Pistoleer Archive

I've been playing this game for a little over 3 weeks, and decided when I started that I wanted to master the pistoleer profession. But it seems like adding skill blocks (or whatever you want to call them) does little to nothing to improve my character.

My character does have a long way to go. So maybe I'll eventually see the improvement I've been lacking to date. Right now I have all 4 intermediate pistol skills trained, and I also have advanced pistol stances and grips trained.

I think the problem is that bodyshot2 is the best special move I have. And that is a marksman special move, gained when expert pistol is completed. I have double tap, but it's simply not as effective as bodyshot2. If it targeted a specific ham bar it would be better, because it does dish out more damage. But it doesn't, so bodyshot2 still kills faster. Pistol Melee Defense 1 is great of course. This special move was the first thing to give my character a leap in ability since I gained bodyshot2 way back when. But it apparently only works good because it's bugged, and it's getting hit with the ole nerf stick tomorrow. So much for that.

As far as skill modifiers go, they seem to focus on defense and accuracy when shooting. Accuracy is the last thing I'm worried about. I haven't had trouble hitting anything I've fought. In fact, when I do miss I seem to miss low targets (like babies in a lair for instance) just as often as I miss monsters that are red con to me. But it's not too often in either case, so this isn't an issue with me.

My problem is I simply don't do enough damage. I can't for the life of me figure out why we don't get pistol damage bonuses as we move up the tree. Because of that I'm starting to think I won't be much better off as a master pistoleer.

I don't mean for this post to come off as a big whine. If this doesn't work out for me (and it looks like it won't), I'll just shrug my shoulders and try something else out with my soon to be master medic skills. I do however want to say that I'm extrememly dissapointed with the issues that were raised to SOE from this forum. I mean come on, who cares about twirling guns and holsters. The way I see it we need to either get damage bonuses throughout our advancement in pistoleer, or MUCH better guns.

Stop going up the tree filling all the bottom rows first. Apply that XP instead to a single tree first, then work on another tree.

Instead of all the intermediate and one advanced skill finished, you could have instead gotten something like stopping shot that hits for 1200 damage.

Thanks for your reply. I will make expert pistol stances and grips my next block. I'm skeptical in believing that stopping shot will do double the damage of every other special move, but we'll see.

For what it's worth, I use a 77-152 speed 2.0 scout blaster (sliced of course). I've had around 20 scout blasters sliced and that's the best I've gotten by a mile. I did try the FWG5 (is that the right spelling?) for a few days, and it didn't kill as fast as my scout.

Is there any other special move I should look forward to? Or can I safely assume that if Stopping shot isn't good enough for me, that I ought to look for a new profession?

Soha, you're at the exact place I was a week ago. Only, I had pretty much filled out all of Pistoleer except for the Marksmanship/Special Abilties tree. Like you, I didn't need more accuracy and PMD 2 doesn't do a KD anyway. It really wasn't until I spent some time questioning BHs, grouping with BHs, and generally educating myself about the BH specials that I realized the special attacks I most want are all there.

As for Pistoleer specials...Stopping Shot is really, really slow. You'd get better damage over time from Double Tap. Fan Shot's the best damage over time special you've got, but honestly it's not impressive in terms of raw damage, you're looking at 600-700 range, though it fires about as fast as Double Tap. They of course all share the same problem of targetting a random pool, so in terms of general effectiveness at actually killing something PVE, they might not bemuch better than Body Shot 2. Stopping Shot USED to have a PVP purpose in delivering 1-shot kills, but they're pushing through that 75% PVP damage reduction tomorrow, so it'sgoing to bea completely useless skill.

As a Master Pistoleer, the only difference would begetting Disarm Shot 2, that's an AE KD right now, but sooner or later they'll fix it, I can't believe that's intentional, especially since like I said, PMD 2 is missing its KD component. I'll bet good Imperial credits that's where it went. It's still a defensive move right now, KDinga targetdoesn't make you do any more damage to them, yet.

