Carbineer Archive

retired: 09/02/'04.

\\\ Sethrak Felbovv ///
\\\ Master Carbineer - Rifleman - Master Bounty Hunter ///
\\\ Corbantis Mercenary and Freelance Pilot ///

I just sent this along to both the Combat Developer and Thunderheart.

***keep your fingers crossed***

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This is a list of the most important pains of the Carbineer profession. Right now the class is nothing more than a support class that must be combined with other professions in order to gain even the basic usefulness of other single professions. However, with a bit of Developer attention on a few key points I feel the class could pull even with the other elite combat classes.

The HAM costs for the various carbine specials are so high that the carbineer skills cannot be effectively used in combat without doctor buffs, extensive food use or heavy investment into medical skills.

Currently carbineer has +60 at master and as a result, carbines are the slowest of the ranged elite professions. This makes it difficult to contribute to a group in PvE because other classes are firing faster thus doing more damage. It also makes engaging in PvP largely futile. The low speed of the class forces players to either accept it, spend millions on speed enhancing tapes or spend all of their remaining points to add bounty hunter for more speed.

Carbineers only have available energy, acid and heat. These are incredibly common resists in both PvE and PvP. Many high-end targets (for example, certain nightsisters) cannot even be damaged by carbineers meaning they are unable to participate in certain high-end content. It is highly unfair that this profession is unable to participate in certain content.

Carbineers lag behind other elite classes in defenses. Even melee classes typically have more range defense than carbineers. The class has many AoE/cone specials which draw significant attention to the player. Without sufficient defenses, these skills are more suicidal than practical. In addition, it has recently come to light that counterattack is not working properly.

Without the ability to target mind, carbineers must attack either action or health. The issue here is that after the 75% PvP reduction, range mitigation and composite armor, the damage applied to the target is so minimal that targets with doctor buffs (99.9% of targets are buffed) will just regen the health or action back almost as fast as it is applied. In the event some damage does accumulate, the target can just use a Stim to heal the damage. In essence, the combination of damage reduction, doctor buffs and stims means that a target can regen and/or heal damage faster than it can be applied by a Carbineer. The reasons for this include inability to hit the mind pool, low speed (Issue #2) and carbine damage selection (armors in the game are very effective at stopping energy, heat and acid - Issue #3).