Weaponsmith Archive
Thread: Overlooked weaponsmith issues
There are many issues associated with weapons that don't really get the attention they deserve from us (because they don't really pertain to the weaponsmith profession itself) and I haven't seen them get the attention they deserve from the professions forums they do affect, for various reasons (mainly that everyone seems to want their professions and their toys improved so the ones that actually do need changing may get clumped with the rest). I think they can and should be addressed here because perhaps we, as players with relatively unbiased opinions may perhaps have more influence on developers, and because remedies may lie within the weapons themselves and not just the profession tree.
Technical - Launcher pistol. AKA the lag gun. Balance-wise I love this gun, but something MUST be done about its animations. If I'm within 20 meters of a launcher pistol explosion, I can expect to see framerates lower than 3 until the smoke clears. Admittedly my video card isn't top end (GF2 32mb) but even on my friend's radeon 9800 you can count on the innability to see anything that's going if you use this weapon at close range (which is usually when you'd like to know the right time to heal). Getting shot by one is no fun either, especially if you're a melee character trying to catch up to them. It really takes the focus off the gameplay if you're taking out your frustations at dying on your computer instead of your opponent 
Balance - pole arms and range mods. I don't know if this is a bug or not but the accuracy mods on these weapons seem anomalistic. Pretty much every other melee weapon is above or near 0 at all ranges, but my pikes (which I confidently proclaim to be the best on valcyn) range from -30 to -55. I understand that pikemen are supposed to be sacrificing speed and accuracy for power, but isn't that kind of covered by the fact that even at master they don't get full accuracy or speed bonuses (even with a good set of skill tapes)? Making the weapons themselves so vastly innacurate compared to other professions compounds this to the point of being a problem. Also, as a weaponsmith I'd like to ask why the slowest and strongest melee weapon (the power hammer) is a considered a sword and not a pike, while all other swords are lighter and faster than pikes.
Balance - Carbines. They do enough griping about this on the carbineer boards, but I look at carbines as a weapon without taking into consideration any skills or skill bonuses (which pistoleers get aplently) and I'd rather use a pistol myself. Even factoring in the armor piercing and current pistol damage (so ignoring all those uber prenerf FWG5/scatter/launchers) pistols seem to have better damage to time ratio due to their faster speed, yet they also get lower HAM costs and range mods. Why? Compare real life pistols to submachine guns and it should be obvious which weapon *should* be faster. Plus, it's a heckuva lot easier to enhance (krayt or otherwise) pistols than carbines due to the lower power handler usage.
Balance - HAM costs. Mention "spamming specials" to any melee character and they'll probably respond with something like "yeah maybe when I'm buffed to 4000 stats". It's a joke that pikemen have specials that'll cost them 200 health to let them do 150 damage. Just look at the HAM stats of melee weapons and compare them to guns and you're start thinking there's some conspiracy going on. Also on the list are T21 rifles (with an adv stock, headshot3 can cost over 300 mind. ouch!), adv scopes, and adv stocks themselves.
Balance - rifle stock. Okay, not overlooked on these boards but c'mon, why does this thing slow the gun down? You can't even experiment the HAMs fully for small benefits with little to no cost like you can with scopes because A) wood doesn't get over 700sr and B) the minor damage benefits come with +.8something speed. I've never seen a situation where one of these will be useful, and I've tried many different ways of experimenting these. I've tried non-advanced ones as well with the same conclusion.
Balance - looted enhancements. I'm not gonna touch on the real-life logic behind putting little bits of dragon in a pistol and finding the damage doubled. But why is it that guns can be enhanced to over a hundred higher damage than normal AND get a significant speed bonus, but the best thing you can do for melee weapons is add a vibro motor that gives a boost in the 20s. Rancor teeth can be useful if you find some really strong rare ones, but even then they're a tradeoff and nothing remotely close to the difference made by krayt tissues. Kliknik glands are a joke (5 uses?), and no one has yet seen a single one of the new feeder mech enhancers, presumably due to bugs with gorax spawns. Why don't non-vibro melee weapons have the potential to be 'uber'? Right now the most uber thing you can do to these weapons is get a 35% slice. Boooooring.
Think of this as a works in progress. I feel that some of the imbalances in other professions can be helped by first balancing the stat distribution on weapons themselves, which was the real purpose of this post. I'd love to hear feedback, and other suggestions (ie. feel free to add). I thought there'd be more technical problems, but I think we do a good enough job reporting bugs in our profession, and don't want to duplicate the hard work put in by our correspondant DarkCipher.
I would also like to add the inability to see the functionality rating of Master rtisan parts (i.e Control Units etc.) that we use for some of our weapons. Unless we make them ourselves, there is no way to tell the quality of the product we are using.
