Pistoleer Archive

Holocron,

I was asked to post thisso it's visible (and not buried), so here's a revised list with some additions from the thread.

Quick Summary:

1. 3 advancedprofessions are built to benefit from having pistoleer skills. (Commando, Smuggler, Bounty Hunter). That alone should put pistoleers, statistically, far higher than rifle/carbine.

2. Carbine specials don't work (at least half of them), and the HAM costs were so high, folks that actually DID know what a Carbine was, chose to go elsewhere since they are in horrible shape. So, for most, the choice was rifle (more complex to use well), or pistols (comfort weapon, everyone knows blaster pistols from the SW movies as well). Fix Carbines. If there is any truth to that, you'd know, not us. Looking at # of posts...11K pistoleers, 11k rifles, 5K carbines. I see smoke there...if just 15% of each pistol/rifle users are Carbineers "at heart"....

3. Knockdown was the best skill to have, pistoleers had two of the best versions of knockdown (before the nerf). Panic shot was 2nd best skill to have, and it benefited from pistoleer skills (Smuggler). Eyeshotis the best damage shot, it's a Bounty Hunter PISTOL special attack, again, BH pistol users benefit greatly from adding pistoleer skills to their character. This is mostly PvP motivated, but again, BH/Smuggler benefit from picking up pistoleer. Half of the carbine specials don't work, that's why they don't show up on "top specials".

4. It's a good choice hybrid weapon. While it won't do the best damage vs armored opponents and they don't have any good state effect special attacks (since disarming 2 was removed), they DO have OK resistance vs melee attacks in addition to having some working special attacks, making them a good choice for those just wanting to pick up "some" weapon skill. This will always be the case. It's also, the most popular for heros in the SW movies.

Detailed summary:

1. Pistoleers had one of the easiest times doing XP with pistol melee defense 1. It still works, it has not yet been patched to be ineffective when spamming it. With this skill alone, you can not only XP pistols incredibly fast, but you can also switch to another weapon and get moderately good XP rates on both at the same time...possibly higher than with the other weapon alone.

(This has been fixed on the test center if immunity is in effect for 30s after knockdown, and 5s delay., but has not yet gone live)

2. We had AOE knockdown, and you could repeatedly fire this special and knock entire groups down, and keep them down/kill them. This alone was worth switching to pistoleer, it was an unstoppable special attack before the test center changes, and before knockdown was actually removed from our disarming shot 2 special. A number of people I have talked to, switched to pistoleer just for this one attack, and now of course, it's gone, not sure what they are doing now. (removed from pistoleers, and KD fixed on test center not on live server)

3. Commandos get benefits by choosing pistoleer, since their only working weapon for a while has been the launcher pistol. Even with the other weapons working, it makes some sense to choose some pistoleer skills to couple with commando for the launcher pistol.(this is by design)

4. Bounty hunters wanting to increase their BH pistol abilities, also benefit from dabbling in some pistoleer, if they just finished BH or got to a slow point, they probably started working their pistoleer skills. BHs have no reason to choose rifle, since it didnt stack with the (broken) LLC. And carbines (as you will see below), have issues still. (this is by design and due to LLC/carbines being broken) What's left? pistols.

5. You also created a THIRD profession, the smuggler, that gains benefit from the pistoleer profession, since they have PISTOL specialsbut no skill mods. Many hardcore smugglers chose smuggling first, then realize they needed to boost their pistol with pistoleer, they already have the pre-requisites from being a smuggler, makes 100% perfect sense to choose pistoleer as a smuggler. And, many XP smuggler first since they want to be a "smuggler", and are just now switching over to XP the pistol side. (by design)

6. The creatures from the creature handler profession hit RANDOM HAM, which usually hits health. Again, making pistoleer a good choice for a CH wanting more firepower than just the pet (since pistoleers hit health, and have random HAM attacks). Furthermore, pistols are best at close range, and creature handlers like to be close to their pets to heal them in some cases. (same for doctors too IMO, they have to get close to heal, and thus, can benefit from pistols rather than long range attacks, or rifles that use mind on top of their medpacks that use mind.) CH was very popular early on, and pistols was a popular choice for CH. (by design, and good fit)

