GU73: Weapons

From Update Notes:
Weapon Mastery

• While having the Hybrid Focus chosen, the following cross weapon mastery attacks no longer return power:
  • Dual Wield - Ground Pound Mastery, Explosive Shot Mastery.
  • One Handed - Solar Flame Mastery.
  • Rifle - Flurry Mastery, Slip Shot Mastery.
  • Staff - Mortar Mastery.

How is using any of these combos better than using simple Solar Flare or Meteor Blast clips and why were these penalized in that manner?
If anything there should be additional bonuses to performing cross weapon combos since they require more animation time and extra SP to spec, otherwise they wont be used at all.

FireMint here

I know visuals are not priority... but can we have Dual Pistols, Hand Blasters and One Handed stand-by stance tweaked a bit? You can have the sickest style on and still look like you just dropped from the brainiac ship holding those pistols like that...

FireMint out

CR 190
Powerset - Nature; specced into Weapon Mastery - using the handblaster into bow explosive shot mastery.
Specced with only 115 skill points. Powers used with WM is Briar, Swarm and Carnage.
Rotation is hit Ads with Briar ( to start PI) go into Swarm/carnage and do a few WMesm.
Place of test is the Village (specifically the undercover mission area) - I like the stat clamping/boosting there it equalizes the stats for my testing.
I find that with this simple rotation alone I find that with nature the ads there are easily solo-able; much easier than on live. I barely had a panic moment as I went through the ads. I did not have any issue with losing power, only when I would clip WM with either Briar or Voracious Plants.
One thing I did notice is that it seemed unfair that unlike the super powered playstyle wherein all the powers are available without using skill points, a player that chooses to use the WM mastery will have to spend an additional 20 skill points to get 1 WMastery.

Is it possible to have a reset option when allocating skill points? I.E. hold the r3 button down on a particular skill to reset to zero? Just so we don't have to reset every 190 skill point or every 300 sp? Is the re-spec station even relevant anymore?

i have to re-visit this post my stats may have been skewed.

Shuriken Mastery is one of the fastest masteries in the game (and always has been). Since damage is based on animation time, it's not suprising it doesn't do as much as other types. You would either need to fit more in between each power or choose a different mastery, whatever works for you.

While using weapons expert keep weapons as they are right now. Weapon mastery should hit hard because its slower than clipping regular combos like solar flame.
While using hybrid make weapon mastery clippable like regular weapon combos are and balance out the damage accordingly.
Weapon damage should be calculated as good as possible to ensure that every weapon is usable in combat.
This is just some ideas of what could be done to weapons

Oh man, I guess my edit was too late. I have to re-visit my test on brawling. I had previously thought I had only specced with only 115 skill points.
With the speed of Brawling mastery I do expect a slightly lower max damage but a comparable timeframe on defeating the same groups of ads that would average out the damage between the two different Masteries. That was actually the reason I chose to compare the two.

Interesting, I wasn't actually testing between using just Wm compared to Clipping a weapon combo with a power. I'll have to look at that as well.

p.s. I see, you were actually referring to weapon combo clipping while in Hybrid mode. I was actually just testing on the use of the WM playstyle. I'm still trying to figure out if clipping the last part of the WM with a power is working for an additional damage or if it's cancelling the WM final damage. I keep getting lag at that point and I can't tell.

I like clipping and i like having variety to how i can play. Weapon mastery does good damage but i cannot clip it as fast as regular weapon combos such as solar flame etc. I dont want to be limited on the ammount of effective weapons i could play around with while doing clip heavy loadouts.

wait a second, i got a QUESTION:
does it even make any sense to still have weapon trees?
i mean, sure: while you are leveling to lvl30, it means something...
if you get a skill point, you can unlock further combos.
originally, you gained stats with it too, wich was the reason you were going for weapon trees, you knew you would never use.
then came WM, and expanded the whole thing with its combos.

separating stats from weapon combos and trees was something i suggested before the revamp was announced.
now, i ask myself: wouldn't it be better to just grant all weapons combos while leveling,
instead of using skills points for it?
every skill point i use for a WM tree (20 if you go full WM, while 10sp for main weapon, 30 as a whole) is a waste,
because i dont actually use the weapon with its combo, only the mastery combo is used.

that begs the questiion if we could get the combos normaly for leveling,
meaning we would only have to spend skillpoints into the weapon masteries for themselfes...?
if i would use brawling for example, to go full WM it needs now on test 29 points to unlock every possible combo.
it could be simply 4 for the WM itself, if all combos would be granted.
maybe 7, if you would keep the masteries of the weapons to unlock the combos as a necessaty.

just a thought...

