f13.net forums - Marksman Build with Justifications

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April 20, 2024, 08:02:50 AM

we're back, baby

Since the game is still really young I'm trying to get some sort of preliminary builds going. Having played through normal mode and starting nightmare I've been trying to figure out what works for my marksman. I'll try to explain everything as well as I can, so please be as critical as you can. If I say something that's wrong, retarded or some such, humiliate me as explicitly as you wish.

Okay so:

1. Weapon Choice

- Automatic Rifles (continuous fire)

Why? Several reasons. First of all, continuous fire weapons are a lot better for clearing the waves of trash the dominate every damn place in this game. This is especially applicable to flying, leaping or ranged enemies, where you either need to follow their motion, move out of the way or pretty much any situation where careful aim is likely to be disadvantageous. I also like the feel of the rifles in this game better than any of the other weapons. Personally, I think the sniper rifle handles like ass, but that might be just me. A second reason for why I prefer continuous fire weapons is that they work extremely well with rapid fire. Rapid fire+rifle --> frontal cone of damage. Snipers or heavy weapons on the other hand tend not to see the same gain from rapid fire as these weapons. In general, sniper rifles are good against spectrals, and heavy weapons are good against necros. If you want, you can keep a spare for these situations.

1b. Weapon Set-up

- I have a rifle modded for each enemy type (well, necros, demons and beasts) with: +crit percent and +crit damage in the largest possible amounts I can obtain. I also have a rifle with a mod of each damage type for the minigame. Beyond that, I have a sniper modded for spectrals. Generally, spectrals tend to be slow, fly, and use some sort of shield disrupting effect. This makes them perfect for sniping with a fully modded rifle (1-2 shots/kill). Beacon 10 and tactical stance 1 are usually enough to make it safe and relatively fast. Beyond that, the most annoying enemy types are probably demons; who are fast, move around a lot and tend to do large amounts of damage. Sniping them is a major pain in the ass, especially against swarms, so you need constant attacks. Especially for flying demon-witch things. Beasts are pretty much the same, especially when you add the leapers. Necrons are split into two categories for me: the support casters, and the zombie swarms. For the support casters, shoot at the swarm to get them to come after you, then use escape to run past them, beacon the summoner and kill it. Then turn and rapid fire to kill the rest of the pack.

1c. Misc. Modding Stuff

In general: mod rifles for crit, crit damage, and stun. Stun is very nice on weapons that attack often but for little damage. There's no point in getting it on a sniper rifle which will 2 shot 99% of all things, thus reducing the return you get from stunning it. Similarly, not much point in getting spectral on a rocket launcher.

2. Skill set up

See here: http://hellgate.ingame.de/skilltree/marksman/?l=50&s=0a01a10700053a0100000001000

To explain it:

Tactical Stance: you start with this, and I don't consider it worthy of putting more points into. The lack of mobility means that this is a long to mid range stance, and in a game where you get swarmed every other second, this seems to be suboptimal. This is especially the case against bosses where you need to dodge some sort of projectile, or for enemies which do something when they die (poison, etc). I suppose if you have a tank between you and the enemies, this is a different issue, but group play is still limited.

Rapid Fire: 10 points. Now, you might notice that this skill ALSO makes you stand still while you use it. So either I'm not internally consistent, or an idiot because I said that tact. stance sucked because you can't move, but then I mentioned maxing out this other skill whereby you *also* can't move. In my defense, this serves a much more useful role. Rapid fire, when used with the right weapon, is basically the equivalent of shotgun firing 10rounds/second at mid-short range. You know what's really useful against swarms of weak but numerous enemies? An ability that makes you attack really fast, but with a decrease in accuracy! Also of note, the increased attack speed increases your chances of triggering other things, like critical, on hit effects, and any secondary effects like stun. Which makes a great synergy with those other on critical skills (see below).

Grenades/Napalm: going to lump these in one category. These skills are great. Lots of people have marksman builds where they're basically casters with assault rifles, because all they need to do is toss grenades. Why are grenades good? Because they serve the same function as rapid fire, but you can aim them, and they don't require you to stand still. Great for clearing trash. Personally, they aren't my style. Running around spamming AoE skills is great for trash and makes bosses boring as hell. I might mention some of the reliance on the things not moving, or the relative lack of modification/customization or whatever.