7. Weapon availability. Given that most advanced weapons, starting with commando, working down to rifle, carbine, then finally pistols,pistols are the most likely to be very well crafted on most servers since game start. On about week #2, we already had close to TOP END FWG5 and Scout Blasters. This gave pistol users a HUGE initial advantage, and that really hasn't changed much. Top-end pistols still seem more readily available than top-end carbines/rifles, although we're starting to see more of those now (T21, elite/laser carbine, etc) On our server, the resources still dont allow top-end rifle/carbine crafting. This craftng issue has helped make top-end crafted pistols more common than carbines and rifles. (by design...might need to make rifles/carbines/heavy weapons, more easily craftable?? Not sure why if carbine/rifle base stats are better than pistols, why they dont end up crafted just the same)

8. No one wore good armor until recently in PvP. This meant no one felt any negative effects from using AR0 pistols in PvP. This is of course changing with composite now being fairly common. Recall, not many armor types have good or any heat resist, and FWG5 (does heat damage) was one of the easiest to craft well weapons, with good overall stats...and HEAT DAMAGE. So you had pistols without one of their drawbacks...everyone ran around in clothes..which made it especially nice for pistol users. Now we're seeing more armor, but too late, folks already flocked to it. And again, at least on our server, we had top-notch FWG5s since the first weeks of the game. (economics...and leveling. Master armorsmiths and the resources for top-end armor took time to develop)

9. Wrap all of this up, after months of game play where these things are common place, and ask someone, if you had to choose ONE ranged weapon to dabble in, what would it be? Itbecame a trend. Commando says pistoleer, smuggler says pistoleer, BH says, probably pistoleer (maybe carbine), creature handler probably pistol, anyone wanting only "some" ranged combat, will probably choose pistoleer since they are less vulnerable in melee, pistoleers using pistol melee defense 1 and AOE knockdown could XP the fastest, and do faction the fastest (very fast..fastest is maybe not true). Of course, the XP rate is being fixed with the KD nerf that has yet to go live. Also, the faction issue will go away with Disarming Shot2 no longer having knockdown.

10. OK, say you cannot decide between CH, Smuggler, Pistoleer, Commando (this was my problem at game start).Pistoleer was/is a very good "general combat" line to get if you are still uncertain what you want your complete skill acquisition to look like. Also, many people that chose a different profession, say crafting, dancing, etc. are mastering now, and going back to fill in their combat skills. And for the above reasons, pistoleer is a good choice.

11. Probably around ONE HALF of the Carbine special attacks do not work as they should. This is the reason many switched from Carbine to rifle/pistol, or passed it up when starting out. Pistol specials need work, but they at least function, and worse still, one of the BEST carbine specials, was what we had with disarming shot 2 (that AOE knockdown that you guys removed on the test center :/ ). So you want to be a Carbineer? Choose pistol then! That sort of thing. I talk to a lot of folks that wanted to choose carbineer, but with so many specials simply NOT doing AOE or doing the appropriate special effect, they decide to move on to something else until it's fixed. That, and the HAM cost was insanely high on carbines, making it harder to solo than pistols. (Fix carbineers so that they become more attractive to the player base)

Not to mention, a lot of people don't know whata Carbine is. Everyone knows what a pistol is (comfort weapon)

12. Some folks mention it, I think it's silly, but some swear, that pistols being the starting weapon you get in the tutorialconfuses them into XPing pistols at first, then they just stick with it since they already made progress (!?).(Offer Carbine/Rifle/Pistol for marksman rather than just pistol at game start so it's "fair")

Good, well composed summary and explanations of the items.

Holo, I recommend doing this in the future. How many pages of messages do you want to read? Work with the correspondents to get these types of questions answered. Simply posting a thread asking a question will generate repsonses, work with the correspondents to get the range of answers to your question (or a range of suggestions for fixes/bugs/etc).

