Pistoleer Archive

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4. Do we want Fan shot reverted or leave it as-is.

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I consider that the present Fanshot is a good thing.　Im does not care about the evil in PvE. I think it important that the usefulness in PvP went up.

Well, it wouldn't concern me too much if the accuracy of fan shot was on par with rifle specials. My concern is that fan shot was just made into an AE without the accuracy or anything else changing. Good pistols can do a pretty decent fraction of the damage rifles can (especially due to the krayt factor) and having them be highly accurate to boot comes very close to the niche rifles currently hold, without rifles having a comparable high-accuracy shot.

I'd also rather not see BH pistoleers running around with 1s fanshots that hit everyone in the cone. Strafe2 does excellent damage, but it has a fairly high miss rate while moving and against moving targets. Having good AEs is what's been keeping riflemen up all this time, and is the reason why I think the accuracy problems and the melee penalty riflemen suffer are currently justified, and I'd rather not see us get stuck with the disadvantages without any of the advantages.

I like the new fanshot, however, i do believe that there is a bug with it.

As soon as i read it was an AoE attack, I ran out to test it. Sure enough, it aggro'ed everything in what was a good size and controlable cone. However, it would stand to reason that i should have been able to oneshot the spineflaps and chubba's that i was testing it on. Later in a hunting group, i was hitting multiple animals for good damage. So it appears that if the animal does not already have some damage started, that the shots in the cone on the animals not targeted will not register any damage.

I've always supported the position that classes should be good at a particular thing, rather than having a more expensive class being better at everything. I don't think a BH/pistoleer should have the AE damage output that a rifleman does, or even a significant fraction of it (I would say anything more than 75% AE DPS and the rifleman becomes completely redundant, and we'll be less useful with any fraction of the damage). There shouldn't be any situation where a class becomes 'obsolete'.

I realize that riflemen DPS will still be higher, especially once AR is working again, but it's getting awfully close to the niche I felt riflemen were holding as their own. If the accuracy mod is still high on fanshot, there will be situations where fanshot is going to outperform even strafe2 using decent weapons on both sides (mostly when the base accuracy is low). +25% is a lot of bonus if your chance to hit is 25% too.

MTPS/disarm2 don't concern me as much (right now) because I presumed they'd be lower accuracy and/or lower multiplier than fanshot, and because they're earned at master. If fanshot's accuracy was modified so it's in line with rifle or carbine AEs, I would be a lot less concerned (something I don't know for sure right now). What I'm worried about is that the devs just made the shot AE without modifying it in any other way.

I'm not completely convinced that a BH+pistoleer with fan shot isn't going to be more effective than a rifleman. I miss fairly close to half my shots under PvP conditions (both sides moving, my target doesn't have a lot of ranged defense). BH+pistoleer can have about +80 more total accuracy considering specials accuracy mod, which would effectively double the number of hits they get. That comes pretty close to making their AE the same as the rifleman's.

pvp test results

all tests done with a fwg5 52-199 1.6 speed

I'm just gonna try to lay some data down, and sorry if it's a mess
i was wearing full suit of 49% comp armor,no helmet
testing was with mobius'strip, idk what weapon he had equiped, he had full comp equiped, he is a master pistoleer

my comp armor appears to block 2/3 to 3/4 s of pistol shots,some examples hit 58,blocked 42, hit 72,blocked 52,hit 89, blocked 63 no dot,poison or flames, those all hit for previous damage still im purty sure

(note,going through combat spam i see, mind slam 666,1485 damage,pvp,and a 245 flame cone 2 pvp)

standard shot from me does 43 damage averaged out (40-44 range purty much)
shots that do same damage as standard shot,roll shot,low blow,pistol whip 1 (knockdowns) panic shot (10 sec delay, warcry works too even with pistol equiped) point blank blast, point blank shot,hold out shot, pistol smash, (didn't see if there was a status change) hold-out blast did 72 once, 40's all the other times,

fan shot,44,89,102,129,67, (looked like the best bet was targeting pet,then the collateral damage APPEARED to be pve, doing 200-300 to players, cannot confirm)

multi-shot, 175,110,113 (aoe)
stopping shot, 59,42,127,72,86,143
sap blast,and sap shot (bleeds,) average around 100 a pop,stack and tick
pet damage is waaaay reduced, but they take pve damage

side note, those are for an outside website so it's pretty incomplete, sorry, but i'm a master pistoleer with smuggler pistol, and last ditch does 135-145 with a fwg5 75-398 (thats after using it many many times)

Noules,

I hear ya, but I don't think AOE attacks is the niche. Everyone "needs" AOE attacks for both PvE and PVP IMO, always have. The fact that some of the good carbineer AOEs were not working or werequirky, and that rifles worked, and that no pistols AOE's worked after DA2 nerf, just lead to that perceived niche.

Regaring accuracy, I don't know. I mean, comparing a DX2 to a laser andT21 has the pistol with less accuracy at around 40 and 45m+. You DO have a point if you are saying that the stacked accuracy BH/pistoleer makes that go away..that's certainly true. It's also silly expensive..but I agree, there is always room to have issues with skill stacking.

I think mind pool shots, high AR, best ranged defense/cover/crawl speed, DB at range, higher damage "per shot", and currently, highest DPS overall, is certainly a broad niche, it could even be paired down some without having a huge impact.

