Stat Revamp 1.7: Weapons

Decided to make a thread since there isn't an official feedback one for weapons.

Staff: Seems to be ok, only two hiccups here is the flip burst mastery seems to be the same damage despite if you do two holds or one hold, where as on live it does more damage on the second hold. Other hiccup is on the downward smash combo, the tap 3 hold 1 needs a buff on the hold. It barely does more damage then the first 3 taps and only does about a 3rd of the damage of the final tap.
Other then those, I give staff a 7.5/10 as far as balance goes. Robin is somewhat impressed.

Martial arts: WAY off. For starters, elbow drop, knee launch, cartwheel kick and spinning punch all do roughly the same damage, elbow drop, cartwheel kick, and spinning punch need a buff since they're longer combos then knee launch. Smoke bomb could use a slight buff as well. As far as WM goes, meteor blast WM is doing great damage, right where it should be. Uppercut WM is doing too much damage, needs a slight reduction, loft shot could use a slight buff as well as sweep shot WM
Overall, 2/10. Needs a second look. Batman is ashamed.

Bow: another weapon that's somewhat off base. Not as bad as MA but still off. First, impact arrow needs a buff, the melee hit is doing less damage then the ranged hit. Arrow fling and bow slam both need a buff. Bow slam only does about 75% more damage then the prior melee hits. Arrow fling barely does more damage then the melee taps, and does less damage then kick up launch. For WM damage, full auto, smoke bomb, and spinning punch WM are all where they need to be. Magnum round needs a buff, its hitting less then meteor blast from MA with more inputs.
Overall, 4/10. You disappoint Green Arrow.

Brawling: has it's ups and downs, back fist seems off, the first hold is barely doing more damage then the first melee tap while the second hold appears to be on steroids, first hold needs a buff. Punt is the same scenario as back fist, first melee hold is too weak, needs a big buff, second melee hold could use a buff as well. In other words, buff hammer fist.launching uppercut and haymaker both need buffs as well. Backfist is doing more damage then the last hit on haymaker so you know something is off there. As far as WM damage, everything seems to be ok besides doomspin. Backfist does roughly the same damage as doomspin making it pointless to combo into.
4/10, Superman is facepalming

Dual pistols: slip shot needs a buff, the first initial tap is doing roughly the same damage as the hold. Sweep shot needs a buff, the last hold is doing far less damage then the first two inputs. Really the only two things I noticed with the normal combos. WM combos seem ok too except for solar flame WM, could use a slight buff considering the amount of hold inputs.Ultra flurry could use a bump up as well.
7/10, not as bad, Hush doesn't look too upset

Dual wield: overall not too bad at all. Only discrepancy I noticed is whirlwind overstrike doing more damage then stunning swipe. Everything else looks good though, including WM damage.
9/10, Nightwing is satisfied.

Handblasts:.... WHAT HAPPENED?? You guys went from almost perfect HB to a heaping pile of steamy elephant poo. Solar flame, meteor blast, scissor kick, and anything else with a hold is doing just about as much damage as a single range tap, maybe slightly higher. Buff buff buff! Know what, just buff every normal combo in handblasts. Oh and buff damage on haymaker WM. Ground pound WM is doing more damage.
1/10. Starfire cries herself to sleep.

One handed: *is concerned*... air launch is doing more damage then spin chop, flipslash is hitting like a big fluffy pillow, although I'm iffy on that one. I'm not sure if it still gets a damage cut when you spec into WM. If anyone has that information please let me know, I haven't had time to test it yet. Flurry could use a slight bump up in damage as well. WM combos seem fine, right where they should be.
5/10, Joker puts down the crowbar until it gets fixed while Deathstroke has a hernia.

Shield: not too many complaints here. One thing I noticed is the damage doesn't split on all of the hold melee inputs if you use multiple in one combo like it does on live. Not sure if intended or not but its a welcoming change. WM is where my complaints are. Lifting strike and home run seem fine, big scoop and magnum round on the other hand, BUFF. Please and thank you.
8.5/10, Wonder Woman can rest easy.

