Parity of elite abilities

Still, range is a quantifiable advantage that carries some weight. The content is relevant for how much of the power budged share it should get. But you missed the point.

I can’t even think of a game where range is not taken into acount in the power design but regardless,on top of that in SWL AR is not “just on par” with the other weapons EVEN if we completely ignore the range. It’s even in the higher tier (and above the actual “pure dps” weapons),free range is only added above that.

Yes you said:

It is a power budget issue. range is part of it. To keep the fist example, even if AR was nerfed to match fist dps, AR would still be objectively better.

What is absurd is to believe that reducing AR damage would suddenly move it to dumpster tier.

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Fists are the melee range dps/heal weapon, seemed like the best comparison for rifle. I’m not talking about where they currently rank, just where they should be relative to each other.

I’m not denying it carries weight in some situations. I’m just denying there’s enough of those situations to warrant a global nerf.

If there had to be an adjustment, my ideal solution would be if damage dynamically tapered off after 10 meters. So that in those vast majority of situations where a 10+ meter range doesn’t matter, ranged weapons could stay closer to stay on par. In situations where close range carries risk, they could stay away to deal lower DPS safely or get closer to deal higher damage.

I can think of several RPGs where range and melee have similar damage output because they have different obstacles to deal with. SWL has a problem with content design where the vast majority of encounter hazards are isolated to very close range. Like Elenoe said, in 90% of cases there’s nothing to worry about once you’re 10 meters away from a boss.

As for AR’s damage output, I addressed that in my first post. It has numeric issues unrelated to the range. Incendiary Grenades deal too much damage (and AoE on top of that) and Stability is noticably stronger than its equivalent in other weapons. These are just very obvious problems that should be apparent even to someone who isn’t an AR main. I’m sure an AR main could identify a couple more issues, but adjusting these two alone would go a long way in bringing AR in line with other top DPS weapons.

Just a side note for “pure DPS” weapons, they are not pure DPS because they are meant to deal the most damage. Back in TSW all weapons had a secondary role (tank, heal or support). In SWL they scattered the “support” role across the board and left 3 weapons without a secondary role. Elementalism still has plenty of CC and Pistol has group utility, but Blade drew the shortest straw. Another design issue.

That’s fair. It depends entirely on the value you see in those 5 meters. I had to make an assumption based on how much importance you had been attributing to extra range so far. If you have a solid idea, you could present some rough values based on your assessment. How much nerf does 5 extra meters demand? Alternatively, 10 meters for AR and 5 meters for Blood and Elementalism. Or maybe 15 for AR, 10 for Blood/Elementalism, 5 for Pistol/Shotgun. It’s a can of worms.

I believe current weapon balance is so far from ideal to comment on that. Like I said, AR has balance issues unrelated to its range which have to be resolved first, so does Fists. You can’t just “Start with making it worse than shorter range weapons” like you suggested. It’s a delicate matter. Funcom nerfed Fists impulsively and they have still not gone back to readjust. I wouldn’t want any weapon to face the same fate.

I also think it is a problem, I wrote about it in another post (about differences with TSW iirc) but I think that it’s part of a whole where AR stacks too many advantages over the other weapons.

If such aoe and damage advantages were those of a melee weapon (see hammer) it wouldn’t be as problematic as the current AR state. Because many players expect melee weapons to have “extras” for the sake of having 0 range.

I didn’t say damage output but power budget, I also know several games where ranged weapons have the same “dps” as melee weapons but with drawbacks that compensate for the range advantage. That’s not what I was arguing about.

I noticed that I talked about “power budget” without clarifying (see my original post in this topic), but it is a game design concept used to represent the “strength” of game elements by trying to take all aspects into account (range being a “typical” factor along with damage and control).

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.

Yep I acknowledged hammer already:

Though when we look at the other heal weapons,

I think that blood (debil too, no non-elite aoe like incendiary, arguably more annoying/dangerous weapon gimmick) and fist are inferior to AR (especially fist).

Blood’s damage is decent, i’ve seen lots of top parses with blood. Blood also offers decent utility (15s debilitate, becomes pretty much 100% uptime with the additional several seconds provided by Thick Skin from the tank, so blood is good for solo-debilitating), and group healing with Eldritch Scourge (relevant for sustain-tank groups sometimes). Eldritch Scourge also spreads on additional targets so it does a bit of AoE. The main problem with blood is that the healing 95% penalty is way too much penalty for a weapon which is already not that straightforward to play, they should remove this penalty entirely and probably just keeping the selfdamage component alone should be enough. If anything, keep only the selfdamage component for Corruption, and keep only the selfhealing penalty for Martyrdom.

For blood healing, they should also rework barriers: right now, any barrier present makes the next barrier ability provide a heal instead. The barrier should rather ALWAYS overwrite the existing barrier (especially relevant if the existing barrier is weaker), and THEN, the existing barrier’s strength should be converted to healing.

For fists, agree to what you’ve said, and that join what i also claimed: for DPS, the weapons lacks damage AND group utility.

Yes it’s decent, but not as good as AR IMO (even if we discard range), the AOE is inferior, no impair from elite, and yes I think that there is a problem with the gimmick penality, they either need to reduce it or give a better tradeoff.

To me it seems that it happened to be less useful than an instant aoe and IIRC it deals less than on the primary target.

When I used to play blood and needed an AoE, if the target were too small, the initial hit from the elite would kill the main target and no dots would spread.

About the debil, I agree, that’s you who belittled debilitate in your post above:

But yes globally there are quite some disparities in power budget with weapons and many points mentioned above including the specifics you wrote on AR are problems that need to be looked at.

Just to point out a last detail about this: high explosive grenade is barely a DPS boost over spamming incendiaries. It’s not for nothing that so many KSR/Inverter DDs play with Blizzard (or even Ice Beam for the juicy Glaciate), it’s because Inverter gives Blizzard a multiplicative 36.9% damage boost, and it just makes this better than High Explosive. In the same theme, high explosive’s stun is unreliable. It’s basically a good elite to use in short burst fights where you can use it twice before the boss dies when Blizzard won’t have time to deal its full damage twice.

On the other hand, you can’t just compare Eldritch’s damage to High Explosive as they have very different opportunity costs, and Eldritch provides good Flay uptime and additional Corruption.

Yes I don’t generally compare the two, when talking about AoE, I was pointing out that eldritch is the only aoe in the “typical” blood dps deck and it’s not that practical as an AoE.

(as opposed to AR with a non-elite awesome aoe that is also godly as a single target ability)