Taem wrote:So far my firearm experience has been pretty disappointing: All toons level three so far and I can never find enough ammo and the damage is always below my front-line Minotaur Fighter using Heavy Weapons and Human Wizard in the back line using Fire magic no matter how many points I sink into Firearms. To add injury to insult, in addition to having a chance to miss with Accuracy, the chance of misfire just makes this skill worthless as it currently stands at low level. Not sure about higher levels yet, but I want to point out that the damage definitely does not scale proportionally to the rest of the weapons/skills in the game;
Take, for example, a Minotaur with maxed Strength and Heavy Weapons (or thrown weapons) using any weapon, an Insect spell-caster maximizing Wisdom and Fire spells, a Lizard Rogue maxing Dexterity and using bows... from my testing so far, any of these examples beats out Firearms damage at an equivalent skill and attribute level. The skill simply has not been balanced as well as the other skills most likely because the other skills got extensive play-testing in LoG1
So, to summarize, Firearm shortcomings are;
1. Damage significantly lower and not proportional to all other modes of damage at the same level
2. No way to replenish spent ammo, and no other means of getting ammo
3. Chance to misfire, in addition to chance of missing due to Accuracy
I've posted ideas like this and the devs usually overlook balance issues for whatever reason, however if I may offer my suggestion;
1. Tie damage to Accuracy - the better the aim, the more damage can be caused
2. Allow ammo boxes to automatically replenish over time, like magic regeneration, where putting points into firearms increase the regeneration%
3. Keep the chance to misfire, but to offset this, increase the chance of critical hit
you forgot one that makes it even worse!
4. 5% chance to backfire, causing minor damage to entire party! actually killed two of my chars in a hard fight with a backfire once.
and:
5. very limited range until skill increased.
yeah... I'd say if you want to play with guns, max it ASAP. agreed that this skill needs some serious balancing. either leave the negatives in, but make it about 25% more damaging flat out, or remove/provide easier ways to mitigate the negatives.
if I were to start over, I'd definitely pick a bow rogue over gun alchemist, even with the bonuses to alchemist for growth, etc. The misfire reduction chance either does not work at all, or guns must normally misfire 75% of the time, because at level 3 firearms, my alchemist was still misfiring about 20% of the time (and still backfired at 5% even at level 4).
that leaves really the only advantage to alchemist as growth, and the only real advantage to that is getting rare plants to grow like crystal flowers. meanwhile, your bow rogue would more than make up for any bonuses to stats from crystal potions with a lot more reliable damage output.