Good point here, I love clipping and tbh i don't want to wait 7 years to get out of animation to pop another move I rather just have the ability to go through my rotation fast lol

@stambock - that was the question I asked as well. it wasn't fair to players that will choose the Weapons playstyle to have to use over 20 skill points to get a WM active while SuperPowered Playstyle doesn't need to spend any.

So I am amending my initial test to this one.
CR 190
Powerset - Nature; specced into Weapon Mastery - using the handblaster into bow explosive shot mastery.
Specced with only 115 skill points. Powers used with WM is Briar, Swarm and Carnage.
Rotation is hit Ads with Briar ( to start PI) go into Swarm/carnage and do a few WMesm.
Place of test is the Village (specifically the undercover mission area) - I like the stat clamping/boosting there it equalizes the stats for my testing.
Wtih only 115 skill points used this only puts 35 onto the precision skill.
I was max damage at around 4400. Taking on a group of 6 is do-able but can be hectic.

I had extra SP so I specced into Brawling Mastery, yes the Precisions skill is still at 35, I see that the damage is comparable to the Handblaster WM. The difference is that in the Brawling Mastery, which is quicker, the hits on 6 ads are around 220 to 240, compared to Handblaster which was only around 65 to 80 hits. Nevertheless, Both WM finished at around the same time; the max damage on Handblaster was higher than Brawling but both WM averaged out in the end.

As a curiousity, I added more skill points to the Handblaster WM changing the Precision skill from 35 to 75. The change was that the Max damage went up from 4400 to around 9000 + per second. This is using the same rotation, gear and obviously same player.

p.s. I specced 115 into the precision skill and got a max damage of 10450.

yup. thats what happens exactly. if you have 300sp, you don't have to bother, but if you are under 275sp,
you will loooose A LOT of dammage for each point spend on the weapon combos. it is rediculous.

I think we should just be granted additional cross weapon combos after we have 5-6 SP in a certain weapon.

Also, if Devs are not willing to bring back some moderate WM crit bonus, they should just make everybody 's lives easier and make cross weapon combos clippable like everything else. Much easier to balance things that way...

Correct !!
It seems that dual pistop has a différent playstyle distance WM ils still bad

Posting my personal work on weapons here for once in regards to "201cr base numbers", bugs, parses, etc. . All of my feedback and bugs are in columns to the right of what it's referring to.

Non-Damage Window Column (excluding WM) done with 201cr, no dps white mods, no sp spec'd outside of weapon combos, without the mastery point in the weapon tree, no prec gen mods, no prec gear mods, league hall buff active. stats are:


For weapon mastery combo damage, the mastery point had to be gotten so the stats for those are:


If a weapon combo has mastery bugged*, it means when you put the skill point into the weapon tree for weapon mastery, that's the result*. The weapon tree, not the crits/other stats tree.

The parse reads are done in full gear. 201cr. No weapon white socket. Escalating precision. Core strength. Max damage. Prec SF gear and gen mods. 175sp in Prec with full crits. League hall buffs. 60s reads. Done with the controller prec buff as well for direct comparison to the reads of PftT and Hybrid posted by Mighty and Crappy in the other thread. Stats for the full build (before controller prec buff kicks in) are:

p.s.- the reason my power pool drops is because i had power special forces mods in previously. generator mods were might and switched to prec which is that drop.

Sidenote - This is WEAPONS ONLY. This is not clipping outside of the weapon buff. If you are running clip heavy rotations that cut off animations, keep that in mind and I'd refer to the base numbers instead.

Link to my google drive to view the Excel files.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwJ1NTq0loGEQzZWbGtnS3hsM3M