Rifleman Archive

You know all that runaround we get about how we are special because we can attack the "unhealable" pool?

---

"Frankly, this situation is a bit of a loophole in the design. We did not catch the medic exploit until too late, so we removed the mind pool heal from them, without creating an alternative. Mind is not supposed to be the determining factor in a combat."

-Holocron

---

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=476555&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

That was in regards to the fact that originally, Medics were able to heal the Mind Pool.

Go back and read that again.

Medics were able to heal the Mind Pool. They had to take that out (obviously) because a Medic could just heal his own Mind Pool and thus be able to heal forever. But the point is not how Medics work. It's how everyone else works. Especially Riflemen.

We were never supposed to be able to attack an "unhealable" pool. It is a SIDE EFFECT of an exploit fix for someone else. That was never supposed to be our unique ability, it just happens to be. Our special gift of Mind Pool attacks are a loophole. Nothing more. Ever wondered why the Mind Pool attacks don't seem balanced, or we seem to hurt ourselves more?

Well now you know.

And yes, I am kind of annoyed about this. Why? Because it's the answer we get whenever we complain that we are gimps. "Oh, but we gave you this special attack type that no one else has." (cough-Bounty Hunter-cough-Swordsman-cough-Teras Kasi-cough)

But that was not the original intent. That was not the balance plan. Our special ability is an accidental side effect. And from the way Holo talks about it, it would seem to me that they are going to chance Mind Pools so they are NOT the determining factor in combat.

The question is whether that will be good for us (no more crippling HAM costs) or bad for us (easily healable Mind Pools).

Make mind pool healable. Remove 2.5x damage penalty. Increase DPS.

Bam. That would make us comparable to pistoleers and carbineers.

If they can figure out how to get around the medic exploit, that would work fine.

I'm not disagreeing with you, Pecos. It kinds of reads that way when I go over my own post, but I am not. In fact, I chose Rifleman not because of the unhealable damage, but because of the slow-yet-powerful character concept (hey, I flew Y-Wings in XvT) and because most combat classes tend to skimp on the Mind Bar. Heh.

But they need to make Medics NOT the ones that heal Mind Pool, obviously. Some talk has been that Squad Leaders will do it. Obviously I like that idea, but I don't know if it would really be the right solution for such a weird Hybrid class to have that ability.

Doesn't that just make you feel all gooiey inside when you hear that our one special 'advantage' is no more then a side-effect of an exploit fix?

If all that separated Rifleman from Pistoleer and Carbineer was DPS (and range even if it was fixed), I honestly would drop the class completely. Who the heck wants that?

Frankly, I love the difficulty of the Rifleman class, and the fact that we do something very special that noother class does with the exception ofBH(but we do with more style :smileywink Commando has none of the finesse of Rifleman. Nor does BH to my mind (look at the Wand of Many Lightning Bolts)

I picked rifleman because it did mind damage and I heard mind damage wasn't healable in PvP.

But it's just become more trouble than it's worth. The pile of negatives heaped on us and the fact that we're not useful in group PvE is not enough to account for this PvP edge we've gained.

I would rather lose the PvP edge and gain a much better class overall.

(Really, I'd rather see mind damage go away as the PvP edge because it's not us who has it anyway, it's Bounty Hunters! If I'd known that BH's were better at mind damage than riflemen, I would have been a BH.)

We are weak in melee, and I think we should be for some variation between classes, but we should have something to make up for that weakness...