The issue with current Weapon Specialist is that it goes against smooth gameplay by forcing you to not switch between weapons, for example causing you to not be able to top off and reload your gun if you want to keep your melee-gained stacks up.
I propose that the increased crit chance gained from Weapons Specialist is only used after the weapon is fired. It should be changed to be its own separate “buff instance” to make the other ability effects remain unaffected by this fix.
This way the triggering of the effect is more controllable, and allows for more fun and strategic gameplay whilst not increasing the power level.
Both buffs should be activated on attack input but be active before said attack actually connects to an enemy IMO. Keeping this fix to just ranged makes no sense.
The switching part is needlessly restrictive and kills what ought to be a very good synergy between hellbore and the keystone.
Good reply, in my original draft I was considering this, but I wanted to err on the side of easier implementation. I second what you wrote, it should not be limited only to the ranged crits.
The issues of this approach are of course the fact that the ammo-resupply and stamina/toughness regain would lose some controllability here as well, if they are tied to attacks.
Perhaps it is better to overhaul the keystone, to not have the timers be cut to 0 upon switch, and giving it more interesting effects than reload speed and 3 seconds of 25% less used stamina.
replace the switch weapon trigger by something else… number of kills on a time period, number of kills with one weapon cumulated, I don’t know… but replace it by something else less dumb.
Weapon Specialist is the only engaging keystone the Vet has. I don’t think making it the same as the boring kill to trigger Zealot keystones is a good move.
Weapon Specialist, as it is currently implemented, is something that would work in a turn based tabletop game. In a real time shooter it feels painfully awkward and artificial hamfisted, and usually instead of flowing with combat tends to be another minigame you have to juggle inside of it.
This is one of the issues that contributes to the Vet’s skill tree feeling like an afterthought since Patch13. The 2.0 tree with patch 13 was a placeholder with no keystones because FS scrapped whatever they were working on before at the last minute, the 3.0 tree that introduced the current Keystones felt painfully hurried, and then FS had to put out a 4.0 tree so that you didn’t need 3-4 more skill points than every other class in the game to reach a keystone. I don’t think really any of the Vet keystones were particularly well thought out, they all feel like something crimped from a turn based pen and paper game instead of thought out for fast paced FPS.
It’s that you’re often switching weapons just for the sake of triggering a buff instead of actually needing to switch weapons, or holding off on switching weapons to be ready and staying wielding a weapon you’d otherwise have switched from so you’ll trigger the buff at the right time.
There’s a lot of situations where it just doesn’t follow organically with the action or interrupts the flow to make best use of. It ends up feeling like a gimmicky minigame layered on top of the normal action.
Not hard
But uninteresting, inefficient and you can spend better your talents points.
This applies to all veteran keystones…
The talent tree patch 13 was excellent. What has followed has made things worse…
At least they could change the keystones triggers to fit the vet gameplay.
Not moving, switching your weapon, and even spam tagging (but this one less, even if i don’t use) are not natural triggers like what other classes have (at least ogryn / zealot).
Well, I guess it’s just different flavors for different people. I never really feel being hamstrung by it other than the aforementioned of not being able to fidget around in the downtime.
Honestly, I like more interactive keystone than the ‘just play like usual but now better’ one. Although the Markman’s Focus keystone is pretty restrictive at launch but after some buff FS put out it’s pretty easy to retain the stack as long as I constantly headshotting enemy, don’t really have to stop moving or anything.
Veteran is the only character class I can think of whose keystones are better off not having additional nodes, let alone not taking keystones to begin with. They’re that bad.
Seriously though, it’s mostly just Weapon Specalist’s modifiers. They are individually weak and not point efficient to grab because of the layout. But Focus Target’s modifiers are all decent to good. And while Marksmans Focus is a bad keystone its modifiers are, mostly, just mediocre, rather than horrible.