Pistoleer Archive

Give an imperial an AT-ST and give a couple disarming shot 2 and they can take out a crowd of rebels in short order. I saw an Imperial last night work from behind with Disarming Shot 2 and knock down 7-8 rebels at a time with DS2. It was amazing to see, even if I was one who was also taken out. i'm not that far up the pistoleer tree but was impressed. If the AOE Knockdown of DS2 is ever taken away, then it will still be appealing for the mass damage it can do.

However, what about knockdown defense in pistoleer? Has anyone tested this since the patch? I have defense up to dizzy defense, but haven't noticed a difference yet.

We really need the defenses to work. I love power and I love protection. I say continue to make moves more powerful and make defenses work a % of the time.

Don't make our characters more impotent, make them more potent! I don't want the nerf bat. I want a Louisville Slugger... just make sure you make a good defense model in the process devs, so that the power of the professions don't work 100% of the time when the other has trained defensively as well. However, anyone who only trains offensively should be taken down easier.

In beta people took the defensive lines from multiple professions. The result was unbalanced (too much defense - they were close to invincible).

So until they could solve that problem, they disabled the defensive skills. Unfortunately we're now umm, about a month I guess, into release and they still haven't addressed that balance issue, so they're still disabled.

It seems pretty straightforward to me...

The problem is that their game mechaings / equations are too simple. Too many things are two or three factors multipled together to give a percentage, or act as a single skill flat percentage.

So you have to do one of three things (off the top of my head):

Not consider defensive skills in a vacuum where 100 = invincible, but instead have them be modifiers in conjunction with the attacker's skill. So maybe some folks could become unhittable by cooks and droid engineers , but a skilled combat specialist would still have a definite chance of hitting and damaging them (although of course less than they would against someone with minimal defenses).

Or, if they want to continu to keep things super simple, have the values converge on some percent effectiveness that is less than 100. So maybe at 100 (or above) skill it acts like 80%. Therefore at 50% it acts like 40.

Or, and I think this solution would kinda stink and kills the whole beauty of their skill system (which enables picking and choosing of skills and abilities), make the skills different. Just as pistol speed and rifle speed are different skills and don't stack, make it pistol melee defense, rifle defense vs knockdown, etc... Only the skill that matched up with your currently equipped weapon would work. This solution is also bad because it doesn't address the issue of skill enhancement attachments (once those are re-enabled... I think they were disabled for the same reason - because too much of some skills was unbalanced and they didn't have a solution yet).

Ageofme, are you on Scylla? I heard about raid in Anchorhead or some other city a couple nights ago, a guy with Disarming Shot 2 who was an imperial totally pwned the whole town.

What exactly does disarming shot 2 do?

Defense Modifiers work fine, just that if you only have defense from one box it's not too efficient.

ok disarming shot 2 is not what is supposed to do. It is for carbines, we get the ranged area of effect knockdown and you get to damage guns. I am not understanding why you people cannot comprhend and tell the DEV's that it is meant for the carbines and that it in fact is broken

Madbarbarian, you scare me.

Go away

k thanks, gg

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MadBarbarian wrote:
ok disarming shot 2 is not what is supposed to do. It is for carbines, we get the ranged area of effect knockdown and you get to damage guns. I am not understanding why you people cannot comprhend and tell the DEV's that it is meant for the carbines and that it in fact is broken

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lol we get to damage guns? lol... disarming shot1 is just extra damage and great damage against lairs and nothing more and DS2 is range area KD... you guys get range area KD, high damage guns with pretty good speed (once you get high carbineer tree, it doesn't matter it stays at 1.0)your guns don't have as much HAM cost , your attacks dizzy/stun/blind?? area of effect and crippling shot is just mad even though it's a random stat pool, in PvP it can literally cripple. we get, what, a range area knockdown at MASTER LEVEL, we get a MELEE knockdown and half as much damage with a pistol? boohoo i'm considering going to carbineer for awesome croud control like when they fix suppression fire... and full auto area 2? ugh don't make me cry

The devs know what disarming shot 2 is doing. They know what skills dont work too. Out of the various pistol skills they have said arent working properly, disarming shot 2 WAS NOT one of them. You do not know its not supposed to be like that mad..whatever your name was.

At first, I was on the side thinking that yes, Disarming Shot 2 was 'mixed' up with the Carbineer skill.

But now that I really think about it, I highly doubt that. Mistakenly mixing up two skills like this in the code is not a small error, either on the developer or the designer's part. The fact that it's stayed this way all through beta and since launch is further evidence that our ranged KD is not going anywhere.

It's far more likely that the designers moved the ranged KD to the master pistoleer box and the newbie developers doing the text descriptions just haven't reached that item in their very long 'to do' list.

Or you can take the middle approach and say that the skills still haven't been 100% set in stone by the designers. As a result, they haven't bothered changing the descriptions yet.

In any case, every day that goes by, I'm more hopeful that when I reach master pistoleer, I'll have my ranged KD.

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But now that I really think about it, I highly doubt that. Mistakenly mixing up two skills like this in the code is not a small error, either on the developer or the designer's part. The fact that it's stayed this way all through beta and since launch is further evidence that our ranged KD is not going anywhere.

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If you look at the pistol tree, for example, you will notice that there are even a few typos. The devs are not above totally screwing up some coding. The description of disarmingshot2 does not mention a knockdown. I doubt that the description is a typo. The AE knockdown is supposed to be the carbineer skill Full Area Auto2.

Abaddon

There are a ton of specials mixed up right now, especially for carbineers. Chargeshot2 is supposed to be an AE knockdown, but it does neither AE or knockdown right now. Suppression1 and 2 are supposed to force posture change, but Actionshot1 and 2 do that now (in addition to bleed). Legshot3 is supposed to be an AE version of Legshot2, but it only hits one target for no more damage than Legshot2. FullAutoArea1 and 2 are supposed to hit multiple targets, but it only hits one target in the first shot and then AE on successive shots.

I wouldn't be surprised if Disarmingshot2 is nerfed--it's in line with the types of weapons. The pistol is supposed to be a fast, close-in, single-target weapon. The carbine is a mid-range machinegun, most of its specials are AE at the highest level.

BTW, you have got to be joking if you think pistol HAM costs are more than carbines.

From a game development standpoint, the following are three different people:

1. Game designer who determines the skill set and the attributes of each skill
2. Developer who codes the skills, the damage, special effects, etc.
3. Newbie developer who does the text string grunt work like filling in descriptions, etc.

As of now, we don't know what the designers have planned for the skills that seem broken or mislabeled. Did they plan for the master pistoleer to have an area ranged knockdown? If you really think about it, it's a huge mistake to mistakenly switch the master pistoleer skill with a carbineer skill.

It's far more likely that the skills are simply mislabeled. Fixing things like typoes, text strings, descriptions would be low priority bugs. The developers have HUGE lists of to dos and bugs to fix.

Even so, I do feel that the most likely explanation is that the designers haven't determined exactly how they are going to change each class. As a result, the issue of these broken or mislabeled skills are in limbo, and the developers haven't been able to make any fixes to the skills or the descriptions.