Commando Archive

Additions are in this color.

1) Weapon Certifications – Heavy Acid Rifle and Beam Rifle say you are not qualified to use the weapon when you should be.

This should be fixed.

This will help for sure with the Heavy Acid Rifle. However, the Beam Rifle is confusing in this. There doesn't appear to actually be a Beam Rifle certification in any profession tree. The actual crafted item is listed as a "Ranged Weapon", so I'm guessing its not supposed to be commando specific. If it is, it will probably need to follow the same route as the Launcher Pistol and give Heavy Weapon Experience. That would actually be helpful, as we wouldn't be tied to having to use pistol skills and could add some rifleman instead of pistoleer.

Heavy Acid Rifle cert is fixed. Beam Rifle issue however still exists. Don't really know what the plan is for this weapon, or even if it is supposed to be Commando only

2) Heavy Weapon Stats – The stats for the heavy weapons is hampering the profession, with 0 ideal range, severely unbalanced range mods, and apparent lack of accuracy in these weapons.

These are meant to be extreme close range weapons.

There are some real issues with this statement. I'm guessing they didn't investigate the actual stats of the weapons at all. As thing are now, the only commando heavy weapons that fit the "extreme close range" profile are the cannons (Beam, Acid, Lightning). Let me break it down:

Flamethrower - Has 0.0 ideal range, and 0/-57/0 range modifiers. What does this mean? This means that at its ideal range, it has a -57 applied to its accuracy. Since it has 0.0 ideal range, this means the closer you get to your target, the worse your accuracy is. See the flaw here? The weapon is working the exact opposite it should. You can see this easily in game, just target anything at close range, and then slowly run away from it. The farther you run away, the better your accuracy number will be (the number besides your targets HAM bar). Following other weapons, its range modifiers probably should be something like -25/0/-57. This would achieve the desired result, but giving it an ideal range of 10m would also help.

Heavy Acid Rifle - Has 0.0 ideal range, but very very low range modifiers. This means that it has very good accuracy at all ranges. Again, not what it should be. Since this is a rifle, I imagine it should have a little better range than the flamethrower. 20m ideal range, and -25/0/-57 would achieve the desired result.

Launcher Pistol - Has 0.0 ideal range, but very very low range modifiers. Again, this means it has very good accuracy at all ranges, and again probably not what it should be. Most other pistols have an ideal range between 10-20m. Now granted these are mini-missiles being fired, so accuracy doesn't really depend on barrel length. In its current state, it works fine, but if its supposed to be in the range of other pistols, it probably need to be change to something like 18m ideal range, and -15/5/-30, though other pistols can have much larger penalties.

Cannons (Beam, Acid, Lightning) - Have 0.0 idea range, and approx. -50/0/-97 range modifiers. This is the only set that actually meets what was described as the desired result. With a 0.0 ideal range, the farther away from the target you get, the worse your accuracy is. However, if take a step back, and look at the Commandos already low accuracy with these weapons, there becomes an issue. As commandos get certified in these weapons, they either get get +10 speed or +10 speed/accuracy at the same level as the certification. This means when they first obtain these weapons, they already have a very low accuracy compared to their marksman skills, and when you tack on the huge range modifiers, it makes hitting with these weapons very difficult. At least until you can train further up the HW support line and get more accuracy bonuses. I think all of these weapons need to be given an ideal range, and have their Range Modifiers at least come down to the levels of other heavy weapons. Maybe 10m ideal range and -30/0/-60

Only updated here, is the mention that the Heavy Acid Rifle +accuracy gains at Novice Commando and Acid 1 do no seem to stack. In your character sheet view, you will see 2 listings of Heavy Acid Rifle Accuracy, one +10 and one +15. This is an issue if they are both not being applied when wielding the weapons.

None of the weapons ideals ranges or range modifiers changed

3) Special Move Recovery – Special attacks take too long to recover from. In some cases 12 – 15 seconds.

These special moves are not designed to be primary default moves. They are meant to add to your default attack.

This is a very confusing statement, and really doesn't address the issue presented. I can understand they are not supposed to be used on every shot, like how a pistol user might use a Body Shot every attack. However, what does it means to "add to your default attack"? Does he mean that they should be adding effects to every non-move shot, or that they are just supposed to be supplemental damage? Either way, this still doesn't address the issue presented. However, until we know how the specials have changed from todays patch, its hard to respond here.

Currently, you can do more damage with the Flamethrower in default mode, then can be done with the Flame Single 1 move and the 10-15 second delay in attacks afterwards. This is obviously an issue, but just have to see how the changes in the patch work out before commenting more.

Ok, so we now know the results of the move changes. Flamethrowers specials now do pretty decent up front damage, and decent Fire DOT (mine was hitting for 233 each tick). Heavy Acid Rifle specials only do decent up front damage, and no DOT.

First issue is that the Acid Specials take a lot more HAM costs than Flamethrower's, almost 4x as much. Not sure why this is, but it appears the Flamethrower specials are not doing the amount of HAM drain they should. I know that's a "good thing" for us, but still should be brought up.

