Musket is described in the weapon mastery menu as "A ranged weapon that fires high-damage cartridges. Ideal for keeping targets at a distance and long-ranged combat with a high payoff for precise aim.
Standard attack: Deals 100% Thrust damage"
With the update to bow making it a very powerful dex weapon, musket seems to lose in all but the longest (75M+) engagements. Bows can counteract that by just closing the gap with cover or with chained iframing. Musket also sees significant disadvantage in arena due to the size of the location. With the Vicious perk being broken and not applying to headshots it seems that precise aim isn’t even really rewarded, and it’s better to go for bodyshots always.
Compare this to the bow that can do up to 150% base thrust damage on a charged hit, and hit a 40% thrust resisted player for upwards of 4k in a single shot - musket seems like it really doesn’t reward precision or even have something to offer when compared to the bow.
Many musket pvpers don’t bother with going for headshots because of the lacking effective multipliers.
If musket is really meant to be the sniper rifle of this game, please make it rewarding enough for players to go for headshots instead of simply body-shotting targets as fast as possible.
I have 2.2k hours in this game with the majority of it being in high-pop PVP servers (Castle of Steel, Maramma, Pluto, Eden, Valhalla, etc) and musket has never been considered a meta viable weapon compared to other end-game pvp alternatives. Now with bow being the forefront of dex pvp it really feels like musket is being forgotten with how little it’s being tuned.
Meaningful buffs to make the weapon viable please.
Thanks