Pikeman Archive

If you notice, that on every skill that pikemen get that adds toughness it only adds +4.... Every other melee class gets +10 where as we get +4. We hit slow AND take more damage! Man what a cool combination, this needs to be fixed, how about you give unarmed +4 so they arnt the uber masters without anything. To not get totaly owned as a pikeman you have to get some good armor, but even good armor drains alot of stats. That combined with the insane cost of our specials make me wonder why I even bother.

I chose pikeman to be different, now I see why no one else is pikeman.

I completely agree. I mean, we take so much damage, and the speed that we attack it...is rather rediculous. I think they should either increase our speed, increase our damage, or even both perhaps.

Actually, I'm a TKA novice. Last night I fought with a brawler using polearm (they had the III skill, not IV), and he was out damaging me. I would hit 3x as often, but he would hit 4x as hard. So I think the reason you have less toughness is that you already do more damage. And that was with me using knuckles, and neither of us using specials. When he used polearm hit, it would blow away my unarmed hit, even though mine uses far far far more HAM.

So I dont see it as out of whack as you do.

I noticed this today as well. Odd that three skill trees would have identical numbers, and polearm (historically the defensive weapon of the bunch), has a much lower value. I expect this might be a relic from balancing the brawler. /bugged it.

Yes you are very correct about the polearm toughness,
we only get +18 thoughness at our elite novice level, when swordsman and fencer get +30.

One thing that you are not considering is polearm hit 2 though. If you compare polearm hit 2 with a swordsman's two hand hit 2 and a fencer's one hand hit 2, you will see that polearm hit 2 STUNS as an additional component to the increased attack damage. If you look at polearm hit 3, it stuns and lowers the target's posture, good luck getting it though!

With polearm hit 2, a lance, a melee defense down trap, and full mabari I can easily solo yellows and low con reds without taking much damage. I see this on my screen
+stunned+
+stunned+
+stunned+

=)

cage of tarquin

Yeah, some of the stats are out of whack. When I stop being lazy I'm going to come up with a spreadsheet that shows the different bonuses given to each of the elite brawling professions at a Master level. Personally I'd be happy with our toughness if they gave us a lot more block. We shouldn't be getting hit as much while using a defensive weapon.

I still think the best thing they could do for Pikeman at this point in the game is to let the weaponsmiths have access to the resources to make vibro lances. I have a feeling that they will resolve a lot of balance issues, especially any comparisons to TKA damage.

Higgs Par'teckal - Master Brawler and Halfway to Master Pikeman

"When I stop being lazy I'm going to come up with a spreadsheet that shows the different bonuses given to each of the elite brawling professions at a Master level"

Already done:

http://www.rit.edu/~iwm7380/swg/meleebreakdown.html

or

http://www.rit.edu/~iwm7380/swg/meleebreakdown.xls

This spreadsheet tells the story quite clearly. Pikeman is quite behind Fencer and Swordsman and it is far and away behind TKA.

Total mods:

TKA: 581

Fencer: 502

Swordsman: 436

Pikeman: 432

And it gets worse. The attack mods are -58 on long vibro axe and-34 on vibro lance and their speeds areapprox 4.7 atbestyet accuracy and speed bonuses are equal or lower than all others. So you get hit more often, for more damage, swing less and miss ALOT more.

No wonder everyone is joining the million monk march. And even if you don't, if you melee, Pikeman is dead last in every category. Damage per second is no contest whenyou miss at least 3x more often and swing half as often compared to every other melee.

OKay, to the Novice TKA...

I am almosy a Novice Pikeman, and I got rocked by a TKA with unarmed hit2 and knockdown... it wasn't even a competition... just knock down, get for 300, get hit for 300, knockdown, repeat, repeat... once a TKA gets past novice, they are too ultimate and we suck. Bah.

I'm trying to figure out how an Unarmed Combatant can defend against anything better than someone with a weapon that is made for defense.

How does a TKA defend against ranged attacks better than a Polearm user? Does he knock the blaster bolts away withhis Fists?

My head hurts.

You may also want to take a look at the threadI started in the brawler forum that unceremonially sunk to the bottom of the page:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=brawler&message.id=1539

Basically, my conclusion from the spread sheets is that the polearm users are probably supposed to get +10 to toughness for the two skills in the brawler tree and a +10 to dodge instead of +5 for the top defensive skill.

I'm fairly sure the +4 in brawler/polearm expert and master is a bug rather than by design.. In beta all 4 trees were +4/+4 then about a week or two before release the first three got boosted to +10/+10 and polearm was left behind, most likely by some novice designer who thought the 4th tree in brawler was the "support" tree like Marksman..

what are u guys talking about.

the polearm is really good my friend uses one and he does around 300-400 with a non special regular attack and does about 400-600 with polearm hitplus he hasnt reached novice pikeman.

hes only using a **edit**ty reinforced staff if u use the polearms attack in conjunction with polearm lunge u will own it knocks them down then u can really mess them up. quit complaining the polearm seems very powerful.