Weaponsmith Archive

You would never have thought the devs have heard of stat caps. oh wait maybe they havn't. They cap the % you can hit on a weapon. This caps the stats. Let uber components be uber componenets just bring them in line. If I spend a month at the acklay and loot 250 bone I want my nice hammer. The cap is what the weaponsmith can produce with the best resources. Just let people enhance their weapon and risk the luck of the slice.

At least make it 1.35% the theoretical max damage. Minimum.

stupid boards This would let WS still be able to strive for the best while limiting the strength of weapons used in pvp/pve.

If we have to have any kind of damage cap at all, I would rather a global per category rather than per weapon scenario. Allow me to explain:

CU has made some effort in bringing some of the 'cannon' weapons back in line with elite professions so that weapons we saw in the movie are desired and not lowbie certs like they used to be. Got really tired of all the pre-clonewars movie stuff being added later to the game and being always coded as superior to stuff engineered 40 years later.

However, they have also slightly ostrisized a lot of other weapons in the process. Geo pistol comes to mind, consider what a pita that is to make (get schematic, get cubes etc). Well more of a pita when the kwi 1hit incap you all the time.

Other pistols that show cert level 30 and 40 to use are comming in much lower in dps than ones certed at level 54. I suppose this is a side affect of a leveling based system.

Lets take the pistol category. The DL-44XT is certed at level 54 and has a hard cap at value X. As long as a geo pistol or scout blaster never exceeds the stats of value X I see no reason why they shouldnt be upgradeable w/ +200 krayt tissues or whatever to get them close. This ensures that no weapon ever gets out of balance (if we have to concede the existance of a cap) but allows, with some effort, the ability of some of the level 30 and 40 weapons to rise to the damage output of a level 54 weapon. They still wont have a chance against those tusken at the fort or the kwi.

Message Edited by EEMAN on 04-20-2005 04:11 PM

Message Edited by laodamas on 04-21-2005 05:22 AM

• The Level-system (getting 1 shot killed by anything because we are level 1). They even inserted double elite's as NPC ;


• The weapons all get caps, and therefor Loot weapons will become absolete (bye bye expensive loot we have in stock);


• The conversions of Uber crafted weapons is ganna make sure that out current stock of weapons will become worth much less;


• The change of Certification places is gonna make sure that the Good weapons we have in stock now, will become worthless to Masters and become Grinding weapons;


• Masters will only have to have 2 weapons and therefore new sales will be limited (especially with the ADK's);


• 12 points will become the Only Viable Crafters;


• With the Nerf of the PuP's these will become pretty useless;


• Currently Crafted components will be inferior to post CU-crafted ones and will therefore become worthless;


• We loose the possibility to customize our weapons due to the change of Advanced Component Changes;


• Due to the Change in Stacking (which is even worse now) people will ALL be using 1 or 2 weapons, so sales will go down;


• People will have almost no means to make Credits and therefore sales will go down;

Basically not much to look out for with the CU, and to all those who are looking to buy the NEW Post CU weapons, do not try my vendors because I will be to busy converting all weapons and to see if any weapon will be worth keeping. (basically leaving me with having to delete over 1500 of them probably)

SOE I think you will just loose another WS and account due to all these lovely Changes (and to those WS looking forward to the CU, you will have to monitor the Trade forums because I have loads to sell if I can't take all the changes anymore )

First let me say that I respect all of your opinions. I just wanted to share my feelings on how I would particularly like to see things. I don't believe it's popular opinion as it appears most of you have an alt account who gathers the big loot and brings right into the arms of your crafter. I'm coming from the perspective as one who may not have that alter ego of a smuggler or krayt killer.

My responses are coming from a straight Weaponsmith/Artisan/Merchant - so please keep that in mind before ya all come after me for the lynching! LOL

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Bermag wrote:

Weapon now have caps on crafted stats. It is not the caps we have today which depends on resources (can never get above 99% experimentation), it is total caps on weapons. For exampel if you use a +150 tissue you might not get that since the weapon will have a cap below of that.

Most of all I want them gone. Crafted weapons have never been unbalancing (if not exploited or buggy components), it is the looted weapons that are. It would be better to fix the ranges on loot than trying to cap weapon stats IMO.

But assume that caps will stay to prevent exploits, what would reasonable caps on weapons be?

Some things to discuss:

1) Should lower certified weapons be capped much lower than master weapons? For example how good should a D18 be? Should I be able to use a +200 tissue and make that weapon 200 higher max dam or should it cap much lower?

I was first negative about caps beeing lower for lower cert weapons (if someone want to put a 200 tissue in a D18 then let them), but CU is a bit different than live today because there are other stats that matter like AP. It would be stupid to use good tissues on lower level weapons which have no AP when you instead can use it on a wepaon with AP.

I don't have a problem with a cap as long as it is aligned perfectly and reasonable %'s are used to get there.

