Weaponsmith Archive

Guys,

One of the chief developers asked me to try to get a feel for which weapons the community considers to have unreasonably high ham costs.

Please be articulate in your explanation on 'WHY' you think a certain weapons cost is to high... feel free to include any metrics, examples, etc...

If it's not simply a single weapon, and is instead a weapon addon, information on that would be useful as well.

Thanks

All carbines, but I think they said this has been acknowledged and would be fixed already. The problem with carbines appears to be with their moves, not the weapons themselves.

Stocks and adv stocks - stats are based on 100% shock resistance, and both versions require wood which always has low shock resistance. HAM costs cannot be reduced to 0/0/0 as with scopes, and even if you could, they'd still be useless because doing that would use all your experiment points, leaving the stock with a pitiful damage increase and large speed penalty.

Adv scopes - required materials have crap stats and make them worse than regular scopes. Advanced fully experimented for HAM with the rest in range was 7/7/7 +13 accuracy, regular fully experimented for HAM is 0/0/0 +10.

Various pistols - no one uses DL44, Power5, DH17, or SR Combat pistols because their damage output is worse than FWG5/DX2/scout and they have equal or higher HAM. If these guns were reworked to have lower HAM, different damage types, or something else to set them apart, people would have a reason to use them.

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LLJK_Griz wrote:

Adv scopes - required materials have crap stats and make them worse than regular scopes. Advanced fully experimented for HAM with the rest in range was 7/7/7 +13 accuracy, regular fully experimented for HAM is 0/0/0 +10.

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I agree here. I was hoping advanced scopes would be better/easier to be an effective add-on. Instead they are worse hands down. Using good materials before experimenting the base scope started with 10 ham costs, advanced 22 ham costs. This seems backwards to me.

Well as a rifleman and a WS the T21 needs to be looked at, its damage has been reduced in past patches but nothing was done about the HAM cost which has remained at the same level's before it was patched.

I will also agree on the adv scope and all stocks have issues along with the carbines all having HAM's that are out of whack.

Made spraysticks for the first time today and they looked a little harsh on the HAM side of things.

Almost all high end melee weapons seem to have extreme costs.

I guess my server is lucky and we have good ingredients for advanced scopes, I can get the range mod up to +37... but still, that leaves me with +23 to all HAMs, and If I experiment the HAM down to 5, the range mod is 10, which i can get with a normal scope adding 1 HAM.

The Launcher Pistol has a pretty high action cost. Not sure it looks bad on paper but when I fire my Launcher Pistol with 1.7 speed my Action bar will go down very quickly.

Heh, Cipher, you outta tell the dev that he should ask the profession correspondents

Amongst the pistols, the DX2's HAM seems too high, considering its relatively poor power, speed, and accuracy.

Among 1H weapons, the mind cost on the stun baton seems silly.

For polearms, well, at least ONE polearm besides a reinforced combat staff should have lower HAM. (although the big problem there is accuracy)

Dx2, all carbines, T21 for sure seems very high. It seems that AR weapons have higher ham costs, which is sort of a balancing issue I suppose. If they would make HAM expirimentation a little more effective, we could solve the problem a little bit ourselves. Not with weapons that we can spend all points on damage though. The gated weapons would have lower HAM costs though. Then again, this would make people with skill tapes much better than people without skill tapes, due to the extrapoints being usefull.Which at the moment, doesnt make much difference.

I am a smith on the Valcyn server and I have pretty much the same problems with components as others have mentioned here. I would like to say that primarily problems on the advanced stocks and scopes results from generally poor, rare materials dropping. First, I will discuss the scopes issue. On Valcyn, the normal weapon scope can be produced with a 0HAM cost and will give an ideal range mod of +10. The reason for this is that every resource is generic and requires only overall quality as a statistic with which to be concerned. I can use 995 or higher valued resources on each required resource. Now the advanced scope requires two special resources chromium aluminum and green diamond crystalline gemstone. Since the start of Valcyn, this week was the first in which a value in overal quality for Chromium aluminum broke 600. The best overall quality in the gemstone to date is 810. I have yet to fashion an advanced scope with the new aluminum; nonetheless, what I have crafted with the 586 aluminum and the 810 gemstone is not that good. The lowest I can get the HAM on the advanced scope is 7 with an +8 ideal range mod. So because of the resource quality no one will ever use the advanced scopes when you compare this scope with the stats given above. Lets look at this at another angle. I can bring the HAM cost on the normal scope to 6 and get an ideal range mod of +20, which is dramatically better than the advanced scope at a comparable level. Essentially I sense the issue with this component isn't necessarily that the HAM is too high but that the stats do not reflect the apparent use of rare resources. The whole point to an advanced scope is that it is supposed to be better than the normal because of the "rare" resource used, not so much dependent on the overall quality statistic. Now I mean "better" in the sense that it should be more accurate, and produce more wounds, not that the HAM costs should be lower than the normal scope, because HAM is the balancing feature to control exploitation. I suggest that given mediocre rated overall quality rare resources in the advanced scope - around 400 - 600 should at least produce a comparable range and wound mod of a normal scope crafted with the best resources. For example the stats for HAM with the 586 aluminum 810 gemstone should have an ideal range mod should yield at a minimum around a +15 ideal range mod and around 7 HAM, just to encourage consideration. At a minimum a fully experimented HAM advanced scope of mediocre quality when compared to even the best of the best of normal scopes with fully experimented HAMshould be more accurate.

