Following a situation yesterday, I had some discussions concerning the balance of the bean-bag launcher. An idea that was raised was to have it not use the same 'taser' effect.
In essence, the idea would be to have it just knock someone over, but not have them laid on the floor for x time like the taser.
As it stands, the bean bag launcher is an objectively better taser (fire rate & range), with limited ammo (although 22 shots is still plenty for most cases). The idea would then be for the bean bag launcher to maybe only play the tase effect for i.e .5s (or maybe 1s, or 2s, just not up to the extreme levels that we have right now where you can be forced to be on the floor for 30 seconds straight), to make the target fall onto the floor, as if "knocked over from the impact", but be able to get back up almost immediately. This would then make the taser & beanbag launcher serve different purposes. Taser would be for non-lethally incapacitating people when you wanna go for cuffs, whereas the bean bag launcher would just be to knock someone over to i.e. prevent them stabbing someone, buying others time to get away from whatever weapon the target may have.
This would make people go through ammo quicker (so you wouldn't be able to keep someone down for minutes on end), thus making the limited ammo a bigger factor to deal with, whilst still making it a very worthwhile tool to have with you to non-lethally incapacitate someone.
I understand the reason the 'taser' effect is (probably) used currently is that getting hit by one of these would "knock the wind out of you", and immediately getting up and running on might be a bit odd, especially after taking a few hits - but in the interest of balance, and making the taser/bean launcher serve different purposes, I think this would be a good way to go about it.
TLDR:
Taser = short range infinite ammo non-lethal incapacitation
Beanbag launcher = long range limited ammo 'buy some extra time', as opposed to full on non-lethal incapacitation
