Stat Revamp 1.7: Weapons

So im not sure what formula/method or whatever you want to call it the dev's are using for weapon balance but if we are still balancing weapon damage off of how long a individual attack is weapons are gonna be messed up forever. Weapon damage should go by the complete time it takes to do the entire combo just not the last attack.

It makes no sense to wind up a 5 tap weapon combo only to have the final hold suck just because the animation of the hold is quick. All that wind up time for nothing??? That makes no sense at all....The entire duration should be accounted for not just the last hold.

A tap-hold weapon combo should never do more damage then a tap 4x-hold.

Exactly. Idky it would ever be that way. It doesnt make sense to me. It should be a build up. Each tap or hold does more dmg as ya go and the last one is the big hitter. Or the time of the entire combo like ya said. There are some serious issues with weapons atm and it really needs to be looked at. Or like ya said, weapons are gonna be messed up. And the weapon only playstyle along with hybrid is gonna be outta whack. Like i already said in this thread, 1 or 2 weapons will be OP and almost everyone will be using the same wpn. And if the weapons cant be balanced how are the 3 play styles gonna be balanced?

And with some of the comments ive seen its very clear to me some people have an agenda and want others to play their way. Stop this please. This nonsense is only going to mess this revamp up. There is gonna be 3 play styles. We should be testing so all 3 are competitive.

What?!? Are you trying to use logic here??? Here?

I see what' you're trying to do!

Agreed.

This^

This is what everyone's been saying here, I'm seriously hoping this doesn't get the deaf ears treatment.

I wish WM's animation and reward for pulling the combo right are back.
Right now using power after WM combo feels unnatural. I feel like some noob who just missed the timing to attach a power.

It doesnt have to be crit% increase but some reward should be added. Like universal 10% power restoring increase for all roles would be nice. Something extra like that would justify wasting SP on speccing WM combos and performing them not just for damage but power efficiency too.

Handblasters:


Overall: 2/10 Handblasters is still a terrible weapon that needs more reward.

The AOE combo is quick, and only does about 1800 damage.

Meanwhile the Ranged Combo Solar Flame does about 1900 damage, and it's also AOE.


So I'll cut straight to the chase here, HB is backwards; Regardless of animation time Melee should always do more damage than range DPS.


The Ranged Combos do alright DPS, but still feel weak.


I gave HB a test with the new changes with a Nature Hybrid DPS loadout at CR 166 in the Artemis solo and it was a hinderance to my DPS.
I died twice in the Seeing Shades solo during the Felix Faust boss fight and I felt I could've done better if I wasn't using HB.



Bow:

Overall 6/10 A solid DPS weapon to use, very strong on melee single target.

Pros: Very quick and pretty rewarding weapon. The strong aspect comes from the single target melee combos, particulary here's what I discovered from Strongest to weakest.

Bow Slam(3 Taps, one hold) Lunging Stab and Kit-up launcher(Both roughly do the same amount of dps at the same speed, Lunging stab requires you to hold melee while kit-up launcher requires you to tap and hold melee)

Impact arrow is the weakest of the bunch, but that's to be expected it requries a tap range or twothen a tap melee.

Flurry Shot also does pretty good single target ranged dps and it can be done from both melee and range inputs which is a nice bonus.

Ranged DPS combos also do pretty alright DPS but some of them are weird which I'll touch up on in a moment.

Cons: Alot of your combos are Straight up single target, this leaves you with only two options to use as an AOE bow user(Not counting WM)

Arrow Storm(Good DPS for a fast combo) Arrow fling(also good DPS)

Another con is that Long Draw does more damage than Explosive Shot, Explosive shot requires just a tad bit more input and the animation time is about the same.


Bow will pass for me.


MA:

Overall: 2/10 This weapon is flipped reverse, Strong Melee; Pillow Range DPS.

Pros: Strong DPS Melee Single Target combos, It's slower but does about double the damage that bow's kit-up launcher does.

Spin Punch does pretty nice dps rivaling Shields Overhead Plate Smash. And Smoke Bomb does a little bit more than Spin punch which I think is correct considering it's just one more tap required.


Cons: The Ranged DPS is laughably weak. Shriuken Storm hits for 200 barely 400 if it crits.. No JUST NO.

I was laughing uber hard when I saw those numbers come from this weapon, I was testing this stuff out on just plain trash mobs and because of these numbers I switched weapons before I got to faust.. No Just no.



TL;DR Buff the Range Damage Asap, MA needs it.

HB does better than this at ranged DPS; but it does worse at Melee. So I'm ranking this and HB both a bad ranking of 2/10.
One Handed:

Overall:5/10 It passes but just barely
The melee combos are pretty much on par with MA, but the weak point is that you have virtually no Ranged AOE combos outside of WM.
This factor alone is gonna make me avoid using the one handed weapon entirely unless I strictly play WM. If Staff can get a new aoe ranged combo, one handed should get one too if possible.

Dual Pistols Mastery to Ultra Flurry is a joke.
I have 23,337 precision and hit more or less 1500 per tick, x6 ticks from ultra flurry, totalling to 9000 damage
Maybe the cast time wasn't accounted for

So after a super long day of testing i need to shake someones hand on the dev team. After going over all the melee combos today and using them in rotations with each power i can honestly say almost every weapon is viable for melee and will get you almost the same results. Some weapons like dual pistols, bow, rifle (only good on single target) aren't the best for melee but then every weapon isn't necessarily a melee weapon imo.

