Pistoleer Archive
Thread: RANDOM HAM, how it works, and yet another reason pistoleers suck
First post I've seen specifically on the issue, but I've heard rumor and have noticed this in PvE when fighitng mobs. My mind and action drop even on a health it. So, I test it, writing fast since regen rate is so high. This is my best guess, it "seems" to be pretty consistent., if not, it's very close.
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Random HAM attacks:
Targeted pool: 80% of combat window damage
Each other pool: 10%
Total: 100%
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So when someone hits you with a random HAM attack for 100 and it shows as a red float number of 100 over your head, that's incorrect. What it really is, is 80 health, 10 mind, 10 action.
Good or bad? Well, technically, it's worse than 100% single pool. Why.
Regeneration rate. If you regenerate 5 per second per pool (for instance).
If it did all one pool then you'd have:
600 health
0 action
0 mind
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After 10 seconds, you regenerate 50 health.
However, the way it currently is, does something like:
480 health
60 action
60 mind
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After 10 seconds, you regenerate 50 health, 50 action, 50 mind.
Net, 550 damageafter 10 seconds vs 450 damage dealth after 10 seconds. Random HAM not only kills slower, but folks heal from it faster.
Not a huge deal, but interesting enough (spike driven into our dead lifeless pistoleer bodies)
Another problems: Stim Packs:
Do 2000 health only damage to a buffedperson,they get healed for 900 health when you use a stim pack. Do 1000 health and 1000 action (over a period of shots), and they are healed for 900 action, 900 health in one quick heal. Blah.
Sucks to be random. Of course, that's on TOP of the knowledge that pool attacks do net more damage to single pools, and thus, still have the advantage of dropping one pool the fastest.
Yeah. Hit a large large creature. Open with a Fan shot, the pool hit will be a majority taken out, but you'll also notice the other two pools decrease just a little.
Test it in a duel (with a trusted friend preferably) to confirm the numbers. See if it's true with PvP.
Was going to be Master Smuggler/Master Pistoleer. After the nerf patch, I'm dropping line I & III of pistoleer. I do more damage with Last Ditch in the smugger line than Fan Shot consistantly. Maybe if the posture defenses work, line III may be worth it. I just need the pistol mods of line II & IV in pistoleer to complement my smuggler DF lines. Afterall, we at least get a ranged KD. 
It's the easiest to buff (although Action isn't too far behind, with Mind being the hardest), and it's the pool that your opponent is doing the least to lower themselves. If you can target action pool, the folks using specials are helping to kill themselves. If you can target mind, then folks healing themselves or using specials are helping you kill them.
So all of our untargetted shots are 20% worse than we thought.
PLUS our one pool targetted shot, as we already knew, BLOWS.
Jaegen:
If the first shot you take hits say the health pool. What does the next shot hit? Same pool or is that shot random also? If so why can't it be changed to the first shot is random, but the next successive shots hit the same pool as long as you are using the same special. I never really bothered to pay attention to exactly how it works.
And yes I know that if we hit the mind pool it opens up the same argument about mind being unhealable but only a third of the time in theory anyway.
YetiIronfist wrote:
And don't forget that the one pool we CAN target is the worst one to be stuck with.
It's the easiest to buff (although Action isn't too far behind, with Mind being the hardest), and it's the pool that your opponent is doing the least to lower themselves.
Actually, Action is by FAR the easiest HAM to buff right now, hot Health. Health Enhance D's need more subcomponents to make and need more specific resources than Action Enhance D's. Action's need 2 biocontrollers, and they need organics and inorganics in the final combine. Health's heed 3 biocontrollers and need specifically Avian Meat and Reactive Gas on the final combine.
My Action D's can enhance for 2200+ for over 3 hours, and the best Health I've made so far is only 1500+ for 2 hours.
Falin
Anyway, my opinion is that targetted HAM attacks are the ones that are out of line, not the random pool attacks (and I'm referring to all targetted HAM attacks). BS/AS/HS1 really should be doing less DPS than autofire, and possibly BS/AS/HS2 as well, and only the third tier, elite-specific attacks being something which is always better than autofire.
I'm of the opinion that all "opening" (ie: spammable) attacks should be random HAM. I'll explain that a bit later. I do have to say that, in PvP at least, the random HAM attacks are a blessing. Before you get your matches out, I believe this is so because the rest of our specials are worthless, and because one bar is unhealable.
