I’ve spent hours watching and reading guides, experimenting with builds, asking players about it and came to conclusion that the only way to make it work is to use an autogun, unload into trash mobs’ heads to gain stacks and then switch to elites/specials before they decay from moving. The “intented” stationary gameplay is an absolute nightmare because:
Standing still is a death sentence. You know what happens if you stand still on Auric for more than a couple of seconds? Poxwalkers will crawl out from the nearby hole and club you to death in the back. Not to mention constant stream of hounds, mutants, trappers, flamers, trappers, bombers throwing their grenades out of the map boundaries and the dreaded ninja crushers, who are still able to sneak behind you with no sound whatsoever. Everything has to be constantly avoided and stacks decay way to quickly.
Allies stealing kills, knocking down enemies and blocking shots. Imagine scoring two headshots on a rager, leaving it with a sliver of health, only to be killed by a stray Psyker flame or Rumbler grenade. It happens way too often. Not to mention allied Ogryns standing in front of you, blocking all shots, so you have to move. Same goes with knockdown, making headshot kills difficult or outright impossible.
The bonuses from the keystone and its skills aren’t even that good. Honestly, the only thing worth going for it is Finesse damage. 15% reload speed at max stacks isn’t that noticeable unless you stack it with other reload skills, 10% rending works only with 10+ stacks (while there is a passive skill that gives 10% rending permanently and for all weapons, sure, they can be stacked, but whatever), “camo” makes you stand still or crawl, which is an instant hard pass and 2.5% toughness regen per stack is just meh…
And what’s funny that the actual good headshot build is no keystone crit build for lasguns. Works much better and doesn’t make you a turret.
How to fix it:
Give stacks on scoring headshot and kills: 1 for headshot hit and 2 for headshot kill. Stack decay on missed shots, but there should be a 1-2 second window after scoring a headshot to make it less punishing for automatic weapons. No more standing still.
Chink in their Armor – change to 1% rending per 1 stack. Will make it more comforable to use.
Long Range Assassin – a must pick skill, nothing to be said about it.
Camouflage – either rework it completely or return old camo back ( minus threat for ranged enemies when standing still, I know some peopl will dislike it)
Tunnel vision – no idea about changes, it’s okay I guess? Would like something else to be honest.
MF feels like it was designed by someone who doesn’t actually play the game, but plays a lot of TTRPGs. The Veteran tree in general has that vibe, but MF in particular in its current incarnation just really comes off as something designed for a more abstracted turn based game and not a fast paced survival shooter.
Obvious mobility problems aside, it’s awkward that pretty much the entire tree is built around trying to score big powerful long ranged headshots to drop things quickly, particularly at the outset or opening of an engagement, seemingly really built around Lasguns, but MF wants you to have already shot a bunch of stuff in the face for it to ramp up. It’s most efficient application is with a high-RoF+high stability weapon gunning through a horde at close and medium ranges. If you’re looking to carefully one-shot headshot a meaningful target from a cold start at long range, Focus Target is actually the more useful keystone (if you’re going to run one) in that role.
I think as far as repairing the existing talents as they currently exist, the above suggestions largely make solid improvements over the existing live version. Removing the mobility issue is critical. I like the idea of missing shots causing decay. However, I think more fundamentally the entire concept needs some rethinking at all levels as to what they want MF to more functionally accentuate the rest of the line.
I want move speed in some way from marksman’s focus, it promotes sitting back and lining up shots but after the fight, you need to catch up to your speed running team and contribute again.
Something like “doubles bullets on Xth hit” would promote all weapons. Headshot or not.
Going for headshots is already rewarding in the first place. I dont see why we need a whole keystone promoting it even more. Especially if Weakspot calculations are the Fatshark kind of awkward.
I recomnend trying to play above Sedition and exploring Veteran’s skill tree, because if you want to be rewarded for good aim and mobility, you will never take this useless node.
