Brawler Archive

I just want to add my voice to this conversation.

It seems our correspondant made a failry legitimate suggestion, give us a range of "unarmed" weapons, so that high end weapons like VK can be something we look foward to using.

The Dev's stepped in, skipped directly over the first part, and moved the VK's to the position that the ultimate of novice combat skills reside, the novice of the specialist proffession.

There are two easy ways to correct this:

1) give us some halfway decent lesser knucklers (gloves, wraps, whatever)
2) Move the VK certification down.

I think expert unarmed is a fair place to get them, facing 70K XP points and having a base damagae of 80points is simply unexceptable.

I've got pistol specialist, expert rifle and carbine, and let me tell you that at expert level you should be doing around 250-500 a hit depending on the speed and quality of your weapon.

I got about half way to advanced unarmed before I even discovered the vibro-knucklers, and at first I felt a little over powere on my way to 15K XP, getting easy 200-300xp kills, but looking up at 70K for unarmed master it felt very much on par with what I had experienced with my other skills.

With the removal of vibro knucklers it seems I'll be busy killing 700 gnorts/chubba/and the occasional Krevel.

But as of the recent patch even the krevels are a tough go.

Anyway I correspondent was missinterprated, and the blame doesn't lie with him (at least not soley), as the devs are the one who truely dropped the ball here, hopefull they can make this right quickly as I don't intend to spedn a month running around wacking gnorts at 80damage a pop.

I agree with you on this. I fear saying anything about this because I am afraid of the nerf bat ... but here it goes ...

Knucklers were thought to be overpowering so they put a cert on them. This is my understanding of why the cert was put in place.

Funny thing is that I was doing similar damage with a curved sword. The damage levels between my knucklers (that were slightly better than my curved sword) and my curved sword were almost identical. I was using a set of knucklers made by Kammi (128 max, 2.2 delay) and a curved sword with slightly higher damage but 2.8 delay (both unsliced)

I don't really feel that the knucklers were overpowering at the expert / master levels in the brawler branches. For a Novice Brawler with no unarmed skill, someone just starting out, yes they are overpowering and unbalanced. But for someone who has attained a specialist / expert level they are right on par with damage made by other weapons.

I am 40k experience from Unarmed Specialist / Master and cringe when thinking about what it will take to get there.

Disgruntled Brawler

Here is the twist, we asked for Unarmed to be... without a weapon... and that is not the issue, the issue is we lost power when they added the cert. No one would complain if we were doing comparable damage to what we were used to.

We dont complain cose we lost power. Actually we do, but we complain cose now we suck sompared to every other combat skill out there. I have a lot of marksman skills, and they only took me 1 week. Now I'm working on getting the 70k of unarmed xp for master for 4 days, and I'm only half way there. They should:

A) increase unarmed damage

B) add other unarmed weapons

C) move the VK's to expert unarmed (You can make it there without useing Vk)

I agree. I made it to expert before getting some vk's and it is about the same difficulty as making the same advancement in other disciplines.

I do like the idea of unarmed combat being unarmed ... but when you can only do a fraction of the damage (thus getting a fraction of the experience) that other classes (brawler / marksman) can do, something needs to happen to compensate or equalize (balance is a popular word that the devs use) the playing field.

Nicely put.

I think moving the knucklers down to Expert Unarmed would solve plenty of problems. That would put the unarmed brawler on par with the other combat oriented classes of the same level. Expert Unarmed was a little tough but not to hard to reach.

Before VKs, fighting was drudgery and going out on missions in the group was like watching a show and not playing a game. When we engaged in battle I was lucky to take out one of the opponents by the time each of the group had taken out 3 or 4 and with a lot less damage taken. Even with them waiting and letting my character fight first, there was a lot of complaining about the time it took as there were a lot of swings and misses and each connect only a little damage was done. Then when I came across a TKA and asked him some tips on fighting and tactics, he gave me a beat up pair of knuckles and said to try them. Suddenly I felt a part of the group as I could actually engage more than one opponent without having to heal up. My individual battles didn't take so long and I no longer felt like a third wheel.

Unarmed brawlers have a lot of problems and VKs solved some of them, specially for the casual player who joined StarWars Galaxies for the social aspect of playing with his friends. Yes, one can grind away with squalls, gnorts, and nightspiders to gain 100 unarmed xp each to gain the huge xp requirements (while others are fighting Gualamas for 600 of ranged xp at the same power level as you) but the question is should you have to?

I agree with the purests out there that unarmed path should be unarmed... however until they allow those who reached the highest levels of unarmed path to hit harder, with more accuracy, and more often without the use of VKs then I have no problem with people using them to gain unarmed xp.

StarWars Galaxies is about people having fun after all(well actually about SOE making money, but people having fun stay longer).