When I PvP, I spam Fanshot ... plain and simple, that's all I can really do. I don't bother with bleeds, getting into melee range for the chance of a knockdown, etc. I just move around as much as possible and spam Fanshot. What happens? Well, most of the time, if I kill someone, it's because Fan Shot has hit their mind pool enough to kill them. A lot of people these days are buffed (as am I), so dealing damage to Health and Action and expecting to win is a long shot.
It works,although not as effective as targeted mind shots do, obviously. Until they fix the mind pool thing, we have the poor man's eyeshot, and I don't really want to lose that right now.
It seem like it's too late to introduce new forms of combat, but I've always been a believe that targeted HAM attacks, and/or status attacksshould never be spammable. I think they should "chain" off of other attacks, being after an event (like dodge/evade/etc), or after an opening move (forexample, headshot 3 needs to be in cover first, or body shot needs double tap first).Or, each shot would have to be used in aprogression, such as, Body Shot 1, then 2, then 3. Now you havesome semblance of strategy, and an interesting fight, rather than F6 F6 F6 F6 F6 F6 F6 F6 F6 F6 F6.Meh, just an idea.
Oh, and as far as the Health pool being the easiest to buff up, the above poster is correct in that Action is by far the easiest. It probably won't always be that way, however. The schematic for Action D's is bugged right now, and I've seen some discussion about fixing it.
The 80%-10%-10% applies to targeted pool also.
I posted earlier wondering why the spatial damage doesn't match the HAM reduction. So I did some testing last night. Make the macro /<special shot>; /pause 1; /peace. Then went around and tabulating results.
The 80-10-10 applies to targeted pool also. The differences I was seeing was the Health reduction was only 80% of the spatial damage (I choose creature/weapon where the armor/ap is the same and where the damage type is the creature vulnerability to eliminate armor from the equation).
An observation, but no hard fact yet, random HAM attacks hit health more often. By this I mean using random HAM only, if it's truly random, then the pool which killed the creature should be random. But in the 50 or so creatures I shot, all died from Health death. I'll tabulate the pool hit tonight and try to do a 1000 sample to see if this is true.
Phuobar wrote:The 80%-10%-10% applies to targeted pool also.
An observation, but no hard fact yet, random HAM attacks hit health more often. By this I mean using random HAM only, if it's truly random, then the pool which killed the creature should be random. But in the 50 or so creatures I shot, all died from Health death. I'll tabulate the pool hit tonight and try to do a 1000 sample to see if this is true.
The ratio which is believed to be correct is 1/2 health, 1/3 action and 1/6 mind (3:2:1 health:action:mind).
I would agree with most of what is said here. I have seem moderate damage to the other pools that I couldn't associate with special attacks I had done. This certainly suggests some damage bleed over into the other pools.
As for random HAMs, I've seen evidence that the distribution of shots may be something like 50-35-15 in terms of where the damage gets allocated. Doing a string of KipUps against an opponent with a large HAM (3000+) it almost always results in a stair step HAM with Health being the killer, action being halfway down, and mind being the least hit. This is certainly something I've seen with my faction pets, who almost always combat PvE enemies who use Random HAM the most.
If my distribution is correct, any of our Random HAM attacks would have to have twice the DPS of a BodyShot type attack to ever be worth using unless you were trying the 'poor mans mind pool shot'. And that would require you to be in combat over 3 times as long to achieve the mind kill on an opponent.
Heck, just running the math, I figure I could kill a 3000 HAM opponent in 46 seconds with BS2. Assuming my % distribution of shots was right and not counting misses, it would take me 211 seconds to get a mind kill off that same opponent with Fan Shot (and 63 seconds to get a Health kill from Fan Shot). In that 211 seconds, my opponent could fully heal his health back to 3000 four times and I'd still kill him faster with BS2. With Fan Shot, I'd need a minute of raw damage before he'd have to heal, so he could be regenerating some of the mind he lost by healing my health damage to him.
Noules,
I like your style. But I don't think it's the right approach, given what Holo made clear about our first issues post. You prefer balance and variety, not "complaing and get fixed". In that respect, we're alike. Also read Holo's communication issues post. Obviously there is no methodology or grand design, orcoding/testing/re-coding that takes place. It's a chaotic system, and point solutionsmight eventually lead somwhere, but I'm not sureeveryone wants to hang on for that ride.
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- Roll/Dive/Kip shot: Add 'tumbling' effect, so special cannot be spammed. This makes it a good one-shot move which adds defense, but not something with better DPS than the pistoleer specials.
Nerfs pistoleers. In the face of so much that is broken, hard to suggest.
- Make Double Tap a high-accuracy, low DPS bonus shot. This is useful at long range, especially when moving, and in particular at lower levels of Pistoleer when you have less accuracy bonuses anyway.
