Pistoleer Archive
Thread: How Speed Works In The Game: The #1 Issue Facing Pistoleers
Philosopher1976 wrote:
The guys asking for nerfs should focus on the few weapons that are more of a problem first, although those weapons have charges so they will need to be more powerful (although probably not 21.72 times more powerful than a Master Pistoleer or 12.30 times more powerful than a Bounty Hunter using a carbine).
Philosopher1976
This is a great post. Thank you for all the info. The only thing I diagreed with here was brought up in the first reply. No account for play style and tactics. This is purley numbers. As you said, it looks like the Commandos are dealing out massive amnounts of damage. However it does not take into account that they actually have to hit you to do it. Most of their weapons have huge acurrecy (sp?) negative modifiers. Plus that formost of themthey have to be within 16M to use them. I kited a Commando the other day. He had no Exploration and he just couldn't get in range to hit me. Bled and Bodyshot2-ed him to death. My point is that while you make a good point here (several in fact) the above quote is inaccurate IMHO because it is only looking at pure numbers and not the whole "class" and all the advantages and disadvantages.
Should probably also check the thread about the same thing on general discussion.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=483889
More people from other professions posting too, so it's more likely to catch attention since it has so many more people posting on it 
The original post is great, it shows the whole issue really well, but I wish people wouldnt take the numbers so literally. You cant get an unbiased comparison in numbers since they're all theoretical. People seem to get stuck arguing about how the T21 really has 50 less max damage than the example one, or AR not being as effective as in those numbers..And miss the point thatthey're just being used to illustrate the point of why the speed mod system is bad.
I commend you on a very well written and informative post. But I must point out a fewe things that have been left out of it.
1. Accuracy was not taken into account.
2. Defensive Bonuses are not in functioning correctly.
As you will notice from my sig, I am a Bounty Hunter. So I can only coment on 2 of the weapons listed in the original post, in actuality I'm only commenting on 1. I am now using the new LLC and I miss about 50-60% of my shots at a stationary target. If that target moves the miss rate goes up. Even though your DPS statsseemcorrect, assuming perfect accuracy, this is a huge factor to all players. If you shave 50% of the DPS on the LLC you will see that it is much more in-line with the other weapons.
The defensive bonuses goes along with the accuracy. If defensive bonuses were working correctly, you would see your damage taken drop considerably. Again this is a huge thing and I thinkALL combat classes need to be pushing the dev's to get this aspect of the game fixed. Once defensive modifiers are functioning then we will see a much more level playing field for all combat classes.
This is a pretty good analysis, but you really need to factor in special mods. With the special mods, you're essentially beating the speed cap, because you're damage goes up but you still hit the 1.0 second minimum.
For example if you use BS3, which is 2.5 damage mod, and 2.4 spd mod as a master pistoleer you jumpto 234.49 DPS whereas a Carbineer with LS3 would only be doing 222.88 DPS, so they're 17.8% edge is vaporized. (+79 spd master pistoller and +70 spd master carbineer; these assume master marksmen as well as mastered profession) This doesn't even take into account your more damaging attacks like stopping shot that still probably get you down to 1 second and have an even higher damage mod.
However, the rifleman damage is still borked. The +95speed mod at master is ridiculous (if this is even still correct?). This essentially turns anything up to a 20 second delay attack into a 1 second shot. They're ought to be a hard-cap at +80 speed or something (which equates to an 80% speed reduction), anything faster than that is insane and greatly favors the higher damage weapons. At an 80% cap the DPS for MS 3 goes from 1463 to 365, which is in line with reason.
Finally, you can say all you want about DPS for heavy weapons, but without specials and with their pitiful accuracy, in reality, they're not that impressive. For all the heavy weapon you have to be close to use specials and you miss more than you hit generally. I put my LLC away in PVP most of the time unless it's a big group battle and people are stupid enough to let me get close.
And finally, finally, you shouldn't compare a sub-par weapon, because once they correct the armor piercing on the DX2, your numbers should improve.
This is an extension of my post above.
If you look at the classes a master marksman has a speed bonus of 30 for pistol, rifle and carbine. A mastercarbineer or rifleman each have a bonus speed of 45 while a master pistoleer has a speed bonus of 49. Thus a master marksman / rifleman or carbineer was intended to have a speed reduction of 75% and a master marksman / pistoleer was intended to have a speed reduction of 79%. The problem is because of the hard 1s cap for everyone, is that often the rifleman gets his full 75% (or more) speed reduction, while the pistoleer only gets a 30% speed reduction at best using a fast weapon.
If we eliminate the hardspeed caps and instead cap the speed reduction to 75% it makes the classes much more even and it would seem to be the way they were intended to be.
This also eliminates or reduces the benifit of taking the BH Carbine / Carbineer combinations which I don't think was intended by the designers.
Great post, but you're making me question my decision to become a pistoleer. Maybe I'll go rifleman instead.
I think the low caps per type of weapon might be a help that was posted above. Making Carbine 1.5 and rifle 2.0 and keeping pistol at 1.0 not sure though,someone would have todo the math there.
I really don't know which why togo atm , I maxed out of one server and started a new server. Things I see are the ease many many others have doing various destroy missions that take me an hour to drain the lair yet they just go up and pound on it or send some pet. Then I see these AE attacks like herding creatures then using rifleman AE and killing 5 mobs at a time. Pistols don't have any types of dizzy or fire or stun that works which is a draw back including the HUGE AP Mods. When you think in the AP for Light,meduin and heavy armor creatures these others way out gun a pistoleer. Also they hit effective pools in pvp where as a pistoleer hit the least effective with no AR for tiny bits of dmg at the same speed they are hitting you with AP2 and AP3 weapons.