Second issue is while these changes are a big improvement, they still are not up to par DPS with most other special attacks. The Biggest issue is the delay after using them. One suggestion to fix this and still keep the specials a limited use move is to make the special have a "reuse" timer itself, but not cause a delay in normal attacks. So maybe you can only use the special once every 15 seconds, but you can keep using your normal flamethrower/HAR attack after its normal weapon speed delay. There might be some way to abuse this though, so would need to be looked at in more detail.

Final issue is that the Acid Specials need to be adjusted. They either need to do more up front damage than the Flamethrower's, or they need have a DOT effect added. It is Acid after all...

4) Resources for Weapon Crafting – The resources for the commando weapons are too rare. It’s too difficult to obtain these weapons because no one can make them.

The weapons are designed to use rare resources. These are extremely powerful weapons. The Launcher should be easier with upcoming changes.

Very misleading statement. This might be how they are supposed to be, but currently things do not match up even close to this statement. Right now, none of the commando weapons except for the Launcher Pistol, can be crafted with any DPS even close to other weapons. Here's a comparison of weapons I have, all form the same master weaponsmith (all unsliced):

Launcher Pistol: 2.6 speed, 48-208 damage, 49.2 Average DPS
Flamethrower: 6.0 speed, 56-204 damage, 21.6 Average DPS
Heavy Acid Rifle: 5.6 speed, 52-147 damage, 17.8 Average DPS
FWG5 Pistol: 2.0 speed, 43-174 damage, 54.2 Average DPS
Scout Pistol: 1.7 speed, 65-103 damage, 49.4 Average DPS
Cyroban Grenade: 5.0 speed (bugged display of 0.5), 40-389 damage, 42.9 Average DPS

So as you can see, the heavy weapons just do not even come close to the other weapons in default damage. This is without using any moves at all. When you add in something like Fan Shot vs Flame Single 1, it gets much much worse. Also an note about grenades, something about throwing them is bugged. If a grenade is listed as 5.0 speed, you actually can't attack for 10 seconds after throwing one. Its appears all grenades are doubling the speed delay when you actually use them. This makes the above listed grenades DPS actually 21.45.

Now, a large part of this problem is most likely do to the weaponsmith bug, where weapons that use multiple blaster power handlers do not get any of the damage or speed changes from them. This is the same issue that effects the higher tier normal weapons (DX2 Pistol, Elite Carbine, etc...) So, the Heavy Weapons DPS issue may be helped once that weaponsmith bug is fixed, but this weapons will still not be "extremely powerful" compared to all others. Unless the whole Weapon AP vs Armor Factor issue starts to work correctly.

Haven't had enough time to investigate if any of the weaponsmith fixes have helped our weapons. I did notice a set of flamethrowers for sale, created after the patch, that were unsliced and had 36-228 and 5.5 speed. That's decently better than what I have seen before, but only a small jump in the direction they should be able to go.

May take a few days/weeks to see the results of the weaponsmith changes though. If we can start seeing flamethrowers in the 80-300 4.5 speed range, and HAR's in the 60-220 3.5 speed range, things will be much better.

5) Craftable Components – The grenade components are in the wrong skill line, and they lack experimentation bonuses.

Commandos were never meant to be able to craft in the final product. We’ve moved grenades into the Weaponsmith line now.

Sounds good. While many commandos wanted to be able to craft their own grenades, at least we know the answer now.

There were all removed the tree, as stated. Still lots of issues around grenades, but at least we know we won't be crafting them

6) Flamethrower VS Pistol – Grenades and the Launcher Pistol are more effective than the Flamethrower. And the Launcher Pistol gives Pistol experience rather than Commando experience.

This will be fixed very soon.

I covered all of this in #4. While the Launcher Pistol experience change is very welcome, it still doesn't address the issue of Heavy Weapons being out performed in every way by marksmans/unarmed 4 weapons/skills.

Launcher Pistol does indeed give Heavy Weapon Experience. However, if you use suppression fire 1, you get Pistol Experience for the damage it does. I'll just mentioned the Launcher Pistol had an AP of none, while the Scatter Pistol has an AP of 1. Missiles should definitely have some AP factor.

While there are many other areas of the commando that need to be addressed, especially around its whole role in the grand scheme of SWG, I felt the need to reply to these vague and misinformed DEV comments. At least it makes me feel better responding

This patch did bring Commandos out of the "totally worthless" bin, but there are still plenty of issues that will need to be addressed. At least now more commando's will be able to get decent experience and move up the Heavy Weapon trees, and probably expose even more issues

Excellent post, but I have to stress we *need* to see the proper AR applied to all of our weapons. I would also love to see our weapons retroactively upgraded for the new weaponsmith code, if this is impossible, I understand. However there are less than 15 flamethrowers on all of Intrepid and I have one... so yeah I'd love to see it brought up to par

The problem is no longer if we can or can not climb our skill trees. The problem now is why should we bother to do so. We still have no reason to really use our heavy weapons at all. I play now and then with my flamethrower and the special abilities.. but quite honestly I'm still not sure why I mess with it. I gain less experience, do less damage over time, and miss quite often with my specials so badly that if grouping (only time I'll ever use such a long delay shot anyway) the monster or NPC is usually dead before I recover to try a second shot. Lots of issues here that I still feel deems us ready for a hotfix or two just to adjust some of the ideal ranges, damage factors, etc.. just to make us a little more usable. I currently still call myself a Pistoleer with a Launcher Pistol and I don't like that

~Caoilte - Commando