I’m all for teamwork, and I’m ok tanking for the ranged DPS. A lot of times I will stand there and wait for a couple rats to get through because I have a Beamstaff Sienna shotgunning everything to death in front of me, and a Bardin with flamethrower roasting the rats behind. We were just caught by surprise by a chaos patrol on legend and we thought it was a wipe, but it turns out that beamstaff can actually permastagger the entire patrol by just spamming the shotgun endlessly. Cool. I feel like I really serve no purpose other than to rez people when they go down. I want to tank, I want to melee, I just rarely get a chance to. It’s not even about green circles, I don’t care about damage done, I just want to play the game, and with a competent Sienna/BH, I rarely get to do anything.
then u sir should play with me (a non competent Sienna)
This is only because of the vent on crit trait. Without that trait you get 5-6 shotguns from zero before the next will kill you. Similarly the vent on ultimate trait likely needs to be weakened from a full overheat dump to a partial dump. The power of the ranged weapons themselves are not an issue, it’s a few very VERY specific things that are causing them not to have their intended tradeoffs. But this also does not effect all weapons equally. I’ve vented half a bar in a single shotgun on Beam staff, but good luck getting those kind of results on bolt staff with it’s single target shots. AOE shots calculate the vent per headshot/crit so a single cast can proc the trait multiple times.
They are likely trying to figure out a good way to balance those traits that leaves the traits useful for all weapons, but doesn’t break it for just a few. But the ranged power itself is fine.