Weaponsmith Archive

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MrSemi wrote:

I'm with this guy. With all the whinin and crying going on about weapon conversions, how do we know what's good and what's not?

You could post your weapon stats in the forum you have as a profession but nobody knows what's good.

Any insight from you weaponsmiths? Is it all about the dps?

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My 2 cents:

Is DPS important? Yes, but its not ALL about the DPS. Keep in mind that a weapon user can always increase thier speed skill (through skills, stims, CA's, etc) but they can never increase innately how much damage the weapon does (ignore powerups for a minute, thats an entire different discussion).

While speed is still important, I think we all don't yet completely understand how speed affects the customer using the weapon. For example, pre-CU, I could tell you, given a users speed mod, exactly what speed of a weapon would need to be for them to 'cap'. Post-CU, we are still trying to figure out if there is a 'cap', and if there is, can and how is it reached.

SAC (Special Action Cost) I think is undervalued at the moment. Once the crafters run out of pre-CU components and customers degrade thier current weapons, we will start to see a shift in importance of the SAC. Currently, pre-CU components have a very good reduction to SAC, so using these in weapons give the illusion that SAC doesnt mean anything. Also, converted weapons seem to have a much lower SAC than a weapon crafted with all post-CU components.

Another weapon statistic we know very little about is the range bonus. How different is the accuracy (and damage) on a weapon that has a range bonus of +1 versus a range bonus of +10?

So, as you can see, there is still a lot of information we need to gather to figure out what exactly is important. Overall, I feel that every statistic is important, and I'm going to strive to make my weapons as balanced as possible.

I'm of the opinion that people will want to be carrying two models of a given kind of weapon in the future... one with a maxed DPS (for the shorter expected combat), and one with as low an action cost as possible (for longer drawn-out combat sequences).

What this also means for weaponsmiths is DON'T destroy or sell for very low prices all your old pre-CU weapons!! They nearly all have converted into versions with low DPS, but also lower action costs that will be hard to duplicate (if at all possible) with post-CU components.

The new "uber" weapon will likely be one that uses enhancements but has components experimented for action cost, resulting in a final combine that is an amalgam of the two aforementioned weapon types... high DPS and low action cost together. Another nice side effect of this is (if the talk about slicing results being relative to a weapon's proximity to it's damage/speed caps is true) the slice % should be higher than a weapon totally maxed on DPS.

Message Edited by Amizar on 05-03-2005 11:45 AM

what is dps actually mean. i thought speed and damage were what you looked at for how much damage you could do in a set amout of time. IE Power hammer with 4.7 speed and 350-900 damage. this meant you could do 350-900 damage every 4.7 seconds. weapons still have speed and dmage so how does dps play into this.

I'm with this guy. With all the whinin and crying going on about weapon conversions, how do we know what's good and what's not?

You could post your weapon stats in the forum you have as a profession but nobody knows what's good.

Any insight from you weaponsmiths? Is it all about the dps?

See my reply to the post here:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=weaponsmith&message.id=81931