Ryzom

Completly off the wall idea and far better to tweak existing stuff first but, how about flame throwers?, we got plenty of oil about. Very short range, Highish damage, fear effect for those close by.

norvic wrote:Completly off the wall idea and far better to tweak existing stuff first but, how about flame throwers?, we got plenty of oil about. Very short range, Highish damage, fear effect for those close by.

You mean like an ocyx special attack?

Im relatively new at the game and dont have much experience from any combat at all - i tried a little ranged and i got one small little thing to add:

If i unequip the gun, wouldnt it stay loaded with whatever i loaded it with last time i used it?

It's a hassle to change weapon, it's not like im trying to equip two weapons - it's one gun, with a clip of ammo.

If the Ocyx has a limited AoE fear effect to its flame attack then i guess so yes Spriteh.

norvic wrote:If the Ocyx has a limited AoE fear effect to its flame attack then i guess so yes Spriteh.

Well no it doesn't have a terror attack (like a Vorax you mean) because that would be crazy. I just meant the whole flamethrower thing... since there's no player attacks like that atm

Well yes flame attack like Ocyx is precisely the effect I was thinking of, I dont go down in the dark much so I dont remember terror on vorax but sounds like the combo I was driving at.

Flame has unfortunatly been used as an awesome weapon but in handheld units was always offset but short range and unreliability.

Ranged should be equal to Magic when it comes to it's offensive capabilities.

Instead of being interupted, a gun could perhaps be prone to random misfires..

just speculating here - dont shoot meh

Personally I've not messed with range much yet. I plan to eventually though, as it looks great fun.
I agree that it needs to be more powerful though. I mean, isn't it that the Karavan come bearing guns, and the Kami come with magic? If they have similar set up to our skills, the Karavan would have been wiped out long ago.
As to the mention of ele damage on top for guns - fine, but it'd have to be added to melee weapons as well. I make fyros axes, and generally only give out burning, just cause it looks cool. But if you set the precedent that the special player guns do extra damage, then I sure as heck want it for my axes.

Ranged could use a small damage boost, which I think would be best done by leaving the ammo damage the same it is now but getting the damage modifier on guns to work (currently it's always 0). Making a gun with a max damage stat is quite easy with foraged mats, but currently it serves no purpose.
Also, activate the speed and range bonuses for ammo (also currently always 0). Ammo only has the damage stat working now which can be maxed with choice foraged mats. Range and speed stats for ammo are only available on quartered mats so it'd give fine quartered mats some use for those who are more interested in range or speed than in damage. It would also give some purpose to crafting supreme ammo.

If these stats are implemented so that they range from 0 to some positive value, that'd make ranged more powerfull overall and also give some more choices. Rather than always using a max range/speed gun and max damage ammo, you could make different ones for different situations. Max damage gun for levelling, max range ammo for sniping, max speed ammo for interrupting casters, etc.

Since magic pretty much beats melee, I'd like to see ranged (pistols and rifles anyway, auto and launcher are another story) being very good against mages but not so good against melee. To do that it needs to have a relatively low damage so a ranged user can't effectively kill a heavy armored melee, and a high stamina drain so that ranged users can't wear heavy armor and are more vulnerable against melee weapons. So the damage should stay relatively low and the stamina drain relatively high in my opinion.

It's true that the low damage makes ranged hard to train, but that counts for all skills that don't do a lot of damage, so anything but 2-handed melee and elemental. 1-handed melee, close combat and afflictions all suffer from the same problem, and will as long as we have a system that awards experience on a per kill basis. Personally I like this; some skills should be harder to train than others. Specially now that we have a limited supply of experience crystals, so that we can choose to save those for the skills that are harder to train.

The only thing that makes ranged even more annoying to train than close combat is having to go back for ammo all the time. So I do think need to be able to carry more ammo, for all ranged weapons. I can carry 1500 pistol ammo before the weight starts to slow me down, but even that's gone pretty quickly using an increased hitrate stanza.

Now for some ideas that would be less easy to implement:

Pistol -- Give the ability to doublewield them. (What is the use of '1-handed ranged' if you can't hold anything in the second hand anyway?) This would give a huge increase in damage output at an equal cost to ammo-usage, so probably decrease both damage and weight a bit and make pistol ammo craft in larger stacks to compensate for this. The idea is that shooting with two pistols at once increases damage output and chance to hit in PvE and should render any mage completely unable to get a spell through in PvP. Set maximum range at 40 meter so you have to get within the mages range to use it, but not too close.

Rifle -- Give the ability to snipe; crouching down and setting the rifle on a standard. It should take a few seconds to get into and out of sniping position, and while in position you'd be unable to move, dodge or parry. But while in position you also get major boosts to range, accuracy and damage. This could be used for increased damage and chance to hit in PvE and for shooting mages from outside their range in PvP. Rifles maximum range should be increased to 60 meter so they can outrange mages even without sniping mode.

(auto)launcher -- Add in some kind of 'explosion radius' stat to the ammo. This way users can keep the AoE to a minimum in PvE, and it makes them choose between maxing their damage or maxing their AoE effect in PvP. Personally I see launchers more as bombardment weapons, so I think they should have a maximum range comparable to rifles but also have either a minimum range or the explosion should damage the user too if used up close. Autolaunchers are more for medium range. I'd like to see launchers and autolaunchers with a very low firing speed but a very high damage, and an increased chance of disrupting spells.

Bump to everything Sidusar said, activating the stat modifiers would be a very good place to start and certainly make rangecrafting alot more interesting aswell.