I can hit 40k melee with every power with the exception of light, rage and celestial cause they don't play well with weapons cause they are combo powers. It was actually very surprising to me after all the bad talk about weapons i head but after testing them for myself and using them in actual rotations and with each power i was pleasantly surprised and i was even more surprised that i could use just about any weapon i wanted, that is something that has never happened in this game before.

Its not often i have a lot of good to say so let me say it again Fantastic job on the melee weapons!! Honestly is so refreshing to know if i want to change weapons up i have a variety of choices. Keep up the good work

The tests i did were only with regular weapon combos no weapon mastery or ranged attacks. I will be getting to them in the next few days.

The only 2 weapons off hand i can think of that need a adjustment are rifle's 5 tap is crazy OP and two handed's 5 tap is a bit to good, not way out of line like rifle but its a tad to good.

To add to what i said above the weapons i liked were staff, one handed, martial arts, dual weild, two handed, brawling. Those were good on AoE and others like shield rifle were good for single but not AOE, HB's were okish. For AoE a 4 tap hold was the common combo for each weapon that did well or a 3 tap hold or 3 tap hold hold....its kinda hard to name them all cause many different combos were doing well and some combos work better with some powers its up to you to decide what works best for you and that power.

The day is finally here where i can pick the weapon i like and not have to pick one i hate just cause its good....well for melee anyway, i'll see how range goes later today.

I can't wait to hear your take on rifle taps.

For melee I got decent damage out of most of the weapons also. Bow and Dual Pistols were notably weak though.

Ranged was much more of a mixed bag. The weapons with single target hold range attacks fell behind even with WM.

Pretty crazy how most weapons for melee are good right, thats a first.

I'm gonna do ranged weapons and maybe ranged WM today but i already took a brief look at some ranged weapons and they don't look to hot. And rifle taps right now seem ok to me cause the only time you will really use that is with a pftt build and you will be full might so they don't do amazing dps but enough to make a difference between using them and not. I'm not gonna put anything in stone till i see where all the range combos sit though then i'll see what i think.

I'd just like to point out that Crappy spent ~9 hours on test last night, just judging by when he first posted this morning. Also, good job on weapon melee balance, dev team.

Feedback:

One handed needs some buffing in the long combo department, Melee Weapon taps are doing roughly the same as the Flip Slash combo.

I used the 60 second parse setup and Spec that was provided from Fatal Star at the beginning of this thread, so while this may not be the end all be all of one handed's potential, I do think it needs a boost in some weapon combo department.





One handed's Min, Average, and Max DPS also ended up being roughly the same.

Just wanted to confirm that you're talking about weapon damage as used for clipping in hybrid power rotations, or did you actually compare weapon combos vs. each other?
Also, did you take into account the higher risk of longer combos in a real world situation, or just parsing in front of a dummy? In other words, do longer combos reward you with more damage, or the same amount or less than shorter combos? I'm asking because I haven't tested weapons since the last hotfix so I don't know if they were altered. If longer combos only do the same amount of damage, there doesn't seem much reason to use them, right?
And, lastly, have you tried testing the dps difference between clipping them and using a weapon's-only playstyle?
I hope these questions don't sound argumentative, because they're not meant to be. I appreciate those hours you put into this, I'm just curious about some of the issues we raised earlier in this thread.

heres a crazy idea which would probably just be ignored.

What if the first skill point of each weapon was granted by default? Think about it.

Decepticons, roll out!

FireMint

I agree


It's a pain in the *** when you go to buy a new weapon and can't because you don't have a sp put in it, because it's not like live server where you have to spec weapons to get certain stats. In the revamp if you want a new weapon you need to respec to it before buying it....

We've found a bug with weapons that's still causing the first tap (melee or ranged) to be doing significantly higher damage than intended. This in turn led to slightly lower-than-expected damage from later parts of the combo. A fix should be coming in the next phase of Test.

Judging by the comments here, it looks like the latest iteration is at least closer to the goal line. Phew

Now a general question: from testing in this latest iteration, how is a weapon focused build using weapon mastery attacks faring compared with hybrid and pftt? We gave weapons a global boost to account for shifting some power around within the combos, and want to make sure it wasn't too high overall.

Thanks again for the dedicated testing and feedback!

I can get on test and try to see how it works, but no guarantee on when I can show the results. since lag/UI problems are just as transparent on test as they are on live.

Question: do you want me to use the weapon buff with this setup or no?

Here's what I've gathered from one handed's WM. I was modded and spec'd 109 sp into full precision.

I did a 60 second parse with one handed's Dual Flurry Mastery and I ulitized the weapon buff at least 4 or 5 times.

I had a couple of flub ups in my results(the air launch mastery) thanks to lag, but hopefully this gives an idea of where WM stands.





From what the Average DPS is showing, WM is doing at least twice the damage of regular weapon combos which I think is fair since Weapons Focused has no other sorts of damage rolling in the background compared to Hybrid or PFTT.