Pikeman Archive

The purpose of this survey is to gather statistical proof of our condition, your thoughts on the pikeman profession and any issues you may have with it, and other such information that may help to serve balancing the pikeman profession. Before anyone says that we are balanced let me add that after doing some research I have discovered that a two handed curved sword does more damage per second than even our long vibro axe, and it is much more accurate. In the mean time, I'll be doing more research in game finding the stats of as many melee weapons as I can find. Please answer the following:

In-game name

Galaxy

What skill boxes you have in the pikeman profession

Do you have any other combat skills

--If so, what are they and why did you choose those skills?

Do you have medic skills?

--If so, why?

What are your top issues with this profession?

What are your overall thoughts on this profession?

Once again, I am going to use this data to show proof of our condition. Also by posting here I will also be able to attain an approximate estimation of the pikeman population in order to further our cause. Thank you for your support.

Scipio
Corbantis
Master Pike
No other combat skills
Close to Master Medic thinking of going further. I really had to do this to cut out down time. It takes me forever to regen my action bar. I really can't think of a reason to not have at least some medic for any combat class.

Top issues:

Toughness, I just can't take any kind of beating even in armor.

HAM cost, I dare not use a special with a LVA and it takes chunks out of my HAM.

-50, It is not as bad at master with accuracy mods but I still miss more than i think I should.

Overall thoughts:

We are a terrible combat class. I kept holding out hope figuring we get get some love one of these days. What do they finally do? Make us worse, if I wasn't bad a few weeks ago I am terrible now. We get nothing from SOE about where they are heading with Pikemen. We got that lame arse post about them looking in to things. That was a month or so ago I figure. I am incredibly disappointed with the devs lack of intrest in our class. I'll be taking my stand at the end of this month with the cancellation of my account. I've given them 3 months, 2 of those as a master only to see us get worse. I'm frustrated and tired of waiting for something that is not coming.

In-game name: Barak Arakson

Galaxy: Bria

Skills: 1,1,1,1

Other Combat Skills: No

Medic Skills: 3,3,3,0 in medic skills

Why?: I found that healing myself during a fight gave me about a 50/50 chance to win against con white mobs. Also it helps neutralize the fact that i do more damage to myself than the mobs do to me. Besides, i need to be useful in a group.

Top Issues: Doing more damage to myself than a mob can hope too Missing about half the time Only being able to hit a stationary target. Finding out that a fist does as much damage as a big stick. Finding out that my top two weapons suck.

Thoughts: I am now completely useless, where as before i was only semi-useless. I did make a good meatshield for the group when Knockdown wasn't timered. Granted i still couldnt really kill anything, i did keep the ranged guys alive by being a tank. Still, i have invested too much time to give this guy up. ohh well, i can work on my secondary skills

Barak Arakson

-Useless guy with a big useless stick.

Name: Ramsey Logan

Server: Scylla

Pikeman skill: 4/0/3/2

Additional combat: 2/2/2/3 CH, Pistol III

Why: I need something to cover my ass since I certainly can't do it with Pikeman skills.

Top Issue and Overall Thought: If I had to choose a single issue, it would be knockdown, but the overall Dev attitude towards Pikeman and all meleeis my biggest concern. The only attention most melee, and especially Pikeman, recieve is to find out a skill has been nerf'd due to primarily ranged issues(see knockdown). As a skill group, melee users are tanks, and specifically, Pikemen are geared towards crowd control. We can do neither at current time. The only tanks are 9k+ HAM pets or AT-STs, and the only crowd control is a bunch of pets or AT-ST's. From where I'm standing, Pikemen could be COMPLETELY removed from the game, and nothing would change, thats how insignificant we are and what we do.

Only Droid Engineers are as bad off as melee users. They serve no purpose due to pets being far superior to Probots, and we serve no purpose due to pets being far superior to PC's.

Ugh, Im getting angry typing this.

/bump

Shakespeare

Flurry

3/0/1/1 Pikeman (going for master).

For other combat skills: 2/3/3/4 Brawler, getting master brawler eventually.

Master Medic, Novice Doctor 0/1/0/0 (going for 0/4/4/0).

Originally I just wanted 4/0/4/0 Medic, but then I got diagnostics 4 just because I had the xp to spend, and was going to surrender it when I needed the points back. So I was 4/4/4/0 medic and figured why not get Doc or CM. Unfortunately, CM like many things in this game, is biased toward Marksmen and requires marksman pre-requisites. So instead I chose doctor.

My top issues are:

a) Our profession is completely unbalanced. We have a ton of disadvantages (accuracy, lower damage modifiers, a number of useless specials, -12 toughness) All these disadvantages seem like they would be in exchange for some sort of power, but we don't end up having any power at all.

b) Server-client fudging on distance. It's often impossible to hit moving enemies, even when they are ZERO METERS AWAY.

