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Post by electrohydra on Jul 28, 2015 19:13:50 GMT -5
It's possible.
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Post by drunkensolamnic on Jul 28, 2015 19:23:04 GMT -5
I was on an NWN1 server where this was done. it basically made it impossible to switch between your ranged weapon and a melee weapon once a fight started because the process of denying you the switch would bug you out and leave you flatfooted for five rounds; just trying to drop a bow and draw a sword.. which in DnD's mechanics can be done in three seconds or less.
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Post by electrohydra on Jul 28, 2015 19:55:59 GMT -5
It doesn't have to be done the same way your NWN1 server implemented it. I'm sure PE can come up with some reasonable mechanics.
Also Engines isn't even close to DnD, so we should probably stop comparing it to that.
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Post by drunkensolamnic on Jul 28, 2015 20:04:31 GMT -5
If it was a stamina cost for this.. which I dont think it should be as its not a huge exertion of effort... It'd need to be low, for it not being a large exertion of effort. The perk of hybrid weapons as well is at least in part that you only need one weapon instead of 2. A shot-gun axe, means one item instead of two.
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Post by electrohydra on Jul 28, 2015 20:07:27 GMT -5
Neither is reloading a magazine. Still costs a lot of stamina.
Not saying it SHOULD cost a ton of stamina, but good, interesting gameplay and balance > Simulationism
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Post by drunkensolamnic on Jul 28, 2015 20:15:33 GMT -5
That's to represent the time of getting a new mag into it though. Which until you train the ability (aka combat reload), is going to take longer than drawing a new pistol and resuming fire.
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Post by ronan on Jul 29, 2015 11:39:00 GMT -5
Going to throw this out there in this thread, because it does somewhat pertain to balance of guns, and it saves me creating a new one. Ammunition may currently be bugged to weigh less than it should..... which is like, imo, the best bug ever. I've seen more people experimenting with guns and enjoying gunplay with the ability to actually carry ammunition in heavy armor than..... I've seen since server launch. Previously guns were pretty much limited solely to light armor folks, or "rogue" characters, which would be fine if they were like super OP one-shot machines, but seeing how varied the roles of firearms are..... I'm totally digging everyone being able to use them. If ammunition is currently bugged, perhaps when fixed it would be considered to lower their weight overall afterall?
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Post by drunkensolamnic on Jul 29, 2015 12:14:43 GMT -5
Ammunition as well as item weights in general were released in the weekend's update.
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Genbor
Gumshoe
"If you die, don't come crying to me about it."
Posts: 81
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Post by Genbor on Jul 30, 2015 0:57:17 GMT -5
Alright, had to collect my thoughts on this, but this post is finally here. So let's talk Guns.
I usually play a dwarven gunner called Bardi Sverdinnse, and I had him test out a number of different weapons. The only exception would be the SMG because I couldn't yet craft it, or afford it from Two-Fry. The problem with guns is, like somebody mentioned it before me, they are not scary at all. Why are they not? Well, for starters they don't do damage. The Hunting Rifle can has the highest raw physical damage possible out of all the guns, and even with that I get the messages of "This weapon is ineffective" in the graveyard sometimes against armored opponents. Currently Bardi has an augmented Hunting Rifle so his AB is at 9 when he stops to take aim. Even with that 9 AB, there's a pretty high chance of missing the enemy (probably because of scaling) and if you miss, that's not just a simple miss of "I'll get them next time!" like in melee, it's a miss with 4 bullets/4 tries left out of 5. Once it does hit, it rarely ever does any significant damage, the only cases are when fighting unarmored opponents, the damage is almost good. Criticals are great too, but I don't like to rely on pure chance for my main source of damage.
Still, we've heard this before Genbor! Alright then, here's the other problem. You can't really do anything as a gunner by yourself. Even unarmed can fight a creature 1 on 1, but trying to kill something that is right infront of you is impossible. This is why guns are currently useless. The agile, low armor opponents are upon you after 1 maybe 2 rounds and then you are useless because there's no point blank shot. The heavily armored lumbering hulks can take a full 5 rounds to get to you depending on where you are shooting from, but with the bullets not really doing any significant damage to them, they will get to you and you are once again useless with the gun. Once your 5 rounds are up with the Hunting Rifle, you can choose to reload for almost all of your stamina for another useless 5 rounds, after which you are a sitting duck, since you won't have the stamina to reload the weapon again.
