Please keep the topic clean as much as possible and answers like musket OP hurr durr I never played it but OP please stay away this is a constructive topic.
So as title says lets start with the critique :
This issue is closely related to point 2 - Try to pair a weapon with it thats not a rapier. Just try it. I tried running musket spear for a month now and its not even average ? This issue is coused with issue number 2 as you require a lot of mobility to be viable with musket
The only, literaly only viable build is 300 dex 150 int and a magic conversion gem. Try running 300 + dex and 100 or 150 consti and I guarantee you your damage is miserable and frustrating. Hitting headshots into heavy healers for 680 to 800 is gonna kill them for sure. At least the spear has kill potential. This is where said rapier comes in. Its the only weapon that got enough mobility to keep a 5 -50 consti guy alive at all. Try that with a spear or hatchet ( dex / secondary dex stat weapon)
The Trapper tree is terrible. Try to make a build around the trapper tree. Guess what you cant. You can at best pick a skill from it to have something at least for the third skill you need.
The ultimate of this tree literaly says that increased damage against targets affected by trapper tree status. Literaly not even the game knows what trapper tree status means. Obvious assumption is the trap but thats it?
Stopping power… Who uses that? I think this is a mispalced ability. The trapper tree wanted to be a more melee range ish musket build but failed at it miserably.
I get it everyone complains about the hit scan mechanic on the musket which is strong. Im not asking to instantly kill people but having only one viable build to deal some damage at all and having only one viable weapon to pair the musket with is just straight out terrible design and balance.
To deliver not only critique but what should be done in my opinion to hopefuly make it count as a constructive topic:
We need some better gems ingame the only good ones for the musket currently ( if not going 150 int ) are opal for dodging, Onyx for opening shot ( which is a joke I tried it with vorpal, enchanted musket and a powershot - barely got anything out of it) or Malachite to boost your damage on slowed targets and you still deal no damage with those on 300 dex.
The third perk in the INT tree is making not only this but every build viable. Get a hatchet 300 STR and 150 int with a conversion gem. Generaly I think we should tone down the INT to damage ratio on musket and rather increase the DEX rate.
6.Another issue tied to this is Powder Burn as it deals magic damage it turns into a strong dot with increased damage. In my opinion change it to bleed damage and let it have armor penetration as damage mitigation is hard against physical absorption stacking atm or when applied to a target causes every damage caused to ignore a XX% of the enemies armor.
Generally I think that the shot boosters - Powder burn, Power shot, Stopping Power should be able to load while walking. To not make it too broken make the character slower moving like when loading the musket normaly just make us more mobile without the rapier.
For the trapper tree. Its a mystery tbh it would require a general revision but here I go. For the ultimate - Instead of headshots you would have a mechanic that would apply weak spots on the target when hit they would be a guaranteed critical hit and have a increased % damage for every negative buff from you ( Traps, Slows, Burns, Bleeds).
To not make this a BiS sniper ultimate over double zoom this spots should activate at max range from the target. Id say about 60-80 meters?
Next thing for trapper tree would be Stopping Power. Instead of it being a useless shot make it an ability that the mobs have. Hit the target with the backside of your musket in the jaw - stunning the target briefly by 1 second. This ability to not make it ridiculously OP should never have grit and the animation should be canceled by stagger attacks. This means the ability shouldnt have a too long wind up animation as well. This would give a fun and close quarter combat skill that the trapper tree would probably welcome especially with the combo for traps.
Sticky bomb - needs just the removal of entering aim mode when throwing it. It causes more issues than solves them. People will learn the distances after throwing it 5 times. Just make it throw instantly after clicking on the skill.
TLDR: Not really TLDR but what the topic is about.
Critique:
Only viable weapon as pairing to the musket is rapier
Only viable build to deal any damage for the musket is 300Dex 150 Int
Trapper tree is terrible - wanted to be guerrilla tactics build but failed at it miserably.
Opinion on changes needed:
Gem viability for Musket is limited due low damage outside of the Magic conversion gem.
