Some major changes need to happen with ammo however for two reasons, one to make launcher/autolaunchers viable and the other to make ammo crafting a viable market. One of the largest, is the need for launcher/autolauncher ammo to be reasonable on weight/mat cost per shot. Rifles use 2/1/1 mats to make a 24 roung clip, but autolaunchers take 4/4/4 to make a 6 round clip that's so heavy you can only hold ~30 shots. This needs to change so that the mat cost per shot on autolaunchers and launchers is similar to rifles/pistols, with the same changes being made for the weight on them.
When I go out hunting with my rifle, I generally take somewhere around 30-50 clips along with some mats to make a few extra clips if need be.... given that you can only have 100 items for sale on the vendors, this pretty much means that ranged fighters will still need to always craft their own ammo or that it will be an occasional hobby at best. Also when you have dozens of little ammo stacks in your inventory it's cluttered and ugly
. To fix this, all ammo (launcher/autolauncher ammo included!) should have weight per shot and mat per shot costs similar to pistol/rifle ammo, and clips should be raised to 100 or 150 shots with mat costs per clip raised accordingly.... very few are going to go through the work of trading 40 little stacks of ammo worth very little individually that take you 90s of shooting to burn .A few major strong point for ranged weapons are the fact that they use very little if any stamina and the fact that you can move while attacking. Being able to use zip for stamina means that ranged fighters don't need a healer to fuel their stamina like a melee fighter unless they are using high cost (and mostly useless) aim bricks, and even if that is the case, they can just drop down to regular accuracy bricks until stam regens. The major upsides of being able to move while attacking means two things. The first is that you can run around to the mages and taunt things off them to play with your heavy armor, the second is that you can kite mobs if you can outrun them.
One major problem with ranged combat currently is that if you relog with a gun/ammo equipped, you will come back with only one shot in the stack you were holding, and need to reequip your gun before you can pick another stack. Also I've once had all stacks in my inventory that were not partial's drop to stacks of 1.
I've never found pistols to be all that useful since they do less damge than rifles and make up for it with a higher rate of fire. I believe you could probably do higher DPS with pistols than rifles though, but give up the ability to slide into launchers/autolaunchers which are 2 handed weapons. It could probably be somewhat useful if the ammo was light enough to be something not really taken into consideration since it would allow someone to keep a pistol/stack of pistol ammo just in case. If there was a small boost to cast speed/power (i.e. 20-30%) then I could see them as being very useful for casters who want to play with fight sometimes.
Rifle overall is not that bad... just not with current game mechanics. Damage is somewhere around that of a dagger fighter with increased damage, and hitrate seems to be about 75% that. Rifle needs a longer range to start out with however. Somewhere in the 50-75 meter area at least. On top of that, rifles need one of two things... Either they need the ability to run 30-40% faster than the base speed 6 (100% speed), without massive drawbacks like "if you get hit your mount dies then you die"; or they need the ability to reliably root/snare mobs. Currently it is possible to stun mobs with a headshot and other locations can snare (slow movement) a mob, however the frequency is far far too low to be survivable. While I have no way of being sure, I believe that given the incredibly short duration on headshot stuns/leg snares/etc, a 20-30% chance per shot of having stun or snare invoked when hitting the proper body parts would allow a rifle user to kite things viably with aim bricks. The other body part shots such as chest for losing stamina or kipee back legs? for dodge penalties are more group benefit type effects and should have a resaonably good change of landing. Pistols could probably be included in the same sort of thing to help with keeping them somewhat useful.
Autolaunchers... Sadly, autolaunchers did not get the same sort of ammo/mat use tweak that rifles got. It takes 4/4/4 to make a 6 shot clip of autolauncher ammo, and I was able to hold 30 shots of ammo for it when I included the autolauncher itself and ammo. Damage was quite good though at around 300/shot at QL70 with what seems to be a spray AOE on it. If ammo were changed so that it had the same sort of mat use per shot and burden per shot as rifle ammo, then it would make this very viable and useful. I would very much like a brick that allows me to make this NOT AOE since AOE often equals death or total party wipeout. Rate of fire is much slower than rifles (roughly half the speed if I remember correctly here at work)
Launchers are similar to autolaunchers and do a bomb AOE from what I remember in beta. I have not used them in retail but believe that is the same. A way of removing removal the AOE might be a good thing for these as well.
Stanza's and credit bricks that I would like to see for ranged attack are as follows.
- Burst without AOE. Empties 3 (or more) bullets from your clip and does a larger amount of damage to a single target. Example would be 3 rounds doing 150-200% damage. Stamina use should be a bit higher than enhanced damage to the point where it's probably not a good idea to use it lots unless you are in light or medium armor.
- Burst with AOE. Same as above with a slightly lower % damage boost and spray instead of single target.
- Single target. Removes the AOE component of launcher and autolauncher attacks. Since this actually lowers damage output by removing the AOE spray/bomb effects, stamina use should be low or very low.
- Wound. Similar to bleed only for stamina & sap, should require flechette/slashing ammo. Stamina cost similar to bleed.
- Disorient. Should require smashing ammo and have a high chance of invoking a short lived snare (i.e. 80-100%) as well as a decent chance of invoking a partial blind or slow attack effect. Stamina use should be similar to increased damage.
- Pierce Armor. Should require piercing ammo and work similar to ignore armor but have a high stamina use to simulate the effort used in aiming for weaker spots in armor.
- Mortar/Parabolic arc. Should require a launcher (not autolauncher) and raise the range by quite a bit (i.e. 150+ meters) but should raise the attack charge time by 30-60% at least in addition to whatever reasonable amount of stamina it uses. I can't think of any situation where you would want to be shooting AOE rounds off 150 meters off in the distance without a deathwish, but I'm sure that someone could and it seems simple enough to do
. - Distance shooting. Should require a rifle and double range on the weapon, or bump it up to 75m or so. Stamina use should be low but it should raise the attack time a good 20-50%.
- Increase attack speed. Should require an autolauncher or pistol, and have an effect the same as the brick by the same name from beta. Stamina use should be rather heavy and is possible, range should drop by 30-50% by using it.
Those 30 shots were 60 mats and enough to kill 3 kipees with 7 shots left