Here are Bardi's current abilities: Combat Reload (I), Gunsmithing (I), Hide (I), Precise Shooting (I), Light Armor Agility (I).
With Light Armor Agility (I) I could kite the zombies in the graveyard, so that when they got near, I'd just run away shoot at them from a distance and reload, then run away again. The result was that for 3 armored Deaders, taking care not to trigger any more spawns so running around in a small area, it took me around 15 minutes to kill them, with 5 minutes each and a hell of a lot of bullets. This could only be achieved with running for so long that I was finally out of combat and had no stamina reload cost. If that didn't happen, I wouldn't even have been able to do that.
But this is in a wider area like the Graveyard. What's it like in a more enclosed space like the Crypts? Well, three Gunners went down and we almost died from 3-5 Deaders at the very beginning. This, with quite a bit of experience behind gaming, so since I know that "Okay, close up my gun is useless", my main focus is always to attack the ones who are farther away and attacking somebody else, and have somebody else cover me and take care of my problem. So it was a gunning triangle, me shooting the other player's target, the other player shooting the third player's and the third player shooting mine. We still almost died and had to flee.
Another example is I ventured down with a newly crafted Hunting Rifle, the very same which now gives me +9 AB, to the Beggar's Cross. On the way there are sewer wolves, and I thought, let's kill a weakling on the way, instead of just sneaking by them. What followed was my total domination, as the wolf closed the distance in less than one round, after which I couldn't do anything: running around would trigger the other sewer wolves, as well as Light Armored Agility (+4% movespeed) is not enough to leave wolves in the dust, with them easily following. Even with a +9 AB, my gun was useless in point blank. Because it absolutely makes sense that having a gun pointed at your heart in point blank will miss 4 out of 5 times. I mean come on, it's one of the easiest ways to shoot something, but apparently guns are treated as Bows, which have to be drawn and shot instead of just aimed and fired like guns do. The end of this story was that I had to run away before that one Sewer Wolf killed me.
1.) Did the shot hit? (No) Fire again until it does, although you only have a limited number of shots with finite bullets to reload with. (Yes) 2.) Did it do damage? (No) Fire again until it does, although you only have a limited number of shots with finite bullets to reload with. (Yes) 3.) Did the enemy die? (No) Fire again until it does, although you only have a limited number of shots with finite bullets to reload with. (Yes) Reload out of combat for no stamina penalty, and pick a new target.
So here's my proposal on how guns could be made better. I know the no-point-blank-shot is a balance thing, and if you are really adamant on that front there's nothing to do, but here are some changes.
[Combat Reload]: Along with the additional Armor Class (which I assume in EoA mechanics means the Dodge Bonus), it should also lower the stamina required for reloading the gun with each rank.
[Activated Abilities]: Marksmanship has no activated combat abilities, the only thing we ever need to activate for stamina is reloading. It would be nice to see some abilities where you aim and slow the opponent witht he shot if it hits, or release a burst of shots (say 3) at once, instead of just the usual one and the like. There are plenty of options here but it's useless to list them until there's word that this could happen from the Devs.
Now onto the Guns themselves, I will not talk about the melee aspects of hybrids, I'll leave that talk to the melee thread. Basically every gun needs to have armor penetration to some degree.
[Shotgun]: High Armor Penetration with Military Shells, High Damage if hit at melee distance and versatility (it already has this with the different Shell types).
[Rifle-Carbine]: High Armor Penetration, and High Damage. They can hold 5/20 rounds respectively, but in combat that translates to 1-3 shots fired before the opponent gets to you, and you'r in the pickle of your life. At least this would make sure that those 1-3 shots DO count.
[Handgun]: Medium Armor Penetration, Medium Damage, has Point Blank Shot, so great at close range, but at long range it's not very accurate.
[Revolver]: Revolver should be the pistol equivalent of a Shotgun in my opinion. You can load different elemental bullets, like Heater Bullets, Military Bullets, and the like. It would be versatile, but less damage than a shotgun. The appeal it would have over a shotgun is that it's not melee range but medium to melee range, so the firing distance is higher, with up to 6 bullets without any modifications. Military Rounds would give it High Armor Penetration.
[Pistol]: Pistols are the gun which everybody should carry around and never fire, preparing for the day when they get left on an abandoned island and look for an easy way out. It has no other uses in my opinion. Maybe somebody can think of something, I just can't because it's THAT useless with the two rounds it has and low damage.
