Carbineer Archive

You know, I've been one since launch.

A little ways down the road, I realized I was pretty good at keeping enemies in a position that they couldnt move. Great! I would get people in my group and just use action shot 1 & 2 to keep them down(this was before Supression Fire 1 worked). Everything worked out. I had a niche in a group.

So they implemented timers. Boo. Now what?

What do I do?Unless I'm grouping with pikemen or other carbineers, I'm not really helping my group that much with my carbine. I can't really keep enemies away from us reliably, since I can only do it once every 30 seconds, and the effect lasts about 5. Most enemies tend to run pretty darn fast.

So I'm no longer good for crowd control.

Ok well can I help out with the health/mind damage that everyone else does? Not really. Sure I can sit there with regular attacks, but thats random as well.

So basically, all I do is damage the mob, but rarley if ever in a large group with the mob drop from action damage, which is the primary damage I do. So really I just soak up XP, to get more carbineer skills, to continue my ineffectiveness in a group.

I'm not saying there arent other things I can do in a group to help - but none of them really come from my carbineer profession.

The majority of people in this game seem to do health damage. Maybe its just the extreme popularlity of Bounty Hunters and Pistoleers. But this makes all our action attacks(which our profession is built upon) worthless in a group.

So we have to rely on our non-action damage attacks right? Well you can't really rely on our random pool attacks, as those can do any of the three pools, and after about 6 shots your near dead.

So can we use Supression Fire 2, Charge Shot 1, Charge Shot 2, or a status change attack?

Well. The first three suck. So those are out of the question. I blame the timers and the brokeness of certain skills.

So what about status change? Well, as far as I have discovered stun doesnt work. I've never really noticed a difference with an enemy being stunned. It says it takes away a round of combat, but I havent seen that.

Can we blind like Bounty Hunters ? Yes, but there is no guarentee. You could fire 1 Full Auto and blind, or fire 10 and get no blind.

Can we dizzy? Yes and no. Full Auto seems to dizzy almost everytime, yet it wears off instantly. Bug or what?

So what are we left with? We can do action damage - which rarley helps kill the mob faster, and we can do stun - which seems to be the most worthless of status changes, if it even does anything at all.

Maybe carbineers should be the one professions EXEMPT from timers, thus we get our role as crowd control back. Otherwise our whole profession needs to be reworked to have a point.

I'm not saying damaing action is worthless - but in the context of a group it usually is, due to the extreme popularity of health-damaging professions, and the seemingly greater chance of hitting health with regular attacks.

So please. Give us back our crowd control, or give us new skills or something.

Aram, ever since I've become a Novice Carbineer I've been doing a lot of thinking regarding my place in the Galaxy. With the mid-August patch Carbineers have become very inefective at almost all forms of combat. Hunting, forget it. MOB combat, eh - not so bad. But my big peeve is my role in PvP combat.

As you mentioned, compared to other Elite Professions like Commando, Bounty Hunter, or even Pistoleer and Rifleman, Carbineers are at a vast disadvantage in PvP combat.

I started off as a Carbineer because historically soldiers using Carbines have been very flexible troops and have formed the core of fast attack and special forces fire teams. Granted, Carbineers in SWG can be rather potent in a group - especially if paried with a Squad Leader or other elite ranged specialists - but individually we seem to be vastly underpowered.

Even our weapons are the target of scorn and shame. I just picked up a new Elite Carbine, manufactured by one of the best weaponsmiths on Sunrunner, that does a nice 41.0 DPS. However, compared to some of the advanced pistols and heavy weapons employed by Bounty Hunters and Commandos the damage is barely enough to make a dent in some tough enemies.

So here's my proposition; increase the abilities of the Carbineer (I like Aram's suggestion of nixing the knockdown/movement timeout for Carbineers) and give us better weapons. I'm not asking the Devs to make Carbineers the most powerful of any class, but to give us a bit more ballance (or nerf the other elites, whichever is easier ) in combat, PvP especially.

The purpose of carbineer? umm...well....you could...were good for...(trails off).....

As it stands now, All we're good for is.......Cannonfodder.....

broke skills, high HAM,elite carbine suxor's.......yup, we're Cannonfodder...