Rifle: not too shabby at all. Everything seems to be behaving like it should, no damage discrepancies except maybe on ranged combos, those could use a slight buff such as rolling barrage, flip-burst, and mortar. Other then that it's fine.
9.5/10, John Stewart applauds.

Two handed: Another fairly balanced weapon, I see you guys fixed mega smash which gets a "SUPER GREAT" from me. It's now actually worth comboing into. One dependency is the damage of hammer throw compared to the simple tap ranges. It's doing 2/3 of their damage, may need to take a look at that. Another issue, while kind of small is the damage of flurry shot WM, could use a slight buff. Other WM combos seem fine.
9/10. Harley is loving her hammer.

Staff on live do less damage on the tap after hold

At what point does a tester become a dev because im pretty sure you have already reached it.

I think I'm just missing a bachelor's degree in programming or something like that, not entirely sure

About Bow: you didn't mention the range combos which I think are hot garbage right now.

• Explosive Shot does less damage than the range taps, most likely due to being multi target. But due to the longer time for clipping it compared to taps, it's not worth using now. The Power regen on it is also not better than basic taps in any way. Both in clipping and non-clipping situations this produces less DPS than basic taps now, even in multi target situations. It's tragic.
• Arrow Storm performs much better in combo-spam situations when not clipping, but even worse in clipping rotations. I guess it's OK for hybrid builds that want to setup a longer duration dot and then just spam weapon combos until it runs out.
• Flurry Shot is crap. It has a cast bar (like the trick shots do), it's single target, its damage sucks and its Power regen isn't worth mentioning either. This is a 3 tap hold combo and should do major damage on single targets, but it does less DPS than range taps!

This is a ranged weapon we are talking about here. The melee combos aren't all that great but that would be acceptable for a BOW weapon. It should be good for ranged attacks though, and it isn't at all. Flurry Shot shouldn't have a cast bar, and Flurry and the trick shots should all do more damage. I realize that Explosive Shot in particular is multi target and rapidly clippable but it should still produce more damage than basic taps do, especially in multi target situations.

Tested all the weapons under "1.8"

TL;DR: IF you don't buy the individual masteries, or WM combos, most of the weapons seem to be balanced pretty well.

My Setup: The "weapon mastery" skill point at the top of the stats tree allows your weapon to regenerate some power and seems to give about a 10% damage buff. That was the only skill point I spend outside of weapons. I made the mistake of buying shield weapon mastery and noticed that it absolutely squashed the damage of some attacks... so I respecced out of it, and didn't buy any of the individual weapon masteries.

Dual Pistol seems to suck. Full Auto spam can keep up with the other weapons, but the rest of the combos seem to neither do damage nor regenerate power very well. Not seeing Fatal's 7/10 rating here, unless the WM combos you can buy make up for things.

Bow is as sucky as Fatal points out above. No... rereading I think it's a little suckier. Crimson calls the range attacks "Hot Garbage"-- I think he's being way too kind. Arrow Storm and Explosive Shot have cast bars and basically can't be clipped, but do very weak damage. You can do better damage spamming DP full auto or Shield hold Range attacks than almost any combo available with bow. Bow 3-tap-hold melee attacks clipped ok.

Hand Blasters are much better than Fatal points out above. They are no longer the completely OP weapon that you can either choose to use or suck at DPS-- which is what they were before. Yes the holds only do a little more damage than the taps, but the taps are single-target and the holds are AOE, and the hold-tap, hold-hold, and tap-tap-hold range combos clip super well. Just looking at the weapon attacks themselves it seems weak, but once you start clipping with powers it's the strongest ranged weapon, and clipping upper-cut produced decent melee results.

MA melee clipping was good. 3-tap-hold 4-tap-hold, and 5-tap-hold all parsed decently. Power regeneration was good. Range was useless.

Brawling haymaker was very strong for clipping. I got uninspired results with the other melee attacks. Range was useless. That's about all that I tried here.

Staff-- similar to brawling. Downward smash is very strong. Range is useless. SUGGESTION: could you please turn staff's new range attack into an AOE?

