Carbineer Archive

Yeah this topic has been mentioned ad nasuem, but it wasn't until last night that I saw the true nature of things when I dueled my Trickshot Friend.

I have carbines 4-4-2-4 and using a powered up for speed and damage sliced Elite carbine (120-230 dmg speed w/powerup 2.6) I got totally creamed. He could spam Fan Shot with his FWG and hit me consistently for 300 points of damage, where as my cripple shot was hitting about 293 only at about half the speed of fan. I couldn't keep up.

Now truth be told I wasn't wearing any armor and we started the fight at about 30 meters. When we started the fight at 50 meters I won both duels using my Damage Sliced and Speed powered up laser carbine. only by opening the fight with Actionshot 2, but still his fan shot was hitting me from about 40 meters and hiting me hard.

I could tolerate pistols doing that kind of damage at that rate IF they were seriously reduced in accuarcy when at range. But as a Novice pistoler I know that pistols are pretty **edit** accurate and reliable even well beyond their ideal ranges. A pistol should be worthless beyond 30 meters I think that might correct alot of imbalances in the game. Or at least they need to up the damge of carbines so that we are at least somewhat competitive with riflemen in that area. If we are expected to be this slow then we should get the firepower to back it up.

I gave up carbines and switched to pistols because of this damage imbalance. When I think carbine I think full auto firing. When I think pistol I think good up close, worthless at range (excluding olympic target shooting pistols lol). and when I think rifle, I think of snipers. The really need to adjust the strengths and weaknesses of all the weapons and balance them better because right now theres no good reason to be anything other than a pistoleer.

IMO, it all comes back to HAM costs. A pistoleer can fire fanshot nonstop. How many crippleshots do you think a carbineer can fire off before he incaps himself? In a duel, the carbineer has to balance wanting to dole out big damage and yet not incapping himself. A pistoleer has no such difficulty. Thus the pistoleer can dole out more and more consistent damage over time.

definetly... Pistol special moves cost on average around 40-80 Action... Carbine moves like Full auto which isn't very damaging costs around 150 Action and it does significantly less damage than Fan Shot... I dont want to cry for a nerf bat but Carbineers need a boost bad!

Speaking as a pistoleer, I strongly believe the HAM cost for Fan Shot is currently too low.

One on one is not a good comparison IMO.

Carbine should be a crowd control weapon and the true comparison should be how each does taking down a group of mobs.

Pistoleer should kill one enemy faster and more percise, and Carbineer should kill a group faster. Mostcarbine specials should be cone.

This big issue on why pistols do so much damage is because pistols can be made very high quality. Its easy to find pistols that do as much or like 90% of the damage of carbines. Combine that with the fact they fire faster and you have more damage over time than carbines.

The Devs have created a system where pistols damage is probably a bit too high. They can't raise the damage on carbines w/o doing it to rifles and then doing it to heavy weapons.

At this point, it is a crafting issue. Krayt and loot-only part weapons are really only easy to make for pistols. They can be made for other weapons but they use 4-5 times as many parts so they cannot be made as easily.

I agree that HAM costs for some of the pistoleer specials are too low.

However, I've noticed that a lot of people completely neglect armor in pvp when most pistols are AR0. I don't understand why said people wouldwant toneglect thatwhen even the worst piece of bone armor will automatically cut AR0 damage in half outright.

Wearing a 66% across the board (sliced for effectiveness) advanced composite helm.... I still lost every duel/fight to every BH dabbler I met 1 box shy of master carbineer. Eyeshot eyeshot eyeshot. Sure, I died to them faster with no armor but I still lost anyway with doctor buffs and a full suit of good advanced composite armor.

After spending over 300,000 credits on this armor and having it sliced... I think I wasted my credits. I live twice as long in pvp but I still end up losing...

Those pistols really hurt =(

Actually, it was the high HAM costs that attracted me to the carbineer class. I also wanted to be a doctor so with high quickness and high strength surely a very pricey, HAM-wise, weapon should be the quickest and deal out the most damage, right? I was wrong. Even with the high HAM costs, it does less damage than a pistol and a far slower pace. It's unreal. The devs really need to do something about it.

