Pistoleer Archive

Interesting post ... very well thought out, made a lot of sense.

I think you're right that Pistoleers will still be able to kill mobs post-nerf ... but will there be any point in getting any Pistoleer skill besides pistol whip? From my perspective, after the nerfyou should just get BH pistol or Smuggler Dirty Fighting if you want to use a pistol.

I do agree that it's much harder to level with riflemen ... although a friend of mine who has hit Master can fire a T21 rifle as fast as I can fire my scout blaster, which kind of sucks. LOL The mind drain thing is a problem for rifle though ... I didn't realize that food wasn't an option to buff mind, just Muon Gold.

Thanks again for the post -- interesting.

As far as food goes, food does help, but it's hard to come by. Muon Gold is much more common and you can usually get it in a crate.

I thought I'd post my experiences since looking at weapon stats and arguing about abilities doesn't really tell you how weapons perform in the game. I'm having fun playing with rifles, and there are definitely times when an expert rifleman is better than an expert pistoleer.

By the way, here's an idea -- have you tried weapon powerups for HAM costs? I haven't tried that yet but I'm getting a Master Artisan friend of mine to make me a crate or two to try out. Maybe that will help you with rifle.

The problem is rifleman's disadvantages are all easily overcome. Pistoleers lack DPS, and there is nothing you can do past what everyone else does it raise it. Once you get master rifleman you will be doing obscene ammounts of mind damage, even compared to the random pool damage specials that pistoleers use. Getting to master rifleman can be a pain. The pay off is..well... would you like doing 500-3000 damage every 2 seconds to the mind pool? I think I know your answer.

I'm not sure the HAM costs are easily overcome. Everything else, I can see ways to get past.

Even with Muon Gold, you slowly lose Mind... and when you crash on Muon, you pretty much only get one or two shots before you're out of the fight.

I got bored with my template so I started leveling up along the Rifleman line for a change of pace. I was previously a Master Doctor/Master Pistoleer... to get some perspective.

Leveling up a Rifle to Rifleman novice is painful after getting used to firing specials off every second as a pistoleer. It's pretty clear that Pistol is more powerful that Rifle when you're not an expert.

Luckily I already had 300k of combat xp saved up from leveling up in Pistoleer and Smuggler, I was able to buy up my Rifle speed right away (0-0-0-3 Rifle) for +60-70 rifle speed.

Stats:

* Master Pistoleer: I use a FWG5 80-220 damage 2.0 delay and a DX2 100-200 damage 1.9 delay
* Partial Rifleman (1-0-0-3): I use a pre-nerf T21 200-500 damage 6.7 delay and a Laser Carbine 50-450 damage 6.0 delay with no powerups.
* Fighting mobs with around 6k to 10k HAMs and Light to Medium armor, 30% to random resists.

Rifle Disadvantages:

- HAM cost (Mind). Rifles have more downtime due to the hefty HAM costs on the advanced weapons. The DLT is similar to the Scout Blaster in ham costs, but the rest of the weapons drain mind very quickly. I'm used to buffing and healing my action to counteract pistol costs. For a rifleman, you're almost forced to use Muon Gold spice (+600 to all mind stats) to not incapacitate yourself with mind costs on Laser Rifles and T21s. I would list this as THE disadvantage for using a Rifle since it's a hard problem to get around.

- Accuracy. I miss quite a bit if I'm not prone or kneeling at ideal range at around 60m (I have not advanced up the sniping/accuracy line yet). I hit master pistoleer before the long range pistol accuracy changes so I don't know how the pistol compares at novice pistoleer. From what I understand, this isn't really an issue at Master Rifleman. On a bright note, the accuracy on the Laser Rifle is already OK at ideal range. I can often run, style, and still hit at 45-60m.

- Mind Pool Attacks. If you run out of HAM to style, it takes a long time for a rifle to randomly hit the opponents mind pool. In essence, if a rifleman wants to kill an opponent, they have to have enough Mind to kill the opponent before he dies.

- Lack of CC. I'm used to having Disarm Shot 2 and Pistol Whip as crowd control. Even without Disarm Shot 2, Pistol Whip is much better than nothing. If there were more than two mobs rushing me, I usually paniced and pulled out my pistol.

- Melee Damage Multiplier. If I don't kill a melee mob/character before it reaches me, I was forced to switch to my pistol if I didn't want to get knocked out.

- Energy Damage. The best rifles are almost all energy damage with armor piercing. In practice, this was never a problem, but could be a problem if there's a 100% energy resistant mob (I have yet to see one).

Rifle Advantages:

- DPS. Unstyled, Rifles with AR2 or AR3 blow away pistols for DPS against opponents with any type of armor when you have a good rifle speed and a good rifle. Pistols lose their DPS advantage quickly when Rifles start getting their speed bonuses. Styled, the DPS is still good, but the mind costs make it difficult to kill more than one or two targets realistically. I am already able to kill armored targets faster with my rifle than my pistol... if I don't miss.

When I do hit, the armor piercing effect is everything I had hoped it would be, doing 2000-3000 head hits every 3-5 seconds. With flurry shot 2, watching multiple targets take 2k-3k damage at once was pretty rewarding.

- Bleeds. The Rifle bleeds are just nasty, two stacked bleeds can do 2k damage easily which is a big deal against heavily armor opponents.

My conclusion:

I still have some work to do in the rifle line... I can still easily do better against most targets using one of my pistols and spamming disarming shot 2 while fully buffed with doctor buffs. Even if it takes longer to kill my targets with a pistol, they don't shoot back.

But... after the knockdown and disarming shot 2 changes, I think Master Pistoleer will still be a viable choice since it will still have a decent DPS and can be used well while kiting. I can spam fan-shot with a pistol for 1k damage every 1s so the damage isn't awful compared to the 1.2-2k damage of high end rifles every second (taking 100-150 of my mind per shot).