[SMG]: I never managed to try this so I can't really give an idea on how to improve it, but it should have the armor penetration all guns deserve as well.
[Shotgun Axe]: This in reality should go to the Melee thread, since it's just a melee weapon with an activated special ability.
[Gunblade]: Gunblade is great as is, from the gun's point of view, but adding armor penetration to it would give it some extra oopmh.
That's all for now, thanks for reading!
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Post by dathi255 on Jul 30, 2015 3:14:57 GMT -5
Whilst I like a lot of the suggestions you've made Genbor, and I agree that many players who want to use guns, all just seem to opt for the rifle because being useless with the gun you want < being good with a hunting rifle. The below comments are not bashing your suggestion at all, but offering the viewpoint of someone playing a heavy armour character who relies on DR.
How much armour penetration would guns give? Or would it just penetrate all armour... Because if so, tanks are going to get shredded. From my observations, probably around 60-70% of the server population use firearms as their main weapon, with melee strictly as a back up. Considering at level 20 milestone heavy armour and block, with a full set of fully modified plate + heavy shield, my character gets to have 37 Armour (so effectively 1d37 DR). He quite happily tanks a lot of dungeon crawls at the moment (many other players will probably agree he does a fairly stand up job of it to). Even so, I often take most of my HP in damage every fight, or go down, as well as the fact I spend a lot more money on consumable potions than most ranged guys will do in their entire EoA experience I bet (one cultist fight (not even the whole dungeon) had me use 40 healing potions and I still went down).
With guns giving flat armour pen (no matter how much), a lot of the tank experience goes to waste, as we already recently had to deal with Crossbones the destroyer (who had no armour pen and still dealt 15+ damage a round to my character). If all ranged enemies got armour pen, tanks would be as effective as throwing elderly people wearing tissue paper at the enemies (as that is the sort of damage output a full defensive fighter has). Whilst this might seem like a good idea to the majority of the server, who do indeed use ranged weapons and would probably prefer enemies in armour to be as effective as the aforementioned OAP's, those of us playing tanks upon hearing such suggestions are alarmed at how redundant our character may be made.
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Post by eba on Jul 30, 2015 3:22:23 GMT -5
If guns had armor pen, mobs would die faster before they took out the tanks
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Genbor
Gumshoe
"If you die, don't come crying to me about it."
Posts: 81
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Post by Genbor on Jul 30, 2015 4:59:36 GMT -5
Whilst I like a lot of the suggestions you've made Genbor, and I agree that many players who want to use guns, all just seem to opt for the rifle because being useless with the gun you want < being good with a hunting rifle. The below comments are not bashing your suggestion at all, but offering the viewpoint of someone playing a heavy armour character who relies on DR. How much armour penetration would guns give? Or would it just penetrate all armour... Because if so, tanks are going to get shredded. From my observations, probably around 60-70% of the server population use firearms as their main weapon, with melee strictly as a back up. Considering at level 20 milestone heavy armour and block, with a full set of fully modified plate + heavy shield, my character gets to have 37 Armour (so effectively 1d37 DR). He quite happily tanks a lot of dungeon crawls at the moment (many other players will probably agree he does a fairly stand up job of it to). Even so, I often take most of my HP in damage every fight, or go down, as well as the fact I spend a lot more money on consumable potions than most ranged guys will do in their entire EoA experience I bet (one cultist fight (not even the whole dungeon) had me use 40 healing potions and I still went down). With guns giving flat armour pen (no matter how much), a lot of the tank experience goes to waste, as we already recently had to deal with Crossbones the destroyer (who had no armour pen and still dealt 15+ damage a round to my character). If all ranged enemies got armour pen, tanks would be as effective as throwing elderly people wearing tissue paper at the enemies (as that is the sort of damage output a full defensive fighter has). Whilst this might seem like a good idea to the majority of the server, who do indeed use ranged weapons and would probably prefer enemies in armour to be as effective as the aforementioned OAP's, those of us playing tanks upon hearing such suggestions are alarmed at how redundant our character may be made. Obviously there's a need to check how much armor penetration would be too much or too little, but that would require careful testing. From just looking at flat numbers, let's compare armor vs damage. The Hunting Rifle has 10-24 damage on the gun, and you can get a few damage from