They have a skill for that :D but I'm sure your ion pistol won't be a problem since you maxed it out XD

I think the cal bonus also needs looking at.. Sorry but reload speed doesn't mean much for a long range weapon.. Though I like the idea of a rof bonus for gal.

I've got an ALT skilled into level 4 Gal Assaults and maxed shotguns. And I find sniper shotguns are an interesting thing indeed.

Rof would trump all of those bonuses.

- Caldassault bonus : 20% reduction charge time of rail weapon per level (=> caldassault would become the only suit which has a RR without charge time. Very interresting. But other people who use the RR have more charge time)***

What if we give gal a % bonus to optimal range? Or RoF.

Flies in the face of range standardizations, not to mention that improved accuracy actually improves DPS at range (which truthfully makes the current bonus better than the proposed bonus). Honestly I'd rather wait to see how HF Charlie plays out more than anything, because I'm convinced that the current gal assault bonus is ****ing amazing, you can hipfire TAC AR's quite accurately and with no real kick with high levels of assault, ar and sharpshooter.

I think a lot of people are pre-emptively trying to 'fix' something that isn't actually broken. The bonus is and always has been good, the suit the bonus was placed on was terrible (like all assaults for a while in comparison to the huge passive suit benefits that scouts had), it's like "what's the point in having +9001% rifle damage on a suit that only has 1hp, moves at 1m a second and has the hitbox of a heavy". If you address the suit itself being bad, the bonus starts to stand on its own.

If we get to a point where all other things being roughly equal, I want people to look at the assault and go "This is the suit I want, because it makes my weapon function *better*" without just looking at damage, that has more or less always been the case for the amarr assault - where the SCR/Laser can be used on other suits but if you want to be the murderking you really want the assault.

Regarding Gallente Assault:

RoF bonus would certainly make sense in the context of "RoF is king in CQC" but it is also a direct dps increase, something that has been strictly avoided for all of the other assault classes... not sure if that is a trend worth breaking?

I think a bonus to damage falloff would be pretty solid for the Gal Assault too, if its possible on the back end to change it. We could do this in two ways, either

1. Increase effective range by 5% per level, which smooths out the damage fall off after optimal giving an increase to damage without increasing the optimal range, something that was removed in Chromosome because it was kind of overpowered... however... increasing effective range to 87.5m might give a bit of a chromosome sharpshooter effect as well.

2. Decrease the damage penalty applied by being outside of optimal. This may be technically more complicated though, but if the reduction at max effective is 70%, I wonder if you could reduce that by X% per level and the linear drop off would remain intact. Doubt it though... its probably quite a bit more complicated than it looks.

or...

3. +3% Effective range per level. Increases effective range to 80.5m from 70m and gives the same damage curve as a 5% reduction to falloff damage penalty (assuming its linear) up to 70m.

Would any Gal Assaults care to comment? Curious what people think of this.

Here is a quick spreadsheet I whipped up and a plot of the damage curves.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MquvowOpdjVS36p2ySs4gW3TlvxRDTQWrWFOmDMNJBM/edit?usp=sharing