Shield was good both melee and ranged. For melee I needed to use the longer combos though, which aren't that workable in practice. Think of shield as a ranged weapon, and it's good. part of the problem with shield melee is that a lot of its attacks are single-target, which throws things off some.

Rifle seems to be the new OP weapon-- though I'm not used to using it so I may have looked at single-target attacks by mistake. I found I could get melee parses as high as brawling or 2-handed. Phantom rifle taps are totally a thing. Mortar was parsing about as well as shield or hand blasters.

2-handed produced pretty good results with clipping. Ranged was also good.

1-handed seemed to be good for regenerating power, but I could only get mediocre melee parses out of it. Ranged is crap.

Dual Wield is now a very forgiving melee power for clipping. I don't generally favor the weapon, but I could very easily match the strongest melee parses of staff, brawling, and 2-handed.

Summary
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The good: most of the weapons seemed decently balanced to me outside of weapon mastery.
The bad: A couple of the weapons are way off. I didn't try the WM combos like Fatal did.
The Ugly: speccing into WM for a weapon can still take your best rotation and turn it into garbage. Can we PLEASE make buying WM for a particular weapon NOT decrease the damage from any of its attacks???!??

so are you guys saying PRECISION and MIGHT is the way to mod for hybrid play or straight MIGHT for hybrid play?

Base stats for weapons testing on 126 dummy.


Here are some numbers for the Bow.
Explosive shot & Arrow Storm are under performing.


Explosive shot

has a knockdown but the time it takes for one click explosive shot is about twice as long as ranged tap. Explosive shot with a knockdown should be hitting for at least at much as a ranged tap.

Arrow Storm

Should be on par with Ranged tap.

Ranged tap 2 seconds = 2000 average damage + or -
Arrow Storm 2 seconds = 1200 average damage + or -

Both attacks are ranged and taps are doing almost twice as much damage as Arrow Storm.

Arrow Volley



Arrow Storm.............. Two taps ( time would not register with 1 tap )
Each Arrow Storm has 4 hits.



Arrow Explosive Shot



Arrow Ranged Taps

Tested a prec build for anyone interested. I'd say rifle does well in both range and melee and probably the best weapon at the moment. Grenade launcher could use a buff though since its multi target and does less damage then hold range, which is also multi target now

Question, cause I didn't see you clip much. Clip the WM animation and still get the damage?

That stinks about grenade, hope the buff it.

You said the hold triangle hits harder than grenade. Are you able to clip the animation or do you have to hold it for all the damage?

I like clipping.

I just wanna know whats up with some weapon taps being better then some holds...? Why is balancing things always so difficult to do on this game? This is easy stuff and after all these years im so feed up that were still struggling with stuff like this.

You can't clip WM combos unfortunately. I was doing a pure weapon build, only thing on my bar was the buff and shields. If I did hybrid I wouldn't have used WM.

As for the hold range, you need to hold it for full damage. There's still grenade launcher if you want to clip.

Cool. Ty.

Lol, one of the devs has to love rifle. How many different times over the games life has it been OP?

You forgot Flurry Shot and I think it's underperforming as well considering that it's a single target attack with a cast bar.

Feedback
I was doing some testing to assess the compatibility of different weapon types with Gadgets gameplay. Specifically, I was interested in group melee and range damage using regular attacks - no weapon mastery - in a Hybrid build. Here are my thoughts on the different weapon types I tested:

Bow
I was surprised at the terrible damage parses I was getting with Bow. Bow was a well-balanced weapon in 1.6 and now it isn't worth considering. Explosive Shot has low sustained group damage. Arrow Storm does "ok" damage, but it doesn't lend itself well to Hybrid gameplay since it doesn't clip well. Impact Arrow was parsing lower than Handblasters Fist Slam. Bow's melee attacks were very unimpressive too.

Brawling
Punt and Haymaker do good group damage. The long animation times and input sequences made me focus more on clipping with powers that had long cooldowns. The power regeneration on Brawling wasn't good enough to keep up with that type of playstyle though. Brawling's default ranged attack does terrible damage. You can make Brawling melee work in conjunction with a Gadgets play-style, but it wasn't much fun to play.

