Hammer have way more to offer a group than rifle, mainly by Eruption only. Having and AoE burst / purge / exposed / interrupt built in a single ability is highly valuable in pretty much any group content. Moreover, Demolish and the hammer’s gimmick is way better for short bursts, and is top notch to deal with content like adds in Pol5. The whole weapon just scales so much better with group buffs like Opening Shot or Savagery than rifle.
Rifle on the other hand, despite having huge DPS (which hammer also has) and better range, can only offer debilitate (which is WAY less valuable than exposed since it can be applied via Sedative gadget) and then AoE / purges - the interrupt, in case the rifle user plays with high explosive grenade, is unreliable here. Moreover, is has less burst than hammer due to the fact you can only start bursting once your first incendiary grenade’s dot is already on the target, otherwise before that your damage is just “ramping”.
And so far, Funcom stated in a devstream a long time ago during the beta that the main design choice to separate ranged from melees was to offer an easier specialty management to melee weapons than to ranged ones. So far, this design choice was respected before KSR rised as the top-DPS weapon. For the rest, hammer, blade, fists and chaos are significantly easier to play and have less rotational things to manage than a proper rotation with blood, a good reload and odds & evens juggling for shotgun, good grenade cooking and offhand juggling with non-KSR rifles, etc…
I’ve been stating that the following points in the rifle DPS are over the place, and that correcting those will resolve many issues imo:
- Stability: it offers 25% increased damage, way over what most similar abilities offer (Blazing Bolts offers an average of 15% for instance, Obliterate offers 30% crit damage which is also closer to a 15% additive increase in damage, etc…)
- Military Strap : its main problem is that it is only too strong for KSR. It is still kind of overbudgeted even for regular rifles. I’d go for giving it a 75% chance to refund 1 energy on each grenade instead of 100%. If not, then i’d work on buffing the other subpar weapon belts. I especially hate the boring weapon belts which just offer a proc instead of meaningfully affecting the weapon specialty itself like the chaos belt does.
- Incendiary grenade: this is the tricky part. For its budget, it’s clearly above anything else, so it’d see a reduction of something like 10% damage on it.
- KSR / non-KSR : i’d like to see the cooking time required reduced by 1s for regular rifles so their damage output can outperform KSR’s output easier, since KSR is just supposed to be a lazy ranged weapon that basically abandons the specialty cooking management for pure “spam”.
For the rest of melee weapons, fists and blade suffer mainly from the lack of utility since they offer 0 utility to the group. Blade’s DPS is pretty good in the current state even if it can probably deserve a little bump, while fists DPS needs a bigger bump. Pretty much the same consideration for chaos which only offers random Enigmas as the only group utility (can you PLEASE Funcom remove the Wellness and Reciprocity enigmas?). For the previous statement, group utility meant any utility build-in elite abilities, for instance, that basically does not require an offhand to bring extras (hence loosing DPS from a competitive pure damage offhand).
I really believe the above issues will resolve rifle problems. For melee problems, i believe hammer should be the reference for damage balancing, and that more group utility for other weapons would solve many problems, alongside a bump in damage output.
Side note : melee DPS does not suck on MT. Below is an E10 MT parse as hammer/rifle, and i’m not even supposed to be built as the top-DPS since i’m using generic signets, no Laceration and no Havoc. People don’t understand that in this game, playing melee is significantly easier than in TSW due to Quickness and Alacrity (for hammer we even have Fast and Furious) which pretty much nullify all the uptime problems that exist. Even dancing in the middle of MT’s AoE’s as melee is very easy these days with the proper move speed setup. Also, rifle DDs can’t just keep sniping MT when he’s in the middle since their grenades will end up killing them when MT gets the shield back, so there’s pretty much no damage difference here between melee and ranged DDs on MT because of that - our parses almost always show 20 to 24k DPS exactly for fully geared hammer DDs and for KSR DDs, they’re often as close to each other as like 200 DPS.