Carbineer Archive

K, I'm trying to put together my findings regarding my favourite weapon, some of these may be total bias but I will try to keep things fair, I'm not searching for a fix like the commando prof had. My findings are mostly based on PvE, though I have been killed more than enough in PvP to know where I lack

I Rate of fire (speed issue)

Currently the Master Carbineer will have speed mods at 60, this means in order to shoot a carbine at hard cap the speed rating of the weapon must not be higher than 2.5, so far on starsider I've only seen a DH17 carbine with speed like that.

This ultimately means that as a master carbineer, you won't be able to modify your weapon with a damage slice and a 33% damage powerup and still shoot at hard cap. As a note I haven't seen an elite carbine on starsider yet - but I'm pretty sure they don't come with 2.5 speed out of the box.

II The carbine crafting

Although the weaponsmiths can give a much clearer view on this, I still think it should be mentioned here. The crafting of the carbine doesn't allow carbines to the extent as pistols are (generally this goes for all weapons that require mulitple power handlers and such). This actually puts pistols at a damage range that carbines can't reach, ultimately making the carbines the weapon with the lowest damage range.

Taking issue I into account carbineers have the slowest weapons with the lowest damage range.

III HAM costs

In both PvE and PvP a carbineer is currently much more dangerous to himself than his opponent is, in other words I'm personally able to reach incap limit using 5 specials and this is with a decent action pool of 950.

In general I have yet to use a special that costs me less than 100 action to shoot.

Due to these overly high HAM costs it is pretty much impossible to play a carbineer without being a medic, of course a doctor with buffs would be even better.

IV Melee damage Increase

Although this is not an issue that has been debated much, but I'm pretty confident that carbineers actually take higher damage when a meleer (mob) is hitting you. This is very deadly as hitting one mob aggroes all mobs around it.

From what I've seen rifleman takes 3x melee damage, and carbineers take 2x damage from meleers. I have no problem with these, or should I say I wouldn't have had a problem with these modifiers if riflemen and carbineers were actually able to keep the meleers at a distance. But as things are now, this isn't possible as combat is either at full range (initial attacks) or at point blank.

V Specials and the perception of the class role

Looking at the marksman tree, pistols do health damage, carbines do action damage and rifles do mind damage. So quite logically people tend to think of pistoleers as those who target health, carbineers as those who target action and riflemen as those who target mind. This holds true with the rifleman, the pistoleers and carbineers seem to lose their ability to target a specific pool. However this is worse for the carbineer as the only damaging special (direct damage not bleeds) is legshot 3, which is the same as legshot 2. These are both called Kneecap shot - seems like legshot 2 has been copy/pasted but not modified.

What about actionshot (1 and 2), well it does inflict an action bleed, but the damage it does is random at best, by this I mean it hits health more often. If it even inflicts damage when used. The cone effect on actionshot 2 does work however, sometimes also putting the bleed on the surronding mobs aswell.

I don't want to go into each special here, as that has been done so many times on the carbineer forum. But I have to say that carbineers have too many styles that does exactly the same things (or close to). I.e there is very little difference between burstshot, crippling shot and fullautosingle - this amounts to 5 specials which more or less have the same functionality.

Suggestions to the issues:

Personally I find a listing of issues has little to no use unless backed up with suggestion on how to solve the problems.

I Rate of fire - suggestion to fix/help this

Well this should be the easiest, I think the master carbineer should be on par with a non-master bounty hunter in terms of speed of using the carbine. My suggestion is not to nerf the bounty hunter but to bring the carbineer up in terms of speed mods.

So by bringing the carbineer up to around 75 or 80 speed, this would also make sense as (correct me if I'm wrong here) the pistoleer is at 74 speed, and rifleman at 90 speed. Then 80 speed for the carbineer would put him in between the two.

II The crafting of the carbine - suggestions to fix/help this

Currently the most popular carbine requires (I think) four power handlers and as an example a T21 rifle requires 10 of those.

So my suggestion is:

Pistol 1 power handler (as it is now), carbine 2 power handlers and rifles 3 power handlers

The modifiers on the power handlers should stack and I think this would bring a certain balance between the 3 weapons in terms of damage ranges.

III HAM costs - suggestions to fix/help this

I will bring in an example from my own char.

My carbine has 28/44/22 (laser carbine) ham costs on it, this gives the following costs in a selected few specials:

Legshot (1,2,3) - 117 , fullautosingle (1,2) 179 and crippling shot 152

First of all I wonder why the mulitplier (i assume there is a mulitplier) is the same for all 3 specials in a line like legshot. But I think the key is to reduce the mulitplier on these specials, as they are way too high as it is now.

IV melee damage increase - suggestions to fix/help this

As I said earlier, if the pistoleers, carbineers and riflemen has skills to keep the mobs/players at a distance according to their damage modifierthen I would have no problem with having this increase. By this I mean rifleman has the best skills to avoid a mob comeclose,carbineer has some skills at keeping a mob/playeraways from point blank and thepistoleer has no skills (or at least very few skills) in that area.

Otherwise I would suggest to remove this.

V Specials and the perception of the class role

This is long and deserves a thread just for this purpose, but I would like to see the carbineer to have better control of where he puts his damage - as it is now 80% of our specials are random pool.

Just to pur one example of a special change up to debate:

Crippling shot - targets action pool, damage modifier of 5x and adds aaction bleed

Then at master the carbineer could gain a skill like this but with the cone effect.

All in all, the carbineer needs an overhaul, only thing that makes the carbineer remotely playable are the other classes available.