In what way does it reward mobile play styles? Mobility is explicitly the one thing that it does penalize. It gives you enough timing space to reposition around an obstacle or slightly move for LoS purposes, but a 1-3 second window doesn’t really let you play anything like “mobile” and maintain stacks. The moment you have to reposition across a room, you have to rebuild your stacks. If you’ve got an automatic weapon and are gunning down a horde, maybe okay, but that’s also not how that skill seems to be portraying its greatest utility.
If you’re running around trying to make precise hits for single shot kills, you’re way better off with Focus Target that doesn’t require you to “ramp up” with other kills first (so your first shots in an engagement will hit much harder to begin with), doesn’t care if you move or not, doesn’t care where you hit, is easier to generate/apply, and will boost your damage more than the first few stacks of MF will (which is all you’re going to get in many situations before enemies run out or you have to move). You can also get away with just the FT node itself without the upgrade notes, MF really needs a couple of the upgrades.
Looking at other classes, their keystones are generally not as fiddly. The Ogryn keystones are basically “always on”, you don’t need to think about them, they just naturally make whatever you were going to do better. Warp Siphon similarly is great in that it just naturally makes everything I do (all damage, all perils generation, all sources) better and easier and I can do literally nothing and still proc it and keep it active for many minutes (or even the entire run) at a time, while Empowered Psionics is quick to generate from all kills and can be held for exactly when you need it, it’s really only Disrupt Destiny that sucks (for many of the same fundamental reasons MF does, it’s a tabletop paradigm skill, not suited to a shooter). On my Zealot, Blazing Piety can proc literally just from team kills, I can literally do nothing and get it to activate, and once it does, it makes literally any attack I make better (doesn’t care about what type of damage or hit location) and just needs the party to keep killing something to keep it up. Inexorable Momentum requires movement but can generate that much more easily than the Vet can remain stationary, while Martyrdom is an entirely skill based utility in terms of one’s ability to get value out of it and not die.
Again, read the tooltip. If you pay extra attention to the actual text instead of beating some talking point you heard on reddit, you’ll find it doesn’t actually require you to stand still. It punishes you for not hitting headshots. That’s a skill issue
The irony is Marksmans Focus is the single highest damage increase in the entire Vet tree for high volume fire guns, and people say its bad. Keeping it above 8 stacks is trivial with the Columnus while never stopping moving. It’s definitely a skill issue if you can’t keep stacks up.
Any change to the stacks being on-hit would be wildly overpowered and strictly better than anything else in the game. Even Righteous Piety needs many kills in a row and drops all stacks at once outside of combat.
In the most literal “technically correct”-meme sense? Sure. Ranged weakspot kills grant stacks. “Sprinting, Sliding, or Walking” remove stacks. Ranged weakspot kills and ranged weakspot hits allow you to move without losing stacks for 3 and 1 seconds respectively.
It’s best utilized with a high ROF weapon against densely packed opponents that can be quickly killed, which is kinda contrary to where the rest of the tree is going.
In practice, the way this ability actually interacts with gameplay, particularly with long range crit-build headshot weapons, this also means you quickly generate a bunch of stacks killing a a couple enemies with short bursts or unloading into a horde, and then once it’s been max’d out you lose it because there’s nothing left to kill in the immediate area (and by the time you’ve found more stuff to shoot at, all your stacks are gone). Or alternatively, you’re facing a big event crowd and have to keep moving to keep pace with the event. Just about every time you get the thing ramped up, you have to move and lose stacks. There’s a couple spots where you can just plant and only really need to shift a bit for a couple minutes, and it’s glorious in those events, but otherwise it’s really hard to see where you’re coming from.
Ultimately, if I’m primarily trying to do specialist/elite hunting as a crit/headshot build Vet, why would you take MF over FT? For all the reasons I gave above, FT just fits better. Rather awkwardly its rather better on a spray-n-pray autopistol or autogun where one just runs at groups of enemies and blasts at the general head region at point blank range.
