Carbineer Archive

I have a 3.4 speed EE3 and a 1.9 speed DH17. Being a master carbineer and having all the BH carbine skills aswell, my shooting speed is very fast. However I was still expecting to see a difference between 3.4 speed and 1.9 speed, yet there isnt any. They shoot at the exact same rate, which is about 3 shots every 2 seconds (or 1.5 shots a second). Is this normal?

Yes. Speed is capped for weapons and the +speed bonus acts as a %. If you have +100 or better speed, theoretically, you'd fire the slowest carbine justas quickly as the fastest one for normal attacks. Where you'll start seeing some differences is in the delay after using a special move. The faster carbine should recover from specials faster.

i believe there's a lower limit to speed... i'm a pistols guy just switching to carbs, but for pistols it appears to be 1.0.

once you take speed modifiers for skills and powerups, i can make a 2.5 pistol shoot 1.0, and therefore see no difference in attack speed

Annex I'm a Master Carbineer too and it DOES shoot faster. You're looking at the animation of shots and not the actual damage you're dealing. Look at the damage numbers over the mob or even in the combat box. I hit about every second.

With master carbineer and bounty carbine skills, there is no difference between carbine weapon speeds, AT ALL. Not with specials, not with normal attacks, nothing. a 1.9 speed will fire normal autoattack fire the same speed as a 5.0 speed laser carbine will fire crippling shots. It's not an animation issue, it's not anyone's imagination, you can run tests on it if you turn combat timetabs on and spend a while shooting at stuff. The only thing making it look otherwise is that the combat tab is affected slightly by lag, so sometimes you might see 2 shots firing within the same second or 2 shots having 2 sec between them instead of 1.. But it'll be pretty evenly 1 per second in the long run.

It's caused by the speed mods acting as a percentage off the delay, so when you get to a -100% reduction, all your weapon delays will be zero (or negative, woo). But since all fire rates are capped at 1, nothing will fire faster than that.

This is also affecting pistoleers and rifles, pistols shoot everything at 1 sec too with a high enough mod, it just happens sooner than with carbines. Rifles get the same effect, kind of, but they dont quite get to the 100% mod, the max they can get is a +95 speed mod.. Which is basically the same thing in most cases. It's the reason the T21 was so insanely powerful for the masters and got nerfed, then the novices who didnt have this crazy speed bonus yet complained cause the thing wasnt overpowered at all for them.

It's totally impossible to balance out the different weapon classes because of this, cause you dont have a weapon class that shoots fast and light damage, a weaponclass that shoots medium speed and medium damage, and the last one shooting high damage and slow speed.. Whats actually happening is you have everyone shooting the same speed, only difference is the damage and ham costs (and accuracy&melee penalties in the case of rifles).

I really wish someone would make a big deal out of this, cause that's what it really is. It's not exactly the most visible problem, but it's the actual reasonfor alot of other very visible problems, mostly it's creating huge imbalances between the classes, and even within the classes. Like rifleman novices are having a really hard time because if they boosted them, masters would be too powerful. People try to nerf or boost the guns or specials in the classes to make up for the imbalance, butwhen the game mechanics arecausing it, that wont really fix anything in the long run.

A good example of this was when I first figured out something was wrong.. I was talking with a friend of mine who also uses carbines, he was about 1 box from master carbineer, so had all the speed bonuses except the one from master. Somehow we ended up talking about crippling shot, he was complaining how slow it fires (we were using the exact same gun). I was wondering what he was talking about, then he told me he has a 7 second delay between crippling shots. I was firing it at 1 second per shot.. 7 times slower at +50 carbine speed mod than it is for anyone with +100 or more speed.

It's also going to hurt the game big time in the long run since when you're designing a mmorpg you're probably going to want to have the game running for a long time, and in order to have that happen you need to keep adding new things. So when they want to start adding new weapons, new skills, new items.. Anything speed related is out of the question cause everyone is capped already, and there's no getting around that cap without totally changing how the speed works.

So here I go again, the speed mods should be a speed increase percentage instead of a delay decrease percentage, which would make it so that the speed mods never automatically reset delays to zero regardless of the weapon speed. This would probably also have to result in some additional balancing between the classes, but it's really necessary to do at some point.. And the sooner that happens the easier it is to do.