abilities, augments etc. Right now my gun does at most 24 damage without critting. So 37 vs 24, it's quite plain to see that there's still a 13 DR difference, so the gun is useless. You mention that you probably drink more potions than any ranged character ever would, and you would be right. A ranged character would die at the first 5 potions if they drank, they can't afford to do so when they are being hit at. You on the other hand probably drank those because the damage output and the amount the potions healed were probably close to each other. Scaling Armor Penetration might be the best idea to implement, since that would ensure that a Handgun (1) wouldn't really do much against a Breastplate (28). Then again, having Armor Penetration that completely ignores armor is way out of hand that's why I never thought about suggesting that. You also have to take into account that Tanking works. You can tank effectively, while shooting with guns doesn't. You might be worried that Tanking might become like a wearing paper, right now shooting guns is exactly what you fear: in the sense that it shoots paper balls instead of bullets that deal no damage physically, and any damage an enemy takes is from being mentally tired at all the mosquito bites. Let's check two types of Armor Penetration, taking in a normal Hunting Rifle and your 37 armor into count. Armor Penetration #1: [50% Armor Shredding (rounded down)]This would mean that the armor check against a Hunting Rifle bullet would be 37 - 18 = 19 Armor Maximum Critless Damage: 19 - 24 = -5, damage carries through. Minimum Critless Damage: 19 - 10 = 9, armor is still intact. Minimum Damage needed to bypass armor: 20 (this from a 10-24 gun) and that means -1 damage. Taking into account a normal 100/100 enemy, that means that at most, without Criticals it will do at most 25 damage (5 x 5 Rifle ammuntion) before having to reload; without looking at the fact that the enemy keeps getting closer with each round. Once the enemy reaches the Rifle user it's pretty much over for the Rifle. [100% Armor Shredding]10 Random Rolls (Rolling with 2xd8, so Rifle = d15 +9 enhanced): 20, 18, 21, 14, 25, }{ 15, 13, 21, 16, 16 A more accurate representation would be with a d15, but this is giving the guns better damage, because on average 2xd6 is better than 1xd12, as well as 2xd8 goes higher than d15. You can think of it as ability + augments, etc., simulation. So what does this leave us with? At a tight space where running is near impossible from the enemy, with the enemy walking, the average shots a gunner can make is 2-3. Looking at the above damage output that would mean the enemy would still have around 30+ health when reaching the gunner, after which it's a one sided massacre against the gunner. This is also assuming that each bullet hits, and ignores misses, as well as Critical hits. The former is too little, the latter might be too much. Let's look at another form of Armor Penetration: Armor Penetration #2: [Bypassing Armor]What this would mean is that depending on what type of armor the enemy wears, the damage of the gun would bypass by an equal amount. Say your heavy armor get's bypassed by 50%, that would mean at 10 damage the at least 5 damage, at 24 damage at least 12 damage carries through. This means there's constant pressure put on the enemy, so that things like confidently walking up to a gunner while grinning fiercely and hiding behind a shield would not work. The amount of what bypass and type of armor needs to be thought out, 50% was just a number I pulled out of my head. It could be that it decreases 20% with each type, Light Armor (80% damage carries through), Medium Armor (60% damage carries through), Heavy Armor (40% damage carries through) something like that. Or it could be less between each type. It would assure that wearing Heavy Armor still counts as tanking, but gunning still works. The exact amount needs to be thought out.
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Post by drunkensolamnic on Jul 30, 2015 8:11:20 GMT -5
Genbor in your example you're assuming that the armor wearer always gets the maximum about. With that 37 armor he might block 1-3 damage as a minimum. So its very possible that your shot will do full damage.
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Genbor
Gumshoe
"If you die, don't come crying to me about it."
Posts: 81
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Post by Genbor on Jul 30, 2015 8:14:07 GMT -5
Genbor in your example you're assuming that the armor wearer always gets the maximum about. With that 37 armor he might block 1-3 damage as a minimum. So its very possible that your shot will do full damage. I admit I was thinking of it as a full DR, but now I see that it isn't. Could someone explain it to me how it works so I can revise my example?
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Post by drunkensolamnic on Jul 30, 2015 8:16:40 GMT -5
If I'm wearing full plate. I get 16 armor off it for just the torso piece. You shoot me. I block 1-16 of the damage, if I have no feats or no other armor. Its a randomized roll.
If I invest two abilities into the heavy armor tree for extra DR, I now block 3-18 damage.
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