(I have made a few comments on threads with roughly the same info, but here I’ll go fully in depth on my thinking)
So muskets have never been able to outperform bows in hardly anything (other than in abusing gamebreaking bugs that is lol)
The upcoming changes made me think about the musket from a whole new perspective and I have an idea about how the weapon can remain useful without being abusive.
Here is the meat of it,
1st: Remove the bloom for moving your cross hair, or add bloom removal as a mastery perk.
2nd: Add accuracy to the perk pool on rings, also make accuracy and keen mutually exclusive perks
3rd: Stacking accuracy (ring/weapon) with the mastery perk, gives perfect accuracy (not being able to consistently hit with any weapon isn’t fun)
4th: Raise base musket crit damage to 200% instead of 130%. In the time for a single shot (200%) an unchanged musket could deal 260% damage in the same time, disregarding abilities and perks since they function mostly the same in both cases.
Accuracy is not a Nerf to the weapon really, it is a fundamental change to how it works. With my proposed changes, the musket would have two obvious playstyles that I can see.
First being the sniper, stack accuracy and go for meaty headshots, but their body shots won’t be too impactful since their random crit chance is base.
Second one I see happening would be crit stacking and using more trapper tree skills as overloaded shots would be unreliable. Landing a sticky bomb crit would be devastating (for those who don’t dodge)
Regardless of what happens, musket will definitely be needing a mastery rework later on to better support the essentially new weapon. Fingers crossed it’s the season 2 weapon.