For example from a pure crafting point of view- I believe that resources and experimentation points should cover MOST of the weapon's damage. I believe in surveying for the best of resources, plopping my harvestors down while in the face of danger of getting incapped by a chuba and then bringing back the best resources to craft my weapons with.

I for one am disappointed by how an "uber" slice alters a weapon by as much as it possibly can. I am also disappointed with the fact I could spend millions on a set of krayt tissues only to get a 18% speed slice and have to pawn the weapon at a third of the cost I have into it.

Ever been to Las Vegas? Sure there are winners, but there's a whole lot more losers or there wouldn't be all of those big shiney casinos. Every weapon I make that is enhanced is me putting my finances on the line and dependent totally on the slice...even with turbo enhancers. It's a gamble, and that's not right.

So...now having said that, I love the idea of enhancing a weapon by loot or by slice and I believe it should never be more than 10% by either than the crafted weapon with rare exception of extraordinarily rare loot or an extraordinary out of this world % the slicer got some kind of turbo slice (which is about 10 times too common in my opinion). If there is to be a cap, then let the crafting part of the weapon be the major influence...Thus, making our skill points and resources very valuable (after all, this is the forum about weaponsmiths and not swordsman, riflemen and tkm's). This won't hurt those characters financially, they still have all the looted CA's, pearls, scales, etc to sell on the trade forums. It's kind of a bummer to purchase a set of krayt tissues from a krayt killer, craft a weapon with the best of resources and make an unreal weapon prior to slice and then it get a not so great slice and the guy you bought your tissues from bids on it in the forums for half of what you bought the tissues from him for! LOL

2) Should we be able to reach the cap when crafting or only when weapon get sliced?

IMO, it should never be that a normal sliced weapons shoudl be able to become better than a weapon made with good loot + sliced. That make it useless to spend money on enhanced weapons.

I believe a weapon should be crafted to a minimum of experimentation % in order for it to have the integrity to stand up to a "slice" or it would crumble. I believe this would counteract the above and also save you from putting junk into a weapon and exploiting the slice advantage.

OR - I believe the slice should be only temporary and detrimental to the long term life of the weapon's power if it wasn't done on a weapon w/ a certain level of experimentation.

OR - I believe the slice should only effect the base crafted weapons minus the loot enhancement. I would like to see it that the slices do not help loot. With this scenario, you have two possible stages of improvement, loot and then slice...both are added to the base weapon stats and do not stack.

3) Should base damage be lowered on weapons? That is another way to look at the caps. If base damage is lowered then caps are harder to reach

I really don't understand why devs has chosen to increase base damage on weapons that much. It cause a lto of other problems. Woudl have been better to adjust special damage and keep damage levels like they were before. Now everything need to be rebalanced, loot and components does not add as much as they did before.

If damage will still be the most importnat stat on the weapon after the CU, then I believe the weapon damage cap should be difficult to reach, not only in the intial crafting, but also in the enhancements...or...the secondary stats of the weaponshouldplay a more important role so the "best" weapon isn't always the one that does the most damage as it is today. I think this would make the crafting part more fun and interesting to play with the different types of experimentation to achieve finer weapons.

4) Should the cap be percent or absolute number?. When calculating the cap should devs use base damage x X % or Base damage + X. The latter take into account how most loot increase stats. The cap could be set to the best possible (acceptable) loot for example +300 and add some for slicing.

5) Finally and most important, what is a reasonable cap?

How can that be answered without fully understanding the amount of damage that would have to be dished out in the CU?

I think the easiest way would be to workbackwards. The devs want you to take X amount of damage outta an enemy max per shot, then add up the best possible weapon, best possible loot, and best possible crafted stats and work backwards based on desired reward of skill vs reward of having great loot vs reward of having a great slice. I believe the rewards should be toned down personally for the loot (as a weaponsmith I want the glory for doing a great job on the weapon and a better financial reward for doing so as well). I also believe if you're 40% of a master weaponsmith, then you should only be able to make 40% as good of a weapon with possibly some additional bonuses if you're up higher and specialized tree with some exceptions made for "starter" weapons as I also believe a learning weaponsmith has a right to make some cash too.

From the crafting side and looking at your question and answering it in a different context (as it can be taken a couple of ways as asked) - I don't believe the cap should be achieved by less than 10pts experimentation..and then only by mostly great success and a min number of amazings.

Finally, who cares what the "cap" may be as long as it works with the thing to receive the damage. If you score a goal in hockey, you get one point, ya score a touchdown in football, you get 6...as long as it all works (which I guess we'll see).

Thanks for letting me ramble on folks.

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there may not be any new drops of legendary krayt tissues so a +300 tissue could be a non-starter for a discussion. If they dont fix damage modifiers there wont be any new tissues in the CU anyway. Level 334 attacks a level 80 for 13740 damage per attack. There is no armor or buff, or spice, or food, or any combination of the above that will endure that. If you manage to actually shoot the krayt before incapping you will observe that he regenerates every fraction of your damage every time it regens.

as far as why the damage is so much higher on the weapons now, it is because high damage weapons with caps and low damage specials is a lot easier to balance than low damage weapons and very high specials.

