Some thoughts on Ranged Weapons

[usinuk]

ALSO - note the difference between piercing, slashing, and smashing ammo and which creatures respond to which. This will go a long way towards actually causing damage with every shot.

Actually, back in my pre-patch days where I could only afford 1 type of ammo per weapon at 100 SPs per plan, using the wrong ammo took about 20-25% off the top on damage (I was using slashing for gingos, I think)...not helpful, but given how relatively low DPS is for ranged weapons anyway its not a killer one way or the other.

Now of course, there's no excuse for not getting the right ammo at 40 sps per, but even with the wrong ammo its not a huge deal.

[kisedd]

I'm still out testing my pistol on various things. I think the fact that mobs have less hp now helps ranged weapons a lot. The cost of ammo being reduced also helps.

I did hear that launcher ammo still takes up insane amounts of room.

[cryss]

Sorry to mess up, but i'm 94 range and craft till 100.
Range is to that level and beyond no comparation to anything else. Mages do more damage per spell and with a faster rate of casting, melees about thrice the damage with 1,5 time the rate.

Now please don't tell me you understand the problem by using a q10 pistol.
You don't get anything by shooting two times more at a Kincher before he reaches you. At that point (assuming you hit all three times, and you wont), you did the same amount of damage the melee will do with his first strike.
Not forgetting the mages who shot spells at the Kinch from afar.

[tetra]

Sorry to mess up, but i'm 94 range and craft till 100.
Range is to that level and beyond no comparation to anything else. Mages do more damage per spell and with a faster rate of casting, melees about thrice the damage with 1,5 time the rate.

Now please don't tell me you understand the problem by using a q10 pistol.
You don't get anything by shooting two times more at a Kincher before he reaches you. At that point (assuming you hit all three times, and you wont), you did the same amount of damage the melee will do with his first strike.
Not forgetting the mages who shot spells at the Kinch from afar.

88 (89?) 2-handed ranged, 87 2-handed ranged craft and second all of this. It's disgusting seeing folks try to claim ranged fight is ok because it works somewhere between acceptable and not completely useless at very low levels. Magic does vastly higher damage per second, melee does easily 2-3x as much damage per shot and hit far faster... and neither has to put up with a constant stupid stream of "you hit but do no damage" or the incredibly high mat costs per hour.

Last weekend, I was able to burn through 2.5 full packers worth of ammo mats in three days of ranged fighting The other 1/2 a packer was used by some random odds and ends such as a suit of armor and some random mats im saving. Ranged doesn't do more damage than anything, and doesn't even do damage equal to anything at all... it costs exponentially more to use... it doesn't even compare to the range that magic has... it doesn't do anything valueable at all... it's a black hole for money and mats with no returns of value and no skills worth mentioning.

[r7chard]

I haven't played enough with range weapons yet to determine for myself whether they are a viable option. However, Range weapons clearly have two distinct advantages. One, that has already been mentioned here is that you have access to all three physical damage types with a single weapon. The other is that unlike magic you can fire your weapon while moving. As soon as I started using that last advantage when solo fighting I began to do a whole lot better.

One question I have about Range Weapons is the difference in effectiveness between a regular rifle/pistol and a bowrifle/bowpistol. I have a bowrifle and I'm wondering if I have a dud on my hands, since the ammo clips have only 12 shots, where as a rifle clip has 24. So, does a bowrifle have something that it does better than a rifle to make up for the smaller clip size?

[cryss]

Yap, You're right.

Rifle ammoclip: 4mats, 24shots
Bowrifle ammoclip: 6mats, 12shots
They do the same Damage.

So, that is the choice: Take the cooler weapons and you pay 2,5 the matcost.
Oh, and the bowrifle has NOTHING besides the cool form to make up for the cost.

[tetra]

I haven't played enough with range weapons yet to determine for myself whether they are a viable option. However, Range weapons clearly have two distinct advantages. One, that has already been mentioned here is that you have access to all three physical damage types with a single weapon. The other is that unlike magic you can fire your weapon while moving. As soon as I started using that last advantage when solo fighting I began to do a whole lot better.

One question I have about Range Weapons is the difference in effectiveness between a regular rifle/pistol and a bowrifle/bowpistol. I have a bowrifle and I'm wondering if I have a dud on my hands, since the ammo clips have only 12 shots, where as a rifle clip has 24. So, does a bowrifle have something that it does better than a rifle to make up for the smaller clip size?

Being able to hit while running, and being able to have access to all 3 damage types with one weapon is somewhat meaningless given the drawbacks of ranged weapons.

I'm not aware of any mobs that are completely immune to a physical damage type (pierce/slash/bludg), the damage output from ranged weapons with the best possible damage type is still going to generally be below the damage of a melee user with the worst possible damage type. Second, you have another problem in that the weight of all of those different clips... or ammo mats... are far in excess of having a couple extra melee weapons, most of the tanks I know can use a couple different weapons decently well. If you decide to make ammo based on the situation at hand, then you have other problems...
1. you are standing there making ammo and making the group wait.
2. you need to pull off all your armor or your ammo QL goes down a good chunk.
3. you can't easily tell what type of ammo you are selecting unless you mouseover it and wait for the text to appear, since all ammo uses the same icon.

As to being able to hit while running... it's being generous to say that there are probably like 3 mobs in all of ryzom that a player can move only slightly slower than them without using speed run. Of those three, nobody really wants to hunt them because they are crappy mobs, are in bad places, or are social with everything under thes sun and don't scale well (i.e. igara, izam, some herbavores). Being able to kite for a few seconds, when the damage you inflicted while kiting is roughly equal to one or two hits with a melee weapon, is not a bonus when you consider the entire fight will be drawn WAY out because of your continued crappy damage.

oh yea, bowrifle sucks. It's even worse for mat consumption than rifles

[kisedd]

On top of that, you pretty much have to use accuracy to make your hits stick. That burns a huge amount of stam. The only weapon that burns more stam than ranged weapons are daggers.


Fights with ranged weapon take a fairly long time to play out. Perhaps if ranged weapons had the benefits of increased dammage, or they shot much faster or had some other innate advantages, they might be on par, but right now they just lag way behind everything else.

[josephm]

I didn't know you could add accuracy to ranged fight.

Anyways, Range fighting is lame. I just do it occaisionally for some extra SP. But using it as an SP well is pretty lame. As for bowrifles. I saw a few cool ones in screenshots. But I got the medium quality deal for Zorai and it wasn't much of a deal at all. It looks like they added 4 screws to the same thing. The lease the could have done was make it look a little sleeker, more like Chewbacca's!