Pistoleer Archive
Thread: Moan about how Pistoleer sucks.
alot of you talk about buffs. But when they run out half way through a lair how do you survive ? I dont like to rely on buffs as if you do you will never know how to tackle things without them and you may need to have this knowledge some day.
I have picked up a few tips from here and I thank the ones that have helped.
Tonight I went back to the drawing board with my solo tactics and managed to take down a hidden dagger base level 20 mission solo without buffs or a FD half way through. I still used the smuggler skills for pistols though as these are better than most of the pistoleer skills that I have at present. I think I am on the right road now and relearning the class.
Sometimes when you look to hard you dont see whats going wrong and I think I found out the problem in a combination of things. I have been trying to do these like I use to do a level 10 mission solo. Coupled with the fact that I have not been stacking health 1 and 2 as this was never needed before. And not moving about whilst shooting. Also I am looking to invest in some Comp armor as I dont think my 31% energy resist bone is holding up as well as it use to. I have managed to try out a chest peice and this alone has helped alot.
ToHardwiredXManthat saidI should take up crafting instead , go for a long walk off a short pier. I think your statement was arrogant and that you most likely have not even played the pistoleer class. I come here looking for some advice and all I got from you was a barrage of insults.
to the original poster:
Im 2343 in pistoleer, i have a 1.2 spd 74-274 fwg5. Im also always buffed as im a doc as well. with full buffs and some muon i can solo practically anything under 20k ham.......and im not even master yet.......so how do you figure pistoleer isnt any good?
some tips:
buff.....all stats....always....
Muon....it is your friend
/prone; /bleed; /peace is your best friend.
I'm here perusing your boards trying to learn a few things about other professions, thought I'd throw out some of my findings on weaponry. I used to think damage slice/damage PU was the way to go, I am finding out this is not true unless your speed is >90 (yes, even riflemen with speeds of 90 will improve thier DPS by going for more speed). By looking at not just pure damage numbers or shot speed but by the combination I've learned some very interesting things. Please note I'm still investigating so most of these numbers are preliminary. I'm also basing my numbers for riflemen on my stats un-moded by tapes, and my guns (which are designed wholy for damage, and areexceptionally good guns), for pistoleer I'm using what I added up in the skill window and a listing of guns on our trade forum (who's quality and build style I'm not sure of). But my findings so far are about 2-2.5x higher average DPS for the rifleman over the pistoleer for the same "setup" of both guns damage sliced for 35% and a 32 max/16 min damage powerup on both. This may supprise some of you who thought it was way higher or a bit more even.
Again this is for a 0040 marksman master pistoleer with I believe 74 pistol speed (please correct me if I'm wrong) and a 4000 marksman master rifleman. I am also assuming ideal slices for either speed or damage (40/35) as I am trying to not so much find the average difference but the "worst case scenerio". I would also be much abliged if you would either post or PM me with some UNsliced stats on any pistol you own that you would consider to be exceptional, preferably krayt and non krayt examples if you would (lets face it, krayt tissues are a far bigger boost to you all than it is to us rifleman). Also no "pre-nerf" items or looted, trying to keep this somewhat realistic 
DankMohda wrote:
to the original poster:
Im 2343 in pistoleer, i have a 1.2 spd 74-274 fwg5. Im also always buffed as im a doc as well. with full buffs and some muon i can solo practically anything under 20k ham.......and im not even master yet.......so how do you figure pistoleer isnt any good?
some tips:
buff.....all stats....always....
Muon....it is your friend
/prone; /bleed; /peace is your best friend.
And lest we forget Dodge.
I don't stack with Fencer, as going the flavor of the month, and I still manage to Dodge a great deal of fire from Ranged.
I suffer against Melee, but if I kite and work it right, I get very good results. KD and Dizzy is my current gripe. Would I like some static effects? Sure! A ranged KD? Meh.. doesn't make sense from a Pistol. Which is why we have the whip. As I said, against beasts, I get excellent results.
Try fighting Ranged attack mobs, like Voritors. Solo easy. You dodge 75% of their attacks.
DankMohda gave you the key though. I don't bleed/run, because as a Master, I don't have to. Heck, I barely use my bleeds now. They work great against certain mobs, but I can put a mob down quicker than the bleed can take effect, so why bother wasting the special when I could have used Stoppingshot you know?
When Doc buffed, I have soloed Hanadaks and a bunch of other Endorian menaces. Can I solo Nightsisters? No. Not many can though. I have soloed a Rancor or two though, and that was well before Master. Tactics, and buffs.