Now advanced stocks are slightly different. Both normal and advanced stocks suffer from limited resource quality with respect to wood. Hardwoods yield the best shock resistance but I have never seen one break 700. Now with respect to advanced stocks and the link steel aluminum required, again same problem as with the scopes there hasn't been anything better than 687 to date, though with generic metals there are near perfects out there 995 - 999. Now I haven't done much comparison between the stocks as I have the scopes because the point differential has not been as pronounced (normal scopes for the 5 spots to be filled yields about 4975 points, advanced scope yields about 3975 a full 1000 points differential- normal stocks 2 spots about 1695 points, advanced stocks 2 spots about 1385 points - only about 300 point differential). Because I haven't done as much comparison I am not quite sure of default attributes. With the current resource situation on Valcyn, the normal stocks have dam 1 -1 speed increase of around .899, a +10 ideal range mod, and around 17 HAM costs. The advanced stocks start of similarly, but I think the speed increase is a little less say around .875, the ideal range mod is the same but HAM costs are around 28. The main issue with weapon stocks is that there are "two" balancing attributes instead of the default 1 of HAM. I am speaking of the inceased speed attribute. On a normal stock I can increase min and max damage by about 20 get a speed penalty of about .500 and leave the HAM costs at around 17. On an advanced stock and can increase damage by over 30 for both min and max get a speed penalty of only .3 and have HAM costs of around 28. So the balance seems to be almost there, but it should be shifted some in favor of the advanced stock. There should be a little better damage to start with by default on the advanced stock over the normal. The same is true for the ideal range mod. So like with the scopes a mediocre advanced stock should yield marginally better default stats (not HAM costs) than the best of the best normal stock. For example instead of the damage for both at default being 1 -1 for both have the advanced say 6 -6 or something (this may be already - I am not too certain). The wound chance and ideal range mods should be better too. Overall, I feel the main sticking point with stocks in general is the double whammy of increased speed and the HAM balancing factors. I am not sure this can really be addressed though with the way combat has been fashioned. Perhaps increase the min and max damage mods on the stocks or reduce the HAM costs a little so that a 0 level can be more readily achievable (since the cap on hard wood shock resistance seems set at 700).

I hope this was helpful. I will update my post with some hard data for stock comparisons later.

Advanced scopes seem backward to me as well, my best normal scope is +12 range3 wound 0/0/0 ham cost with materials being 900+... my best advanced is +10 range 5 wound 7/7/7 hams using materials all852-972 (I don't expect to get a 0 ham scope with these, but a 2-5 would seem to be likely)... that is with using all 10 points to experiment on efficiency on the advanced... since they do start outwith very high hams as mentioned above.The range can be experimented on with greatsuccess as well as the wounding on the advanced but the hams always bad, they seem to start out several points too high. Unless you are specifically aiming to make a weapon for one-shot kills then the advanced scopes seem to be a waste of time.

Experimenting on efficiency seems to be the least efficient way to improve any weapon I have made yet. It only gives you 1-2 points on a great success, I had a moderate successincrease the action ham on a scatter from 54 to 60 (yuck!) I only experiment on the ham if I manage to max out the damage first, I'd rather spend the points on range or durability because if it fails you just ruined your weapon, and if it succeeds you are only getting a point or two taken off of the hams... sometimes it doesn't seem to lower it at all. 1-2 points just seems like what a normal success should grant, agreat or amazing success could maybe give 2-5 or something, that would be worth the risk to me.Lowering the starting ham stats on advanced scopes and making efficiency experimentation on the final weapon produce better results would probably allow us to make a big improvement in the hams on most weapons (at least weapons that don't use stocks.)

Pistols like the DL44 and Power 5 pistol can have a much higher max damage than a scout pistol. DL 44metal max dmg 131 (with somewhat crap resources), Scout max dmg 129, Power 5 max dmg 158 (and that is with 17/38/17 ham and a 0/0/0 scope). These are all relatively low ham pistols, the Power 5 doesn't seem out of line when compared to anything else I've made, certainly better than a scatter pistols ham. The problem with DL44 and Power 5 are most likely the speed being 2.5 or worse. Unless you are an Expert Bounty Hunter or Master Pistoleer then these pistols will be too slow for the dps to beat a Scout Blaster. When you get certified for almost any pistol above a scout you will do lessdps with that pistol until you pick up BH pistol or Master Pistoleer because of the speed mods because the speed of thepistol won't matter after a certain point.There are a handful of reasons why the scout blasters are more popular than these pistols but the hams don't really seem to be way out of line to me, as far as making these pistols more desirable to buyers I think speed would be the biggest concern, lowering the ham wouldn't make the dps of these more "advanced" pistols any better... I don't think anyone would care unless the hams were way lower than a Scout Blaster simply because these pistols can take a lot longer to fire.

So to sum it up, efficiency experimentation on the final product seems verrrry ineffective, and the starting ham cost on advanced scopes is too high. I only have experience making pistols so I can't comment on any other weapons/components.

Most of the thrown weapons have HAM costs that are EXTRA-ordinary. Considering their short range, and the fact you pull the pin with your teeth... methinks that the cost for chucking an explosive are significantly out of whack.

Many of the grenade types are in the 150+ mind cost per throw....some have multiple HAM costs in excess of 100+...

There have been many explanations of what the mind cost actually denotes; the additional skill needed to set weapon to shoulder, sight down the barrel (or scope) and squeeze off a round into your opponent. If this explanation holds true then exactly how difficult is it to tear one off your belt, yank the pin and heave...

One handed weapon users (pistol) even have a hand free to do all the work...

a) make experimentation on HAM more effective and this isn't as much of a problem

b) DX2, all carbines (even the dh17 snub is too high), T21 and spraystick (spraystick is a fast rifle and fires nearly twice as fast as other rifles, but it's ham costs per shot are comensurate with the rest)

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