Combat Medic Archive

I've recently made Master Combat Medic on Farstar (Europe) and am now wanting to master one of the ranged combat classes to go with it. I don't really want to do Carbines, which leaves me with a choice of Pistoleer or Rifleman... With Rifleman I can stay well back and hit people/mobs from afar, but would be vulnerable to Melee fighters, particularly in PvP so my inclination is to go for Master Pistoleer - despite the fact that I've already got novice Rifleman. Also, which ever profesion I go for I want to Master, If I'm going to do it, I'll do it all the way.

Answers on a postcard...

If you want to primarily do PvP, I'd go for rifleman. If you want to go for primarily PvE, I'd go for Pistoleer.

CM/Riflemen have an extreme advantage over normal Riflemen, b/c tossing poisons and diseases gives you combat xp like crazy...and the Rifle Specials column is the speed for rifles. You can fly through that column as a poison/disease tossing CM. If you go with a group hunt, toss the area poisons and diseases, then just start firing away. Any creatures you never touch give you full combat xp (like 3-4k per creature on dathomir). If you just heal the group then every creature that dies gives you pure combat xp.

once you get 3-4 boxes in rifleman, just fire normal shots. With a high damage T21, you will fire once a second and start getting serious rifle xp.

The Pistol Stances column is not nearly so valuable. /shrug

That's just my two cents.

Kiarda Kismet
Master CM on Gorath

Both these comments make a lot of sense, my initial inclination was towards Rifleman, but the mind drain is something that could be hard to justify. With pistols I could use poisons as a mid/long range attack and then pistols at closer range, so I'm starting to veer more toward pistols...

Any other suggestions out there?

well all i can say is.. if you can wait for the combat revamp to come in, they were going to change the HAM costs on using specials so that they regen ALOT quicker.. if that happens then rifleman would be a great choice.. but under the current combat system a rifleman is not a good combo with Master CM

Hmmm. I am a Master CM/Rifleman with 900/800/900 mind stats. I don't see this massive mind drain that you do.

well my mind stats are 1000/500/500 and I'm not taking anything out of health and action to boost my secondary stats for what i see as a minimal improvement to the mind.. even taking a muon gold and going 1500/1000/1000 still drains the mindvery quickly when spamming specials

I can see that whichever of the two I chose to persue, there are going to be benefits and drawbacks, so seeing as I already have Novice Rifleman, I might persue that first rather than waste the 5k I spent paying an NPC to teach me.

Unless of course someone else can persuade me that pistols is far better?

well just look at the defence mods the pistoleer has.. they rock! and stopping shot just rules!! and you can spam as many times as you like and heal yourself when you HAM get too low.

Go Pistoleer. When you spam your specials you can heal the damage you give yourself. As a rifleman you cant heal that mind damage. In a fight you still will get incapped from running out of mind but you will last longer if you dont use mind in your specials. Im a MCH/Pistoleer and I dropped Rifleman bc i was getting incapped to much and I had 1000/500/500 mind...Still do

I've been a Master Pistoleer and nowtrying master rifleman now, and rifleman is good but the mind drain is just too much of a drain, you throw a mind poison a few head shot and you'll have no mind left. I prefer Master CM/Pistoleer combo over the rifleman any day.

I'm a MCM and am climbing the pistoleer trees rather quickly. You get great speed, accuracy, and defense mods as a pistoleer. You get crazy dodge mods too if you climb that first tree, which I'm not going to do because I'm greedy and wanted to be able to rez ;-) SO, pistoleer gets a knockdown, defense vs. stun, blind, dizzy, and something else which I forget right now, they get ranged defense mitigation, they get speed mods, they get stopping shot which rocks, fan shot which does just a bit less damage but takes less HAM and time to spam, and great mods. I've heard that master riflemen rock, but only once you hit master, until then you get owned. I had a similar debate when choosing what my char was going to be. I had 3001 in rifleman and decided to give it up for pistoleer, in which i'm now 0443. So, ultimately it's your choice, but i personally feel pistoleer rocks. Oh, and also, like someone mentioned already, you can heal your HA bars when you spam specials if you're a pistoleer, but can only mindheal your M bar if you go rifleman, which does crazy wound and BF, and isn't worth it unless you're playing primarily support and doing it to others. That's my 2 cents, hope it helped.

oh yeah, i forgot to mention this, it takes far less time to climb the pistoleer trees than the rifleman trees. For some reason, it just seems that the xp comes quicker. get a decent suit of armor and go to dantooine and do quenker missions. Have your pet or creature grouped, but not fighting, and you'll get 20K for each lair, it goes pretty quickly. I get a tree or two a night, and the fourth trees only took 1.5 nights to do.

OK, on this evidence I've started to lean towards Pistoleer once again... So come on Riflemen... give me your best!

On another note, I know what damage a T21 rifle can do, but I've yet to look into the Pistoleer elite weapon... how good is it, and what are it's normal stats?