My choice of pistol wasn't made until I had played through the 4 boxes of marksman with the other 2 as well. I think that something that needs to be tweaked is the smoothness of combat with the other 2. This was my deciding factor. The slow shots and long delays made the weapon and combat just feel clunky and slow and seemed to make movement while in combat harder. Anyway thats just my "feel" of the weapons. (although the ability to be a hybrid dabbler with pistol in many other skill trees did help too)

I think another part of it may be that Jaegen is a rocken Correspondant and makes us look good.

/agree

Holo Listen to Jaegen....he is a great correspondent, and listens to others as well as having great ideas of his own.

Absolutely perfect Jaegen88! My only other comment is that I would have hoped all of that would be obvious to the devs... but with correspondents like Jaegen88 hopefully things will get balanced out sooner than later. Keep up the good work.

- Znel

or they go basically over this:

(didnt read thro all you posted so..)

_

pistols high accuracy with low skills trained ie. 0m-64m accuracy

pistols high dmg low speed, right now on SS, you can make a 1.9 speed FWG5 with 379 dmg, and prolly with one pistol +10 speed thing would drop you down to 1.0 speed if not, put some cloths on

range KD

melee knockdown

running while shooting and starting new attacks while shooting

no dmg penalty

Nice work Jaegan.

Someone please explain for me why the developers and designers of this game don't have the knowledge or smarts to pull this kind of info together internally, before Raph has to go and post it on the Pistoleer board.

It's pretty sad when the only communication our class gets with so much stuff broken is "gee, why are people playing your class?"

The #1 pre-requisite for hireing ANYONE to code for an MMRPG like this should be a dedication for playing the game that they create. Pay them to do it.

Now go code twirly pistols because it's cool. pffft

5 Stars! You definately are one of the best, if not the best, correspondents out there now.

Great post Jaegen.

I have to say though, I am filled with a sense of dread that the constant whinings about us pistoleers, may well indeed overthrow the devs in time.

But I'll plod along for now, hoping that we get the fixes that we so badly need.

Keep up the good work Jaegen.

Acof

Holos post was on the number of novice pistoleers not the number of ones working up the tree . The reason for all the novices sitting there is because they are using thier points for unarmed combat and getting the smuggler pistol specials . they are getting this to still have thier ranged knockdown . make all KD a melee example being pistols = pistolwhip and rifle/carbine a weapon butt stroke . this will help balance the ranged vs. melee complaints and not make it such a big issue in PVP . I am pistoleer because i want to master that to be close to my master ch pets to be able to heal them when they need it . plus all mobs rush so pistol is nice to have close range . lower the close range penalties of rifle and carbine and youd have less people trying to explode pistoleer trees . Some will say speed is an issue but it really isnt when you look at a rifle hitting at 2k on an un stimable ham and carbine hitting for much greater damage . it is pretty balanced except for KD and ranged penalties . I see plenty of pvp duels and faction wars being won by each weapon . some players just know how to use thier skill trees better.the rush of pistoleer novices is the smuggler pistol tree . go ingame and see for yourself the people using smuggler to get a ranged kd before the new patch .

Jaegen's post is spot on.

As always, Jaegen, youwrung out the sponge onthe issue and set the bar for all Correspondents.

Though you hit the most important reasons, I think there are two others:

1) Mysterious fascination with the DX2 Pistol - people want an acid pistol, even if the stats are subpar. Weird, but true. They want to be different than other people, since the FWG is endemic and in many places, DX2s are rare.

2) Roleplayers don't want to carryhuge, intrusive weaponry - serious roleplayers, or even just people who are very concerned about their character's "look," often don't want some huge piece of firepower in their hands. Carrying a pistol in what often amounts to a Wild West setting is not so in-your-face, and makes sense from a roleplaying point of view.In any case, atiny pistol doesn't seem so out of character for, say, an Entertainer, whereas a Lightning Cannon might.