Dual Pistols
Dual Pistol combos are generally limited to single-target damage and you lose access to several potential combos when speccing into Mastery. The long combo sequences provided limited opportunities for clipping.

Dual Wield
The thing I like most about Dual Wield is that you can easily change your tap input melee sequences to fit your loadout cooldowns and still end up with a group attack. I was getting very consistent damage while using Dual Wield. All of the group melee attacks were doing good damage. The ranged damage isn't very good, but it is workable. While the adjustable number of melee taps is a strength, it is also a weakness. I always find that my hand tires easily when playing Dual Wield due to the large number of quick taps.

Handblasters
The damage reduction in Handblasters group attacks is very noticeable when compared to 1.6. The melee combos generate low damage group parses. Solar Flare was doing reasonable group damage for being a ranged attack. Scissor Kick was not parsing well at all for me. The best thing I can say about Handblasters is that most of the attacks clip well and you can easily shift between melee/range.

Martial Arts
Spinning Punch and Smoke Bomb were generating reasonable group parses. The problem I ran into is that those attacks don't mesh very well with several of Gadgets cooldowns. Powers were coming off cooldown at awkward times in the combo input sequences. The loadout that worked best for me was Cryo-Field, Battle Display, and a power with a short cooldown. Ranged damage was unimpressive.

One-Handed
The group melee attacks for One-Handed are parsing low compared to other weapon types. Also, I had a hard time finding a loadout that meshed well with One-Handed. Powers would generally come off cooldown a fraction of a second after I had completed the final part of a One-Handed combo. The default range damage is terrible.

Rifle
Rifle's attacks are doing good parses by themselves, but I found this weapon type to be very awkward to use in conjunction with Gadgets. Gadgets is best played as melee-range powerset and Rifle's unique lunge don't mesh well with the playstyle. Rifle's melee attacks can work with certain Gadgets loadouts, but I always found them to be a bit clunky. In terms of ranged damage, I found Rifle to be lackluster. Mortar is awkward to use at times and was parsing poorly. The range tap attack provides good clipping potential, but that type of playstyle consumes power very quickly.

Staff
One of the things I dislike about Staff is your limited group damage options. Downward Smash Combo does good damage, but it has a long build-up time. I found it awkward to use it lower-tier combat because everything would be at very low-health by the time I got to the first hold on the input sequence. The long buildup time also translates into limited clipping opportunities. The ranged damage wasn't very good either.


Some Overall Thoughts

• Bow needs some attention. I wouldn't use Bow in any situation in its current form.
• Handblasters melee could use a bit of a damage increase.
• Dual Pistol Mastery needs to be looked at. Speccing into Mastery should not disable several of your potential weapon combos.
• Staff can do good group melee damage in content where enemies don't die quickly.
• Martial Arts and Dual Wield provide very consistent damage depending on your loadout.

Testing needs to be done with weapon mastery within weapons trees and weapon mastery that is picked in the stats tree. Neither are giving bonuses from what I have tested. I need more testing from other people to confirm.
They both state that you are suppose to receive bonuses to damage and I have found zero bonuses on any weapon that I have tested.

All I have to say at this point in time is that weapons has not been gone through very well. I have found a number of issues / discrepancies between the first few weapons I tested within minutes.

The first two weapon ranged taps that I compared.

MA & Bow

Bow
100 ranged taps ( 45 seconds ) 409 average damage

MA
100 ranged taps ( 43 seconds ) 300 average damage

If I have to go through all this. Who do I send an an invoice to for my time? It's absolutely clear from the start that someone needs to do a better job running these numbers.

Bow
100 ranged taps ( 45 seconds ) 409 average damage

MA
100 ranged taps ( 43 seconds ) 300 average damage

HB
100 ranged taps (49 seconds ) 369 average damage

Take this damage difference just from these three weapons within less than a minute and then multiply that by 30 minutes.

These miscalculations are HUGE.

Comparing these numbers directly isn't useful if you don't consider the different animation times. There are definitely some inconsistencies but just comparing the numbers 1:1 isn't enough.