Pistoleer Archive
Thread: Publish 8 Combat Balance: How does this bode for pistoleers?
I think anything is better than what we have now. and there's some good changes going in that could level the playing field a bit. I'm worried about the following things though:
- What is the Pistoleer's combat Role in SWG?
- Will our damage output be made comparable to other professions? will be be a good damage class for ranged?
Right now, anyone can have decent defenses if they stack, buff, and wear armor. I see defenses being the same if people want to invest in them. This severely limits weaknesses in classes (IE, rifleman have the weakness of high HAM specials that disappears when they are frying off of Muon, Brandy, and Canape) while making some classes more viable in PvP due to their high damage output.
I don't want this patch to come and go and pistoleers still holding the short end of it all. I'm really tired of that. I guess we will know soon, at which time I'll have to decide on what new profession I'll want to do, or keep this one if it becomes "good".
I have a lot of faith in these new combat changes because they are way better than what we have now.
My character is a master tka/ master pistoleer/ rouge smuggler/ novice medic and while in PvE he kicks butt, in PvP he gets wasted fast because PvP is mostly an item based activity in SWG. If a player is not spiced up, buffed out, wearing high cost spliced adv/ken comp amor and using a krayt tissue enhanced weapons then you'll always be owned in PvP and it's this part of PvP in SWG that I really hate because I don't have enough credits to waste on some of the above mentioned items.
TKA's do not need to be nerfed. All you have to do is keep your distance from a TKA and you'll be fine because a TKA has the worst range in the game. Warcray I and Warcry II are getting nerfed! Warcry I and Warcry II were a melee characters best weapon in PvP. I love the idea that players using fire arms will do more damage! This damage will be a little more in line with the damage that melee chacters do and it means that we gunfighters wont have to fork out 300,000 credits or more for a lousy krayt tissue enhanced weapon! The devs have tried to make the melee players happy by at least letting them have a to hit bonus against players who are equiped with a ranged weapon.
I love the idea that mind can't be targeted! I am so tired of being killed with 2-3 hits from mind attack specials used by a rifleman or bounty hunter!
DrBonzai,
Wanderhome.
This is when the speed cap will be put in as well.
1 sec - Pistoleer, 2 sec - Carbineer, 3 sec - Rifleman.
Seems to me the biggest winners are the Carbineers here. With all the state effects (dizzy, stun, blind) at their disposal plus single ranged and multi target ranged KD, that seems like a very strong profession.
Pistoleers would be in the middle ( an increase from being the worse ranged prof ) and
Rifleman would get the shaft. 3 sec speed cap and the mind pool now being healable makes them the big loser this time around which isnt so bad since they have been the BEST ranged profession for awhile now. Every PvPer is a Rifleman now a days but I see that quickly changing.
Hard speed caps haven't been announced by any developer. If they have and I missed it, by all means provide a link.
I'm a little frustrated that Thunderheart's preview was so vague and difficult to understand. I'll answer the questions as best I can:
HabeasCorpus wrote:
Quote from the Front page Feature:
Combat Balance: A major Combat Balance pass will be happening in Publish 8. The goal of the combat balance is to make combat challenging and equitable across the combat professions. The Combat Balance consists of several aspects.
" The first aspect is the Weapon Balance. The Weapon Balance pass is intended to bring relative power of weapons between professions more in line with each other. I'm all for this....but does this mean pistols will be more powerful, or rifles andcarbines will be less powerful?
The weapon balance is only for balancing the weapon schematics themselves. Skill trees are untouched. As for specifics, you guess is as good as mine.
This is not to say that they will all be the same.Different weapon types will still have various strengths and weakness providing different abilities in which they are ideally suited. What do you think this means?
I think it means he himself doesn't know anything specific yet.
Certain weapons classes will stay more or less powerful than the average but this is to reflect a balance paradigm of the profession that uses those weapons.Should this read:We aren't nerfing TKA and Rifleman, and Pistol will be as week as it always was. ???
No, it should read "Certain weapon schematics will remain better than others, but the skill trees should reflect this. For example, if profession X has excellent weapons, we will take it into account when balancing professoin X's skill tree. In the end, there will be balance or something a lot like it. Don't look at 1 aspect and get in a tiffy over it."
Additionally weapon certifications will be rearranged to provide a better power progression and to better match up with when Weaponsmiths are granted the schematics to craft them. A major goal of the weapon balance pass is to provide players with a consistent and balanced power progression as they advance up their profession as well as providing interesting and varied weapon choices at all skill levels. This doesn't make any sense to me... although it seems like they have abandoned their "Novice and Master" level weapons Idea. I'm guessing that grinding will be harder for combat now... and that people who have been playing and are already masters of their chosen professions will be the big winners in this, while newbies will be hit hard (much like the crafting changes that are going in which really screw the new/aspiring crafter while widening the gap between novice and master.
Maybe it's been abandoned, maybe not. I think the idea is that we get most of our certs much, much sooner than weaponsmiths gain the ability to craft them. This ticked off the weaponsmiths to no end back when the game had just launched.
" The second aspect of the Combat balance will be the HAM redesign. A very critical part of the overall combat rebalance is the change to the functionality of the HAM system. This change will allow a greater ease in balancing overall HAM costs for weapons and special moves. It will also allow Mind to be removed as a special damage type and place equal emphasis on Health, Action and Mind pools for both abilities and damage.
Mind can't be targeted anymore? wow, that evens the playing field out considerably. Perhaps that means that mind will be able to be healed too (and no, Blue Milk isn't a Mind stim... sure, that's the description, but it's 70 filling for about 500 heal and how many of us PvP without brandy? Muon is a better mind stim.)
This was the most confusing thing in the preview. Targeted mind damage is not going anywhere. The idea is that after the HAM revamp, mind damage won't be such a big deal. It will just be damage, on par with Health and Action. Read between the lines, guys. I didn't get explicit permission to talk about it, I'm just rewording what Thunderheart said. I can also assure you that when this goes through, players will not be able to "Chain Heal" indefinitely. The kinks are being worked out on that.
Before any Bounty Hunters start saying Eye Shot will be useless, let me be the first to point out that a nifty bonus to the special is the Blind state effect. The goal seems to be gravitating away from "spam your best special" anyway. Combos are the future, at least the developers hope.
" The third aspect is the Profession Balance. Once the underlying core systems for combat (weapons, damage & HAM) are balanced it will be possible to look at all combat professions and balance them in a way that emphasizes each of the professions roles in combat and to give purpose to each individual player as well as reasons for choosing various profession combinations in groups. This includes a skill mod balance, skill tree progression tweaks, combination stacking, special abilities (existing and some new) and overall difficulty. "
What's our role again? Is it the damage shield from Melee types and we can't attack outside 32m? I'm kind of afraid of what is coming down the pipe for us.
Our role hasn't yet been announced. Presumably, it will closely resemble what we have been telling the development team we want. If it doesn't, well, I'm not going anywhere. We'll deal with it.
I'm just asking questions here. I'm sure this patch is about 2 months off at least, so we have plenty of time to speculate and ponder and complain about the changes before they go into place.
biwan: