Brawler Archive

First off, I must say, Im sure glad that I dont have to use the brawler skill anymore now that Im officially a smuggler.

This post is basically a summary of my experience with Unarmed.

1. Attack speed. Its fast, faster than most things, even pistol.

Base damage however lacks. THat is, until i got a vibro knuckle. Then I was hitting between 100-200 damage on average.

2. Specials. Im not sure what to think here. First off, ALL specials have incredibly high HAM drain, especially with vibro knuckles. I was losing up to 150 each time I used a special. Thats just ridiculous. Also, the effects of the specials dont last long enough. Unarmed stunned attack? What a joke. I saw no stun, no delay, no loss of one combat round as the description says. I would chain this special attack over and over, and it wouldnt make a difference. Specials take WAY too much HAM away and dont do enough to make enough difference.

3. Effectiveness. This is a big issue. I could see NO advantages in terms of tanking ability between Unarmed and Pistol. None what so ever. I took just as much damage, got hit just as often. Only, with pistol, I have ability to attack from a distance. Id wrack up so much fatigue and wounds it was insane as an Unarmed class.

Also, accuracy. This is a biggy. One, specials miss a LOT. Second, if your target moves, you are screwed. If the mob steps even one foot back, its out of range and suddenly your character stops attacking. If it runs off to fight another group member, your character just sits there helpless. Ok. So you say "use the /follow command" Ok, so thats what I did. Set up a macro to use /follow before engaging. Didnt help. /follow does make you stay close, but not close enough to attack until the creature stops moving again. This results in you hardly doing any damage (or getting any xp) on creatures that kite around when you are in a group.

ADD A FRIGGIN GOOD /STICKY MELEE ABILITY DEVS!!! AC1 has it, Daoc Has it, even AC2 has it. EIther that, or do what AO does, allow for a BIG distance/range for unarmed attacks.

Agility: Ok, this is a toughy to explain. You are a melee character, better yet, you are an unarmed martial artist style character. So why then, do all your movements feel like you are trying to parallel part a 18 wheeler?. Your character by default is slow and sluggish. Just try standing up from a sitting position. Using /follow to get into combat range adds a good second to the time it takes you to get in combat. Why? Its slows down as you get within range, so you dont over shoot your target. Thus, its faster to run in manually, but sloppier. Then, hitting the attack button, it actually takes a good amount of time to actually have your character turn and get into his silly little combat stance. Take in mind, you wont actually attack until you get into this stance. If the creature is moving around, and you are on /follow, you wont get into this combat stance until AFTER it stops. By the time you actually startin hitting the target, any ranged players in your group will have gotten a good 2 -3 shots off.

PvP. Ill be honest. I only dueled twice. Once vs a pistol using BH, and another vs a marksman.

Both times I lost. Vs the markman, I started from a distance, He had me down to 25% action by the time i got to him, using his carbine. I hit him for about 300 damage and then died.

Vs the BH with the pistol. He killed me in 2 shots, starting at point blank range. I hit him for about 340. He used some mind attack that did about 400 mind damage per shot.

Sorry, but when a melee loses to someone with a RANGED weapon starting at point blank, there is something seriously wrong. Not to mention, I started out with my first attack being the unarmed stunned attack on the BH, and it did NOTHING to slow him down. Unarmed has no special skills (through mastery) that allow you to focus on just one of the HAM bars. ALL ranged weapons can focus on one specific Ham bar. Pistols its Health, Carbines its Action, and Rifles its Mind, with a few excepts. This is a HUGE downfall to someone using unarmed.

I found Unarmed to be extremely frustrating and a HUGE let down. This is obviously a class that had either VERY little planning and intelligent thought put into it OR its the result of mass nerfing during the beta.

About the ONLY effective way Unarmed played out for me was soloing (not grouping) against blue/white con single targets. I could pretty much chain pull blue cons all day and never have to rest.

Some serious work needs to be done for the Unarmed skills, if not the whole brawler tree if the rest are similar in any way to what I experienced.