Eyeshot steps on that in a big way, not sure why the rifle community left this alone. BHs, by Wepps admission, do not need a mind pool shot since they mostly PvE (heh), and it's only used for the blind

What then is the pistoleer niche:
Fastest attack (well, currently rifles are faster, but let's say "intended niche"), highest average accuracy (but least damaging), health pool targeted shots, cheapest weapon, least vulnerable to melee.

I don't know< i agree that I'd rather see DAOC style limitations so that all professions have a VERY well designed niche, but right now, we're different flavors of the basic 92 point offensive ranged attack. It's like melee Noules, fencer/2H/TKA/Polearm...aside from speed (once again), no realy huge difference is there? Very similar to pistol/carbine/rifle.

hey jaeg, one question.

when they said the 75% pvp reduction got pushed through twice, did that mean they wanted to reduce pvp again? as in 75% after the previous 75%? sorry about the stupid question, i'm just confused, because poisons, fire damage, bleeds (dots) appear unaffected so ......i'm confused

Regarding the PVP...it makes no sense for pistoleers (and others in general) to do less damage than what most people drain doing their usual shots. This MUST be a bug or a mistake.

i think fanshot is a bit too good now. granted i think armour is still broken on even npcs but i was trying fanshot on nym guards and i was hitting for more damage than before, on all nyms in front of me. with my two pets i can aggro two or even three guards, wait for them to melee then just spam fan. this way i kill three guards when it used to be one ata time.

i think maybe its an armour issue thou although it might not be. also it would be nice to see the ham bars of all the targets you hit. currently you can only see the ham above the head of the one you target so i have no idea how much damage i'm doing on the rest, also the animation on the fanshot isn't fanning. it centres around your target which is a bit unconvincing.

Well, I think melee classes do have a bit of a niche. TKA is clearly the best class for ranged/melee defense, and for utility (no other melee has anything remotely resembling the meditate line). Fencers get the best combination of state defenses and ranged/melee defense. Swordsmen and pikemen are the closest to each other, but pikemen seem to have better AE, while swordsmen (and every other melee) has better melee toughness than pikemen. In PvP I agree they all seem to kind of blend together since you can kite them all, but I definitely notice a difference in hit rates against a TKA/fencer vs. another melee type.

I really don't see much of a use for riflemen if we aren't supposed to be good at AE. Cover and crawl speed doesn't add anything - I have never used cover in PvP and I think I've used it once in PvE. The HAM cost, fail rate and everything else about cover makes it pretty useless, and going prone in PvP is asking to die. Crawl speed doesn't work, and even if it did, see above.

I concede we do have better ranged defense and DPS than pistoleers right now, but we also have a lot of disadvantages, and the lack of an accurate special is extremely painful. Better AE DPS is the main reason in my mind to choose rifleman over BH/pistoleer/carbineer, but if BH/pistoleers can do everything riflemen/combo can do, and more, there's no purpose for the rifleman any more.

I don't think it's panic time yet (I think rifle AE DPS is stillsufficiently better than BH/pistoleer) but a strong part of what kept me as a rifleman instead of a FoTM has been cut down pretty significantly. I'm not saying that this should necessarily affect what you ask the devs, but it's an explanation as to why the rifleman class is less appealing for me due to this change.

Sadly I don't think melee has enough distinguishing them either, Noules. Most non-TKAs feel that they've gotten the shaft because TKA is more powerful. Fencers are in bad shape because the way speed works isn't in their favor at the moment, and Pikemen have a big accuracy bug, but for the most part there aren't sharp distinctions between the four aside from some of the added TKA goodies (meditate, force of will, etc).

The same is true of the ranged professions. Like Jaegen said, I would strongly prefer DAoC-style niches for all the combat classes, but I don't think we have rigid niches in SWG at the moment. I read your previous posts about what you thought the niches were, and I thought they were interesting, but I didn't really agree (and ironically I don't think most of the riflemen agreed either -- it's hard to get SWG players to agree on anything!). Most Riflemen prefer the idea of being snipers and want some cool new skills to make that more possible -- like being able to hide on radar, wearing ghuile suits, more accurate SniperShot, etc. That's why a lot of Riflemen originally asked for a nerf to the Master AOE attack -- they wanted a stronger single-target attack, to fit the sniper role. More power to them, either way.

Personally I think that what Riflemen want is up to them. They can be the Masters of AOE, along with the Masters of mind damage, high DPS, one-shot kills, DB at range, etc. I think that Rifleman, as implemented is pretty cool and I enjoy playing it a lot but some upgrades are neededto make it morefun(but not as much as in Carbineer, at the moment). I don't think that having FanShot as an AOE attack reduces the advantage of Rifleman much at all. It might affect your long-range view of the Riflemen as "AOE damage dealers" and the Pistoleers as "Melee Killers", based on your posts from a couple weeks back, but frankly that idea was not one that was ever in the game to begin with and probably not one the players in either profession want.

Things to keep in mind:

1. Once our speed is increased (per developers and reminded by Dinian), stopping shot will probably be better overall DPS than fan shot even for pure pistoleers with normal weapons (that's an educated guess).

2. Right now you "can" use kip up shot and do old fan shot DPS, no big deal there (less accurate I think, but same DPS).

3. If you are fighting in PvE, you probably want to use body shot 2 or 3 anyway, even in groups. However, having fan shot be AOE is a HUGE boon for most PvE'ers if they use it correctly (kill something that dies before it reaches you, or use tanks/pets to get "all" aggro first, etc.

4. To be safe, I'm suggest stopping shot damage or delay be modified so it's base DPS is better than double tap...

Correct me if I'm wrong in those, that's off the cuff before I log out for the night