Third Perk on INT attributes too strong. INT scaling toning down and DEX scaling tuning up for Musket.
Powder Burn dealing Magic damage amplifies the issue of the third INT perk being too strong and INT scaling. Another take on Powder burn with bleed and armor penetration
Shot enhancements ( Powder burn, Power shot etc. ) should be casted while walking with slowed down movement speed like normal musket loading.
Ultimate of Trapper tree rework to be more guerilla tactics instead of a sniper and having viability in close quarters.
Stopping Power - Generaly useless - revamp into a musket whack with the backside of the musket giving it a brief stun and a 10% slow maybe afterwards for 3 second. Again to get into the guerilla tactic trapper not another sniper tree.
Sticky bomb a QoL change - Instead of aiming throw it on button press.
I hope other fellow musket players can feel the issue with musket being a one trick pony weapon currently and can give some insights on what AGS can do to change that.
Guy (or gal) has some valid points. But as I was reading it I was like “this isn’t gonna be received well”. Scrolled to the bottom and yep.
Musket is out of balance. It has ONE use. Pvp. It’s horrible in PvE and I agree with all of OP’s points. It’s also cumbersome and slow and annoying to use.
It needs to be tweaked on all fronts. Actually, it needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the bottom up. But good luck with that.
Explain how you LOS when your nameplate level is always 1cm above your head? Muskets on many servers are also cheating/exploiting and shooting through rocks so LOSing isn’t even possible. Hit scan is fine if it doesn’t do as much damage as bow. Why should a hitscan rifle be able to do as much damage as something that has to be aimed is only really effective close-mid range?
Explain how you LOS when your nameplate level is always 1cm above your head?
By putting a solid object between you and the musket. It doesn’t matter if they know you’re there when they can’t hit you. The point is not to hide, but to make it impossible to shoot you. New World is littered with cover and it is very rare that you actually have to traverse vast expanses of open terrain.
Muskets on many servers are also cheating/exploiting and shooting through rocks so LOSing isn’t even possible.
This bug needs to be fixed but it also does not happen often. The rock outside the one spawn in OPR and a couple trees in a Brightwood war are the only two places I’ve had it happen to me personally. I’m sure there are others but 99 times out of 100 if it exists in the world it will block a bullet, and there are plenty of places that shouldn’t but do (far more than the reverse) thanks to random invisible walls. You can even weave through the bamboo patches in OPR outside of mid to reduce your chances of being hit drastically, and those things are stick thin.
By putting a solid object between you and the musket. It doesn’t matter if they know you’re there when they can’t hit you. The point is not to hide, but to make it impossible to shoot you. New World is littered with cover and it is very rare that you actually have to traverse vast expanses of open terrain.
Balls, muskets in OPR can hit for 4k+ headshots already and there’s very little cover between, say, the middle fort and the rock that overlooks the map. How am I as a melee player supposed to get to that overlook with what is effectively an awp watching over the entire area the entire time. There’ splenty of instances where there’s almost no cover available and even if you are behind cover it just means the musket can’t hit you, it doesn’t mean there’s an effective way for you to actually approach the musket since any melee player trying to close distance is guaranteed to die. I don’t know what to tell you, if you’re not slapping with musket you’re a bad player, simple as that.
How am I as a melee player supposed to get to that overlook with what is effectively an awp watching over the entire area the entire time. There’ splenty of instances where there’s almost no cover available and even if you are behind cover it just means the musket can’t hit you, it doesn’t mean there’s an effective way for you to actually approach the musket since any melee player trying to close distance is guaranteed to die.
Why do you need to get to this overlook? There is no objective there. And why do you think you’re supposed to be able to deal with a ranged duelist that starts from a literally optimal position? The way you deal with said musket player is by ignoring them. Someone sniping from that rock is worth somewhere between .25 and .5 players to their team. You only go up there to snipe if you’re just trying to have fun playing a pure shooting gallery mini-game. If you want to actually impact the match you fight around the fort itself.