It punishes you for not hitting headshots.
Yes, in the sense that it limits your potential mobility, but again further reinforces the use of high RoF close range weapons over ostensibly more careful headshot-crit build long range weapons. It doesn’t punish in the sense that you can sit there in one spot all day, max out your stacks, and then miss through your entire remaining ammo stash and still keep that max damage bonus, really incentivizing some often suicidal player behavior.
No, in the literal “play the game and use it” sense. I use it all the time and I never intentionally stand still and get lots of mileage.
Literally just headshot things and you can move freely. If you’re moving and you’re not headshotting stuff it’s either a skill issue or it’s by design ramping off so you don’t have the buff up permanently.
This isn’t some technicality or whatever you’re making it out to be. Actually go use the thing and go ingame. You’ll find it’s always up so long as you’re hitting things in the head. Pretending that there are additional stipulations is dishonest. Even if you do suck at hitting headshots and drop the buff entirely from time to time, it’s still dishonest to pretend it forces you to stand still or anything like that.
I can keep up the 10 stacks just fine but it gives no real notable breakpoints on most of them.
As for using it on the MK V it’s not even worth it. The TTK is faster with MF on max stacks, but I can get a nearly identical TTK on most targets with just Focus Target with faster boss killing as well even with just solo DPS let alone with the 12% more damage each person is doing on top of the tag itself which is at least 8%, but probably another 16%.
EDIT: As a bonus the middle tree actually helps both melee, AND ranged so even more reason to not pick up MF.
It’s a pointless keystone that only really makes a notable difference with MK I IAG.
I want it to be changed to lose stacks on miss - not on move, and increase the finesse bonus. Can’t use it with autoguns that way and it can actually be a precision keystone like it was supposed to be thematically.
It would perform much worse on miss, assuming the spirit of the blessing is on-miss of headshots.
Fatshark clearly wanted the keystones to do two things, all classes included:
Not be active 100% of the time unless player skill enables it so, and even then not literally 100% of the time.
Match a single playstyle and/or weapon type.
Marksmans is the rapid-fire, run and gun option. Focus Target is the slow sniper option, and Weapons Specialist is the melee option. Changing Marksman to be always online and give maximum dps to all weapons makes the other 2 keystones worthless. Fatshark doesn’t want a return to the original Veteran pre rework.
Focus Target is better on average for most builds, but Finesse power on ranged is easily the best option if you can kill with headshots efficiently (reload speed included in this assessment).
Wait, first you’ve said that making it stack on hit would make it overpowered, now you’re saying that “It would perform much worse on miss”. Maybe make up your mind already before mindlessly putting the blame on users and making up excuses not backed up by anything?
Good thing it would be only good for people who don’t miss. Almost like it would be rewarding for slow firing weapons shot with care and precision.
MF is only slightly better than Focus Target and I do say slightly at 10 stacks (still a worse boss killer as well) which no matter what you say aren’t up all the time especially when it counts ie Kiting scenarios where your melee weapon has to be out a lot.
“Just spray into a crowd, lol” because I’m going to take even half a second away from shooting a trapper, or bomber. No.
MF sucks. As all win-more talents, abilities, or weapons do.
My pie in the sky ideal of a change means it would always be active even during rough situations if you are good enough to not miss your shots meaning it only becomes win-more depending on player skill.
It’s a pve game. Don’t flatter yourself, “not missing” doesn’t involve a whole lot of skill in a horde based pve shooter where all the ai mostly runs in straight lines. Would be absolutely busted if it could just stack to full and stay there based on that. Hence why it has a mechanic built in that ramps it off when you’re not actively shooting things.
For every other similar mechanic in the game (such as uncanny strike) thats just a timer. Would you rather the buff is on a 3 second timer rather than disappearing with movement as a little flavorful unique mechanic? Because I guarantee just giving the buff 100% uptime isn’t an option. Vet already has that, it’s called precision strikes and it’s 30% weakspot damage.