First off,
The blunderbuss is broken.
- Crosshair if off the center of the pellet spread. The real center is actually above and slightly to the right. This doesn’t happen with the Grudge-Raker, it’s dead on center.
https://imgur.com/a/CT4D5 - Headshots are unreliable. I think the game assigns a single pellet to determine if a headshot is achieved, even though multiple pellets can give headshot damage. I have no idea of which it is and where it’s going.
- Shield overkill. A single wooden shield will block the entire blast. About 135 damage lost.
Half of the Huntsman’s talents involve headshots so the Blunderbuss can never be balanced for him because it uses just half of his kit. It relies on bruteforcing by using just the extra damage from active skill together with a tripot.
Also, the Blunderbuss (12 pellets) does about the same damage per pellet as the Grudge-Raker (9 pellets), but it has higher spread (Huntsman can equal it with -25%), less ammo (18 vs 20) and reloads every shot as opposed to once per two shots. It’s much worse.
Second,
The Repeater handgun.
The repeater has so much spread that even with 25% reduction it can only reliably headshot at about under 7m distance, which is similar to the Swiftbow.
- Huntsman needs to headshot to recover ammo. Waystalker doesn’t.
- The repeater does more damage per shot but the Swiftbow has much higher DPS and doesn’t slow movement and dodge.
- The repeater leaves Huntsman vulnerable to melee because it has only average rate of fire and a small magazine of 8. Waystalker can effectively use the Swiftbow up to point-blank range since she can always spam a few arrows to stagger enemies or activate Trueshot to panic out.
- With charged attacks, Kerillian has much higher accuracy (perfect if standing still) while still retaining damage comparable to the repeater. She can play sniper, Kruber can’t.
- The Repeater does damage against armor, but it’s similar to the halberd. Considering it’s effective range it’s easier to just use the halberd because it has block/shove, cleave, etc.
Like the Blunderbuss, since the repeater is so poor at headshotting, it only uses effectively about half of the Huntsman’s kit and so it also is just about shoving damage when Hunter’s Prowl is active.
This makes sense to me because together with the Blunderbuss these were the 2 weapons most exploited when the Hunter’s Prowl multiplier was x5.
The only good use I can think for this weapon is to activate Makin It Look Easy and then proceeding to use the bonus in melee. Since the Mercenary has been buffed and already had 150hp vs 100hp of the Huntsman I find it nonsensical to place the Huntsman in constant melee combat.
Third,
The Handgun.
I’ll compare it with the Imperial Longbow.
- The Handgun doesn’t need to charge, it always does full damage.
- The Handgun has superior armor penetration at 95% dmg vs unarmored while the Longbow has 75% when fully charged but much less when uncharged.
- The time to charge/aim both weapons is similar, but reload lowers the handgun’s rate of fire.
- Comparing charged attacks, the Handgun does about 40% more damage against armor but only about 12,5% more damage against unarmored.
- The Handgun has 44% of the longbow’s ammo.
My target isn’t SV. WS, BH, Pyro and even the longbow kills SV perfectly fine.
My target for the Handgun are chaos elites. Maulers and CW.
I didn’t perfectly stack bonuses to maximize damage vs chaos elites and as it is I can’t one-shot any of them without activating Hunter’s Prowl.
If the argument is that it’s possible to achieve a critical break point with the Handgun then that argument is weakened because strength potions reduce armor class. When fully boosted the Longbow will deal similar damage per shot as the Handgun vs armor.
Beating a dead horse. Speed potions increase the Longbow’s rate of fire. Speed potions do NOTHING for the handgun.
The Handgun requires less shots to kill them vs the longbow, but it is also generally less ammo efficient and has less DPS.
The handgun has flat trajectory and instant or nearly instant travel time. It’s good at sniping at that’s that. The Huntsman’s bonuses don’t seem to really benefit the handgun and it’s best as a sidearm for his other careers.
Fourth,
Hunter’s Prowl
The visual effect is TERRIBLE. It’s been plagued with visual glitches since I ever saw it in the closed beta.
Currently it looks like this to me - https://imgur.com/Bgzj6t6. Not enough. It ALSO makes every weapon “reload” so you lose time and aim.
Now, even what seems the intended effect, the reduced FOV is simply USELESS. It makes everything much worse by shifting your aim around. You will lose time from your precious 5 seconds just to adjust your sight + the visual crapfest that always happen when it’s active, which you will be PLEASED if it actually ends so you don’t play the rest of the game with a green, overexposed screen.
Hunter’s Prowl also gives invisibility, which is good, purposely to “ambush foes”, but you only get 5s total time. There’s no time to actually move around AND attack with the bonus. All ambushing you do is when you Steroid yourself into oblivion and miss a 200 dmg shot into an ally.
The Good,
The Longbow.
I think it’s the only weapon really viable. All his other ranged weapons are firearms and are have weak stats that impair their use as spread, ammo capacity and reload. The longbow doesn’t have to reload so his talent choices are streamlined.
Although his arrows are weaker against Kerillian’s when headshotting. Huntsman’s bodyshots have so much force they drop everything but CW even if they don’t kill.
The Huntsman can currently stack so much crit with talents that the Longbow can actually be good against enemies, even CW, which no other ranged weapon is actually effective. With sufficient crit his bodyshots also don’t deplete ammo so fast.
Opinion.
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Firearms suck for Huntsman because he has to pump so much stats into them.
He should have the +20% reload speed and at least +15% less spread baked in his passive career stats. -
Waste Not, Want Not and Taal’s Blessing are inferior to BH’s Prize Bounty for Firearms because BH’s actually reduces how often he has to reload. If one/both of them were converted to not spending ammo it would greatly benefit firearms.
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The BH has nice lvl25 talents which modify how his active behaves. I think it would be interesting if a talent Lvl15 or Lvl25 talent would be converted to enhance ammo instead of just pumping stuff with damage. I think of something like explosive rounds for firearms, so they had an aoe blast effect proportional to caliber. Similar to fireball staff LMB or drakefire LMB.
Blunderbuss could be converted to fling small bombs, so it would still be mostly AOE damage instead of “now you have enough damage to oneshot CW”. It would also avoid the weird “shield blocks everything” because it could be ground targeted giving an effect similar to Conflagration staff w/o DOT.
Arrows could give DOT’s or w/e. -
Hunter’s Prowl duration should be extended to 10 seconds to match Shade’s invisibility. Upon attacking, invisibility is cancelled and begins the 5s of damage.
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Remove the stupid filters from every ability. WTF is that for? Is this 2008 again? It feels like playing Fallout 3. It’s like a compilation of the WORST instagram filters in game form. Like someone just found out how to apply recolor filters and everything NEEDS to have a palette.
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Edit: Longbow shouldn’t zoom after charging because most players find it counter-intuitive to lose accuracy while zooming in. Max charge + minimum spread zone could be extended a little. The Huntsman could have the same passive as Waystalker that allows zooming w/ an extra button.
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(2) Blunderbuss fires 12 pellets vs 9 from the Grudge-Raker. So 4/3 of it’s damage p/ shot.
Bug note:
Currently Makin It Look Easy doesn’t show it’s duration in it’s icon and it also shares the same icon as Call Out Weakness (which is probably a placeholder from beta).