DUST Search - Can someone explain Dust racial philosophies?

Beren Hurin wrote:

Vespasian Andendare wrote:

Princeps Marcellus wrote:

I'm confused about this, too. Out of curiosity, do you think you could tell us about the weapons that the races use, too?

Ben Hur (:P) has been doing a good job in this thread, but CCP has already sort of revealed the weapon strategy to us with Assault, Breach, Burst and Tactical. Assault is about higher rate of fire, higher damage close range. Breach is going to be a slower round but high damage at long range. Burst is going to be high accuracy, extremely high burst rof, and tactical will be high single damage shots and medium to medium-long ranges.

We can already see these strategies reflected if we take the AR and its 4 variants together. The "regular" Assault Rifle is high damage, good rof at close-to-medium ranges, while the Burst variant fires a quick three-shots to one spot. The Tactical AR is great at delivering a high damage single round at medium to medium-long range and the Breach variant fires slower rof but higher damage individual rounds.

Similarly, the Scrambler Rifle (Tactical theme for Amarr base) fires high damage, relatively accurate rounds at medium to medium long ranges, with of course there being the very-high-damage charged round. The Assault SCR is accurate and fully auto, mimicking the AR but firing at longer ranges. If you haven't had a chance to check this weapon out, you should. It feels very futuristic and awesome.

People have said that the assault will be the primary gallente weapon, and tactical is effectively the scrambler rifle model, but really I'm not honestly sure if the racial ones fit that mold. I am just roughtly going off of what I know from the weapons devblog, and the little bit I know from Eve weapon systems. Minmatar short range weapons are flexible in how far out they can hit, but they don't hit the hardest at close ranges. Gallente weapons are probably the hardest hitting. Amarr has some of the hardest hitting longer range weapons with some of the better 'damage application'. Caldari weapons also hit hard at medium to long ranges.