Im not looking at the animations, im not that dumb. Im looking at my combat window, and the rate of which im hitting the enemy. 3 hits every 2 seconds, with both the 1.9speed and the 3.4 speed, its exactly the same.

Thanks Sarne! That explains everything for me. Guess from now on damage andHAM costs are all ill be looking at...

Sarne hit the nail on the head. You can't balance a variety of weapons when they all shoot the same speed. Yet they all can, given the proper skill template. A master rifleman gets 95 speed bonus -- it takes a 20 second rifle to not be capped. A partial BH + carbineer or pistoleer will easily hit the cap many times over -- in fact, they can accumulate a speed mod over 100, meaning that you could give them a weapon with a delay of 1 million seconds and higher and they'd still cap it out at 1 second.

The bottom line is one of three things: either they have to a) cap the speed mod at something reasonable (maybe as high as 66) and adjust the skill mod distribution accordingly, or b) nerf the rifleman speed mod to a reasonable level, and make pistol and carbine speed mods on hybrid BH templates use the higher of the two values -- the weapon profession's modor the BH's mod, or c) switch to a percentage based on increase of attacks in a given time period, ala EQ's haste.

The EQ haste system probably offers the most room for variety and mix-and-match goodness in character design, with the fewest artificial restrictions (caps). However, it comes with a sort of "clumsiness" in trying to explain it to people. This is okay if you don't mind having a semi-invisible system of mechanics rather than an easily accessible and graspable system. However, even with an EQ-style system, you'd have to keep a tight rein on controlling the possible mods -- the current BH hybrid still gains a TON in power through pure speed increase even in that system with the current skill mod numbers.

Bottom line: It should take well made pistols and a master pistoleer to hit the 1 second cap, and for pistol variety's sake, even that should only brush it. Rifles and carbines have no business hitting the cap, but should be compensated by correspondingly outstanding per shot damage and AR. That's not happening now. As it is currently, it's easy for riflemen and pistoleers to hit the cap, and not too difficult to figure out how to cap out a carbine's speed (though it does take some skill point expenditure to do so), and so they're having to be adjusted to do really similar damage per special, resulting in lots of head-scratching about where the variety comes in, because it's just not here for the top levels of play.

I'm in favor of the "eq haste" system just for the reason that it doesnt have any kind of cap that way, you can just keep increasing the speed mods and they'll continue having a better effect than a lower speed mods as long as the weapon speed is slow enough. A semi-invisible system like that is fine, I mean, it's not like it's exactly visible now either is it? It's just aspeed increaseand most people assume that the higher it is, the faster you shoot.

Doesn't really have to be explained as long as the higher mod = shoot faster is true.With a 100% delay decrease at some point that's not true anymore, higher speed mod = same thing as a lower speed mod when you're over that point.. That's even worse to explain in detail than a speed increase percentage

Devs should read this.... bump!

Titanus

I agree, an invisible system shouldn't be bad. But it can become tedious for number crunchers trying to educate the masses and defend their crunching. I was a relativelyactive member of the EQ ranger community, and we as a community probably did more parsing than any other class in the game, so I've seen this a lot. People would always be trying to figure out their "effective delay" in order to calculate their DPS, and we'd always tell them to just calculate it unmodified, then increase the DPS they calculated by the percentage of haste they're running under -- some get it, some don't, but it's still a chore. Then, of course, when we go to test haste stacking via parsing, whenever you do this (calculating haste), you can't avoid the admittedly convoluted math involved in the difference between delay decrease and speed increase, and so you're always left trying to explain this stuff.

Granted, SWG seems like a less parse-happy system thus far, so this wouldn't be as bad an issue. But that's just an example of the annoyances of an invisible or overly complex system.

In this case, I think that EQ haste style would work, but so would capped decreases. One advantage capped decreases gives you is that if implemented properly, you can end up with good tradeoff situations: for those with low skill, a 30% powerup would end up granting more DPS increase than a 30% damage powerup, but for more powerful (and closer to capped) players, they'd be better off with the damage. This would mean some variation between weapon preferences, too -- newbies would slice for speed, masters for damage, etc.

EQ haste doesn't have that tradeoff, however. 30% more "haste" equals 30% more swings/shots, which is equivalent statistically to 30% more damage.

Either way, any one of the systems I mentioned in my previous post would be a vast improvement to the "BH/Carbineer or Rifleman wins" system currently in place.