Weaponsmith Archive

i agree with all of you that the market is stronger for the high damage carbines...and by a lot. but i would gladly pay the same amount of money for Phenriz's carbine (with a couple more points off HAM even sacrificing some of the damage) as i did for my high damage laser carbine. and i do not think i am alone on this.
but, again, i realize that most of your customers are hounding for the damage output. i guess what i can't understand is why a person would get so much grief from a merchant for being specific about how he wants the product to function.
anyway, thanks for all this input. i appreciate it.
some background about my squad: the vanguard consists of a commando, a bounty hunter, and a pitoleer/smuggler. they handle the damage output (and they do it very well). then we have a rifleman/combat medic. he has three jobs consisting of healing group members, dishing out mind bleeds/poison to opposing medics, and ranged deathblow. as you can see he needs a rifle that can hit on the first shot at long range thus the +75@60meters rifle that i built him. and then there is me. squad leader/carbineer. my job has nothing to do with damage until i can get my crew buffed and get the opponents debuffed. so it's rally, then full auto on all opponents until i get them sufficiently blinded/stunned. this tends to draw their attention to me if our bounty hunter doesn't pin them first. so i need to conserve as much HAM as possible during these fights.

Don't mistake my explanation for instructions on how to play. I get lots of custom requests for low HAM rifles and low HAM carbines, and I make them. My point is simply that such weapons are not typically mass-produced because the first number anyone looks at when comparing weapons is damage, then speed, then maybe HAMs or to-hit. HAM costs are low on most people's list of concerns, as there are ways to alleviate them or make them less painful: high secondaries, buffs, food, etc.As a weaponsmith, my goal is to make weapons that sell, and what sells them to 95% or more of my ustomers is damage numbers.

yes, laser carbines are great with armor piercing but are horrendous on HAM. i typically start off with my snub-nose DH17 spamming the specials then switch to my laser for normal shots or overcharge2 during an emergency.

have an of you guys experimented with an EE3 for HAM? where is it compared to a snub-nose and laser?

just curious, why do you carbineers like the snub nose instead of the std dh17 carbine, and dont say looks because boy the sr combat looks cool when your looking up at your cloner menu.

the standard dh17 has better range mods and its ideal range is significantly farther than the snubnose. Damage appears to be about the same.

i made both a snub and a regular DH17 and the snub had greater damage for the same HAM. you are correct though, the regular has better range and accuracy. maybe i should go back to that. the main thing about the look of the weapon is that the regular looks like a CDEF and the snub does not.

Dagger, If you are switching to you laser after you put the blind/dizzy on, then you need a better dh17. A good DH17 will fire at a much higher rate and with an avg dmg that far surpasses a laser. I have a dh17 that has a min dmg of 118 and a max of 289. My laser does 71 - 329, but I had an advanced stock put on it to get it that high, and you can see from the very high minimum (at least for a laser) that its a krayt weapon. The HAM on the second one is 78 for action.

Lasers can give you the big hit you're looking for here and there, but they just aren't that reliable. Use a good dh17 or even a dxr6 for your no/low armor target and you'll get through them a lot quicker. You're not going to see those huge pretty numbers in the combat spam that you see with the laser, but you won't see the little crappy ones either.

Yeah, i was asked to do a 'special' weapon a couple of times. I always did as told - experimented on range in one case and on HAM in another. The stats came out horrible and the customers were pissed. I tried to find a good balance between HAM experimentation and damage experimantation and nowadays if someone asks me for a low HAM weapon I experiemnt about half on damage and half on HAM. They usually bitch and moan that the HAM is "only 4-5 point lower" and I have to spend my time explaining that 4-5 points is 15-25% decrease and that's a whole bunch. Then it comes to the price and IMHO for a custom weapon, where you experiment on each component separately, the price should be at least 2x (if not 5X) the factory produced one, but try pounding that into some people's head... Sorry, not all people are like that, but a lot are.

---

WufgarRuffian wrote:

far better for you to try and sell a gun your customers would like instead of tell them how to play their character, gee after all this time ya think maybe JUST maybe i know how to play my character and am currently trying to find things that would work well for me in given situations??

thanks for you condesending post werrtZer your a true credit to the weaponsmith community-not

---

Well wufgarruffian, the people coming to me looking for carbines, want damage specific models, figuring that the more damage they can do with less shots the better all round for them. You sound like someone who spams specials, to me, and I was merely offering some advice...

I geta couple ofrequests for low HAM carbines, and have to tell people that theirdisadvantages will far outweigh the benefits in terms of speed and damage. Most combatants on my server seem to realise that if you're gonna use medium range weapons and special shots you need to buff/spice/eat to handle it. To call my response condescending only shows your lack of knowledge on this.

Here's some more advice: Go to your local dealer and ask for a bespoke low HAM carbine. H ewill be happy to make it for you, but I would advise him to get the money upfrontbecause when you see the finished product you will wonder where all the damage went to, and may be reluctant to pay the price for what can be seen as a below par weapon.

For you to blame 'smiths for what is a dev produced problem is a joke. Go and petition in the devs board for HAM reduction costs, like we have to on broken components and missin resources...

Also I see a lot of goodideas in this thread since I first posted in it; maybe you might heed some of them, if not mine.

i use a laser specifically for the armor piercing. but PadiOne has me curious now. what is the armor piercing of a DRX6? i have never seen one and cant seem to find any information on that.

Light armor piercing, acid damage.

I use a DX6 asa secondary to my Laser Carbine. When my Laser's powerup runs out, or when an enemy is resistant to energy, I'll switch to the DXR6, but in most cases the laser is more damaging due to higher min/max and medium piercing. The DXR6 is a full second faster than the laser for me, so if I need to spam slower specials I'll use that instead.