Carbineer Archive
Thread: An analysis of all carbineer skills.
Well since so many of our skills seem to either not work, not do what they intended, or just seem useless because they do something so similar to another, lets take a look at each skill. I'll need help from anyone willing to give it to compile a good list, because I dont have experiance with all the skills, but I've gathered the general idea from reading most of the posts on this board.
Let's start from the bottom and work our way up each skill tree.
Novice Carbineer - Action Shot 2, Full Auto Single 2.
Action Shot 2 - Damage over time (DoT) to action pool on an enemy target. Causes AREA effect attack(but tends to only bleed 1 target). Causes posture change, so if the enemy is standing, they will kneel, if kneeling they will be forced prone. This posture change results in a slight delay effect in the enemy, effectivley freezing them for a few seconds. Very usefull, but I dont believe it is supposed to have either the area effect OR the posture change. Currently its one of my most used skills and I'm almost up to some 3rd tier skills.
Full Auto Single 2 - High damage against 1 target, applies to a random pool. Tends to hit health from my experiance. High HAM cost, but decent damage for a novice carbineer ( I get around 500-700 with an EE3 ). From my experiance this can cause stun, dizzy, or blind. Very nice.
Intermediate Carbine Assault Tactics - Scatter Shot 1.
Scatter Shot 1 - A single target attack that hits for reletivly high damage and can hit all or some of a targets pools at the same time. Useful, but very hard to get a reading of how much you are doing due to the combat window bug where scatter shot always lists as doing "1" damage. This seems like it would be easy to fix and hopefully it will be.
Advanced Carbine Assault Tactics - Wild Shot 1.
Wild Shot 1 - No clue. Do not have it, and very few people mention it in their posts. I can only assume that means it is not too usefull? The skill description states it can stun a single target. If someone can give me an accurate damage for this skill that would be usefull. An attack that stuns a target doesnt seem very useful since most of our skills seem to have the "stun" effect by default. So unless this does good damage in addition to stunning, it would be rather meaningless.
Expert Carbine Assault Tactics - Scatter Shot 2.
Scatter Shot 2 - Well this is just an improved Scatter Shot 1 from what I can tell. Seems do quite a big of damage and can hit any or all 3 HAM bars on an single enemy. Very nice from what I have read from posts. Again, if anyone wants to comment feel free.
Master Carbine Assault Tactics - Wild Shot 2
Wild Shot 2 - The description says it can stun multiple targets. So basically Wild Shot 1 with an added area effect and maybe some damage increase? Anyone who has this feel free to comment. Once again, stunning does not seem very usefull for a specific skill as many of our skills seem to stun already.
IIntermediate Carbine Marksmanship - Leg Shot 3
Leg Shot 3, is sadly, nothing more than Leg Shot 2 from all my experiance. There might be a slight increase in damage, but not near enough. It does seem to cause "stun" often, but I can't recall if Leg Shot 2 did that either. Reletivly cheap HAM cost, targets the enemies action pool. I hit for 200-400 roughly. This skill seems like they forget to change the numbers from Leg Shot 2 and just gave it another name. Hopefully this skill will be looked at.
Expert Carbine Marksmanship - Crippling Shot.
Crippling Shot - The skill descrption is very vague, sadly. From what I have gathered from your posts, it does a very high amount of damage, that hits a random pool, but at a high HAM cost. I've seen many posts stating that Burst Shot 1 or Scatter Shot 1 can rival its damage almost, and that seems a bit wrong that two tier 1 skills can almost rival a tier 3 skill.
Intermediate Carbine Counterinsurgency - Burst Shot 1
Burst Shot 1 - Seems like an upgraded full auto. Targets a single enemy, and does a lot of damage. I dont have this skill yet, so anyone who wants to comment please do.
Expert Carbine Counterinsurgency - Burst Shot 2
Burst Shot 2 - Upgraded Burst Shot 1? No idea on the damage, HAM cost, or any effects it may cause. Hopefully does a significant amount more damage than Burst Shot 2.
Master Carbine Counterinsurgency - Supression Fire 2
Supression Fire 2 - From all accounts, worthless. Action Shot 2 already does what Supression FIre 2 does and it only the "novice carbineer" skill. Why is supression fire 2 all the way up at master carbine counterinsurgency? Perhaps if Action Shot 2 is fixed, if the posture change is not intended, this skill would be worthwhile. No idea on damage output, but it is supposed to cause a posture change, ala Action Shot 2.
Intermediate Carbine Special Abilities - Full Auto Area 1
Full Auto Area 1 - Seems like a weaker Full Auto Single 1, but with an area effect. Not completlty worthless, but from my experiance in most games, "area" attacks are more a deathwish than a help. I've used it to take out whole groups of small rodents for entertainment, but once again, I dont use it in hunting situations as its more likley to aggro more enemies than I can handle.
Advanced Carbine Special Abilities- Charge Shot 1
Charge Shot 1 - Knockdown 1 target. No idea on damage output, HAM cost, or how succesfull the knockdown is. Any advice is welcome.
