Rifleman Archive

Well my idea for the hybrid profession, ie bounty hunters and commandos is to mix there combat lines together and catergorize them differently. So instead of catergorizing each line by a certain weapon, they would be organized by the special types within. These would resemble how the elite professions are organized. An example would be putting all AoE (area of effect) attacks in one line, all of the HAM targeting specials in another line, and putting all of the knockdown type of attacks in the last line, so a BH for the AoE line would have a LLC, a carbine, and a pistol AoE for that line. Each box would give a +accuracy and -speed delay modification to the weapon that the ability goes to. Commandos ,however would only have the weapons that have abilities be mixed together in to a somewhat similiar orginization. This idea will help those that plan to master, or almost master these professions. The result would be that they can choose what kind of attacks they want for their weapons. It will by the most part stop dabblers from gaining high amounts of modifications for their weapons, for example carbineer and pistoleer masters getting only the carbine or pistol line of BHs to increase their modifications to extraordinary values. So a master hybrid profession would still get all of the modifications and all of the abilities, they would just be organized in a different manner.

To fix some of the damage per second problems many are having, the devs could in fact change the way specials are done. Many feel that at master all of the elite professions are very similiar, the only difference is what works and doesn't work. I believe an effective way to fix these similiarities, and provide a differnce between pistoleers, riflemen, and carbineers, as well as the melee fighters would be to change the special modifications. The examples I will give for the most part will be for pistoleers, carbineers, and riflemen, these will just be examples to try to prove the effectiveness of my idea. The devs can and will change the examples I will provide if they so choose to adopt my idea.

The idea is to change the way specials are. Most people know that every special in the game one way or the other increases accuracy, increases damage, takes away HAM, and increases the speed delay. They then add some kind of status effect, damage a certian HAM bar, and/or are an AoE.

Instead of having, say riflemen follow this certain formula for their specials, we could instead drastically increase there damage, increase their accuracy significiently, increase their HAM costs significiently, and increase their delay drastically with differnt specials increasing or decreasing these mods slightly with the added HAM targeting, AoE, and/or status effect.

Carbineers on the other hand would have specials that decrease accuracy somewhat, decrease speed delay drastically, increase HAM cost moderatly, and decrease damage slightly. Then each ability would have slighty changed modifications, and the added status effect, AoE, and/or specific targeted HAM. The speed caps will most likely need to be used, so carbineers will reach the .5 speed cap with most of their specials, but will only reach between a 1 and 2 second delay for their default attacks.

Pistoleers would have their specials increase accuracy moderatly, increase speed delay somewhat, increase damage somewhat, and the HAM costs would be very low. These then would have the slightly changed mods from ability to ability, and would have the added status effects, AoE, and/or specific targeted HAM. Pistoleers would reach the .5 delay with their default attacks, and around 1-2 second delays with their specials. The default attacks of pistoleers will be significiently less accurate then their specials, making them miss a lot more.

Melee fighters would also have these selected changes as well, but it is hard for me to come up with examples for melee fighters because their roles are hard to define in game at this moment.

I did not give exact values of how much each modification would change the specials, because I don't know exactly how they are figured. Hopefully through the describtions I gave one can understand the ratios are in balance. These are examples and ideas which I feel will help balance out the many combat professions. I would like to add that these ideas can and should be added to BHs, commandos, and smugglers. Since BHs, commandos, and smugglers are all hybrid combat professions their abilities can be even more varied from ability to ability in their profession. I did not mentoin Combat medics in my post, because I honestly do not know what their role in combat is, and what it should be. Feel free to comment on any of my ideas and to fill in the gaps I may of left.