Pistoleer Archive
Thread: How Speed Works In The Game: The #1 Issue Facing Pistoleers
Another possible solution is to cap the max profession speed at 75.
Since the "damage multiplier" is inversely proportion to the profession speed and since it approaches infinity as it near 100, just cap it at 75 and everything is balanced. It'll also address the issue of hybrid profession dabbling to get speed up to 100. Since profession speed is capped, it won't do them any good. This will get rid of the unsightly "divide by zero" bug. At 75 speed, a master can shoot 4 times faster than a novice, which is plenty good.
Second thing which can help is to allow weaponsmith to trade increased speed for increased damage. Thus a Master Pistoleer wouldn't mind running around with a FWG5 4.4 speed, albeit 80-320 damage whereas a novice can run around with a FWG5 2.2 speed 40-160 damage. This will also balance the DPS.
Shooting more than once per second is not do-able simply due the divide by zero above (if there's no min cap, at 100 profession speed, we will shoot a zallion time per second). They have to pick a time slot, one second is as good as any.
Do you have the data for HAM cost? This analysis is based on generic auto-attack. What if we apply special move? If pistoleer can spam Body Shot 2 forever whereas carbineer/rifleman can't spam their special, then that'll balance thing out a bit. I'll search the other board for HAM cost for special move and will post the result.
Also, this analysis is based on 2 stationary targets shooting at each other. Do you have the data for accuracy while moving/on the move? This could be another balancing factor. If the data bear out, then the best tactic for a pistoleer vs a rifleman is to get up close and personal and run around in circle. The DPS for a rifle may be 500 DPS, but if shooting at a moving target at point blank drop it to 100 DPS whereas a pistoleer at point blank moving only drop to 70 DPS, thing doesn't look too bad. I'll comb the forum for accuracy data/formula for posture effect and will post the result if I can find it.
Nice work. As for how the devs think things are working we have holo post about T21 for around a month ago.
In that he discusses speed and based on what he saidhe thinks the system works by reducing the speed of the weapon and then that number is raising to 1 as a min, and then multipled that by the speed of the attack. If this was true it would give a reason for having fast speed guns, a reason for speed powerups, and would explain the various speed up that various weapons have, since the ones that get the most have some of the slowest weapons.
Under what you did, as high end a bounty hunter would be smart to get a weapon that is really slow but has huge damage. However under the way the devs think a master pistoleer could use a something like a 5.2 speed weapon at the same speed a novice could use a 2.4 speed weapon.
This actually seems like a good way to do it. No matter how many boxes you get that have +Speed mods in them you can only get up to +75. Would nerf the riflemen a bit but that can be compensated in other ways, its the speed formulae that becomes infite which needs to be changed first and then a balance achieved afterwards.
Phuobar wrote:
Another possible solution is to cap the max profession speed at 75.
doesnt matter how often they miss(unless they miss everytime) as when they hit your dead,
with my pistol i hit hit hit hit andhe HEALSi hit hit hit hit and heHEALS
meanwhile
he misses hes misses he misses hes misses hehits and im DEAD
get it?
now, thats wearing a full suit of composite with a 51% shrug all and a heal enhance makeing the ham 2k
dead in one hit...
no way to heal no way to respond..simply dead
and noone wants to address issue number 2, ever notice that the pistoleer has no state effects? thats right, no stun, no intimidate, no dizzy, no knockdown, no flame, no blind - all of these state effects change the dps change the armor shrug, change your accuracy, add that into the equation)
PVE? with no armor peirce some mobs are just plain unbeatable by a pistoleer even if its 10-1
on another note, dont u jsut hate spending all that time killing the CH's pet in pvp and get no faction, i mean he is the enemy he is haveing effect on the feild of battle, just as much if not more of an effect than that faction pet, which btw does give faction upon death
oh, and this idea of disarm shot damageing the weapon, your asking for a nerf, think on this, if the disarm hits for a tiny bit of dmg, then its not worth using and the move is BS, if the damg it does is signifigant then a pistoleer can single handedly end the rageign battle by takeing away everyones weapon, which also cost them money to replace, so u lose faction, u lose armor and u lose weapon, we should have our inventory filled with weapons now? or maybe put a banknear the clone center?
which brings me to another point stricklty for mr rifleman who wants to complain and compare as if hes got it worse
so what i can gun you down, u put the unhealable unstoppable mind bleed on me and i die right after you do, so u come outta the clon center walk up on me and incap, we both died cant get any more equal than that
there needs to be a mind heal, ever been hit by disease, a mind disease at that. everyone is fighting and dying and killing and everyones cloneing 20 ft away from the battle and yes 90% of the battles are like this
but a cmbt med hits u with mind disease which cannot be healed, yes it can be cured but by that time your going to the med center, u are effectively out of the cmbt zone, can anyone else remove you from the cmbt? no . hm whats that? torso shot, burn? does the same thing, yea to the health or action, which can be healed right there by a doctor, the mind is everyones weakness but only a few can harm it..this is a serious problem
Nice work topic-poster.
