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I'm making a rogue who I want to be using a firearm equivalent of a Shortbow. A Reload 0 ranged weapon that has the whole firearm aesthetic going on. The Long Air Repeater seems to be the closest I can get, but it's Simple so it's a step down in damage compared to the Shortbow. It's frustrating that my rogue has no good reason to use the thing instead of the shortbow, and if I want to go up to Martial with a gun I have to accept Reload 1.
Why aren't there any Repeating martial firearms?
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Yeah, I'm okay with paying a bit of a feat tax for flavor, I'd just rather not have to deal with reload 1 on this character.
Why do you think it would have lower damage? Repeating is straight up worse than regular Reload 0 shortbows since every few rounds you have to spend your full turn reloading.
A theoretical martial air repeater could be 1d6 repeating with no other traits and would be significantly worse than a shortbow. There'd be room to leave it at 1d6 AND add another trait.
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Why aren't there any Repeating martial firearms?
Well there IS one, it's just got a reload of 1: Repeating Heavy Crossbow.
Yeah, I'm okay with paying a bit of a feat tax for flavor, I'd just rather not have to deal with reload 1 on this character.
Why do you think it would have lower damage? Repeating is straight up worse than regular Reload 0 shortbows since every few rounds you have to spend your full turn reloading.
A theoretical martial air repeater could be 1d6 repeating with no other traits and would be significantly worse than a shortbow. There'd be room to leave it at 1d6 AND add another trait.
Agreed. I think that the aversion to power creep is a bit high on the design of firearms in general.
Compared to a sling, a Flintlock Pistol has a lower damage die, a Flintlock Musket needs 2 hands, and a Dueling Pistol needs martial weapon proficiency. In compensation these firearms get Concussive and Fatal traits.
Instead of Propulsive that the sling gets. I don't feel like doing a ton of math to determine if the extra crit damage from the Fatal trait is overall better than the improved standard and crit damage from the Propulsive trait (or rather, what STR bonus would be needed to shift the balance). The point is that it is a tradeoff already. Just from the difference in traits.
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As a GM I would maybe go a middle ground keep the Normal air repeater but make a hombrew mod for the gun.
Over Pressurized Cartridge- An air repeater with this modification has a higher stopping power granting it the Fatal d8 trait and increaseing its range to 60ft.
Really emphasize that the weapon isn't normally a killer but in tbe right hands shooting the right spot it becomes devastating.
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A theoretical martial air repeater could be 1d6 repeating with no other traits and would be significantly worse than a shortbow. There'd be room to leave it at 1d6 AND add another trait.
The problem is Paizo made a 1d6 repeating weapon with no other traits. The repeating hand crossbow.
For some reason, they marked it down as an advanced weapon despite clearly not being budgeted as one.
Because that weapon exists, there's no "room" in the budget for a martial repeating firearm.
Trait budgets say a martial weapon should be 'one step' better than a simple weapon and advanced weapons should theoretically be one step better than martial counterpats too.
But there's already only one step between an LAR and a repeating hand crossbow. There's only one die size and no extra traits between them, which is the gap between a typical simple and martial weapon.
Why they marked it down as an advanced weapon when it's clearly not is really unclear to me, but they printed it twice that way.
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I don't really think there is. Paizo values agile and a die size roughly the same, so there isn't much of a gap between the regular air repeater and the repeating hand crossbow either outside range.
Splitting the difference would mean trying to cram something lika 45 foot version of the same weapon into that category, which just feels too close to both weapons to really make sense.
It would make more sense to just fix the repeating hand crossbow's proficiency.
Now, two things. first, I have done the math, fatal is pretty much equal to an increased damage die for everyone with marital prof, slightly weaker for anyone with caster prof, and stronger for anyone with fighter prof. So balance wise it's just a choice between propulsion vs concussive for the flintlock pistol, which is a fair trade. a fair trade for all of those guns to be honest.
Interesting. Because I was comparing Propulsive to the increased damage die. Propulsive adds half your STR bonus. So a +2 STR is approximately equal to a 2-point increase in die size (d6 -> d8). Though that only holds true when you are only rolling one die.
Now the second point is that every weapon has a trade off. literally no two weapons share the exact same statistics and traits. if a weapon would be a clone of another weapon, that weapon never gets published.
Yeah, I don't think anyone wants repeated weapon statistics - though it wouldn't be terrible for firearms vs bow/crossbow weapons since those end up falling in different genres of games.
As for overall differences, the reload 0 firearms would generally still have a capacity limit of some variety. So they could only reload 0 for a limited time - while the shortbow/longbow can do so indefinitely.
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A theoretical martial air repeater could be 1d6 repeating with no other traits and would be significantly worse than a shortbow. There'd be room to leave it at 1d6 AND add another trait.The problem is Paizo made a 1d6 repeating weapon with no other traits. The repeating hand crossbow.
For some reason, they marked it down as an advanced weapon despite clearly not being budgeted as one.
Because that weapon exists, there's no "room" in the budget for a martial repeating firearm.