Atleast we get the cool titles

Ah yes! The cool titles! I love the titles! I usually randomly rotate my titles between the 4 carbineer tree titles. Master Carbineer sounds kinda dumb compared to Mercenary, Assaulter, Infiltrator and Maurader... and I gave up using my CH titles a long time ago as they only get me into tell hell.

It seems to be the general consensus that we well..suck.

Are they ever going to fix us? Its not like certain problems like absurd HAM costs are new - its been known since day 1.

Or how about the fact that roughly half of our skills do not work, or do not work as itended(Scatter Shot 1 is still bugged, Wild Shot is useless, Burst Shot 2 does little more than Burst Shot 1, Full Auto wont stick the dizzy, Legshot3 is Legshot2 in disguise, Charge 1 & 2 suck or do not work, None of the area attacks work).

I forgot to address another issue of ours. We can also do area attacks. Great, too bad they dont work, and even if they did they would hardley seem beneficial in a group or alone. Groups, even with large amounts of people try and take on the least amount of mobs, preferably one. Why? Its more efficiant that way, and less dangerous. Thus having some crazy carbineer in your group letting loose area attacks is more likley to get you killed than anything else. In addition the attacks dont seem very damaging, and target random pools.

Why do I get the impression that the idea the devs had for us carbineers is just guys with guns, with blindfolds over their eyes, spraying shots in every which direction praying we hit something?

Instead of KD, since we attack the legs, shoulding we force mobs to slow down? It's not as drastic as KD spamming, but, we should be able to gradually slow people down. This would at least help against animals--heck, I don't even care if it's in PVP. We should all know by now that if you load up any creature with enough Warningshots, it will slow down. Why not make that a possibility only carbineers have control over? Then we'd have more of a niche in groups, and we wouldn't hear screams of nerf since we didn't get full KD ability back.

Maybe our KD timer could be shortened? instead of 30, say 15 for carbineers. I don't know--I'm just spouting out ideas. I left pikeman for this profession. I don't want to leave a useless profession only to find out my new profession is useless.

Well causing slow down infringes on trapping, I'm not out to make any other profession more worthless.

Warning shot thing is a bug and will hopefully be fixed, as well warning shot seems to miss horridly on higher level mobs. If you want to slow a mob down, get some trapping skill.

However I believe we were designed with crowd control in mind, thus maybe either carbineers should have no timers, or drastically reduced timers. Then we could employ our various skills which cause knockdowns or posture changes(Supression Fire2, As 1, As 2, Charge shot 1 & 2).

Since the KD/Posture change timer went in, I've found myself doing the following:

BH FireKD, Confusion Shot (until one or both takes), then switching to LLC if it makes sense, then using the LLC until the mob is fried. I do this because the HAM costs, even for LightningSingle1, are so low that I can spam 3k hits forever. I only switch back to my beloved carbine if the enemy is closing on me and I don't want to take a hit with the LLC equipped, and I can hit better while moving with my carbine.

My next steps are Eye Shot and Bleed Shot (both BH Pistol Specials), for which I will have to turn in some Carbine Skills. I hate to have to do this, but I feel like I have no choice. The BH Pistol specials are among the best in the game, and beat just about everything in the Carbine tree. Sad, but true.

I never intended to become a BH at all, but the way the specials work out, Master Carbineer is just not worth it. I have a ton of stored carbine XP (800,000) because I still use it in combat, and when I do I get great XP, but I have to switch weapons constantly.

Also, can some developer explain to me why a knocked down, dizzy, rifle-toting Tusken can just jump up the instant he's knocked down, while when I'm dizzy and KDed, I stay that way for half a minute? No? Didn't think so...

Area attacks, I don't know how cant you make it work. Get laser carbine, go to 50m action shot2 for bleeds and then full auto area 1 or 2. It's cone so in 50m range it's around 20m wide area what will get hit. If you dont have any tank (melee/pet/bot) change to dxr6 or dh17snub when mobs are closing and spam full auto area. Works fine for me except i kill myself with action pool costs.

Guys i know u wanna be fixed but everytime the devs try to fix some profession it screws another one up so they are trying to see what will be balanced and not make another profession mad.

My feelings on the subject are that the posture change abilitiesare what the carbine was about. This is something that this class originally had to control a firefight while your group took down the mob. It allowed you to be a saftey for your team . As it stands now though most of the higher level carbine abilities are broken. Just my 2 cents.

Duggan

Shadowfire