Pikeman Archive

I'm saddened by the fact that on top of that, except for sweep2, swordsmen have better area attacks than we do as well. We are outclassed in every aspect of the game. Damage, speed, accuracy, defenses, targetted pool, weapons, specials, state effects, even our area attacks. We do well enough, but we're not the best at any aspect of the game, we're second-rate to just poor in everything, pve and pvp.

We'll see what the combat passes do.

Well, at lest we get looted weapons with mind DoTs...that we rely on.

antares
master pikeman

Message Edited by antares_Kauri on 03-09-2004 09:30 AM

As far as state effects I like the fact that I can hit stun on folks (yeah just like the TKA's I know). Once I stun them (doesn't that lower defense) I find it easier to hit folks.

I basically got back to novice pike by hitting stun and spamming leg hit using a post patch LVA on huurtons. It worked well.

Stun is good, no doubt. We have 4 specials that stun, 2 that dizzy.

antares
master pikeman

Ok it's official then

Fire the guy who designed carbineers and pikemen or at least assign the TKA designer over to our profession.

I don't know about 1/2 as fast when comparing Swordsman to Pikeman.

Just going by exp with a swordsman at basically the same lvl, I can say that there is something wrong. The swordsman gets easily at least 1.4-1.6 times the exp I do. He misses less and his spin move kicks ASS on mine (both lvl 1 spin or area attack). I have to spam specials, keep an eye on HAM bars of enemies to match which bar is going down fastest and target as fast as possible just to keep up. Where as he just kinda goes in and attacks.

I wouldn't say it's TOO off balance tho, but the fact that his damage output exceeds mine, and I have no noticable other advantage is somewhat weird. I did notice a bit of a change as I got Speed lvl 2 and I'm hoping when I get lvl 3 for the next spin I should be on par. I think he went up his defence tree first and 2nd lvl. Weapons are sliced LVA and sliced heavy cleaver.

I was going to say that i think although we hit slower, we hit harder. On average my special hits are for more (when they hit), but yesterday I did a hit for 5K and shortly after he hit for 8K so I dunno.

I'm mainly talking about just weapons and not about DPS etc.

Just look at the stats on the swords vs the stats on the pikes.

Take the two handed curved sword vs the basic lance.

two hand curved sword has 2.x speed, medium armor piercing, and a damage of 250ish or so.

The lance however is slower, has armor piercing of zero and the only thing going for it is it's got a higher base damage which is negated by being slower and with no armor piercing.

I just want our pikes to be upgraded that's all. A little faster and more armor piercing would be nice.

Right now we have 2 weapons. The LVA and the VL. All the others are bunk as soon as you get certs for those two weapons. Who here still uses a basic lance?

Name another profession that basically only has 2 weapons to choose from either melee or ranged (ok maybe carbineers with just the Laser Carbine)

The early weapons in the pikeman profession serveno other purpose than giving you something to use until you get to polearms III and novice pike.

its our HAM costs that are rediculious... i recently dueled a pure novice TKA (no other professions or dabbling, oh he also had no armor) he hit me once with a 20 or so damage and incap'd me.. why? because i burned through my own HAM to that level

seriously things have to be done..when a novice tka can completely waste a master pikeman things are really messed up

As a fencer, I hear ya. The Fencers have the same exact problem. A fencer has a curved sword that has no AP and hits for 160 max unsliced. Swordsmen have weapons that have the same speed, do more damage, AND have AP2. That's inexplicable.

When I was mastering brawler, I found that I could take out critters easy as a swordsman on box three, but two boxes higher on fencer, I had trouble with the same critters.

I hate to say that our swordsmen fellows are overpowered, but they are. I hate to say that Fencers are the most balanced, but I think that we are.

I definitely wouldn't say swordsmen are overpowered. They have a niche, currently, pre-combat-pass they are the biggest damage dealers with low defense. The issue is that we have nothing over anyone. We have area KD, but soon carbineers will have area KD+dizzy from range.

antares
master pikeman

Yes. Swordsmen are NOT overpowered and this is not a nerf swordsmen thread. I'm just asking for lances to be bought up to snuf.

Well one hand swords may not be as damaging but you get about double the defense and you hit the speed cap (with specials) very early.

Remember the last patch notes where it said the Energy Lance was being improved to account for the difficulty involved in getting it?

Assuming perfect success in looting we have to chop through about 900k worth of HAM (that happens to be 100% resistant to our two damage types). Swordsmen need to cut through potentially as little as 25k for the Scythe schematic quests plus sword cores, or maybe 50k for the nicer components. Going strictly by this HAM measure and using the Scythe as the baseline of difficulty that would mean the energy lance should have been improved to have a base damage of roughly 7000-10000 points. Not a fair measure, perhaps, but the point is the scythe is both a very good weapon and comparatively a breeze to get.

I don't begrudge the Swordsmen their nice weapons at all, they deserve them. But giving them the scythe while we're still relying on the very slim chance of looting a nice pike just serves to further weaken pikemen as compared to the other melee professions.

Neither do I. In fact I played last night and got about 100K weapon xp just killing stuff on dant and had few problems (at only 0-0-0-2 I got ahead of myself).

However my LVA is speed sliced down to 3.0 with a powerup to bring it to 2.5 but with only +35 for speed that was great.

I do have hope. When I hit master pike I'll be swinging pretty fast with a 4.5 speed LVA with my +75 speed mods. . . of course I got a lot of xp to go.

And with this combat balance I've got a sneaking feeling that the devs may implement different speed caps for different profs like Dan the combat man was talking about doing back in September and since I like decent speed. . .