Now, I’m sure someone will start an argument about how much they love it as-is, but this is such a bad talent, encouraging players to STAY STILL.
I had avoided it for a long time, but decided to go for the Penance of getting 2500 kills at full stacks. Damn, it feels worse than I thought it would.
Who thought this was a good design, to make you lose stacks from moving?
Can we just change it to x number of missed weakspot shots reduce stacks? Or they decay over time, one at a time? I think I like the latter better, though the former would play more into the idea of being a marksman.
Wait, so you want Marksman’s Focus to actually punish people for not being a Marksman?
Nah, penalizing players for moving around in a game that demands players reposition often due to a constantly changing environment is significantly better.
But that’s more or less exactly how it works RIGHT NOW in practice. Your stack decay is paused as long as you are consistently hitting head shots. Literally keep hitting headshots and you get to move around as much as you like. It also does already decay one stack at a time, just the rate of decay is relative to movement speed. But like the idea is to keep hitting heads so you don’t need to worry about that in the first place.
I use MF and I have never once stopped moving or crouched to avoid stack decay. Just keep hitting heads silly.
Mainly it just needs a transformative sub node or two as options for people who don’t like it currently. They should replace camouflage (noob trap) with something more interesting. Chink in the armour is dubious as well as boring so they could replace that one too.
Tunnel vision is actually a multiplier to all non coherency toughness gain so is a lot better than many think (also deadshot synergy), and long range assassin is already best sub node and should stay as it is.
They already doubled it once, it’s at reasonably comfortable levels as the moment IMO. 6 seconds is a long time to line up another head shot.
I’m comfortable if they halved it since I play headshot marksman style in most FPS, but it also feels like it is the least used ability by miles and miles (could be really wrong idk) and it sounds like it is partly because people don’t like being punished for missing a weak spot hit (missing your shot is punishment enough lol). Giving it more leeway is just the easiest fix that they could realistically do.
Just b/c something gets a buff doesn’t always mean it was enough.
Tbh camouflage is kinda nice for weapon that need to preserve ammo or is too overkill to use on generic mob. It consitently produce 1-2 stacks while aiming and then any headshot would stop it from decay.
It certainly should be improve or replace with better QoL node though.
Fair enough I guess, but is there any situation where you wouldn’t be better suited with WS there? Like MF is only good if you have pretty high shooting uptime.
A pretty niche helbore AutoCrit build also… basically all the slow shooters benefit more from camo and the rapid fire headshot kills from LRA… naming kind of feels off for correlation.
Ranged Weakspot hits delay the inevitable stack loss 3s, kills are what prolongs it and when you have to whip out your melee for majority of match building back up your stacks seem futile.
When you really need the damage boost boss fights may not be easy targets to snipe for stacks.
I use MF with camouflage for my Hellbore build. I’m running the medium speed mark (can’t remember the name after the renaming patch..) and camouflage helps with getting some stacks while preparing the headshots to more consistently hit the crusher 2 shot breakpoint.
My build kinda falls off on high intensity missions, but mainly due to the abysmal weapon swap of the hellbores, but that’s something for a different thread
Hard agree on this, it rewards spray and prey weapons more than it does sniping currently, but that’s an issue with a lot of blessings / talents / mortis trial boons.
Edit: Veteran is my least played class btw, I only play it when I want to RP as a kriegsman. I main Electrokinetic Psyker
It gets better with some Stam curios/weapon stat but the better you want it the more vulnerable you get without toughness.
Also for some reason different stamina levels on bullet guns make it more viable as well… you have to do a lot of building to make thing work but usually at cost to survival stats
Yeah I agree its use cases are too counter intuitive and the keystone is too niche currently. For the record though I use it with Kantrael heavy las pistol which is decently fast firing but probably not what you’re envisioning here (IAG/Recon).
I don’t really know how to fix that without making it too free TBH. And it will still have the inherent issue that a bunch of really strong ranged weapons don’t really need it for breakpoints.
Only idea I’ve really toyed with is having melee weakspot hits pause stack decay briefly so it’s possible to keep stacks when you’re forced to melee for an extended period. I think that would lower the barrier to entry but not really fix its narrow use cases.
I’m still not super sold on the use cases of camouflage but honestly if some people like it I think they could unironically just make Camo part of the base function and you’d hardly risk power creep or making MF over used.
It’s clearly not an unworkable keystone, but it is definitely far behind most keystones, and under the bar.
I really don’t know how to improve it. I thought about “maybe one-shots contribute to it?” thinking that it implies a good aim. But I imagine some automatic/fast firing weapons can still just spray into a crowd and get some one-shots on chaff enemy or something.
A random thought, but given how hard it can be to see normal shooters in some maps, it’d be nice if the highlighting of them from volley fire could be moved to something else.
If the “sniper” tree keystone works best at short range with automatic weapons firing bursts at head height, something is fundamentally wrong.
In a game built on constant mobility and that actively disincentivizes stationary gameplay in every possible way, building a keystone talent that incentivizes not moving belies a conflict in game design going on.
The Vet keystones we have are all pretty haphazard last-minute ideas that I think were devised by a different dev than whoever was involved with the core gameplay loop. When Patch 13 introduced the talent trees, Vets didn’t have a Keystone because the original weapon-based concepts got dropped at the last minute, the next patch hamfisted in the Vets keystones but then needed yet another patch because they all took 2-4 more points to reach than every other class, and Vet remains the only class that really does consistently well without using a Keystone in builds at all. MF in particular feels like something fundamentally conceptually more suited to a tabletop game, not a real time action shooter.