Rifleman Archive

Now that BAF's don't aggro on you until your target aggro's, you can pretty much Conceal Shot anything and not risk any harm...last night I was able to prone & conceal shot my way through a whole lair of reds, not once aggro'd, not once hit, finished it with full health & action...when I ran out of mind, I just /peace andsit there until my mind pool filled back up. The mobs didn't notice, and when it was full again I continued my pot shots. I love how it now works, I finally feel like a sniper, but I'm afraid the devs will see it as too easy and nerf the crap out of it.

Any thoughts?

Depends, how fast were you killing things?

I always found conceal shot to be FAR slower than doing the whole double mind bleed run like a wuss while spamming HS2 and WS.

If you're taking 8 minutes to kill something I can kill with a pet in 2 then where is the harm?

nope i doubt it because it does not allow you to really make cash faster than any other class soloing. miss twice and they come and get you. there is risk in running around by yourself in the wilds. for it to recieve a nerfing it would have to be on the order of being able to conceal shot a nest and not get attacked. or if there was no risk in doing it.

what they MAY do is scale the risk of conceal shot and make it harder to use at box one or make you also have to go into cover. or make it so the first miss draws their attention. things like that may happen but not totally removing it.

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shotoyan wrote:
Now that BAF's don't aggro on you until your target aggro's, you can pretty much Conceal Shot anything and not risk any harm...last night I was able to prone & conceal shot my way through a whole lair of reds, not once aggro'd, not once hit, finished it with full health & action...when I ran out of mind, I just /peace andsit there until my mind pool filled back up. The mobs didn't notice, and when it was full again I continued my pot shots. I love how it now works, I finally feel like a sniper, but I'm afraid the devs will see it as too easy and nerf the crap out of it.

Any thoughts?

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It all depends on how antsy the idea of solo play makes the Devs.

Make no mistake: This patch catapulted Riflemen into the Number 2 slot for most powerful solo class PvE. The number of things we cannot kill all by our lonesome just dropped to somewhere near zero.

The thing is:

A) It's NOT risk free.
B) It's as slow as a two-legged turtle crawling up Mt. Everest against a stiff headwind.

I've hesitated to mention this, for fear that some of the more impressionable members of the Dev team might see it and get all moist and runny. But I soloed a whole lair of Mantigrue Screechers Thursday night. Heavy armor, 20% resists vs. everything, and 12k HAM. These are level 55 MOBs, and I killed 16-18 of 'em by myself.

But.

I was incapped multiple times, so it's not risk free. Sometimes I would miss twice on one of 'em, and bring the whole pack down on me. Other times a new one would spawn and break my Mask Scent. Or my Mask Scent would break as I was running in to harvest the Meat off the MOB. I'm lucky I didn't get a nasty disease, 'cause those Mantigrues can drop a disease you that knocks ~250 points off each tick. If they had been DB MOBs, I woulda been sent back to the Cloning Center.

Also, it took me 4.5 *HOURS* to clear the nest. That's approximately 15 minutes for one MOB. I would blow my entire mind bar (900, 500, 500) getting one down to half Health, then I'd have to sit and regain mind. Then I'd blow my entire mind bar again taking the rest of its Health off. And then there were the multiple incaps, and then the healing back to full health from the incaps, and then the chasing the MOBs around as they got antsy and flew off, and so on, and so forth.

The point being that Conceal Shot is low-risk, but very, very slow. A Critter Handler or a good group could have had the nest cleared in 30 minutes or less, and gotten as much or more XP in that 30 minutes because they were grouped than I did in 4.5 hours.

I think that "speed" vs. "safety" is a perfectly acceptable trade-off. Conceal Shot will never be the tactic of choice for the die-hard powergamer -- it's too slow. In 4.5 hours, a good group could have made 5x (or more) the XP I made clearing out that nest of Mantigrues.

So, from where I sit, it's pretty balanced -- especially given how badly Novice Riflemen do in groups in terms of XP share. I suspect that we will probably see some non-DB MOBs suddenly have a change in temprament and start DB'ing folks, but I don't think we'll be seeing much additional nerfage beyond that.

VG you should save that post and give it to our correspondent when they even mention conceal shot.

It really does sound very well balanced to me, enables people to spend a far longer amount of time for a greater degree of safety.

Personally I don't use it, takes too long and Doc buffs + composite let me solo fairly well anyway.

Conceal shot is not risk free even at master. I took one pop shot and bam i missed and the whole mob came down and wooped my ass.

Ageed. Concealshot isn't unbalancing due to the high HAM costs ( which force you to go much slower then normal )+ the fact that if you miss twice in a row = dead rifleman.

It certainly IS a nice boon to those who are currently grinding their way up to Master level; wish I'd had this working properly when I was grinding up.

Overall, I think this change did right by all of us as a profession.

noooo!! be quiet jeez !! or we will get nerfed !!! dont talk about how good anything is EVER!!!!! yell about how much the sucky things suck !!!

The Devs **edit** well better not! This is one of the first things that makes Riflemen really worthwhile!

Let compare Conceal Shot to HS2:

Conceal shot:

damage multiplyer 2.5x, time delay 3x, and mind consumption 5x

Now lets look at HS2:

damage multiplyer 2.5x, time delay 2x, mind consumption 5x

Conceal shot is random pool, but as we all know random means it hits health 50% of the time, since only 50% of the shot goes into the pool thats going to kill the MOB conceal shot's damage multiplyer is halfed.

So now conceal shot is:

DMG 1.25, TD 3, MC 5

Its really not that overpowering itsequal to the mind consumption of HS2, 50% slower than HS2, and deals half the mortal damage HS2 deals.

Think if it took you twice as long to kill a MOB using HS2, How many times would you miss? I think its a unique abillity- but far from overpowering.

Dammit, shut up about it. We don't want to be nerfed again.

does suprise shot work the same way?

i dont have anything in the conceal tree yet but id like to add something in:

its random pool. Although the target will most likely die from health because health is hit the most (reason is that body is the largest target) there will be alot of wasted shots going into the action pool and mind pool, its not a very efficient attack