Thoughts on the profession: I didn't choose this profession because I thought it would be a strong profession. I chose it because I thought it would be a fun, cool class--but still viable, not useless. I think the root of our problems is that devs make far-reaching balance changes without thinking about the effects it will have on less-popular professions.

Kanima

Eclipse

Pikeman 3/2/2/2

Ch 3/4/2/3

Because I needed help in combat, somthing to keep from getting killed.

Medic 4/2/0/0

I had to have medical or i would die,even in the early days i had to have some way of healing myself after attacking 1 creature due to half my ham being gone and lairs have more than one creature.

Issues:

Speed our speed modifers are broke. read the post i made about the test of a 1.6 speed long virbo axe it is on this forum.

Damage, for those that don't know our damage per hit has been stealth nerfed 3 times. Once in beta, 2 twice on live in 2 weeks. If we can't get defenses that the other professions in meele have, and our speed can't be fix, or our misses i want damage , and when and if i do hit, i want to knock the *********** our of them.

Defense we have to be in everythings face we should be able to dodge , counter attack , but we get hit like a punching bag.

Misses, my top misses todate were 10 in a row on a baggerset. (pre-kd-nerf ) post kd-nerf i die in 5 swings, no matter if i hit or not due to....

Ham cost, 240 ham hit per speical is the pits.

Overview.

I played a pikeman in beta, it was as much fun as you could get, I didn't have to relay on a medic being up my a** literaly hitting me with stimp packs to fight. As pikeman stands now we are nothing but a hinderance to a group and a waste of resources for medics. I had a group tell me last night, they didn't have enough stimps to have a brawler in thier group hunting kilo's. We can not fight or join in any fight on the Large creatures due to 1 hit we die, as i see it we are being left out of any of the higher level fun in the game. Think about it, Agro's always turn on us , medics except for cm's have to be in 10 m range we go down what happens ? the medic dies, and the medic can't even have fun attacking anything due to us being a hinderance needing a stimp pack every 5 secs. To fight the large creature we have to use speicals, they either hit or and most likey miss, and therfore we die.

Zorlon Starwind

Lowca

Master Pike

Creature Handler

-- Because we're ghimp. I can't even fight a dark blue con now without being utterly rocked while using a GOOD Long vibro axe, best I've seen on lowca, I'm always near death, wether I use specials or not. With pets I can fight with impunity, and still be almost dead from HAM cost.

I had medic skills, but I ditched them and opted to use a friends 900+ heal pet stims, and refrain from using any styles.

Top Issues:
Inability to detain a moving target- I CANNOT EXPRESS HOW MUCH THIS PISSES ME OFF. Ican barely even do factional missions because thing sjust take off running. That's right! I'm kited by REBEL NPC'S! PvP is a joke, too.

HAM Cost - I literally do MORE DAMAGE to myself then I do to enemies. To someone with 1000 HAM, I do about 100-200, 300 if somemagical rainbow of luck occurs,with Polearm hit 3, The cost? 160-180, 150 with a HAM reducer on my LVA. To a creature with 10,000 HAM I hit for about 1,000-1,500... Cost is the same. Break it down: 10k health - 1k damage = 9K HAM. My 900 HAM goes down to 720-740 if I'm lucky. More damage to myself.

Accuracy - I'm sorry but, I think we're permanently drunk. There's no hooting way we should get a -40+ modifier with our high end weapons. We do lousy damage now, and we can barely hit. Wow, we're so scary that master tailors are willing to duel us becuase they know they'll win even with newb weapons.

Defense - I don't actually care as much about defense as everyone else does, I've always had the tendency towards action. However, we lack in both departments severely.

Thoughts: Frankly, we're ghimp. There's no other way to describe it. And I sincerely doubt, anything we say or do will get this fixed. There just isn't enough of us left. No ones willing to do what we have to do to get noticed. We aren't crying in General discussion like the Pistoleers, who, I might add, have their own dedicatedprogrammer now, apparently.

On a side now, On Lowca I know of 1 other Master Pike, and 2 novice pikes. Master is dropping Pike for pistoleer, novices are still dumb to the reality of things.

Slistak

Sunrunner

4 2 4 4

Also a 0 4 3 2 Smuggler

Cause I like playing broken class apparently.

I have Novice Medic

Cause I thought it would help keeping me up while tanking (it doesn't)

1. 30 Second timer makes our crowd control specials useless.

2. HAM so high with high-end weapons that not worth using, especially with how often they miss.

3. Inability to tank a PvE mob. I'm tired of hiding behind a Novice CH pet. It's sad when a durni tanks better than you do.