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Vespasian Andendare Subsonic Synthesis Alpha Wolf Pack 172	Posted - 2013.08.27 14:51:00 - [1] - Quote Admittedly, when I came from Eve Online to play Dust months ago, I had preconceived notions of the four races' philosophies. In Eve-O, the Amarr are stalwart armor tankers, generally possessing the most low slots for their armor tanks, The Caldari have the highest amount of midslots (highslots in Dust) for their shield tanked ship fleet, the Gallente are known for their speed and love of armor but generally have less lowslots than the live-or-die-by-armor Amarr. Lastly, the Minmatar are speed demons that don't prefer armor or shield, and their slot layouts are mixed, as some of their ships are armor tanked and some are shield tanked. Now, skip over to Dust, and those same races' philosophies are apparently scrapped. You have Gallente THE armor tankers in Dust, having suits with the highest low slot count and most base armor amounts, Amarr are some shield/armor hybrids with a balanced slot layout, Minmatar holding the prize for the most high slots and best shield tanking setups and Caldari being able to mount a mixed shield/armor tank on their higher end suits but generally preferring shield with their higher base shield amounts. So what gives? How did the racial philosophies get so out-of-whack to their same races in the same New Eden universe? Other than Amarr typically being slower, nothing else matches, and I'm very confused why reinvent the wheel when it was already invented and fleshed out. It should have been: Armor Shield Amarr > Gallente > Minmatar > Caldari But it's not. So, can anyone explain what I'm missing here? Does the Caldari ck.0 suit get a better shield tank with a 4/3 slot layout than a Minmatar mk.0 suit does with 5/2? Does Amarr have a better armor tanking setup with their 3/3 over the similar Gallente gk.0 with 3/4? It feels like I'm missing something....some piece of the puzzle, so if anyone can shed some light on this for me, please do!
Vespasian Andendare Subsonic Synthesis Alpha Wolf Pack 173	Posted - 2013.08.27 15:16:00 - [2] - Quote Funkmaster Whale wrote: The fact that you're comparing an FPS to a submarine simulator presents some problems because you don't have as many variables to work with in DUST so the design philosophies had to kind of be retuned for the game. The variables we're comparing are tank and speed, which are both very easily compared between the two. If anything, Dust presents more variables, with hacking speed, stamina, etc. But strictly based on the tanking and speed variables compared in the OP, it's not hard to compare the two. Caldari having a good mix of shield/speed is a dead-ringer for what Minmatar should have been, and Gallente having more low slots than Amarr really doesn't make any sense. I could understand that they wanted Gallente to have 3 high slots for damage mods (to keep with the Gallente flavor of typically high dps), but they have the same amount of highs as Amarr with more lows. And then Amarr have one less slot than the others, which is confusing to be sure, but it's because they have a larger innate shield buffer? What?
Vespasian Andendare Subsonic Synthesis Alpha Wolf Pack 181	Posted - 2013.08.27 20:19:00 - [3] - Quote Princeps Marcellus wrote: I'm confused about this, too. Out of curiosity, do you think you could tell us about the weapons that the races use, too? Ben Hur (:P) has been doing a good job in this thread, but CCP has already sort of revealed the weapon strategy to us with Assault, Breach, Burst and Tactical. Assault is about higher rate of fire, higher damage close range. Breach is going to be a slower round but high damage at long range. Burst is going to be high accuracy, extremely high burst rof, and tactical will be high single damage shots and medium to medium-long ranges. We can already see these strategies reflected if we take the AR and its 4 variants together. The "regular" Assault Rifle is high damage, good rof at close-to-medium ranges, while the Burst variant fires a quick three-shots to one spot. The Tactical AR is great at delivering a high damage single round at medium to medium-long range and the Breach variant fires slower rof but higher damage individual rounds. Similarly, the Scrambler Rifle (Tactical theme for Amarr base) fires high damage, relatively accurate rounds at medium to medium long ranges, with of course there being the very-high-damage charged round. The Assault SCR is accurate and fully auto, mimicking the AR but firing at longer ranges. If you haven't had a chance to check this weapon out, you should. It feels very futuristic and awesome.
Vespasian Andendare Subsonic Synthesis Alpha Wolf Pack 181	Posted - 2013.08.27 20:41:00 - [4] - Quote Beren Hurin wrote: Vespasian Andendare wrote: Princeps Marcellus wrote: I'm confused about this, too. Out of curiosity, do you think you could tell us about the weapons that the races use, too? Ben Hur (:P) has been doing a good job in this thread, but CCP has already sort of revealed the weapon strategy to us with Assault, Breach, Burst and Tactical. Assault is about higher rate of fire, higher damage close range. Breach is going to be a slower round but high damage at long range. Burst is going to be high accuracy, extremely high burst rof, and tactical will be high single damage shots and medium to medium-long ranges. We can already see these strategies reflected if we take the AR and its 4 variants together. The "regular" Assault Rifle is high damage, good rof at close-to-medium ranges, while the Burst variant fires a quick three-shots to one spot. The Tactical AR is great at delivering a high damage single round at medium to medium-long range and the Breach variant fires slower rof but higher damage individual rounds. Similarly, the Scrambler Rifle (Tactical theme for Amarr base) fires high damage, relatively accurate rounds at medium to medium long ranges, with of course there being the very-high-damage charged round. The Assault SCR is accurate and fully auto, mimicking the AR but firing at longer ranges. If you haven't had a chance to check this weapon out, you should. It feels very futuristic and awesome. People have said that the assault will be the primary gallente weapon, and tactical is effectively the scrambler rifle model, but really I'm not honestly sure if the racial ones fit that mold. I am just roughtly going off of what I know from the weapons devblog, and the little bit I know from Eve weapon systems. Minmatar short range weapons are flexible in how far out they can hit, but they don't hit the hardest at close ranges. Gallente weapons are probably the hardest hitting. Amarr has some of the hardest hitting longer range weapons with some of the better 'damage application'. Caldari weapons also hit hard at medium to long ranges. Well, true, but the weapons Dev Blog in addition to what's currently in game seem to fit the Assault, Tactical, Breach, Burst molds. I think it'd be really helpful if the optimal/effective/falloff ranges of various weapons were displayed, since then we could determine about what range a burst weapon variant operates in relation to a breach one. Overall, though, with what we have to go off of (Dev Blog), and what we have to compare against (AR vs SCAR/SCR vs TAR, Breach as it relates to sniper rifle/Breach variants of weapons), I think we have a good idea of what to expect when the Rail Rifle and Combat Rifle are introduced. I'd expect the Rail Rifle to be a slow RoF, longest range in its class, hard hitting slug and the Combat Rifle to be a high RoF, accurate at medium ranges, medium damage round, with lots of its damage coming from "lots of little strikes" vs one or two heavy-hitting rounds.
