Fellow Ex-Gunners Of Icarus Lend Me Your Ears!

[Moriarty]

How can a brother gunner who seems to have an understanding of the game talk such nonsense, its enough to drive one into despair.

I am in despair.

Although at the same time i thank you for fighting the good fight and trying to salvage our good name!

[Helmic]

But hold on, saying "most ships still use a gunner" isn't relevant. The fact is gunners are strictly worse than engineers in almost every scenario. The only time I'd ever consider a gunner more valuable than an engineer is MAYBE on the front of a Manticore Goldfish. MAYBE.

The truth.  A lot of people want to BE gunner, but not a lot of people WANT gunners.  There's plenty of reason to shoot, not a lot of reason to switch out ammo compared to the need to maintain their own gun and help out with repairs.

Well here's how I look at it. You can have another engineer if you would like to help you rebuild when things get critical, but what is there to stop another captain from following you down and just keep hammering you so that all your engies are busy? Your ship is essentially useless at that point in time, b/c you are not putting out any DPS. The moment your gungineer hops off the guns to help, is the moment your ship is doomed to die (IMO of course). The gunner role gives you extra ammo so that you can hit your enemy fast, and provide more DPS. As a side note, gunners are becoming more important for guns with arming time, if you get into a close quarters engagement (lesmok for long range, Heavy or Incendiary for short)

Except in your situation, all that the engineer needs to do is keep gunning.  Nothing is forcing him to jump off and help with repairs, he just CAN if he doesn't have anything to shoot.  The only weapons with an arming time are the Lumberjack and Heavy Flak, and only three of the six ships available can even them; and even then those guns can work at near-optimal conditions with a single ammo type as three engineers on a ship with a heavy gun is just as viable as two engineers and a gunner.  There's a difference between someone whose job it is to shoot and someone who's taken the Gunner role mechanically.  Ammo switching just isn't as useful as the extra gun uptime and repairs you get from a gungineer most of the time.

Why are so many light guns only really good with one type of ammo?  Why isn't there enough of a difference between ammo types to make switching between them more worthwhile than just switching back to vanilla if the one you brought isn't useful at the moment?

[Captain Smollett]

But hold on, saying "most ships still use a gunner" isn't relevant. The fact is gunners are strictly worse than engineers in almost every scenario. The only time I'd ever consider a gunner more valuable than an engineer is MAYBE on the front of a Manticore Goldfish. MAYBE.

The truth.  A lot of people want to BE gunner, but not a lot of people WANT gunners.  There's plenty of reason to shoot, not a lot of reason to switch out ammo compared to the need to maintain their own gun and help out with repairs.

Well here's how I look at it. You can have another engineer if you would like to help you rebuild when things get critical, but what is there to stop another captain from following you down and just keep hammering you so that all your engies are busy? Your ship is essentially useless at that point in time, b/c you are not putting out any DPS. The moment your gungineer hops off the guns to help, is the moment your ship is doomed to die (IMO of course). The gunner role gives you extra ammo so that you can hit your enemy fast, and provide more DPS. As a side note, gunners are becoming more important for guns with arming time, if you get into a close quarters engagement (lesmok for long range, Heavy or Incendiary for short)

The idea for the third gungineer is not to leave the gun to repair the ship.  It's to have the proper tools to keep his own gun operational.  Something that has a much more direct relationship to DPS than ammo type currently.

[RearAdmiralZill]

Well its pretty obvious that we arent going to convince either side of the other's opinions.

I dont care what the updates have changed. It hasnt changed my opinion that unless you have a very specialized situation where only one ammo type is useful on the entire boat (Like a Squid build), a gunner will always be better suited for that last crew slot. The added variety in ammo can make a disable gun into both a disable and kill gun. It can get you first strike over an opponent, and give you an advantage when they get too close. I dont need to call an engineer repairing the engines up to the front gun cause he's got the proper ammo for a 3-5 second window of opportunity.

[Helmic]

That having a gunner at all is controversial is an issue.  It should be indisputable that having one of every role is optimal, and that's just not how it is right now.  I don't know how you manage your crew, but on my ships everyone stays near their battlestations, my engineers aren't wandering off far from their guns or relying on each other to trade places on their guns for different situations.

It's just so situational.  Everyone can always use a full repair kit, it's situational when you can use different ammo types.  Proper planning can drastically reduce the needed ammo - carronades can get away with just having charged, burst on Manticores so long you fly with teammates so you're not trying to fight another Manticore in which case you bring heavy (the extra uptime and selfbuffing is a REAL help as you have time to buff EVERY shot).  I really look for excuses to use a gunner whenever possible but I'm responsible for all three of my crewmembers having fun and that often means actually winning those close matches, I hate having to tell someone that they need to switch roles.  If the light guns could benefit more from different ammos, then having even two gunners could be very competitive rather than the near death sentence it is now.

I think a lot of the problem is that there's very few ammo types that can work on any gun.  Ammo choice, as it is right now, is commonly dictated by the captain or just inferred when the gunner looks at the loadout.  There's one, two, possibly three ammos that work well with the guns they'll be using.  There's not a lot of room for variety, and ammo variety is the gunner's one strength.  It's not fun just taking what the captain tells you to take, you should be able to mix and match to your preference without impacting the captain's plans at all.  I should be able to say something like "take something for accuracy, hull damage, and disabling" and just let the gunner choose based on comfort and his own skill.

[Squash]

Zill, name one situation where you'd want different ammo for the same light gun.

