Ransurias

This is probably a very unpopular opinion since Ark / Atlas players have this peculiar fascination with playing zookeeper to tame random wild animals and make them into pets, but... come on. It's a pirate game, and yet the overall state of balance fundamentally and heavily focuses on this concept of creature taming. Want to farm treasure maps? Better have a tame, because soldiers of the damned are too numerous and tanky to deal with on foot and are inexplicably immune to swivel guns, cannons, etc. Want to farm resources? Get that tame out there for carrying capacity. Base raiding? You guessed it -- tames. PvP? May the better tame win. Everything revolves around this stupid taming concept when you aren't sailing. Apart from sailing and shipbuilding, it's arguably the most fundamental concept of the game. And even when you're at sea, your ship ends up looking like a zoo, with elephants or bears or hogs on your ship deck. It's just... ridiculous. Everywhere you go and everything you do revolves around this weird pet mechanic that most other MMOs simply don't have.

I'm not so sure about all that. I attacked a parked brigandine last night with greek fire, and it took a solid minute or so to take out two front planks. The damage is decent, but there's just no way you can sink a big ship as fast as you're describing with just one swivel gun. I can't speak for its anti-personnel capabilities, but the damage to actual planks doesn't seem nearly as godlike as some people are making it out to be. Maybe the brigandine I was shooting had upgraded planks, or maybe brigandine planks are tougher than schooner planks (although both ships use medium planks). You can shoot explosive barrels out of medium cannons, and those do insane damage -- around 5,000 plank health. Maybe they used cannons while you guys were dead? I really wish I had captured footage. I'll probably make that my mission tonight or tomorrow. --- EDIT: here's a video showcasing greek fire in addition to most other weapons. Greek fire is at 3:55. Notice how much damage explosive barrels do later on in the video.

My counterargument is that flamethrowers are currently extremely powerful, and arguably overpowered. The idea is to get in close, deal maximum DPS, and get out fast rather than use cannons, which are slow and loud (although they do have much more range). The medium cannons are mostly there for longer range engagements when getting in close is difficult or impossible, such as when we're chasing a fleeing ship. As for the sloop's speed and maneuverability, you might be interested to know that the sloop is actually a relatively sluggish ship compared to schooners or brigandines with speed sails. So... if I'm attacking a parked ship that's harassing my base, I might as well have flamethrowers to maximize my DPS before the enemy can react. When it comes to "big guns," the flamethrower is pretty much the biggest gun there is at the moment. It might not have much range, but it's super powerful.

Thanks! I'll probably be adding some more cannons on the back as well. Possibly a large cannon that could be used while the sloop is facing away from the enemy while running away from danger.

Cool! Here's my current design. 3 flamethrowers should be pretty solid DPS against most ships, right? I'm also using wooden roofs and ceilings as armor plating. https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/957479470588896281/4127DBC3EC5A423AD4788DA6C6132407A678E9FE/ https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/957479470588896097/A4D1AAEE2E6C57A387671C99A438377D5BDBCA25/

Thinking of adding a few swivel guns to my sloop's front in addition to medium cannons and loading all of them with liquid flame. How quickly can this take down ships compared to regular cannons?

I've lost two ramshackle sloops thus far to ships of the damned, and even in favorable wind conditions, it seems almost impossible to outrun them. To address this, I'm currently making a standard sloop with a medium speed sail that should be quite a bit faster, but I'd like to have some extra protection in addition to greater speed. Has anyone tested the effectiveness of using sloped wooden ceilings as armor, sort of like in this video (without the cannons and a few other adjustments)? I was thinking of using ceilings for the back of my sloop and leaving the front exposed for weight / storage / aesthetic reasons. This could be made into a small room for my ship's bed so that I don't have to stick it on the lower deck.

While I certainly don't hate the game, I'm not fond of the bizarre, easily fixable balance issues that plague official servers. Fire arrows are still tremendously overpowered because their AoE deals percentage-based damage, which the devs can't seem to understand as evidenced by pointless band-aid nerfs that fail to address the underlying issue. Alpha animals are completely ridiculous and altogether too common, and firearms were essentially sacrificed in PvE to make them more viable as PvP weapons against armor, which was an unfair blindside for PvE players. The game is literally in a state where shooting a fire arrow under the feet of an "alpha animal" can kill it within a few arrows while countless gunshots to the head are required to bring them down using firearms. Metal armor is apparently combustible since walking in a fire arrow's AoE causes an insane damage over time effect, even while wearing plate. Many, if not most, animals have no headshot multiplier, so shooting a giraffe in the head is the same as shooting it in the leg. A lowly turtle can often survive a rifle bullet to the face. All of these issues shouldn't be tremendously difficult to fix. The fact that they haven't been fixed says a lot about the studio, and if pointing that out is tantamount to "hating on the game," fair enough. I mean, I don't know. I guess it's harsh to expect so much after just a few weeks, but it's really hard to wake up one day to find that your main implement for dealing with the abundance of predators received a ~40% damage nerf to satisfy PvP players who thought that guns didn't do enough damage to plate armor.

Reload speed isn't a problem. They're flintlock weapons. However, they desperately need to do more damage. At the very least, giving every creature a headshot hitbox would significantly improve things. It makes no sense that giraffes, bears, crocodiles, rhinos, elephants, and boars have no headshot hitbox, and it really emphasizes just how insignificant 75 damage is (which is the new base damage of the flintlock pistol). Two flintlock pistol bullets isn't enough to bring down many creatures in this game, which is fairly retarded given how insanely long it takes to reload them (not to mention how many skillpoints firearms cost). They're not completely useless due to their long-range / hitscan potential, but they're still extremely underwhelming right now.

