currently scoundrels pistol damage is lack luster at best in comparison to weapons that are a lower level than it. Even when using the super for a damage buff it will rarely do enough for it to be worth having on a shard run, This is a disappointing thing seeming it is a fun mechanics based class with a lot of interesting mechanics too. but the damage on the other hand is where it goes down hill. it sucks.
There is a dire need for a flat damage buff to this class (I’m not talking about pvp, orbus is a PvE game with PvP features). I have a +4 legendary I have for a while but I just don’t use it. with a rank 5 crits land at around 21-25k ish (from what I remember non crits land at about 19k ish.) (you normally just hit crits when they get going) (also without tiles procking) this is a very low amount of damage for a legendary +4. when you see other classes hitting for 30K per hit you tend to notice the drop when you switch them out.
yeah it can be a good debuff class but its meant to be a DPS it has the armour break and flint card but even with them it active you are not getting a high enough dps for it to be worth swapping for a mage, shaman or ranger.
There is also the issue that you have to take a moment to charge and curve the shots, this means you loose dps, but what happens when you miss, you need to recharge the shot and try to hit again. there is more of a dps lose.
This class is about loosing DPS at the moment, yeah the other classes have there down sides. shaman needs to get close, rangers need to be far away. mages get there shots blocked and cant easily move and cast (telecasting is a thing though but not all mages can do it.)
so please give it the buff it needs, give one of the most fun and interesting classes it needs.
it’s primarily about the skill, not the weapon tier. scoundrel has the 2nd or 3rd highest damage potential of the DPS classes, can’t remember exactly, but ask @Scott he did a bunch of math on that and is afaik the highest DPS scoundrel in the game atm.
The class that actually needs a buff is ranger which has the lowest damage potential by quite a bit.
Max scoundrel is currently on the third spot in dps (Edit: after adding some more tweaking on classes: scoundrel, ranger and shaman are basically equal dps). Won’t say I am done having all factors in. The ranger is also very close to scoundrel in my current calculations. I wouldn’t jump to conclusions that a buff of ranger relative to scoundrel is 100% nessecary just yet.
About buffing scoundrel, I would say the problem lies more in how the class is designed it is not too obvious how to play max dps on. And the difficulty of the class is a range of factors which in my opinion should be improved uppon:
- The curving is very hard on itself. Add the factor in that the velocity needed for a max damage boost curve is way too high. And not visible for anyone not double checking the numbers and math. There is no good rank indication visible to help with that.
- making useful tilesets while not relying on another class is very very very difficult in comparison to other classes. Its a good ~24% damage lost for not having constant good proccing tilesets. Which no solo scoundrel has.
What doesn’t help for scoundrels either but can stay:
- timing charged shots losing dps if not. Not picked up by many in the beginning. Costs most your concentration of playng the class…
- add some difficult math optimal card management to it and dps lowers again for most scoundrels.
this is written in the post and one of my reasons for saying it needs a buff. yes ranger needs a dps buff but this is about scoundrels awful dps in comparison to its level of machanics. this post was just to say that scoundrel needs a buff and reasons for it.
I’ve heard you and Metris both mention curving being difficult. What headset are you using? I’m using the old Rift and have no trouble whatsoever getting rank 5s on mobs and bosses. I’m genuinely curious if different headsets/controllers may be affecting this.
its fine on vive for me (though I should help rule out vive ether that or its just me)
No it’s not? I don’t have difficulty curving on most bosses, I curve horizontally, mostly hitting IV-V (Rift S and Original, I switch between those). As for vertical curves though (trash), forget it, as for velocity/force, forget it, I tried with several of the guys hitting that off more easy, but I simply lack the physical strength for that. And after 100s hours flowing into this class, no, there is apparently no technique for verticals which isn’t making my wrist or ellbows snap, for me.
I gave up on the class, frankly, I play it on the very few bosses where I must and use it for farming, mostly just doing straight shots to save energy. Red mobs are not possible this way (with my +4 weapon ha-ha), I farm them with the musky. This topic has been brought up ridiculously often since the ranger buff. Rangers got buffed shortly after the Beta, Scoundrels were left out, since then the numbers are off in logs, by far. It is really that simple, nothing to riddle about it.
That 1 or 2 players found techniques getting along despite, or people posting - sorry, totally fantastic - theory-crafted or fully-buffed numbers does not change the fact that 99% of scoundrels we play with in real dungeon environments are too low dmg in logs, compared with everyone else (including new rangers). Most of them left anyway so who cares. I am tired of this discussion really.
PS: And for those stating in the beginning oooh ya know it is just a high-skill class, well, if after months and months barely anyone is figuring how that is so, it’s perhaps not the players who should adapt. There’s a buff needed already, the imbalance of this class, compared with others, has scared many enough away. One single scoundrel in the game who does not wanna be named so much 
will then likely compete with mages in dmg, but this is only fair and the big exception imo. Now that I got details on what he all does to reach that dmg I don’t think it can easily be copied by anyone.
Na using a rift too. Rank V doesn’t say your getting the max damage boost of a rank though. (I guess I just suck)
I am afraid though if you give scoundrel a plain buff overall to make it in-line dps with other classes for the average players, that you will create another mage class where the very few do more damage then other ppl of other classes.
theoretically max human damage under perfect conditions doesn’t mean anything to 99% of players. simple fact is scoundrel has been in the gutter since the nerf except for pvp
The numbers have not changed since Cam worked out the math some time ago. Rangers are around 30% behind scoundrels. And from what the devs said Cam’s numbers were pretty close to what they had. The problem with scoundrel is almost no one plays it well.