Important to know how to time your buffs. Use them like stim packs. Don't spice up before the fight, but during. Pixie is great during the battle, as is Muon. As far as food, I use Tatooine Sunburn, Fishak and Glucose. Knowing when to use them in combat can save your life.
Seekalaei wrote:
DankMohda gave you the key though. I don't bleed/run, because as a Master, I don't have to. Heck, I barely use my bleeds now. They work great against certain mobs, but I can put a mob down quicker than the bleed can take effect, so why bother wasting the special when I could have used Stoppingshot you know?
When Doc buffed, I have soloed Hanadaks and a bunch of other Endorian menaces. Can I solo Nightsisters? No. Not many can though.
The only reason I bleed/run is not necessarily for the bleed but more for just pulling purposes, so as not to have 7 craggy bolmas stomping after me. I just /prone/bleed/peace and move back 50m or so to give them room to run at me without me firing and pulling the whole pack 
As far as NS's...soloing them should be no prob, i do it frequently. Not as fast as Giant Baz's for xp, but still fun and fairly simple. this is of course, with full buffs and mind buff from ent (the mind buff from ent is key because of the NS force powers)
I am impressed that you can solo FS Nightsisters. I cannot.
I generally only get Doc buffs when I pvp though, and I have only gotten Entertainer buffs once. 10 minutes is simply ludicrous, and I couldn't imagine waiting 20 mins, but if I knew I could kill, much less solo something that force chokes me here and there, and then knocks me down with lightning from their fingertips, maybe it's worth a shot..
Cool!
Seekalaei wrote:
I am impressed that you can solo FS Nightsisters. I cannot.
I generally only get Doc buffs when I pvp though, and I have only gotten Entertainer buffs once. 10 minutes is simply ludicrous, and I couldn't imagine waiting 20 mins, but if I knew I could kill, much less solo something that force chokes me here and there, and then knocks me down with lightning from their fingertips, maybe it's worth a shot..
Cool!
Its well worth the wait. I can in fact get quite far in the NS force labor camp by myself. Its quite satisfying to be able to do it. My usual routine is, get home from work, log on and find a master to mind buff, tip them the creds and, i go make dinner Once i come back i run to med center and buff myself. In whole about 25 minutes of prep time for hours of killing uber stuff on Dath 
Ive in fact Ive become so "addicted" to being fully buffed, i dont go fight anywhere without em. If you see me unbuffed, its cuz i just ran out and havent had time to re-apply! 
Nolseao wrote:
Ok so this may of been said before. But the proffesion of the pistoleer sucks bad.
The skills a broken or bugged , our specialist weapon ( DX2 ) Is worse than a Striker pistol, and my DL44 does more damage and has better accuracy.
Disarm shot does not disarm anything and it only does double damage to lairs.
Pistol whip 2 does not knock down your opponent.
And now that I am drawing level 20 missions solo if I never had Feign Death from the smuggler skills I would never be able to kill a **edit** thing. I use Neutron Pixe nearly on every lair / Faction mission I do.
Our damage output can not match the mods levels as we rise and get harder missions infact the damage output for the pistoleer stays the same throughout. Sure we get faster but so do the mobs and I find it difficult now to take down 3 light blues where as on the level 10 missions these were done with relative ease. I expect a tough fight vs a white con mob but I am finding I have to use FD or spice just to stay alive.
If it was not for the smuggler skills set that I have this proffesion would not be a viable combat proffesion to play. And once I master it I am dropping it as quickly as possible. I am at my wits end and realy I do not know how you guys put up with this class, and so I must salute you for sticking with one of the worst combat classes in the game that I can see so far.
A master pistoleer is no where as equal in damage or accuracy like a rifleman nor a carbineer and yet we draw the same level missions as these two do.
You have smuggler skills and you're still having problems? Granted, I'm masters of both, but I can kill most things under 20k HAM w/out buffs solo (things that don't shoot back at me anyway) with just a hit of tattoine sunburn and a self heal or 2. Get ranged support...with low blow, panic shot a mob stays down for around 12 seconds. After it gets back up, suppression fire it. Continue firing at long range. you only have about 8 more seconds to kill before you can low blow/panic shot again. Rinse and repeat til critter is dead. Another good trick is to kneel and bleed the target w/ HS 1 and 2. Then wait for the bleed to hit and engage from that point on. It's a free400-900 damage shot to their health straight away, and only more to come.
I think people focus more on what's broken than what works.
I'm a 0-0-4-1 Pistoleer. My only other combat skills are Marksman 0-4-0-4. I can solo a creature with 10k HAMs, though I can get into trouble if I get attacked by a group.