Anyways These other should be more powerful per shot but not at the same speed as a person shooting a pistol. Close range fighting a pistol should diffenatly beat a rifle. Picture a bar fight basically the quick gun is going to out do someone trying to aim a big rifle and sence this is fastasy nether will kill in one or 2 shots haha..
Also all you chanting about the speed seem tobe also in the Pistol line of Bounty hunter cause a pistoleer get very little mod to speed what is it 24? do you get +6 more at master? I forget even so that's 30 where a BH who has 3 weapons to choose from reaches a +30 at Tier 2 in pistol. A tier 2 BH can Dizzy making you falldown then blast your eye for what 400k pistol XP ? hahaA lvl 3 or 4 pistoleer skill that everyone wants to use costs twice the XP in pistol to get.
We should maybe all just say scrwe pistol and be Limited BH that can merly dable in one other area BUT we'd all be killers for very little amounts of XP grinding plus have fire and bleeds and dizzy and alot more speed. So why spend 63 points on a pistoleer line and4,900,000 of pistol XP points when you can be three times as effective with a pistol for 14 skill points and 1,120,000 XP points ? PLUS have a heavy weapon plus be better then a master carbineer in carbine at a 1/4 of the cost.
But awayways getting WAY WAY off track , I agree that speed is an issue and also AP is a joke . with all the plus MODs you can get with an AR weapon +50% then another +50% and on top of it another hahah WHY WOULD ANYONE want to use a none AP weapon ? Take 2 players both in obese or what ever armor as you whittle them down with tiny dmg shots cause of the PVP changes they sit back with a AP weapon and hit for +50% plus other mods with lets say a laser carbine so basically 2-3 shots even with buffs and spice, When it would take you 3 times that with a pistol plus they can heal the damage very easy and Suffer Zero Types of Effects cause pistol has none.
after making it to master pistoleer and having some of the best sliced weapon around...I've picked up a cdef carbine and will be slowly knocking off pistoleer. Although this point may be mute as i'm so sick of the nerfed stuff in this game i may not continue my subscription...glad i only paid for 3 months. I started going for bio-engineer---nerfed--- commando was nerfed, so didn't go there(i guess it isn't now)....doctor--resources unavailable 99% of the time---nerfed....carbines were nerfed when i started....why do they keep messing with our shots? every class has a knock down shot...we have to get close, and melledefense2 doesn't even work!!!
.world of warcraft is starting to look good...................
Capping the speed mods, even at different levels for different guns wouldn't really solve anything. It might work as a short term balance fix of a sort, but the actual issue is MUCH larger than just that. The whole concept of capping the speed like that, specially this early sounds very flawed to me. I posted this on the general thread already, but I guess since we have 2 of these going its worth doing here too 
One of the biggest reasons forwhy it's bad,which for some reason hasnt been brought up at all yet is how if affects the game in the future. I've been an EQ player for over 4 years, and been watching how the game develops over the years alot. One thing that's been in the way of additions in EQ quite often has been hard coded caps in the progression of characters/skills/mobs/items/whatever. Those are VERY BAD. They'll need to be changed eventually if the game intends to have any kind of future, cause you need to keep adding stuff to the game. A speed cap at +100 mod resetting all delays to 1 is exactly one of those hard coded caps that cant be changed other than by altering the way the whole system works.
EQ has several good examples of how they've had to change the actual code to allow progression later on since they were sorta short sighted in the start, probably not thinking they'd be needed. All of them resulted in staying at the "capped" state for a while before coming up with a real fix, having to resort to "optional" ways of getting around it, cause the real fix wasnt possible without changing the whole system. Here are some of them.
- HP cap was 32k for all mobs in the start, so they had to start making encounters harder by just giving them insane AE damage spells since making them able to take more hits was not an option. Was changed with velious.
- Resists werent working at all when you went over a certain point, they actually rolled over in the start, and as a first fix the effectiveness just got capped.. but then later on everyone was at that cap and they finally came up with a way for the spell system to make higher resists better around luclin.
- Item stats were limited to +127 or +128 to one stat max, resulting in all good items in the end being +125hp/125mana, as they couldnt make anything better.. Was finally changed around PoP.
- The "sure death" fall damage was 10k for a long time, when people were getting too close to having 10k hp, it got bumped up to 20(Ok that wasnt a very good example, it was just amusing )
Anyways, what we're facing here is very similar to that, except that we've reached the cap already for alot of classes. As the game advances, there'll be just optional ways of getting around the issue without a real fix, which will get harder and harder to do with time, and the longer it takes to come up with a "real" fix, the harder it is to do if you want to keep some sort of balance in the game.
I havent figured any good way to fix it other than changing the speed mod system to work as a speed increase instead of delay decrease, that way you wouldnt create a cap in the same way at any point.
Your Damage per second is kind of misleading. Heavy Particle Beam Connon, Rocket Launcher, do not have any Sp attacks. And therefore are incorporated into the initial dmg.
And, farther more no one uses a Rocket Launcher nor a HPBC, as a right hand weapon, Way to expensive. These weapons are only for the first shot.