I’m still waiting for ranger dps to be balanced.
Scott can beat me with scoundrel, and I have yet to find any other ranger that can.
of there isn’t a single player on orbus that can play the class well then that’s an even more fundamental problem that should be addressed
I only beat you on boss 5 which happens because you are probably wasting dps on searching for the add which is more bad on my side than yours. Survival is more important than dps (in that situation). I can not beat you any other boss.
Cam’s numbers if what I remember he said to me is based on only ~2 hours of theorycrafing. Which is not enough to get every factor in. And the numbers did change after his theorycrafting. The ranger got buffed, scoundrel got lowered. Unless you talking about him testing everything out again after the nerve which I am not aware of.
That is why I want to see some fundamental feedback and reward systems brought into the class more obviously. Less aggressive curving needed, better curving ranking feedback, better shooting max damage feedback. More consistent tiles for scoundrel tilesets (storing a card tile? and more), etc. The problem is not the potential, but how bad the class is in communicating the lack of optimal usage.
Sorry, in which universe is that happening? I say really nothing to this (dang now I did after all) and also not to “Scott can beat me” lol. Yes he possibly can, he can beat alot of people, on alot of classes, while noone else can though.
Is it so important to hold everyone else down to be the best, even for the prize of the game getting more and more empty…? This is not about balance, seriously, it is about power and the crave to have as few competition as possible. Fun fact, the ranger buff has been done on your request. Are there any Scoundrels you even play with, regularly? Most elite guilds don’t even care because yea, there are none in the elite guilds, normally. Oh wait, YES there is one single Scoundrel in the game who is - not /very/ close - but at least on the way to those theorycrafted numbers; with all tricks possible, though. No one else is there.
But sure that is a problem of “no one” playing the class well. Except one. Does that really make any sense, is there any logic in that??? No. All this is not about the game, not about balance, there is no logic or “numbers” in it. Any such dummy numbers don’t help ffs, if 99% of the players can’t reach them, in their everyday play of this class. The reasons for that, with dungeon design, distances, everything and everyone blocking curves, mobs dying from party members before you even got a chance to unfold any combo dmg on trash etc. etc. are all not included in the maths.
And why do people even care about all this who are not playing Scoundrels? Guilds should be happy over every buff of whatever class. But nope, this is about power, about competition between classes (which I personally find ridiculous, in itself) and people not wanting others to top them - like, beware, a scoundrel could top mages, after 100s of hours in (why actually not…) … but. omg PREVENT!! 
Cam was able to do 40k dps on a scoundrel without curving any shots or using any cards. If you factor those in a perfectly played scoundrel can pull about 75-80k dps. This is after the last balancing changes. If no scoundrels are able to do that then either they are not good enough or the class is too hard or both. The best mages are able to do about the same dps even after the triplicity nerf. I have seen shaman pull numbers in that range too. Rangers top out at about 55-60k if played perfectly.
What you see ppl do says nothing about the max potential of that class. Those comparisons aren’t even on the same lvl. One is a controlled environment with all sorts of buffs and advantages. The other is just what you see ppl do. It says nothing to me.
I would say though there would be 1 thing which will prevent ranger in current state to be equal max shaman and bs bard-tiled-scoundrel and that is their current tilesets.
on a test dummy.
(with fire card and flint card)
I don’t think you can get to a consistent 40 dps maybe per hit but not dps.
(these were charge shots NOT with the 4 charge perk)
And this is the other universe I was talking about. One person who’s not even playing the class sits there for half an hour in front of a dummy, ads all possible fantasy buffs, posts a number and everyone repeats it ever since. This has nothing to do with real numbers, not with dungeon mechanics and I could not care less what wonders people do in front of a dummy. It is irrelevant for dungeon runs, if it can’t be reproduced there, consistently, over a long time, by others.
I come from everyday numbers, checking every log, after nearly every run, looking at my dungeon count that’s over 1k boss fights, easily. I don’t ever see 40k (Scott excluded and I am still not entirely sure what he does), folks are curving, using cards and what not.
Looking at the guild I do see all rangers in there, which makes dungeons harder due to the lack of diversity. And that is not because that class is so cool or easy (that is shaman, however, not possible to play that one everywhere), but because they get rewarded for their playtime and efforts put in. Half the new members came as Scoundrels, due to my impression.
None of these stayed around or made it in the core group, while nearly all rangers did. Scoundrels we can’t really take anywhere, they are doing 10k dps and less at the beginning, with lots of practice perhaps 20k or bit more, one finally reached that, after months, but that is it. But most don’t stick, they are long gone, because being significantly below everyone with no real clue on how to change that sucks, majorly.
The only class even less rewarding is mage, new mages are gone even faster, doing a whooping dmg of 4k or 6k in dungeons, means, the group 4mans this. However, it’s known that this is a high skill class and countless mages prove that it’s worth sticking to it, with numbers every other class can only dream of (shaman included, it got a definite hard cap related to orb spawn times). I can not see that for scoundrel.
And while for some this is only all about whose e-pen is longer in the very high regions of the endgame, for us it’s a matter of getting 5 people together on an evening or not. Balance issues are not only impacting at the top, but all the way down to the bottom. I don’t know a game where I saw so many people leaving couple weeks after hitting max level; and it’s mostly same classes and no wonder, if these classes are that unrewarding.