It's all about strategy:
* HealthShot2, HealthShot1, Peace. They won't agro until the bleeds start. If there's two of them, do this to both of them. Wait about 15 seconds. (Bleeds start in 20.) Then spam each with a StoppingShot or FanShot if you can risk it. They are at range, and you want to get the first good shot of damage on each enemy when they are as far away as possible - and StoppingShot is the best damage shot we've got.
* The Marksman skills: SuppressionFire to knock them down and slow their approach, or WarningShot then Peace to get them to run away indefinitely (while the bleeds work).ThreatenFire to get them to run away from you if you're taking too much damage in melee.
* Pistol whip them, and when they fall, run awaya few steps. We've got decent accuracy while moving. Since you should be shooting one shot per second, getting 3 or 4 seconds before they can melee attack you again gives you the chance to do 500 to 1,000 points of damage w/o special moves.
* FanShot, StoppingShot, and BodyShot2 until the HAMs come home.
I worry about what works. It's enough to keep me busy; I don't miss the broken specials. :-)
If the system works right you should be drawing white con missions, which means you've got a 50/50 chance of being cloned if you're equipped with only average equipment.
If you're drawing level 20 missions (about where i'm at btw) then you should know by now that your guns and choice of guns for a particular opponent makes a world of difference in your missions. By now, you should be familiar with foods and spices. By now you should be familiar with armors and working with them and with out them depending on your playstyle.
I use sliced composite armor. I've migrated my stats so 1 bite of Thakitillo gets my armor on. One sip of a sunburn and I'm a special spam master. One hit of gold and I can heal on demand with some great stim-b's. With my Krayt DX2 and Krayt Republic, a level 20 mission doesn't stand a chance. If fact one hit of gold will last long enough to complete 2 missions and 1 nearby spawn before the downer hits. I like gold since the downer is pretty short.
But honestly as my personal skills increase I've notice I can solo a level 20 mission without any buffs at all if I already have my armor on and I use my specials sparingly. My armor stops a lot of the incomeing damage and my DX2 really tears it up. So even with out having gotten my next box I can do the first lair unbuffed and hit the gold to regen my mind before hitting the second lair and be able to take out 2 more lairs on the way back to the mission terminals
But more importantly, with this knowledge I can also take out yellow cons with confidence and even red cons if i'm very careful.
So my conclusion is that you just want to shoot things. If that's what you want to do, I'd suggest quake or UT
I use them all.
You missed a few. Point Blank singles, BSH3, etc...
Stopping shot rules among my pvp specials. Fanshot also works very well sometimes. Depends on what I am fighting. Truth be told, I use my Smuggler shots a tad more, but I also use Aim a ton. Send those defense stackers packing with it sometimes. Against melee, when I am buffed from a Doc, I even go as far as pistolwhipping fools to the ground, rare, but it works. Pistolwhip2 is poop.
Yea, smuggler skills are not in the pistoleer tree, which was the topic - i think everyone agrees the smuggler skills rule and make master pist woth having. Odd you use stopping instead of fan, and interesting idea with aim, the delay it causes im not sure its wroth it, but thats something neat to try out.
In PvE, NPCs, examples being Stormtroopers, Multitarget does 900 a pop, granted, it sometimes says it's hitting, but it really doesn't. I still get good use out of it. Disarmshots both suck, so we can agree there. Bodyshot2 gets more love from me than 1, and I only use Healthshot2 occasionally. No one really uses bleeds that much anyway.
I recently mangled a lair of Pikets using Multi-Target, from the right range, and I of course used my buffs as well as I could. Tat sunburn to assist in the regen of my mains, and some Muon to make sure I could heal myself rapdily between shots. Couple that with Fanshot when I was facing the right direction so I could be sure not to aggro the Hurtoons 50m away, I was golden. Double-Tap is a low cost special, which does between 3 and 600 dmg, so this is a good one if you want something you can spam with little to no HAM cost.
I mainly use a DX2, 101-186, 1.6 speed on a speed slice. I would rather a damage slice, but if I use 33% Max pups, I get that gun to 120-256 sometimes, and you can't beat that.
There are many mitigating circumstances to combat. HAM costs on the guns you use, buffs.. tactics...
I dunno man. I never had no trouble.
So it sounds like you agree with what I said other than you like to use multi-target shot which doesnt work. I think you mentioned pistolwhip (pistolmeleedefense1?) which is pretty craptacular as it work maybe 1/10 times for me. Then again, I have melee to compliment my ranged, so perhaps a all ranged person would see more value in that move which rarely works. Not worth the delay in my opinion, you should have been shooting instead.
/shrug
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