Hailene Da'Covale
Master Weaponsmith-Master Merchant-Master Artisan
Chaser of resources and sometimes women...
Proud member of Mason on the Naritus server
Yeah, especialy the T21? Doesnt make much sense to me.
#1 Moderate successes....
I think it's not a matter of these issues being overlooked, but a matter of these issues being overlooked on these boards. Why? They're profession-specific issues, really. They relate more to Pikeman/Carbineers/etc than they do to us. Why do Pikeman have such notoriously horrid accuracy? Why do Carbineers have such tremendous HAM costs? Just part of the grand scheme of balance that would be better suited for their boards. Most Weaponsmiths aren't Pikeman or Carbineers and can't as easily propose fixes as those communities could.
Except for the loot enhancements, which I completely agree with and we definitely have the most say over, since I think we're the only ones who actually know anything about 'em. I really feel these enhancements were the sloppiest implementation of loot I've seen yet. They have horrific balance problems, along with the associated headaches of the rampant krayt gun exploits. We missed getting these into the limelight the first round, so here's hoping we've got enough support behind rebalancing loot for the second round of Top 5.
Here's another one, probably belongs on the artisan forums, but meh 
Technical - there is no schematic for heavy weapons powerups. It is clear they were intended to be a part of the game, as there is a section of the bazaar for them, however there is no way for them to be made.
Lurax wrote:
Kliknik glands are a joke (5 uses?)
I agree with this statement. As someone who specializes in Commando gear, I can no longer honestly tell people these are worth hunting to add to grenades. Who cares about 20-90 max damage and the fact that you have to carry single-stacks of grenades wherever you go?
Now if they made these 100-500 on the damage, then yeah, people would REALLY want these and go hunting to bring them to your favorite weaponsmith.Until then, they are absolutely useless.
Agreed. Like some of the other smiths I wish these were never put into the game to begin with. The day they patched Krayt tissues into live, I told my guildmates this was a bad idea that was going to lead to weapon changes. Since then they have caused rampant farming, KS'ing, hoarding, overcharging, and a plethora of other negative actions ingame...I am still a supporter of having them done away with entirely.
Logix wrote:
Except for the loot enhancements, which I completely agree with and we definitely have the most say over, since I think we're the only ones who actually know anything about 'em. I really feel these enhancements were the sloppiest implementation of loot I've seen yet. They have horrific balance problems, along with the associated headaches of the rampant krayt gun exploits. We missed getting these into the limelight the first round, so here's hoping we've got enough support behind rebalancing loot for the second round of Top 5.
The horrid range modifiers on the polearm weapons are NOT properly compensated by skillmods. There is an unbalance, but with Pikeman being nearly outnumbered by Jedi... the issue will not get attention. We've all pretty much accepted that fact.
Thanks.
Logix, I realize that most/all of the balance suggestions I made didn't pertain directly to our profession. But I've seen pikeman complain about their horrid accuracy and HAM costs throughout the last 2 major patches, with nothing being done. Same thing for carbineers. If they are intended to be balanced classes, why are their skill bonuses and actual skills worse, AND the weapons themselves worse as well.
I made an impressive krayted elite carbine for a guy last night, which got a 34% damage slice. With a power up and everything it was over 400 dmg, 3.1 speed AP light. He was positively giddy about how it turned out (and he rightly should be), but I'm just sadly thinking of the large number of scatter pistols I've made that were better.Carbines are supposed to be bigger stronger guns, but that just isn't the way things turn out in the game.It does no good for carbineers to cry "we're underpowered! beef us up!" because EVERYONE is saying that. Take you pick of what you think the strongest class is and guaranteed at least 5 posts on the first page of the forum loudly proclaim they need to be made stronger.
I guess what I'm saying is that to a certain extent, weapon stats, schematics, etc DO pertain to weaponsmithing, the same way the ridiculously imbalanced stock pertains to weaponsmithing. Who will a usable stock affect? Not us really, mostly commandos and rifleman who use weapons that can use a stock. Compared to a lot of professions our bugs are very minor (take AS, seen the stat shifting of PSGs and tantel? How about the armor hole where armor just randomly doesn't work?), and making certain weapons more saleable to new players who haven't yet chosen a profession ISa weaponsmithing issue. I keep alarge selection ofweapons on my vendor, and after explaining speed caps, armor piercing, and general damage over time calculations, new players almost ALWAYS choose to go for a profession specializing in a pistol or a heavy weapon. If our weapon schematics are working properly, why are we being limited in what is saleable?
In the end, a more balanced combat atmosphere means more diverse weapon requests, so rather than spitting out dozens ofrepublic blastersand only making those vibro lances on special request, we become a more diverse profession profession as a whole. So yes, while these would directly affect professions other than ours, it would change weaponsmithing in the long run. And for the better, I think.
That was more or less the intent of my post.