Early access, brah™ But seriously, though -- the current state of weapon balance is fairly ridiculous. It should never, under any circumstances, take 20+ rifle bullets to take down an animal, even if it has the word "alpha" in front of its name. As for fire arrows, they're overpowered due to the fact that they deal percentage-based damage that bypasses any and all resistance values (armor), whereas every other weapon in the game deals "flat" damage and is subject to resistance modifiers. It's really quite befuddling that Grapeshot hasn't realized or figured this out, and it's equally befuddling that firearms had to be further gimped in PvE for the sake of PvP balance in patch 10. It's also unclear as to why melee hasn't received a direly-needed buff. Life is full of mysteries, I suppose. I'm more or less resigned at this point.

Yeah, so where's the patch notes?

Not seeing the patch notes anywhere. This was a client-side update, so there's liable to be some interesting changes.

Weapon balance. I can NOT overemphasize how asinine weapon balance currently is in ATLAS. The basic underlying logic in the current game is so fundamentally, mind-bendingly twisted and warped that it makes about as much sense as a black hole's singularity does to our current conception of physics. I mean, we're at the point where fire arrows (which deal percentage-based damage) can take out an alpha creature in seconds while firearms can pelt the same creatures with dozens of brain-scrambling headshots without bringing it down. IT MAKES NO SENSE. And more importantly, it has terrible gameplay implications.

I had the same experience with a level 17 turtle today, except I was using a carbine. It's insanity!

Firearms definitely need to be beefed back up in PvE. They're insanely weak now.

Bump.

"Clearly, this had some knock-on effects on how players dealt with creatures (tamed and wild), which we expected but to know the full extent of the changes it is best witnessed in a live environment. The gameplay/balance team are consuming your feedback and will make adjustments when necessary, it’s possible that there may be some potential tweaks too with some multipliers which are being looked at right now. Not going to confirm anything is being changed right this instant, but just acknowledge that we’re aware of the feedback and it is actively being discussed internally." ------------------- Put mildly, the firearm changes were atrociously bad for PvE-focused players. Please listen to the majority of feedback on this issue and give firearms their original damage values against wild creatures. I really do appreciate the hard work that goes into developing and patching an EA game, and I think Atlas has generally improved substantially over the last couple of weeks, but I'm a bit miffed and boggled by the firearm changes. Why screw PvE players over so that PvP-focused players can defeat player armor more easily? The flintlock pistol is essentially a potato gun at this point, and the carbine isn't much better if you can't get headshots. The blunderbuss was rendered virtually useless. The firearm changes make it much harder to hunt on power stone islands. Higher-level predators and monsters could survive multiple headshots before dying even before the changes, so I shudder to think how weak they feel now. If the intention was to make firearms PvP implements and discourage their use in PvE, why not just say that in the patch notes instead of giving PvE players an unexpected and rude awakening? By your own words, the damage changes were "expected," and you have no intention of making any changes "instantly," so it's clear that reduced firearm damage in PvE was intentional to some degree or another -- or, at the very least, it was considered a worthwhile sacrifice for the sake of PvP balance. Nowhere in the patch notes was it stated that firearm base damage would be dramatically reduced. But here's what really gets me. I don't recall a single thread complaining about the effectiveness of firearms against wild creatures, so why fix what isn't broken and drastically reduce gun damage against wild creatures? Why? I mean, why? Isn't it somehow possible to make firearms more useful against armor without gimping their effectiveness in PvE, which is where almost all of my firearm usage occurs? I'd bet my house that if a poll were put up right now, the overwhelming majority of people would agree that firearm damage didn't need to be scaled down in PvE. I'd also be willing to bet my house that most firearm usage in this game occurs in PvE against wild creatures. So again, why screw over so many people just to satisfy a segment of the playerbase that routinely engages in PvP with firearms? Really, though. Why? It makes no sense!

Doesn't really seem fair that PvE-focused firearm users should be shafted at the expense of making guns more "piercing" against player armor, so I'm going to go ahead and post a reminder that guns, especially pistols and blunderbusses, are extremely weak right now. I really just want firearms to go back to the way they were against creatures. It's not fun when a wolf or a lion miraculously survives a rifle headshot with 30% health remaining and charges you like a mad, raging bull.

You can make fairly convincing-looking dwarves / hobbits / gnomes due to the liberal nature of the character creator, you know.

As mentioned earlier, being able to move while swinging a melee weapon is the major change that needs to happen in order for melee to be viable. A damage buff would also be welcome (it also sucks), but being able to actually hit your target is the most important thing at the moment.

As of patch 10, carbines are no longer visible while on the player's back.

I don't get it. Wasn't this patch supposed to buff firearms in PvP by making armor less useful against bullets?

Some enemies have decent headshot hitboxes, such as wolves and lions. Others don't seem to have headshot hitboxes / multipliers at all. I don't think I recall a single instance where headshots gave me extra damage against bears, giraffes, elephants, boars, and rhinos.

Well, isn't the damage percentage-based to a certain degree? Doesn't matter how much health a mob has.

Rifles can no longer one-shot many level 20+ predators.