That being said, you also absolutely can approach them if you truly do want to waste your time doing so, and you can do it through multiple avenues. The easiest and safest – though the one that takes the longest – is flanking. If the musket is ADS their awareness of what’s happening around their body is nearly zero and their FoV is very limited. You can run wide to either side and then climb up the rock and they probably won’t even know until you’re on top of them. You can also just run at them and not be trash. Muskets have a fixed rate of fire and if you bob and weave with your dodged mixed in the best-case scenario for the musket is that they have to hold their shot until right after your dodge which reduces their DPS by easily 30%, minimum. And if they hold their shot you hold your dodge. If you’re getting tagged by more than ~60% of a musket player’s shots they are, by definition, outplaying you. Winning the mind game of when they’re going to shoot vs. when you’re going to iframe. I’ve rushed plenty of muskets in the literal scenario you’re talking about and I don’t think I’ve died a single time unless there’s multiple ranged firing on me at once; you run from the fort to the little ruins and then from there to the rock below them. And the instances where I’m rushing them while they’re shooting back at me are literally when they are a better shot than me and I want to change the circumstances of the engagement to rely on our close-quarters combat, so I’m not rushing people who have poor aim.
If you’re getting slapped by sniper muskets you’re the one that’s awful, lol. I am a very effective musket specifically because I don’t rely on those trash strategies. I actually do work instead of camping a sniper perch nearly AFK.
no point to argue with him. Hes literaly never touched a musket and plays light armor without resilience. Id appreciate it if you could point out some stuff on my topic
Not much to add. I disagree that int is too strong as a secondary attribute and think muskets being mostly tied to low con builds fits the way the weapon should be played, but in general yeah the weapon is a hot mess in most ways.
Powder Burn is fine and Shooter’s Stance is fine but everything else needs touching up, including and most importantly QoL fixes on the abilities. Bomb working as you suggest would be fine. Trap needs to deploy much more quickly and the final trap talent needs work off of a two charge system rather than requiring you to use both traps before either starts cooling down. Every headshot talent needs to simply apply or proc off of crits generally instead, except Critical Reload which needs to only require hits of any kind. The best Widowmaker OTPs in the world only boast about a 30-35% headshot rate (another hitscan sniper), with the point being that there’s no such thing as a “headshot playstyle”. You click heads when it’s correct to do, no more or less. The Marksman talent needs to offer more CDR and also be activated by any 3 consecutive hits rather than requiring they be on the same target as well. Like, in PvP you simply cannot guarantee you’re going to be able to hit the same exact target 3 times in a row even at one shot per second, and a measly 25% CDR for a weapon that has pretty awful abilities is itself pretty awful; it doesn’t even reduce its own CD which is the ability I’d most like to have the CD apply to! What it should actually do is straight up reset other musket abilities and reduce its own CDR by 25%.
Besides that yeah, both Power Shot and Stopping Power need tuning. The idea of the latter is fine but it just needs to straight be more impactful. If it’s going to be a moderate damage boost plus utility that utility needs to be huge, so it needs to knock a motherfucker the hell back when hit. I should be able to straight peel a healer (or myself) completely if I smack someone with that. Power Shot needs like extra damage based on the target’s missing health damage if it’s going to be just one big shot, because it’s never going to compete with Powder Burn as the DPS and opener shot.
should be combined with power shot so we can have an actual “trapper” ability in that side.
the bear traps are hot garbo, clunky and easy to avoid unless you really arent paying attention. they dont last enough to properly set up a trap ether.
stickybombs got that annoying animation bug now. i like it for pve but its damn clunky.
i would of liked some big aoe caltrops (similar to gen archers sticky flower trap)
makes way more sense as a group disengage, setup for damage.
Dude you definitely suck at musket. No offence but whole your “critique” is just meh…for skilled musket player. And im not talkin about PvP only. Musket rapier\spear is kinda cool in PvE too with proper gems and perks.