Trait budgets say a martial weapon should be 'one step' better than a simple weapon and advanced weapons should theoretically be one step better than martial counterpats too.
But there's already only one step between an LAR and a repeating hand crossbow. There's only one die size and no extra traits between them, which is the gap between a typical simple and martial weapon.
Why they marked it down as an advanced weapon when it's clearly not is really unclear to me, but they printed it twice that way.
That would require paizo to be balancing weapons with a budget to begin with, which we know they don't do because of things like this.
Though a hypothetical martial 1d6 repeating weapon does have an advantage over the shortbow and that is that it would be truly 1-handed, you can wield something else in that hand like a shield, a staff or something else.
Though a hypothetical martial 1d6 repeating weapon does have an advantage over the shortbow and that is that it would be truly 1-handed, you can wield something else in that hand like a shield, a staff or something else.
Well, until it runs out of shots: the two 1 handed repeaters have 5-6 shots and a character can burn through those quickly.
And I was fully expecting a 1d6 two handed repeater
There should be repeating firearms at all proficiency levels just for the sake of verisimilitude and the weapons design space is easily broad enough to allow for that if we ignore obviously broken weapons like repeating crossbows and the daikyu (low end) and the flickmace (upper bound) as design considerations.
Any Gunslinger build that wants to be using reactions wants a repeating weapon with reload 0 so they actually have shots available for reactions. Capacity weapons do not solve the action economy issue.
The repeating crossbow (1d8 repeating) is the best option for repeating weapons. Of course, it's an advanced weapon that needs a feat to use properly, and of course it's still just worse than than the martial longbow.
The only other options for repeaters are a d6 one handed crossbow (which is also advanced), or a d4 agile simple weapon.
A martial d6 repeating firearm with another trait fits perfectly into the power curve and would fill a desperately needed niche. It couldn't be a d8 base, but d6 agile, or d6 with fatal d8 would be fine.
Designer
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Now, two things. first, I have done the math, fatal is pretty much equal to an increased damage die for everyone with marital prof, slightly weaker for anyone with caster prof, and stronger for anyone with fighter prof. So balance wise it's just a choice between propulsion vs concussive for the flintlock pistol, which is a fair trade. a fair trade for all of those guns to be honest.Interesting. Because I was comparing Propulsive to the increased damage die. Propulsive adds half your STR bonus. So a +2 STR is approximately equal to a 2-point increase in die size (d6 -> d8). Though that only holds true when you are only rolling one die.
This misses a key point of the balance-Propulsive is half your Strength to damage, so it's not even possible to have a +2 to damage from propulsive until level 5 unless you're playing a class with a Strength boost and taking a 16 Dex; the loss of accuracy is a steeper cost than the 1 point of damage gained. You gain that extra point a level after striking runes become available, which further mitigates its potential value since by the time you get it, it represents a lower percentage of your total damage (whereas traits like agile are equally good regardless of level and traits like forceful scale more consistently without requiring you to invest additional character resources.)
Weapon traits are very complex in a way that makes it hard to grok how they're assigned without taking a really deep dive into the way things are put together. It's not like traits have a single flat value; for example, fatal is worth pretty close to versatile, two-hand, and kickback all put together, while agile is perhaps the strongest weapon trait in the game and hard locks elements of handedness and maximum die size regardless of what other traits the weapon possesses. And even with all that there are around half a dozen edge-case weapons that are a bit too strong or too weak for their categories in a way that doesn't have a simple adjustment to correct (and mostly not the weapons you might be thinking of, though there's a couple obvious ones.)
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Agree they probably shot themselves in the foot with regard to making the repeating hand crossbow advanced at only 1d6 dice size with 60 range, there’s no “room” in between the Air Repeater/LAR and the Repeating Hand Crossbow for a martial repeating weapon.
I think Capacity was probably intended to be the martial version of repeating but was changed last minute
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This misses a key point of the balance-Propulsive is half your Strength to damage, so it's not even possible to have a +2 to damage from propulsive until level 5 unless you're playing a class with a Strength boost and taking a 16 Dex; the loss of accuracy is a steeper cost than the 1 point of damage gained. You gain that extra point a level after striking runes become available, which further mitigates its potential value since by the time you get it, it represents a lower percentage of your total damage (whereas traits like agile are equally good regardless of level and traits like forceful scale more consistently without requiring you to invest additional character resources.)
Weapon traits are very complex in a way that makes it hard to grok how they're assigned without taking a really deep dive into the way things are put together. It's not like traits have a single flat value; for example, fatal is worth pretty close to versatile, two-hand, and kickback all put together, while agile is perhaps the strongest weapon trait in the game and hard locks elements of handedness and maximum die size regardless of what other traits the weapon possesses. And even with all that there are around half a dozen edge-case weapons that are a bit too strong or too weak for their categories in a way that doesn't...
How does this theory of weapons design actually get tested? It's fine to have a system and to stick to it, but I'd be interested to know under which conditions these weapons are designed to be equal and which cases tend to break things.