Beacon: 10 points. Yes, it's that good. This is probably the single largest damage increase of any skill. It allows you to do almost 2x more damage. It's spammable (2 second cooldown). It has 2 other skills that make it even better and don't require a large investment themselves. And, if you're the grouping type, it increases everyone's damage, not just your own. Really, there isn't a downside.

Ricochet: 1 point. This is the first on crit passive you get. This is also pretty damn useful if you combine it with a small area and a high rate of fire weapon. Umm.... rapid fire? Yeah! Synergy of: target enemy, press rapid fire, pray and spray, watch as bullets fly around everywhere. You only need one point because: 40% is already a good enough chance to trigger and because only one on crit effect will trigger each crit. And since you're maxing reflected shot, putting more than 1 point in ricochet will lead to a decrease in reflected shot uptime.

Escape: 1 point. Great skill. Set up a devastating attack, save your ass, check whats around the corner. Many uses. No point in dropping more than one point, since the initial time is plenty long enough if you're in any way smart about using it (and maybe waiting for the cooldown to be up if you used it to run away). Escape artist, on the other hand, sucks ass. Yay! More run speed while invisible. I hear they gave us sprint for a reason.

Reflected Shots: 5 points. the 2nd crit passive. This one is nice. When combined with rapid fire, a weapon with stun, and beacon, you get some very nice results. This skill essentially increases the amount of bullets you shoot by 3x. The retargetting has weird AI, but in against a large clump, it really doesn't matter. The returns past the first point are meh, so max this last.

Elemental Beacon: 3 points. you put 3 points in because its a prerequisite. This is nice if your weapon has any additional elemental effects (spectral sniper rifle for killing spectrals comes to mind). Since beacon will usually be up on most things anyways, and this makes beacon better at no additional cost, the choice is pretty obvious. Plus you need it for the next tier.

Heightened Senses: 10 points. Improvement to rapid fire. 80% is just second to beacon for total amount of damage gain. However you should focus on maxing this third (alternate rapid fire/beacon then this) because beacon gives a better result (90% after 10 versus 80%) and is usable more often, and rapid fire increases attack rate by 15% per point, which will in itself increase its overall damage more than points here. Still, a good skill after you have nothing else left to click on.

Sniper/Overshield: again, refer to tactical stance comments. Sniper is even worse. You take more damage, and attack slower, and still can't move. Have fun spending 15 minutes clearing a necro camp. Or trying to hit any of the flying demons. Overshield is at least a good idea. If you're going to be taking all that damage, you at least want to have strong shield to soak it up, right? Yes, except for all those mobs that cut through shield like butter. Spectral and lightning enemies are plentiful, and the rate at which they kick your ass increases linearly with points placed in tactical stance and the things that boost it.

Hollow points: 1 point. Good return for one point,crappy return for points after it. You can get +crit damage very easily on so many mods. Much less than pure crit chance. This is a lackluster skill, but 20% for 1 point is just good enough to make it worth taking, largely since you'll max all the other things that matter before you run out of points.

Homing shot: great if you're using a slow rate of fire weapon. For an assault rifle, where you're putting out hundreds of bullets a minute, you can simulate this effect with a basic ability to play a shooter. This game requires very little technical skill, compared to say... TF2. No point in wasting points on something you can do yourself.

Multibeacon: 1 point. This is a pretty good skill. You basically get an AoE effect from your beacon. Now you only need 1 point, since the only time you're going to get any use out of this is when you beacon a support caster surrounded by his swarm and then you rapid fire into the crowd. Beyond that, beacon is spammable and cheap, so you can afford to put it onto everything you're fighting. Not to mention the fact that power packs are everywhere in the game, so it isn't like you'll run out.

Controlled Burst: reduces rapid fire cooldown. Rapid fire is already at 10 seconds, and given what it does, I sincerely doubt that you're going to need to use it that often. It might be worth it if you wanted to get multishot, but since I'm not, I don't bother wasting points here.

Speaking of... Multishot: hmm. Sounds like a great skill if you're using a slow rate of fire weapon, because then you can get 3x more damage! Except for the fact that the uptime on this skill sucks ass, not to mention that it's in the rapid fire line, which is based around using a fast weapon for short range AoE burst. And since these things already fire fast enough to get all the triggered effects (stun, poison, etc) happening, the only way to justify getting this is for the damage increase. Except for the fact that it doesn't work properly with rapid fire, which vastly reduces the usefulness.

3. Tactics

Really simple. For any crowd, wait till they're ~15metres away, and then use rapid fire.