Vespasian Andendare Subsonic Synthesis Alpha Wolf Pack 181	Posted - 2013.08.27 20:49:00 - [5] - Quote Zeylon Rho wrote: The comparison is broken in various places as per their stated intent. The "Plasma Blaster Rifle" version of the Tactical rifle (the TAR) has longer range than the Scrambler Rifle (the default Tactical version of the Pulse laser), which is a longer range tech. So, they SAY the techs/variants will work a certain way, and then they make the shortest range tech (blaster) have a longer range version of the long-range rifle than the people that came up with the rifle and using a tech with superior range. I think this is true because of the availability of weapons available in the game currently. Certainly if the SCR had a longer range than a TAR, then the charge-shot, extreme-damage-round nature of the weapon would make it too powerful. So, what long-range, single shot, medium/high damage round-firing rifle do we have in the game? Certainly that'd be the Rail Rifle, but in its stead, CCP substituted the TAR for it, at least for now. I fully expect that when the 4 racial rifle variants are introduced, we'll see another round of balancing that'll greatly reduce the ranges on some of the AR variants, as rightly they should. Of course, this will mean endless QQ threads demanding skill respsecs and spelling the death of the game. Until then, it's hard to balance the paper-rock-scissors of the current lineup, given that there's only two. There's no counter long range, hard-hitting slug coming from a Rail Rifle to shoot that extreme-damage charged-shot of a SCR at medium-long ranges. (Well, technically there's the sniper rifle, but that's in a different class altogether.)
Vespasian Andendare Subsonic Synthesis Alpha Wolf Pack 183	Posted - 2013.08.27 21:08:00 - [6] - Quote Chunky Munkey wrote: I was rather surprised to hear that Gallente were the "up close and personal" type in Eve, since they are the sluggish armour tankers in Dust. (Although perhaps those low slots were intended for sprint mods). The Amarr certainly still are the max HP ppl, and the idea behind the Minmatar seems to be that they sacrifice overall survivability in favour of a being in the right place at the right time. Yep. I guess to further clarify about the races' strategies in Eve, you have to consider their weapons systems too: Amarr prefer slow, very brick tank ships using lasers. Lasers are unique in that even their close range guns can project out damage fairly well to medium-range engagements. So, they make up for being slow by projecting their damage out. Their tanking style is almost exclusively armor with heavy armor tanking being the way to go, which is unlike Gallente, who use armor as well, but their preferred armor tanking style is to buff active armor repair modules on their ships. Their ships are typically fast baseline, although they slow down a bit with armor plates. Fitted with active armor repair modules, though, the ships are fairly agile and can get in close to apply damage with their blasters, which are high damage at extremely close range. They can't project damage anywhere near as good as Amarr, and Gallente typically use their active armor to make sure they can stay throughout the fight as well as keep up with their target. Caldari use missiles and railguns in Eve. Both are long-range weapons, with missiles being medium-long range and railguns being the longest-range turrets out there (they can use Blasters, too, as both blasters and rails are hybrid weapons). They have some other factors that aren't terribly relevant to the conversation here, but suffice to say that rails have higher damage per second than the other long range at the longest range. They are typically slower ships, though, and they are near-universally shield tanked. They prefer a shield buffer, which is unlike Minmatar who prefer an active shield tank. They don't really have any active shield tanking module in Dust currently, but when they do, it'll be the shield-booster found on vehicles. Shield boosters begin repairing the shield immediately (regardless of it being shot at). Minmatar can use autocannon weapons (that are likely to be the weapons in Dust for the near foreseeable future), which are high rate of fire, lower damage at medium to just above medium ranges. Their ships are the fastest around, and their strategy is to use that speed to stay away from the enemy while their autocannons pick away at the enemy. I'd love to say that any of that matters, but as the title of the thread indicates, the races in Eve apparently don't share any of the same mentality with those same races in Dust, so take the above with a grain of salt. I wanted to share how the slow brick Amarr make sense in the context of how their weapon systems interact with their philosophy overall. There are obviously more factors to consider, but I think that's a pretty good synopsis.
Vespasian Andendare Subsonic Synthesis Alpha Wolf Pack 183	Posted - 2013.08.27 21:27:00 - [7] - Quote Beren Hurin wrote: You just can't expect things to work exactly like Eve. To have an armor tank that can sustain incoming fire at close range would be rather overpowered. Even shield tanks have to get out after taking heavy fire, but their regen rate lets them get into battle quickly. I think its fair that to get the same kind of regen on its armor as shield tanks get is to either have deployed reps, or rely on logistics, which ends up providing an even better repping speed. After all the gallente logistics is arguably the better logi-hull. Oh, I don't. I expected some variation. I was moreso explaining racial philosophies in Eve, because there's many factors that go into how armor tanking vs shield tanking works for spaceships, but some posters here may not be aware of them. I was asking questions like "Well if Amarr are tanky and slow, how do we put damage on their target??" I just didn't expect that racial philosophies with respect to their innate qualities or "flavors" would go away. Honestly, the idea that Amarr are the best balanced shield/armor race made me do a double take. Caldari suddenly being fleet-footed had me scratching my head. Minmatar I think represent the best overall of their reflection of their Eve counterparts with their speed, but the inherent weakness that comes with it is questionable--but certainly understandable given that they'll avoid a lot of damage with speed--also questionable is their 5 shield prototype suits. I'm sure when the racial variants on weapons/suits are fleshed out, the total picture will begin to make more sense. Reading what you wrote about the racial qualities currently in Dust with relation to stamina, fittings, etc. cleared the picture up somewhat. Don't get me wrong: it's nice to approach Dust and learn "new" racial philosophies....it's just if you tell me Amarr are some shield loving, land lovers, then I'll call you a liar every time. :P