Unfortunately, things are never going to be realisticly balanced because of the basic game design. Three guys (one pistol, one carbine, one rifle) stand 10m from a target that isn't moving and unload into as fast as they can. Assume that they never miss. The damage of a semiautomatic pistol firing at the fastest rate possible will not come close to the damage of a middle of the road carbine unloading at fully automatic speed. This damage will again be eclipsed by a heavy machine gun like say an M60 which would be under the rifle category. The maximum possible damage per round should be balanced accordingly if they want to reflect reality.

If they do this though the pistol will fall into the category that it is in in real life: for military use it is a last resort weapon one step above a combat knife. The effective ranges would also paint a similar picture with sniper rifles having a huge range, pistols having a very short range in general and carbines having a high range of accuracy bordering on that of the common rifle but not coming close to a sniper's gun. Additionally a rifle does not become "less accurate" as a target gets closer, until the target is within 10 feet or so and the arc of the moving gun barrel actually makes asignificant difference in how fast the target can be acquired. That just defies physics. The reality is that considered across all ranges carbines and rifles are more accurate and dish out a helluva lot more damage per second than pistols. So realism has to be sacrificed to make pistols a viable weapon choice as a standalone career. It's a contrivance though and a pretty hefty one.

Keeping that in mind the least they could do (seems to me anyway) is to develop a consistent and linear scheme, wherein pistols are short range, low damage and fast, carbines are mid range, fast, and mid damage and rifles are slower and high damage. The average damage per second of these weapons should be examined thoroughly and brought into line. If a pistol is doing 90% damage twice as fast it is doing %180 of the damage per second, which is grossly unrealistic as well as unbalancing. (just an example pulled from a post above). The maximum damage output of a pistol should be roughly half that of the laser carbine at best, as the laser carb has a typical speed of roughly 4 seconds and a pistol speed is typically at about 2 seconds. Keep in mind this is only taking into account speed and damage. When you add in the bonuses which weigh heavily in favor of pistols at the moment the equation becomes even more lopsided.

This is not to say "please nerf pistols" it is to say "please balance the game". In the long run nerfing one class or buffing another class amounts to the same thing, but you can't explain that higher perspective to every 12 year old online, so the easiest thing to do would be to buff as needed to balance. (If jimmy and jack have 5 cents and 8 cents, buffing jimmy 3 cents has the same effect as nerfing jack 3 cents in that in both situations they end up balanced. Either way they need to do some serious reworking.)

I had a krayt made FWG5 - with power up and a 30% slice it was doing 434 max dmg at 1.3 speed.

it wasn't the best tissue I could've used.

Well you have to take into acount that pistols like the FWG5 and other popular pistols have no armor piercing. Granted - they are still absurd in their damage/speed, but that point must be accounted for.

At least most of our guns have AP 1, and the laser has 2(but armor piercing doesnt seem to work properly in PvP against unarmoured targets, so we lose a lot of damage there).

So if that pistoleer uses a FWG5 on you, and your wearing composite with heat resist, that gun is actually doing Damage - 50% - resist %. 50% is taken off for the armor, then resists are applied. That's a pretty big penalty.

Now if you dont wear armor - those pistols are deadly, however if you do, you will notice they do next to nothing to you. I have 50%ish composite armor(so thats 50%ish heat resist) and I fought a guy with a FWG5 earlier. He was doing almost no damage to me. So if he hits me for 400 damage, only 100 gets through. 400minus 50%(AP0 vs AR 1)= 200, minus another 50%(heat resist) is 100.

The real problem however is the combination of both absurd damage and very fast speeds, which almost negates any penalties they incur, because they can shoot so fast and hard.

I also think the armor system in this game is overly complex, and armor due to design is limited by nature. All armor has some vulerability, which means no resist. But it means more than even no resist, it means the attack is treated as having NO armor penalty, which I think is a mistake. That means you are incurring the penalty of wearing armor(which is very heft in the case of composite) but actually recieving no bonuses.

So if that AP 0 pistol heats your armor vulnerablity, it does full damage. I could understand no resists being applied - because the armor doesnt have any - but armor is armor. That's like saying if you were wearing a bullet proof vest(used to protect against .. well bullets) and were hit with a baseball bat in the chest, that it is like you were wearing nothing. It would still provide SOME protection(or actually in this example a lot).

Also given the fact that most professions get a wide range of damage types, so they can exploit any armor weaknesses(for example pistoleers and rifleman can bypass composite armor using stun weapons).