Anyhow, wanted to respond to this:
"We expected to have the lowest damage weapons ... but we ALSO expected to shoot the fastest to somewhat balance that out."
I always kind of thought balance for the pistoleer should come from good specials and better accuracy. Status effects, posture changes, that sort of thing. I don't mind lower DPS, I want better specials and accuracy then the other ranged. Just my opinion.
Now, let me just start off by agreeing this needs fixed. ALOT needs to be fixed in this game. I have played Rifle and pistol masters. I have leveled carbine for master marksman ( that alone made me decide to never try a master carbineer).
I just want to say one thing about this speed issue.
If pistols have the same max range why can't rifles have the same speed?
Now consider all these other issues that help balance out the speed problem at the moment.
1) I can have a +50 bonus with my rifle and I miss 60% of my first shots. considering hte melee damage I take ths is a huge penalty.
2) PvE level 1 mobs will Dodge, counter, whatever a master rifleman, pistoleer as much as they do a newb artisan with NO weapon skills
3) I can't hit the broad side of a barn with ANY carbine no matter what the stats say. with carb 4 in marksman tree these things have about a 30% accuracy at ideal range. AND they have a horrid damage variance. While I agree they should have 1 or the other, having both cripples them.
4) Rifles stop for EVERY shot. Carbs stop for first shot. Pistols keep on a trucking. THIS IS THE BIGGEST ADVANTAGE of pistols.
5) I hit 90% of ANY type of shot with my pistol at ANY range. again, regardless of what the weapon stats show. Even while I'm running (and not stopping to shoot as already pointed out) I hit 75%+ of my shots.
6) what the hell kind of sniper is going to get within 1km of his target let alone 64m? this is freaking retarded to the point of making snipers pointless. Change the name of the profession please!! --- yes i know you did it so you didn't have to deal with the PR nightmare of having people killing people with no chance of fighting back--- yes I know that having players load at 500m-1km is nigh on impossible considering the stability of the internet not to mention bandwidth and lag issues. Which is why I said to change the name and not make them true snipers.
7) The DPS calculations you give above look great on paper and are very convincing. But I have not seen this in game. My pistoleer kills anything alot easier than any other profession I've tried. Which is all ranged combat except Master Carb and BH (I'm working on a BH now). NOTE: I solo most of the time. Rifles should not be near as hard with someone to tank for you.
8)Yes the new weapons you throw out of every chart are kick ass (with major drawbacks--like limited uses, horrid accuracy, and exhorbitant costs and manufacturing issues and pointblank range) they should be kick ass precisely because of all those drawbacks.
9) Despite all the problems the pistoleer is still the best PvE class. Commandos are cool, but **edit** those weapons are expensive to use for PvE constantly. Haven't finished my BH. And don't think I'll ever suffer throught he carb inaccuracy to try it. SO take all this with a grain of salt (which isn't even worth .02)
The answer to the speed problem in this game is simple. Make each +1 to speed on a weapon count for half of what it currently does. When you figure the formula jaeg posted, it figures so that each +1 to speed in skill is equivilant of 1% off of the end delay of your move+weaponspeed. Or you can take the %1 off of the weapondelay then multiply by special move delay. You get the same exact result.
Just cut that in half. Currently the highest you can get in +speed mods is 129 in pistol I belive. The people who have that would still benefit more than the people with +50 speed, but it would actually take the balanced dmg/delay on the weapon into effect because it would only reduce overall delay by 65%. Very few weapons would hit the cap with this rule and balance could be achieved once again through weapon dmg/delay and special move dmg/delay mods.
I started a thread in the SWG discussion on this very subject and I"ll link this thread in it and vice versa.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=547883
Maybe if we keep both threads going in a constructive manner we can get some sort of response. It should never be possible to hit 100% speed reduction. It just obliterates weapon and special move delay/dmg balance.
Net delay = (base delay) * (1/(1+Speed))
where Speed is the speed mod expressed as a percentage. The advantage of this equation is that the DPS of the weapon increases linearly with the speed, e.g. +100 speed means the DPS is increased by 100%, or doubled. This allows speed skill mods to be roughly comparable to mods such as 'unarmed damage', and eliminates the boundary condition issue.
The max range is to prevent kiting, that's why most weapon have the same max range.
I do agree, though, that the accuracy isn't working correctly. Rifle should hit more often at max range than pistol and that should be fixed.
I don't have a problem with rifle firing fast as long as they don't cap the speed. If, at rifle speed 95, a rifleman can fire every second on a 20 second rifle, that's find and dandy with me as long as I get the same treatment and be able to fire my pistol 10 time per second (pistol speed 95, weapon speed 2 sec). Now, we both on equal footing since we're both firing 1/20 as fast as normal.
In regard to passive defense (dodge etc), holo admitted it's a bug in that it doesn't scale correctly and they're slowing fixing it as not to be disruptive. But this have nothing to do with speed.
The BH owned me in PvE (read we're grouping and he always get more xp than me). Since xp is a function of damage over time, this imply the pistoleer is not the best PvE.