i keep hearing about how there broken or suck and i don't know why they look good to me i like there skills and such and it looks like they work well how are they broken?
Making touch attacks all the time with x4 crit multiplier is the start of the problems, I mean by themselves maybe not a big deal but combined with magic guns, dex mod damage, deadly aim, ect....it gets to alot of damage.
I have a game with a gunslinger and a paladin the paladin has a spell that lets the gunslinger share his smite evil, one shot killed an evil big bad guy on a surprise round with a lucky crit. Good story but was a wake up call as to how powerful a gunslinger and in this case good teamwork make for fast death.
ah there too powerful i thought everyone was saying they just didn't work like they were to weak
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/facepalm
Many, many threads have shown that gunslingers are powerful when their situation lines up perfectly, but can be matched by equally optimized characters of other classes. Let me save you the trouble of getting 4 guys up here to make that point with DPR calculations.
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Yeah, if you read the threads the people who claim they are overpowered produce builds that are wholly one-sided thin glass cannons and pit them against, say, a barbarian built to sunder and who chooses rage powers that don't help damage.
Also, people underestimate misfires. A gunslinger can't get past misfires until level 13, which will see a mild number of games, and that's only if they take an archetype. A misfire breaks the gun, half damage, 20x2 multiplier. If you misfire again, it explodes. A build like most of the ones you see built around here with like 10 attacks at level 12 will misfire at least once, which destroys the damage you will deal. Also, most of those attacks will be at single-digit or negative modifiers with what you have to do to deal that much damage.
tl;dr, No, they're not broken. Try one out in a real game and you'll see.
People downplay the misfires too.
You roll 1 with a sword or bow you miss that sucks but you keep swinging and just deal.
You roll a misfire with a firearm it's generally a full stop there or risk the gun exploding. Sure the pistol only has this problem on a 1 -- but if you want to get more than one shot a round in you are going to be using alchemical cartridges which puts you up to a misfire of 2... meaning 10% of your shots are going to break your gun raising the misfire rate by 4 (2 at later levels for a gunslinger).
This combined with the a general lack of damage boosters and accuracy boosters for the gunslinger means he can just manage to average out with a fighter on damage if he uses a lot of shenanigans to get there (which eats into wealth a lot).
meh I would know but i never really get the chance to play no one in my area plays and play by post has everyone and there mom posting chars so it's hard to get into them
As a DM, the only recurrent issue I have with Gunslingers is that they require choosing a fairly specific set of character options by certain levels in order to function normally within the game, something that's not obvious to players who aren't either the sort to just scour every inch of the source material or aren't otherwise super experienced with the game. The fact that an vital cog to making the class function is buried under what looks like a weird alternative ammunition item family's intro paragraph in the middle of some fluff text is crazy. For something that functions in a relatively simple manner, firearm use is shot through (no pun intended) with trappy options. I mean, how many people thought that firearms were for shooting *actual bullets* before they flipped back and forth around the firearm rules for a while?
(They're also ludicrously expensive at existing for the first few levels. I do consider it a minor flaw of the class design that they start out kind of complicated and get simpler and simpler as you level.)
I've never had any power-level concerns with them, though. Is a well-constructed combat-focused gunslinger sometimes the biggest damage monster in the party? Sure. I don't have the slightest issue with that. That's kind of what they do. They're not out-of-band, or even at the higher end. (They are swingy, though. A gunslinger crit can do a terrifying amount of damage, and a misfire early in an attack sequence can spike their damage in the other direction.)
No issues here. Everybody can dominate in the right situation. Nothing new under the sun.
Joyd you are joking, right?
You want to use firearms but reading the relevant section of the rules is a unacceptable task? ...
I understand the rules. Most players understand the rules eventually. But the firearms section is like eight pages of rules text. That alchemical cartridges reduce load time is six pages in, after a massive amount of of random stuff and before a bunch more. In my experience, it's most players' expectation that a gun shoots bullets. I don't think reading the rules about firearms is an unacceptable amount of work; I think that critical information necessary for playing a gunslinger is scattered around in non-obvious places and is potentially easy to overlook. I believe this because I've DM'd for a lot of players, and see a lot more trapped gunslingers given to me as first-drafts of character sheets than most classes, including classes I'd expect to be way more confusing, like alchemist or summoner. I believe gunslinger to be the base class that requires you to make the most specific choices just to get a character that functions how someone would expect a character to function, something that's exacerbated by the organization of the firearms section. Other people's experiences may differ.
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@Joyd: Yeah, they're not nearly as bad as all that.
Basically, you need to read the Firearms Rules, which show that you need Rapid Reload and Alchemical Cartridges. Aside from that, all you need are the standard ranged combat Feats. And the Alchemical Cartridges aren't even necessary for 1st-5th level Pistol users, all they need early on is Rapid Reload.
Though I suppose Deft Shootist, and later (at 11th) Signature Deed are potentially awesome, too. Both right there listed as Grit Feats, though.
I guess there's Reliable Weapons, but much like Furious Weapons for Barbarians, those are more really cool than they are necessary.
...
I do agree on the potentially high expenses at early levels, though. That's a little annoying.
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Sorry Joyd , but to me this sound like someone saying: "The archery rules are scattered in different sections: combat, equipment, feats, so they are confusing".
If the player is a novice that need to the taken to the game for the first time there are simpler classes. If he want to play a gunslinger it is reasonable for him to read the relevant rules and if still has problems the GM can help him. But not looking how your missile weapon ammunitions work? That don't speak to me of bad rules, it speak of lazy players.
What is the player doing to have this kind of trouble? He look the weapon table on page 138 and say "I want this" and don't care looking the other material in the section?
Under firearms rules, p. 136:
Ammunition: Firearm ammunition takes two forms: either black powder and shot (either bullets or pellets) or cartridges. Unlike other types of ammunition, firearm ammunition is destroyed when it is used, and has no chance of being retrieved on a miss. No part of a cartridge can be reused to create new cartridges. Firearm ammunition cannot be treated with poison, unless you are using a pitted bullet (see page 141).
an handy reference to the fact that the firearms user need ammunitions and where he can find he ammunition description.
Hey, all I can do is report what I've seen, and I've seen players have more trouble putting together what they need to make a gunslinger perform as they want than most other classes, and overlooking alchemical cartridge reload reduction time seems much more common than overlooking material of comparable importance to other classes. Other people may have different experiences. I do think that alchemical cartridges reducing reload time is in a kind of oblique place for something so important to the class, but maybe that's not something other people have run into. This isn't theoretical; it's something my players have historically (well, since Ultimate Combat came out, so the history isn't that long) stumbled over. I'm not saying that putting together a gunslinger that works how you want it to is a mystery no man can fathom, just that in my experience it trips people up a bit, and I trace that to vital material being in places where people might not think to look. (Or might not recognize as important; 90% of the firearms rules are things that a player would be much better off not latching onto.) I think some players peg bullets and blackpowder as the "normal" ammunition and alchemical cartridges as the "weird blunted smoke arrow with dye on it for weird special situations" ammunition, even though that's not the case.
It's very possible my sample - which isn't massive - is just a bit unusual. (I know, for example, that I've never had any issues with anyone building a legal eidolon, which is something that famously trips up a lot of people.)