Gunner buff - rotation speed

[sparklerfish]

There have been lots of threads about how to improve the balance between gunner and engineer and make gunner a more useful class.

Here's a simple suggestion:  Give a gunner buffed rotation speed on guns.  It makes sense -- a crew member trained on guns would be better at maneuvering with them.  It's not too OP but would definitely be helpful for a gunner's accuracy and reaction time as opposed to that of an engineer.


Thoughts?

[Hoja Lateralus]

Devs don't like passive buffs. The suggestion most people liked was to make gun reload faster (for everyone) when you're on it. Then gunner who is mostly sitting at one gun would be more useful.

[pandatopia]

Yea passive buffs instead of loadout changes really go against what it seems the devs are going for with the current class system.

No class should be inherently better than another class at anything.

I'd like to add that I'm a huge proponent of the "nothing's wrong, everything is fine, add some cool ammo is a good idea" crowd.

Who cares if 2 gunners is not good - why do you have to be a gunner?

The idea of a "class" is something that people go into their first match with - hopefully after 10 or 100 matches you'd realize classes are completely free choices - you decide (well your captain/team) what would be best for the situation.

If that situation is 99.9% of the time dual gunners bad, or even 50% of the time 1 gunner bad, it doesn't matter. Just be an engineer and shoot what you need to shoot and repair what you need to repair.

[Richard LeMoon]

I have been suggesting for months to make the buff hammer improve the rotation speed and possibly health and +rotation angle of guns instead of anything that would directly improve DPS (such as +damage or +reload or +fire rate).

[sparklerfish]

Devs don't like passive buffs. The suggestion most people liked was to make gun reload faster (for everyone) when you're on it. Then gunner who is mostly sitting at one gun would be more useful.

Being able to carry three engineering tools is already a passive buff that engineers have making thm better at repairing than gunners.  Being able to both put out fires AND repair AND potentially buff is a massive benefit over a gunner.


I do also like the faster reload speed idea a lot.  Or the possibility of being able to select an ammo type and walk away and it still loads that ammo type.  Having different ammo types is sort of helpful but it can be crippling to have to stay at your gun to load it.

[Crafeksterty]

having more tools is the only passive every class has.

If anything, gunner needs another tool type. A tool type that activates when selected on a gun so you can combine it with the ammo loaded.

[Hoja Lateralus]

We're having this discussion over and over and over and over and over again....

pandatopia pretty sumed this up, the idea is everyone can do everything equally well but classes are limited by possibilities - therefore gunner has 3 ammo slots and 1 engineer slot - but essentially they use the same tools (gunner shooting the same gun with the same ammo is no different than engineer or even pilot shooting the same gun with the same ammo). And as far as I know Devs will do everything for things to stay this way. There is only one thing that bothers me:

Who cares if 2 gunners is not good - why do you have to be a gunner?

Well, game gives you choice between three roles - implying that those roles are more or less equal, pretty equally needed on the battlefield. But then it turnes out that pretty much one of the role is inferior in the game and you can only choose between other two. If most competetive (and experienced-pub) scene is sure that crew of the ship consist of minimum 2 engineers - this is simply bad game design. Similar is with "extinguisher or chem" question - there is no real choice, you don't see high-lvl engineers running with extinguisher because it's purely inferior to chem. Game doesn't give us real choice regarding this matter.

Being able to carry three engineering tools is already a passive buff that engineers have making thm better at repairing than gunners.  Being able to both put out fires AND repair AND potentially buff is a massive benefit over a gunner.

Because engineer is for repairing and gunner is for shooting. And maybe two gunners will never be "viable" choice because the risk of taking a second gunner simply isn't enough to pay-off the safety of second engineer. This may be fundamental game feature/error which can't be "fixed", but IF it can - the simpliest to implement and best solution is to make such ammo types that are worth the risk.

I do also like the faster reload speed idea a lot.  Or the possibility of being able to select an ammo type and walk away and it still loads that ammo type.  Having different ammo types is sort of helpful but it can be crippling to have to stay at your gun to load it.

On one hand - yes, this is an interesting idea that can increase the use of gunners somehow. On the other hand if one gunner can pre-load all of the guns in one run (just like engineer chemsprays) - second gunner seems unnecessary again. Also, technically you don't have to stay on your gun all the time it reloads, only like second or two before it ends and it's used many times in the game, so basically it's just cooldown thing, just as engineer has to look out for cooldowns.

If anything, gunner needs another tool type. A tool type that activates when selected on a gun so you can combine it with the ammo loaded.

Devs always say - gunners don't have tools. Gunners have ammo.

[sparklerfish]

I guess it just boils down the the fact that ammo types aren't as useful as repair tools.  The fact that a ship can function perfectly well with no gunners at all (and oftentimes is better that way) is a pretty clear indication that gunner is an inferior class that needs SOMETHING done to make it more useful.

[pandatopia]

A ship can function perfectly well without a pilot class - pilot tools just make it easier to move.