For a single mob, beacon then either shoot at it from 20m away if you don't want to get close, or run in and rapid fire (if it's a boss or something that needs to die fast).

I usually run around a lot, dodging missiles, or do the backup and shoot thing that works on damn near everything (especially with stun).

If you need to snipe something, tactical 1 and beacon 10 are just fine, so long as your sniper rifle is of decent quality and well modded for the target. I almost never bother sniping, except for shield draining spectrals (think mind of 314).

3b. Rapid Fire

Use rapid fire when the enemies are 15m away or so. That way, it's over by the time the mobs get in melee range, by which time they are likely dead. If you have multibeacon, beacon one of the central mobs. I'd avoid using it at pointblank, since marksmen aren't really mean to take a lot of hits, and you might get stunlocked and be unable to use escape. I'd advise against using a rapid fire with a sniper rifle, except for at extremely close range.

Any corrections, comments, suggestions or anything of the sort are extremely welcome.

Let us know how it works.

Can you live with some skills not maxed out? You should get 1 point into multishot if you're planing on using rapid fire a lot.

Well so far, at 32, I have rapid fire (8/10) and beacon (7/10), with the rest mostly in filler. I suppose that if I wanted to I could grab multishot, but someone would have to explain to me how useful that would be.

If anything, I might try to find a weapon with +1 to it and try it out.

Just to brainstorm, the build I'll try on elite:

http://hellgate.ingame.de/skilltree/marksman/?l=50&s=00002107000750070000000a0a0

And the engineer I'll play on Elite HC (playing this right now on normal, it works great):

http://hellgate.ingame.de/skilltree/engineer/?l=50&s=023a00200351071070000300500

I know the skill tree is not the same in game.
Still not sure if I'll max beacon or nanobot. Depend on the quality of nanobot.

Quote from: Aez on November 03, 2007, 04:27:58 PM

Interesting set up. I'm guessing you want the multibeacon+ grenade combo for swarm clearing.

Looks good, but what are you going to do against bosses?

Word on the hellgate forums is that Ricochet and Reflected shot are exclusive, in other words if you have 1 point in Ricochet it will always take precedent on the crit and Reflected shot won't trigger. No idea if that's true but worth looking into mebbe.

I've barely seen Reflected Shot go off with my crits Richocheting all the time. It does give a damage boost but it's useless in open areas. So maybe 1 point in Reflected ain't so good.

I've been trying to test this.

I've gotten it so that both ricochet and reflected are up, but ricochet went up first.

So I guess what the hellgate forums say is true.

Personally, I don't see ricochet as being useful at all. It's useless in any sort of open area. And if I really wanted the bounce, I'd use a cluster rifle.

Quote from: Phunked on November 03, 2007, 04:41:29 PM

Interesting set up. I'm guessing you want the multibeacon+ grenade combo for swarm clearing.

Looks good, but what are you going to do against bosses?

I'll kite them. I might even switch the grenade for a maxed sprint skill. I would prefer to find good running boots tough.

Two things I either don't understand or disagree with.

1) Automatic Rifle > Slowfire aoe.

Couple of points,

First, I'm not seeing any significant dps dropoff on aoe weapons to pay for the advantage of splash damage.

Second, slow is typically better in dps calculations becuase of the "first shot is free" principle, that is if you charted damage over time with identical dps slow and fast weapons You'd get something like this...

Slow: 5,5,5,5,5,10,10,10,10,10,15....
Fast: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11...

That can be a big deal vs groups of trash mobs.

Third, finding random palladium or drops in boxes is much quicker and easier with rocket launchers.

Forth, Aoe weapons seem better with rapid fire, you get exactly the same dps multiplier, but you don't care that accuracy drops because, aoe-lolz.

2) Favouring the rapid-fire chain over the 'nades and napalm.

Maybe this is just a playstyle thing, but to me, rapid-fire is a win-faster and a win-more skill, that is, it kills things even more dead if they aren't strong enough to catch you when standing still. But you were going to beat them anyway.

'nades and naplams seem to be the best way to improve your chances of winning in the first place, by giving you a tonne of free damage (and killing the trash dead) before the enemy can respond.

Number (2) just seems like a playstyle preference, but I'm not sure what everyone is seeing in auto-rifles (it's not just you, your approach seems typical in game). Does dps get much higher for automatic rifles at some point?