One thing I have noticed is damage/speed are not going to be the end-all-be-all holy grail of crafting anymore. Being a 12point smith is going to be paramount. Crafting an FWG5 when my server hit tc-chilastra I got the damage to around 740ish and spent the remaining points on speed to have a 1.99 base speed and high damage. Guess what my action cost was? it was around 134 or so. Compare that to the 85's on TC-EP3 and notice how with 85's the pistol wielders still ran out of action landing the states trying to keep the melee's rooted/slowed down. Its really going to be impossible at 134. If using a kryat tissue hits your cap freeing up 12 points to lower action costs and speed (if it already isnt low from the tissues), you would have a more valuable weapon than a non-krayt weapon IMO.

This is all speculation because enough experimenting wasnt given to test how anything will fare out with regards to crafted weapons. But if I was taking on the role of 'mezzer' I would want a pistol with as little cost as possible to do the mezzing and hoping my buddy with the high damage stuff could do the incapping.

basically it boils down to this...

if caps exist and we are a single line of experimentation.. then we really have our hands tied on diversity.

if caps exist and we are truely a multi line experimenter then enhancers will let us permeate the other lines of experimentation more successfully. If indeed this is the case; we have now become an absolutely essential multi-line experimter. Be very glad that the crafting community went up in arms and fought off that crafting 'revamp' where the quality of the resources affected the percentage gain per experiment, thereby making it so 10 points was required to max out a single line. In that system when the schematic purposefully called for plumbum iron it would take all 10 points to raised you to 30%.

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Rurry wrote:

Really good points made here by all. One thing that stuck in my mind, if the cap is there to "allow" us to spend exp in other lines, then wouldn't newer WS be at an even worse disadvantage than they are now?

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for the most part. But how is this any different than a rising chef compared to a 12point exp chef with the FS points and eating bespin port? Chef is a very multi line crafting professon, probably the most extreme example. One of the chef in my guild pulls in over 1mil a day. New chefs cant even give their stuff away because duration of 35min is not long enough for the stomache to completely empty itself (although I remember reading somewhere it should be completely empty in 30min). Its nearly impossible to have high nutrition low filling and long duration near the levels the public now considers 'standard' without having every advantage a chef can muster.

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EEMAN wrote:

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Rurry wrote:

Really good points made here by all. One thing that stuck in my mind, if the cap is there to "allow" us to spend exp in other lines, then wouldn't newer WS be at an even worse disadvantage than they are now?

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for the most part. But how is this any different than a rising chef compared to a 12point exp chef with the FS points and eating bespin port? Chef is a very multi line crafting professon, probably the most extreme example. One of the chef in my guild pulls in over 1mil a day. New chefs cant even give their stuff away because duration of 35min is not long enough for the stomache to completely empty itself (although I remember reading somewhere it should be completely empty in 30min). Its nearly impossible to have high nutrition low filling and long duration near the levels the public now considers 'standard' without having every advantage a chef can muster.

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Good points for the upcoming crafters...However, this just hit me. In reality, what's the shelf life of a "noob" or upcoming crafter? A couple of days or a week tops? Lets face it, I would say a very high percentage of folks picked the best item to macro up that would grant them experience points and they're off to Master where they begin to craft their items for sale or use. In fact, the only circumstance I have ever seen anyone try to sell something was to try to regain their resources loss for the investment of grinding by plopping stuff on the bazaar with hopes to sell a few wind generators, or whatever it may have been.

I believe the "theory" of the upcoming crafter (regardless of profession) is more of a great set of ideals we're supposed to have so everything is fair, but in reality - I seriously doubt the noob is nothing but almost a mythwhen it comes to even attempting to sell their products for reals.

For example - say I create a wood staff and plop it on my vendor. That staff for the upcoming pikeman is good for about 20 minutes use or less..they're gonna qualify for the metal staff and pitch that thing asap to gain xp quicker. How many weaponsmiths made the "barrel" and then the "heavy warhead" only to gain their experience points? I don't believe I would be wrong and say MOST. One of those doesnt even fit in a schematic.

If we want to reward the upcoming crafter who wants to sell something (yes, I believe maybe a couple do exist), why not allow some great experimentation on "component" items they could actually sell to weaponsmiths that would be useful and finely crafted? Not only would that give them some source of income, but would also give the feel for a real "apprenticeship" under a Master Weaponsmith and would benefit a Master Weaponsmith as well. It seems SWG wanted this type of role to take place as I'm sure most of you remember the Apprentice Points required prior to Mastering a profession. This would be a great situation for all.

Message Edited by Chumplestilskin on 04-21-2005 10:42 PM