As soon as I realized this, I surrendered all my Pistoleer skills except for PMD 1, all my Medic skills, and got BH Pistol 4. Now, I hit things in the body with Torso Shot for 600-700 a pop, it's like Fan Shot, same speed, but targets body only, and has a VICIOUS fire-based dot that will leave 500+ wounds on a player if you use it in PVP. Not that it's my only good special, Eyeshot is a mind-pool targetted pistol special that blinds its target too, also devastatingin the600-700 damage range. Bleeding shot has its uses, it's a mind-based bleed, about as strong as Health Shot 2 and I assume Rifleman's Mind Shot 2, since it targets the mind. The biggest hidden bonus to all this is my scatter pistol...I can't tell you what a huge difference a high minimum damage, high maximum damage, AR1 pistol makes over the pitiful scout blaster and fwg5.

Do I miss my Medic skills? Of course, but I have pets to tank for me, and if things get close I can still Pistol Whip. Pet damage can be healed with pet stimswhen the patch comes, so that's not a problem either.The extra dots and extra gun damage I would say increased my offensive abilities at least 50%, as in, I kill things 50% faster now. Do I end a lot of fights out of action? Not if I just stack bleeds and autoattack, it's still pretty effective, and I always have the option of going all-out and chaining Torso Shots for a quick takedown that's just not possible with Master Pistoleer.

So my advice to you is, get BH Pistol 4, I think you'll like it if your focus is on offense. In PVP I find my lack of healing irrelevant, it's not like my enemies can heal their mind pool, and that's what I'd target with Eyeshot/Bleed shot. Hell, I might just throw in a Torso Shot for the wounding if I want to annoy them.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I want my focus being on hitting harder and killing faster, not defense and accuracy. I am going to take your advice and go for BH4 starting tomorrow night. And it looks like I'll be able to keep most of my medic skills, though I willcome up atad short from mastering it.

Thank you for your long and insightful post

Glad I could help, I have some advice on getting BH faster too The Master Marksman side isn't really very special, you can probably go through all of it in a day or 2 w/ just a laser carbine and rifle, but the Scout side could take some time if you don't know some tricks. The actual scouting XP can't be helped either, you have to get it from killingcreatures and harvesting corpses, you canprobably get there if you have a pet or some help fairly quickly.

Trapping XP is fast to raise once you hit Trapping 1 (quite easy, it's like 50 xp if you throw a trap at a durni and get it to land, and you only need 1000 xp), make Glow-Juice traps, the effect is minus ranged defense on the target, so it helps your normal attacks, and it's endlessly stackable...as in, you can throw as many traps as you want at a target and each one that lands will give you the full xp. Most traps have a long-lasting effect and don't give any xp againbefore the duration for the first one wears off. I don't think you'd have much luck getting it to land on anything CL 30+ with just Trapping 1, but once you get Trapping 2 you can get those last 30k of Trapping XP in literally 1 fight, thingsat aBaz Nitch level give 400+ per trap, and you can chuck those pretty fast

Survival XP ended up being the most tedious XP to get for me, you only get that from making camps, and the more people in your camp, the more XP you get, up to a certain limit according to the type of camp. At Novice Scout's basic camp, that limit is 600 solo, 640 I think if you have more people, and if you have more people, it'd get that much XP in as little as 5-10 mins. Otherwise it's literally 30-40 minutes of sitting there by yourself, doing nothing and then manually disbanding the camp using the little panel in your camp site, instead of waiting the full hour-ish for your camp to auto-disband. I did it w/ macros and leaving my computer on at night, you can probably do it faster by just going to a popular place like the tusken fort on Tatooine and get people to come to your camp.

Good luck, I think you'llenjoy BH as much as I do...it's comparatively easy, really, since you only need 1.2 mil of pistol XP to get to BH Pistol 4, that's like a single line of Pistoleer.

Actually, you do get damage bonuses under a different name. Pistol Speed, in the special abilities line.

Testing with 20 speed vs 74 speed. Simply an amazing difference. If you check out the FAQ on the sticky, down about 8 or so posts you'll see PISTOL SPEED. We figured out the formula there and it's a huge increase in damage over time. I will clean the FAQ up so it's more obvious sometime soon.