preference I guess.

With the vortex I was just talking about maybe a few large particles, sort of like the ones on Xen in HL. And with the "ripping" I meant that instead of being left with either a full body or part of a leg you might be left with just an arm instead.

Maybe make proxies able to pick up double damage

ShieldGun: We can't really replace this one without some Serious AI recoding. The bots look for the shield gun by name(same with Link and Avril) and so unless you wanna mess with TONS of botcode, its not exactly high on the coders' list of desired chores.

CCP: We feel the exact same way.

MUG: I agree with you on the MUG, We used to have a totally awesome effect for the MUG, but with a particle only system you can't control the particles (Engine limitation). so we had to switch to this projectile based effect sort last minute. We shall see what happens with this.
Chaos will get more polishing with a patch or two, and of course the next PR

could you then remove shieldguns dmg and make it a knocker/shield?

The model looks awesome, but is really let down by the 'fuel effect'. Just look at how cool the corresponding bio-rifle effect looks.

Yeah, I feel the same way.

Finally, the ending of the vortex is a little anti-climatic. No showers of glowing particles or gibs or flashes of blinding light.

Interesting, I can think of some ways to really increase the 'oomph' of a vortex

IMHO replacing the SG completely with the Sword would be best , as it might kill this weapon loop we've beeen seeing alot as well. However i think it's not doable because of the bot ai . . . like how we had to keep the Linkgun and Avril in.