My overall thoughts on the class is that if we don't get some love their will be like 3 of us across the entire game. Anytime I meet a fellow pikeman in a game (extremely rare), all we do is talk about how were a dying breed and how long until we surrender our skills.

I love the Pikeman look and really want to have fun playing the class.

Gakisho

Intrepid

2/0/4/2

Noother combat skills ormedic skills (darn master armorsmith).

My biggest issues are the relative damage taking into account weapons. Swordsman's top weapon not only doesn't do kinetic which is a really common resist, but has less than half the hit penalties and does 20% more damage. TKAs barehand for nearly the damage we do with no penalty to hit. It was pretty clear that pikeman were built around AE and defensive skills (knockdown) and not defensive bonuses (we dont get any). Now that the skills have been basically removed and AE attacks are bugged, we are left lacking.

If they improve the accuracy on our later weapons, I think we will be closer to "in-line" and it's a short fix. More would need to be done, but this one change would satisfy me until a more complete overhaul can be done. Combat needs to be completely rethought out before the classes can be balanced, but that's a whole other discussion. If everybody caps at 1s between attacks, those with the lowest damage weapons (or I guess the weapons that never hit) lose.

Xardas

Gorath

Master Pikeman

Master Brawler, half the TKA defensive bonus line, Novice fencer

--I chose those skills because pikemen havereallylow defense and toughness.

Master Medic, Novice doctor

--Polearm Hit 3 does 200-250 damage to me per swing. I kill myself in 4-5 hits, I usually miss 2-3 of those hits...you get the idea

My issues with this profession are many:

First we get the lowest defense/toughness of all 4 melee types, yet all 4 melee types do about the same damage.

Other melee types Hit 3 does x4 damage, while pikemans Hit3 does x3.

Pikeman have3 knockdown/posture change attacks, all 3 got nerfed when the knockdown change happened. One of these moves was our Polearm Hit 3 which does LESS damage I assumebecause it has a posture down and stun effect. The posture down is now useless on this move, can we get some higher damage on this move that we get at MASTER pikeman?

We have 2 AE attacks that are almost exactlythe same, it ispointless to have both.

My accuracy is horrible even at master, sure at master I can hit a durni without missing, but try hitting a high level mob with high defense? I miss over 50% of the time and when you miss on a special move that takes 250 HAM that is NOT good. In PvP missing one shot can and usually means death for you, needless to say I die a LOT in PvP.

Being successful in PvEas a pikeman is near impossible without medic skills. Being successful in PvP is near impossible without medics skills and master brawler.

My overall thoughts on this professions are that a lot of changes were made that completely buried pikeman. We were weak to begin with and we kept getting indirectly nerfed. Maybe it wasn't intended, but it happened. The knockdown nerf and increasing other melee types damage output hurt pikemen. TKA are insanely better than us (and all other melee) because they match our damage, hit faster,have about double our defense/toughness,has a knockdown attackand can hit all 3 HAM pools. I am jealous of TKA I admit, but I don't want TKA nerfed one bit. Pikeman just need to be bumped up and put inline with the power of theTKA.

D'nial

Bria

1/3/1/1 - (Currently qualified to be 2/3/1/2 or 1/3/2/2. However, I'm teetering on dropping pikeman entirely, and switching tosomething elseso I can do some damage without killing myself.)

I'm a Master Creature Handler...

Novice medic, because I haven't surrendered it yet. (meaning only the first box) I don't ever buy stims. I will use them if my friends give them to me. I use pet stims for my boys though.

Biggest issues:

HAM costs on high end weapons.

Accuracy on high end weapons.

Lack of good high end weapons. (But that's a server issue, Bria saw ditanium for the first time maybe three weeks ago.)

Thoughts:

I'm a CH so I have an advantage over non ch pikemen in that my pets tank for me and my group. They are my primary fighting skill. I intend to master a combat class as well, but my chosen one blows donkeys right now. I chose pikemen because I wanted to be different than everyone else, but still be a great fighter.

Now when I fight high mobs, I run in, nail 'em with an action bleed, spam leg hit 3, watch my HAM fall, run away, sometimes not quick enough and get incapped. Then I peace, and watch my boys take the hits for me while I sit on my ass waiting for regen. I don't use knockdown, because it never seemed all too effective to me as the mob was standing up before I hit him again.

I'll leave you with this: I was leading a large group on Endor, and had stored my pets. My title was down as well, because this was during the exploit week, and I didn't want anyone hassling me for CH training. A new guy came to our camp, and before I could invite him, someone said "So and so, ask D'nial for an invite." He came over to me and looks at me for a second, then says "A pikeman? We're grouped with a pikeman? I'm gonna run through all my stims healing him." His buddy goes, "no... he's an MCH, we just let him play with his stick when he wants to"

Chirac Mohr