Expert Carbine Special Abilities - Full Auto Area 2
Full Auto Area 2 - Upgraded version of Full Auto Area 1. No idea on damage output or anything else. Hits multiple targets in front of you.
Master Carbine Special Abilities- Charge Shot 2.
Charge Shot 2 - Once again upgraded version of Charge Shot 1, with an added area effect. I dont have this, or know how much damage it does, but if it can knockdown multiple targets, that sounds pretty usefull.
Sadly, at Master Carbineer, we get nothing but some skill mods. Would be nice if we got a skill or a new weapon certifaction.
If I have anything wrong, or you want to add your own experiance, please do.
A brief recap about problems with certain skills.
Action Shot 2 doing an area effect and posture change, not sure if that is intended or a bug.
Legshot 3 being the same thing as Legshot2.
Scatter Shot 1 displaying "1" damage always in the readout screen.
Supression Fire 2 being worthless since Action Shot 2 does its job and is much much easier to get.
Lower tier skills being almost or as good as top tier skills( from what I read Burstshot1 can almost do the same as Crippling shot ).
I'm not sure why people dont like crippling shot, because the damage increase from burst shot 1 or 2 is very noticable. I ran around shooting at stuff to get exact numbers yesterday, I couldnt go over 1550 damage or so with burst shot 2, and the highest hit I got with cripple shot was 1962, I think.. This is with a 266 max damage carbine. Problem I see though is burst shot 1 went up to over 1500 damage too so the difference between those two is very small. Maybe burst2 hits for higher averages or something.. But that's alot harder to tell than just max hits, would have to gather a bunch of lengthy logs and parse them. (I dont really use any of these though because underhand shot / fire knockdown are just simply so much better vs just about anything unless you want to just show off with high hits) HAM cost on cripple shot is slightly higher than burst2, and burst2 is a bit higher than burst1.
Second, all the AE effects are broken. The only AE that actually does damage to multiple targets is actionshot 2, and that probably isnt supposed to 
Full auto area 1/2 both HIT multiple targets.. they just dont do damage to them. They do damage to one of the targets, the rest of the targets receive "blanks" of some sort, for example if you shoot at a camp of non aggressive non social mobs, they'll all aggro on you cause you hit them all, but only one receives any damage.
Charge shot 2 is supposed to be an area effect knockdown yeah, but it's not AE, and it doesnt knockdown. Other than that it works fine.
Wild/scattershots I've briefly tested when I initially got them, I cant recall wildshot2 AE working either, but I havent really used either of these since then.
There's a chance the actionshot2 thing is intended I guess, but I really dont see a single hint pointing to that other than the fact that its not been fixed yet. The description of the skill is the exact same as actionshot1, other than it says its more powerful. The effect of the shot is a single shot fired, which also points to not an AE (all the others seem to mostly have some rapid fire in an actual area in front of you). It does direct damage to everything but the target, which isnt mentioned anywhere either, and isnt in line with the whole bleed line of shots, and last but not least, its insanely overpowered as an AE vs mobs for exping.
Anyways, in addition to what I posted before, the full auto areas being totally broken is a bit misleading and wrong, since they do damage after you fire at them a while.. but the first shots only shoot those blanks to everything but the first one. Still broken, just not as bad. (I'm dumb and didnt test them on anything that could take several shots at first, so I never saw anything but blanks)
Also did a few tests on the wildshots and scattershots to get some info out of them, so wildshots first.. They are really low damage, (800+ max on wildshot1 and 1000+ max on 2, compared to 1500+ on burst shot 1 or 1950+ on cripple) wildshot 2 indeed doesnt have any ae in it, although the effect on it is clearly intended for an AE. Shoots some concentrated fire in a 45 degree cone in front of you, pretty much like full auto area. I dismissed both of these as pretty useless once again and didnt do much more tests on them
Scattershots well.. are hard to test :/ I tested mostly scattershot2, but I'd imagine the following goes for 1 as well, it just does a bit less damage. They do ok damage to all pools at once, although the damage isnt distributed evenly. Seems it does the least to the mind pool, health/action seem about similar.. but they vary alot, had several occasions of it doing 2x more damage to the health pool over 6-7 shots, and then the next time it did 2x the damage to the action pool. Never had mind as the pool that ran out first though. But its really hard to say how high that damage is, since it just displays 1 in the chat log and the spam on top of the mob is hard to figure out.
Basically on mobs with an AR of 0 and 20% to energy, approx 3500 HAM, was killing them in that 6-7 shots with a 26-266 damage laser carbine. It's, well.. Less dependant on luck than the random pool ones. It's a decent rate to kill them, if you compare it to cripple shot, cripple shot can kill them in 2 hits if you get high hits and luck out on them hitting the same pool, but on bad ones it can take up to 8-9 shots cause of low damage and hitting different pools with it. On average cripple shot seems to kill things faster though, maybe 1-2 shots faster on these mobs. Slightly higher ham cost on cripple again, 129 compared to 110.
Scattershot kind of has potential but I still wouldnt really use it over cripple except in some few select situations. (Again though I wouldnt use any of the carbineer skills over underhand/fireknockdown in any situation except charge shots with aCDEF in some few situations.. and actionshots, but those dont count )