I have a blue lightning gun [the 400-rounds-per-minute one] and a legendary rocket launcher, both modded appropriately for damage. The lightning gun outdamages the launcher in almost every situation, except for typical AOE trash like zombie summoner + minions (which is one of the few mobs a sniper rifle is useful for, but I digress). The biggest problem of the rocket launcher is that it's slooooooow and has a slow refire rate.
Typically it takes 3-4 rockets (of which maybe 1 is a direct hit, the rest splash damage) to eliminate a pack of melee nasties, but constant backpedaling and firing from the lighting gun takes them down in less time with less overall risk; against fewer tougher targets it's not even a contest, since beacon makes fast-and-steady guns rip enemies apart in seconds. It's still better to use rockets against zombies though, and in an AOE heavy group, the firefox's firefield is pretty good.

I use the sniper rifle [+stance] fairly often when soloing against bosses and tough solo mobs, it's typically an instakill with beacons against non-bosses. Otherwise I get two solid hits in, then switch to my lightning gun and start running.

[disclaimer: my marksman is only around lv15, but I have both a legendary firefox and the cluster launcher type, which I assume are the two major rocket launcher types]

-- Z.

Maybe I've had a couple of lucky draws on high damage launchers, and it's skewing my view. /shrug.

The next automatic weapon up from the lighting one is even better. 480 rnds/min, much tighter aiming even when moving and does fire damage. I think the default damage spread on it is 9-11. Start saving your +%fire damage mods. Plus it's got a kick ass sound.

I was running around with Firefox launcher/ SNPR / Auto Rifle for a long time. I pretty much never used the rocket launcher after a certain point.

If you get a clear field of fire you can drop a swarm in seconds with an auto rifle if your willing to risk going into sniper mode for it. I don't know if head shots do more damage but it seemed like it, I was killing packs long before they got to melee range and my shields are more than enough to duke it out with anything at range.

Well, except for shielded imps with a boss giving them super powar, then it's sniper/SNPR/escape time. But otherwise remember, short, controlled bursts are your friend. Enough of a difference that I find myself pausing even when I have something in my sights to let the reticle focus.

Automatic weapons win out over slow ones because of one thing:

Aiming. In theory, a slow, splash damage weapon will out DPS a fast attacking one if you never miss.

However, in practice, you'll miss a lot. Either because of human error or because of accuracy skill.

Let me show you a time chart:

Slow:
0 5 9.5
hit miss dead

Fast:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
hit hit hit miss miss miss miss hit hit win

In general, anything that attacks faster is more reliable. Not to mention that you have a higher chance of igniting/stunning/critting/whatever. They also win out with rapid fire because of either ricochet or the other passives. Attacking faster = more bullets = more crits = ricochet goes up. Ricochet allows your bullets to bounce 3 times. They can bounce off the ground, any solid objects or enemies. This means that rapid fire into a pack can increase your damage by up to 4 times. With a fast firing weapon, you can unload about 400 rounds in 3 seconds. With a slow one, you get like 6. In theory, the damage return is the same. In practice, the faster weapon has a tighter damage distribution over multiple uses. If you need to clear the pack running at you in a frontal cone, you want to have a 99% of winning, not a 50% chance of winning and a 50% chance of having half your shots miss. Also, as far as I know, rockets can't ricochet. Cluster rifles can, and if you combine their inherent bounce with rapid fire and ricochet, you get absolute ownage indoors. Not the best for backing up and shooting though, but that's why you have 3 weapon sets. Rapid fire is a win-faster, win-more, and a don't lose skill.

As for the grenades, it might be a playstyle issue. Personally,I hate the physics on them. They bounce too much and are pretty hard to aim, and with the long cooldown, you can't afford to miss. Not to mention the fact that unless you dump 10 points into each one, they won't have AoE capacity anywhere close to rapid fire. I only like the phase grenade, largely because it sticks on hit and has a huge chance to phase. And phase is good. But that's a 1 pointer, and can be replaced easily by adding phase to your assault rifle.

I'm not sure about that. in wide open spaces...at the range of 40 m Sniper + beacon is just ...well click and kill fest for me. Even if they somehow manage to reach me, Escape. And repeat. But I do agree in fast-pace situation, auto weapons will outperform since aiming is just secondary to survival on boss fights. (learned in museum encounter)

Well if you're sniping with beacon sure.

But personally, that takes longer, and for large parts of the game, the mobs run into your face pretty aggressively.

And yes. For boos fights, I let ignite do the damage.