Class Balance For Gunner/Arsenal Mando/Mercs

[goeblu]

Gunnery/Arsenal is my favorite spec to play. Nothing like bursting your enemies down with a combination of Full Auto, High Impact Bolt, and Demo Round. However this spec has its flaws. Keep in mind this is primarily PvE oriented.

 

This spec has got to be one of the biggest RNG dependent specs in the game, if your getting Curtain of Fire/Barrage procs reliably, you will put out solid numbers, if not your numbers go way down. So in order to put out consistent damage, Full Auto/Unload needs to be balanced.

 

Right now the chance that CoF/Barrage procs is 45%, which to me is awfully low when you consider other classes proc chances, such as Sentinel/Focus, Gunslinger/Trick Shots, and Powertech/Rocket punch from Immolate, along with many others. One way to balance Full Auto for Gunnery is to increase the proc chance to 65%.

 

Another potential solution is to keep the proc chance the same but make it so Full Auto is free if CoF procs. This would make it so ths spec is much less energy intensive

 

Thoughts?

[KeyboardNinja]

Increasing the proc rate on CoF without increasing the rate limit would be really problematic, given that the class is already parsing very competitively. The trick of course is that the really best parses had above-average CoF procs, so maybe that's a moot point.

 

In any case, what you're talking about is a straight damage buff, which is unlikely to be balanced given where gunnery/arsenal is parsing. The problem is that increasing the proc chance while also increasing the time delay is likely to run into issues with the hard cooldown. For example, the proc chance is right now 45% with a rate limit of 6 seconds. That's an average proc rate of 6 + (1.5/0.45) = 9.33 seconds. You could improve the proc chance to 75% if the lockout were increased to 7.3 seconds without affecting the average proc rate. This would reduce the variance due to RNG quite a bit, since you would be getting it on the ICD nearly every time, but would that be what you want? You're effectively trading some of your top-end DPS for better reliability and DPS that is closer to the mathematical target on a more frequent basis.

[LordKantner]

They need to make it proc reliably is all. In assault spec if you do not get Ionic Accelerator from your first Charged Bolts, (45% chance) which btw almost procs nearly 100% of the time, the second Charged Bolts always procs HiB.

 

You can fire 7 Grav rounds and get no Full Auto Curtain of Fire proc.

 

So I'd say make the proc w/e they did with assault, that is the reason I switched to assault, reliable procs.

[goeblu]

Thanks for your input. I was thinking along the lines with Kantner. The proc chance is not reliable like it is with other specs and classes. I've had many times during a parse where CoF isn't procing like it should. It drives me nuts when I gotta spam GR 5+ times before CoF procs and everything else is on CD. Because of this I'm probably gonna be playing more AS because I have had more reliable procs at the same time as putting more dps than gunnery.

 

I'm ok where gunnery is at the moment, but i think it could use a few tweeks to be more effective and fun to play.

[CommanderKeeva]

Yeah it"s obvious that something is very wrong with the proc. In a dummy parse yesterday I fired 9 Grav Rounds in a row without a CoF proc. I was kind of curious how many it would take so I just kept spamming it.