A ship can function perfectly well without gunners - gunners just make shooting more effective.

A ship cannot function perfectly well without engineers - because you need 3 engineer tools to be effective (some would say even 4-5 as buff hammer is indispensible occasionally).

The trick here is not that engineers are more powerful/desired - its that you need so many tools to be an effective engineer.

Do you see the difference in point of view?

Frankly we have TOO MANY ammo types - their use is not varied enough and many gunners say a certain gun only needs one or two types.

So clearly the solution - and direct gunner buff, is to coalesce engineer equipment into fewer tools.

Xtinguish also is chem spray.

Mallet/spanner/wrench all just becomes the "super wrench" tool.

Does this make people angry? Do people not want this to happen?

Because IMO this is more about requiring too many engineer tools rather than not having enough gunner tools ("ammo").

[sparklerfish]

Yeah.  I really don't know what the solution is.  Just throwing ideas out.  I'd like to see gunners be more useful/viable in more circumstances but there are really only a small handful of guns that benefit from a gunner, whereas every part of every ship benefits from engineers...

[Hoja Lateralus]

Well you can't have enginner with only 3-4 tools, this would be overreacting to the other way.

I wouldn't say we have too many ammo types, rather we have ammo types which are good only for some weapons (and other way - we have weapons that are only good with certain ammo types). For every weapons you have, say, 1-2 ammo types that make this gun significantly better and a 3rd choice which is just fine, maybe more situational. And that's pretty much it. The best thing we can do without breaking the game is to make better ammo types. For example - ammo that jams temporarily a specified component (say - engines) and works like chem, in the meaning that even if engines are broken and rebuild it still works.

Other, but more possibly-game-braking idea is decreasing significance of fire in two ways:
1. Decreasing speed of fire stack increase
2. Letting fire fade out stack after stack during some time
Then gunner would be less invalid as engineer-helper and wouldn't have to be babysitted all the time.

As I said before it may be that game is just created in such way that the viable tactics would always be "crew have at least 2 engineers", maybe we can just push it from "3 engies OP" to "2 engineers and gunner".

[sparklerfish]

Fire stacks on guns fading over time would be fantastic.  Getting 7+ fire stacks on a gun is the most crippling thing for a gunner -- not only can you not use it and not put it out, you literally cannot do ANYTHING until it breaks and you rebuild it.  Just one more reason being a gunner sucks -- an engineer could either just put out the fire or at least reduce it.

But if this happened, it would probably have to be applied universally, and I'm less a fan of the idea of fire stacks fading on other components.

I wish there were a way to purposely break your gun to make the fire issue more manageable for a gunner.  It's especially bad if I happen to be on the gun, clicking away as I fire, when it suddenly gets too hot and I'm kicked off and because I was clicking to fire, it then clicks to repair, and I have to wait even LONGER for the damn thing to burn out because I've just accidentally repaired it....

Oooh!  Maybe we could make it so that guns that are too hot to use are also too hot to repair?

[Crafeksterty]

If anything, gunner needs another tool type. A tool type that activates when selected on a gun so you can combine it with the ammo loaded.

Devs always say - gunners don't have tools. Gunners have ammo.

I meant tool TYPE.
Pilot has helm type tools and spyglass type tools.
Whats so nice about the helm tools is that they can be combined by how they are designed.

The engineer has Repair, Anti-Fire and Buff Tool Type
3 different types of tools that can be combined and mixed up.

While the gunners only have Ammo type.
This only allows for 1 thing at the time, meaning an engineer can do the same.
Another Tool type for the gunner that helps neglect or buff the drawbacks away will make the gunner always do more damage or use the gun in a more reliable way than the engineer.

[C. Darwin]

Answer to sparklerfish:

Fire stacks on guns can be prevented or dealt with heatsink ammo(as a temporary solution until an engineer extinguishes the fire), as a gunner you can do that much when you know there will be a lot of fire dealt from the enemy side.

[Hoja Lateralus]

I meant tool TYPE.
Pilot has helm type tools and spyglass type tools.
Whats so nice about the helm tools is that they can be combined by how they are designed.

The engineer has Repair, Anti-Fire and Buff Tool Type
3 different types of tools that can be combined and mixed up.

While the gunners only have Ammo type.
This only allows for 1 thing at the time, meaning an engineer can do the same.
Another Tool type for the gunner that helps neglect or buff the drawbacks away will make the gunner always do more damage or use the gun in a more reliable way than the engineer.

Okay, now you made it clear to me. When you put it like this - yeah, it seems like gunners have too limited choice in their means. Assuming that we're staying at idea that gunner can have only ammo I'd create three categories:
Kill, Disable, Increase range/hit chance
Gatling would be such example. Kill-ammo for gatling is greased whereas Increase range is lesmok, increase hit chance and disable is heavy clip (because with stable stream of fire you can snipe out components). Then gunner with 3 ammo types can be more effective in various situations than engineer with just one. Of course this is just an example of the beginning of what we would like to achieve on every weapon.