[Helmic]

I can think of a couple, the flamethrower can extend its range with lesmok and turn a bit better with a longer clip with greased.  Gatlings beneift from heavy and long range and greased at close.  Flaks like heavy clips for range and burst for close.  Mercuries can be a touch easier to handle with lesmoks, though charged is the bread and butter.  It's that having both doesn't provide a great benefit, it takes too long to switch ammos in a flamethrower to make use of their different reaches, a gatling will often strip the armor before there's a need to switch from heavy to greased (plus at closer range heavy clip can selectively disable enemy components while waiting for the armor to go back up), the light flak isn't that much better with heavy, it isn't hard to compensate for the drop to get that extra damage on a Merc even across the map.  When compared to the benefit of keeping those guns up and going more often AND having them buffed AND having the ability to have everyone repair in an emergency the extra ammo just doesn't seem to compare.

What I'm more interested in is how Zill's making a weapon change its purpose just by switching ammo.  I know incendiary rounds on a gatling can start some fires, but I haven't seen that used to great effect.

[RearAdmiralZill]

Zill, name one situation where you'd want different ammo for the same light gun.

Light Flak - Heavy and Burst/Charged/Greased (Many of my guys have different opinions on which is best. I like the burst for the extra shot.)
Carronade - Heavy, Greased
Flamer - Lesmok, Burst/Greased
Mortar - Greased, Lesmok
Gatling - Heavy, Greased/Burst (This on is a little bit of a stretch and usually not manned by my gunners.)
Artemis - Lesmok, Burst/Greased
Banshee - Heavy, Greased
Flare - jk

What I'm more interested in is how Zill's making a weapon change its purpose just by switching ammo.  I know incendiary rounds on a gatling can start some fires, but I haven't seen that used to great effect.

This is pretty much restricted to Heavy guns. Most if not all light weapon ammo swaps just make it more useful at different ranges. The Heavy Carronade and Hwacha benefit greatly with a varied ammo selection. Flak and Lumberjack do as well, mostly due to arming times.

[Helmic]

Oh, I thought you were referring to actually changing the role from disabling to killing and back again.  With those guns you're still just changing range, the effect is just more pronounced as using an inappropriate ammo at certain ranges can mean completely wiffing a volley.  A gunner is arguably more useful on those ships, but still a third engineer can function great on those ships as well by just taking the ammo that'll be most commonly used and relying on the improved uptime.  The Manticore in particular can do just fine with heavy clip and benefits GREATLY from engineer TLC as even the slightest bit of damage will prevent it from turning, not to mention the ability to buff every single volley or run off from the gun to do repairs during the reload.

[Moriarty]

This issue was canvassed in the last community chat which had participation from a number of people in this thread

*cough* Zill *cough*

Looks like the general consensus is with me.

[RearAdmiralZill]

This issue was canvassed in the last community chat which had participation from a number of people in this thread

*cough* Zill *cough*

Looks like the general consensus is with me.

I didnt feel like arguing in the stream. My boats will still always have a gunner on board.

[Pickle]

I'm with Zill - always take a Gunner.

[Tsal Vlaxitov]

I almost exclusively play as a gunner and from my short experience with it, the guy who forces me to switch to engineer is the same guy who thinks its ok to stay in a galleon's broadside for the sake of shooting at another ship. Its either that or hes soo unaware of his surroundings that he fails to notice hes in a galleons broadside to begin with and needs several engineers to carry him through that handicap. This is no exception to higher ranked captains either as rank is clearly not skill gated in this game. Good pilots can easily get by with one engineer and that one engineer is either shooting or chilling half the time. Besides that, why wouldn't you want someone to focus on gunning and someone else to focus on fixing? That ridiculas term "gungineer" is an engineer who only guns and never fixes anything other than his gun most of the time and once again, the pilot who demands all engineers is too unaware to notice that. I do more fixing as a gunner than alot of "gungineers" I've seen in action.

Engineers might be better on paper but in their actual in game roles this is how its working out to my witness. That said I would love for there to be an undeniable advantage to having a a gunner over coordinating different ammo types between different engineers but really only to keep those pilots who would exclude me or at least moan about it from doing so.

[Pickle]

A Pyra can cope with two Gunners but gains very little for having the second.

A Galleon can do well with two Gunners, but the second is pointless with an all Hwacha broadside as that only needs one gunner to operate at 100% DPS.

For a Goldfish it's barely worthwhile as most of the effort is put into bringing the main gun into action and having a buffgineer assigned to help the Gunner on the forward gun has significant advantages.

But for the Junker and Squid, having a second Gunner is a liability that's likely to cost dearly.

[N-Sunderland]

I almost exclusively play as a gunner and from my short experience with it, the guy who forces me to switch to engineer is the same guy who thinks its ok to stay in a galleon's broadside for the sake of shooting at another ship. Its either that or hes soo unaware of his surroundings that he fails to notice hes in a galleons broadside to begin with and needs several engineers to carry him through that handicap. This is no exception to higher ranked captains either as rank is clearly not skill gated in this game. Good pilots can easily get by with one engineer and that one engineer is either shooting or chilling half the time. Besides that, why wouldn't you want someone to focus on gunning and someone else to focus on fixing? That ridiculas term "gungineer" is an engineer who only guns and never fixes anything other than his gun most of the time and once again, the pilot who demands all engineers is too unaware to notice that. I do more fixing as a gunner than alot of "gungineers" I've seen in action.

Engineers might be better on paper but in their actual in game roles this is how its working out to my witness. That said I would love for there to be an undeniable advantage to having a a gunner over coordinating different ammo types between different engineers but really only to keep those pilots who would exclude me or at least moan about it from doing so.

You can get by with one engineer against a team of newcomers. Otherwise, two is a necessity. You should  try playing as an engineer more before you say things like this.