Pistol specials were all designed with high bonuses to hit already.
- Make Stopping Shot a high DPS bonus, low-accuracy, close-range shot. It should be the obvious choice when up close to a target with little chance of missing, but be range-limited (like other PB moves)
higher DPS? Lower accuracy and range? Sounds like a neutral change. I like, the idea, personally, of almost all pistol specials being <=32m range, but wicked powerful in that range, but I dropped that notion a long time ago once I learned how screwed up everything was.
- Make Fan Shot the 'any-time' move, with moderately high DPS and moderately good accuracy. It would be what you default to except under the special situations where DT or SS is more useful (and it's why you would get it last).
That's what fan shot is. Moderately high DPS? You mean lower it? FYI, we already have lower damage via weapons, the speed issue, and lowest AR ratings. We don't need yet lower damage in the face of heavy weapons, ranged knockdowns, mind pool shots, and AR3 weapons. That's my opinion.
- Pistol Smash should probably add dizzy (but not necessarily KD) and thus allow 'chains' with Pistol Whip.
Pistol smash needs works, that's for sure. I don't think we suggested dizzy per se, but we suggest a number of things.
- Multitarget should be a straight cone attack with moderate damage.
Probably. Aren't you curious what they were TRYING to do though? Sounds neat, would let you AOE attack and not attack the ATST and get slammed for 1000+ damage, which is always fun.
- Disarming1/2 should be single target and cone delay attacks, much like Panic Shot (already proposed in the report).
easy fix, not unique though. A master pistoleer gets an attack that is only as good as a mid-level SMUGGLER attack? I'd rather it do more damage or be unique and effective in it's own way.
With a random HAM shot, all shots are random. Not just the first and then you continue to hit that pool. ALTHOUGH, that is something I've said before I would like to see, not for all random HAM shots, but for some as a way of making them kind of special. Another idea I had was to add new commands /TargetHealth /TargetMind /TargetAction. Using them would reduce your accuracy because you're trying to be more accurate, but when using one of those commands with a random HAM attack, if you manage to hit, you would hit the targetted pool.
FalinMor:
You may still be correct about agility being the easiest to buff, but when I said "buff", I didn't mean just the doctor profession buffs. I meant the combination of chef food + spice + doctor buffs that gives you the max possible.
In my opinion, pistoleers should be the most versatile of the classes, and probably the best ranged combatant against a close, short-target. I really think the single most useful thing we could get from Holo or the Dev team is a clear statement on what the 'niche' for each class is.
I see Pistoleers being versatile and close range, single target masters.
I see Carbineers being area effect and masters of status effects and posture changes.
I see Riflemen being area effect damage (some people think Riflemen should be snipers, but given our specials, AE damage is what our job seems to be).
I see Bounty Hunters are being the best at one-on-one, overall (but inferior to Pistoleers at point-blank), if they get to control the engagement (a BH should have a good option to counter a single pistoleer/rifleman/carbineer, without having a single option countering all of them).
There's just a lot of variables that the Devs should be able to manipulate, instead of just putting everyone onto a damage ladder and saying you're less damaging than X but more damaging than Y. The reasons for my suggestions on specials is to reflect what I'm interpreting the Dev's vision on Pistoleers to be. For example, Double-tap would be the high accuracy shot you use at long range and even with poor range modifier weapons (i.e. DX2); riflemen and carbineers don't get an equivalent, i.e. riflemen don't get a high accuracy point blank shot, because versatility isn't in the Rifleman charter. Stopping Shot is the short-ranged, single target killer that Pistoleers should have. PMD2 should add a dizzy without KD so that it doesn't obsolete PMD1, yet provides an extra advantage that you don't get from just PMD1.
I'd rather not look at it from the perspective of nerfing from the current status, but rather changing the uses for them. I realize it's easy to look at my suggestions as 'nerfing' the class, but IMO it's a better solution than just asking for more damage overall.
If there was one thing I'd ask from the Devs, it's to know what the classes are supposed to be. It's hard to ask for intelligent changes without knowing what the end result is supposed to look like.
And yeah, adding tumbling to kip/dive/roll would technically be a nerf for pistol-users (although not necessarily 'pistoleers') but given the other changes proposed I think it's quite reasonable, not to mention creating unique specials with unique effects that doesn't encourage simply chaining. And when I said 'low', 'moderate', 'high' for DPS, I meant relative to the other shots in the pistoleer branch, not necessarily compared to what they are now - it was easier than 'high', 'really high', and 'really, stupidly, he's-missing-half-his-innards-kind of high'.