A note for anyone going for smuggler who has to get through the unamred tree. Get a ranged/pet use friend to pull and agro tuff creatures. Then jump in when they are 30% dead and leech some xp. I managed to make the 70k xp needed in two nights of playing this way. It would have taken me weeks and who knows how much hair pulled from my head if I had to solo it.

No misconceptions here. Im a huge fan of kung fu, and of lightsabre/melee weapon fighting. I WANT brawler to be good, but no way am I going to make a character based on it as their main specialization. Devs have some serious work to do here.

(pardon any grammar errors, had to type this quickly while avoiding the boss heheh )

True dat!!

I agree.

Brawlers need work. One thing I did forget in other posts was the lack of a /stick command that keeps you following in melee range. /follow doesnt do that. This is a function much needed as well. Nice catch.

Email feedback to SOE, its doubtful; they even pay attention here.

Excellent post, very good points here. I hope the Dev's take a look at this. Unarmed combat was actually decent in beta but it was cut in half with the live version. Unarmed combat is seriously, literally 50% of what it was. I'm also really bummed about the insanely high HAM costs on specials, that has to go for the class to be worth playing. People forget that unarmed combat has NO range. It's effective when you can actually hit something, but because you can't hit anything most of the time unarmed combat is really, really inneffective.

I agree with most of what you have to say about unarmed I'm about halfway thru master now and having a heck of a time getting past it.

But they do have a DAOC /stick type ability. Try follow (pre-programmed F11 key) it works on creatures and PC (at elast in duels). Try it, it helps.

Alixana Trakesian, Intrepid

Yes - that's all pretty much correct and like so many others, does a nice job of summing upthe problems with the brawler profession.

I honestly don't know if the devslistening to us or not.There have been over 1000 posts here on the brawler board (most expressing the same concerns you did) but no responses from the devs at all. I think they have made some changes (lower HAM costs & lunge) but they never post anything here or in the patch notes so it's hard to say for sure.

I would humbly suggest one more time that to fix brawler, the devs should:

1.Make the specialsmore effective - particularly lunge which I think should do normal damageAND stop the opponent from moving (but not stop them from attacking) for long enough to do 1 or 2 attacks to them.

2. Add a /Stick command or let us set the distance for /follow and fix it so that the brawlers can reliably attack while moving like marksmen and every mob in the game can.

3. Increase the damage multiplier for unarmed and melee damage vs marksmen with a gun equipped to offset the huge defensive advantage of kiting.

4. Make the combatqueue hold the actions so that I don't have to keep hitting the stupid special attack buttons when my target is out of range.

5. Fix the -15 to hit problem, It's just silly that A brawler at point blank range has a worse hit modifier than a pistolier.

Thanks for reading yet again,

Akuna

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Hawkeye_78 wrote:

But they do have a DAOC /stick type ability. Try follow (pre-programmed F11 key) it works on creatures and PC (at elast in duels). Try it, it helps.

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Yes, as I stated, that is the /follow command. It DOES make you follow something around, but if it moves more than just a jitter, you get out of range of attacking and simply stop attacking. This isnt much a problem when you are out chain soloing blue con things. But when you are in a group, fighting yellow/red con things, MOST of the time, the creature you are using /follow on is going to be running all over the place, which means you get tugged along, helpless, not attacking at all, and getting no xp.

And in PvP, or at least Duels, it works the same way. I got right in close against a pistol user, who then began running around. I was more or less right next to him, but because the /follow command doesnt keep you at an exact distance 100% of the time, I was 99% of the time just out of range of attacking him. Lunge would hit, but half the time it would miss, or simply do 1 damage and have NO visable effect.

And you guys are transdosians. I am a zabrak going for smuggler, **edit** near impossible. My special moves kill me as much as the creature im attacking does, if i dont use them at all, i will die. If i do use them i have 5 minuets of downtime ahead of me before i attack the next blue. Whoooty doo. Thanks for making Smuggler so frickin hard devs. I know a grand total of NO smugglers who go their without either using an exploit or one of the group xp miscalculation problems.