So what is everyone thought on the Errata for the Seeker Rifle? I thought having 120ft range with a magazine size of just 1, reload of 1 and no traits of value was enough to make it a balanced simple weapon for dealing D10 damage. Why did it suddenly get Volley (60ft), it didn't need a Volley greater then 30ft (Standard Volley).
My thought is do you have any PCs in mind who will ever use a Seeker Rifle over a Laser Rifle and if so how do you justify it? I can see you may want to use it on a spell-caster for the first maybe 5 levels if you want to hit something farther then 60ft but ten you would need to reload it which is a minor problem....
Volley 60 is borderline unusable. For most ancestries it requires 3 (!!) move actions simply to move out of penalty range.
They should've gone in a different direction for changes since we already had a d10 single shot simple weapon in the Crossbolter, which only has 20 feet less range in exchange for not having the ruinous Volley 60.
They may as well have deleted the Seeker Rifle with this change.
The seeker rifle actually has a reload of 2, so it's even worse than what's listed. A reload 1 weapon that has to reload after every shot is in my opinion on a similar power level to a reload 0 weapon with a damage die two steps lower, so simply reducing the seeker rifle's magazine size and reducing its reload to 1 would've been enough. At this point it is almost strictly worse than the crossbolter, and that's before even factoring in the volley trait. One of the nerfs would've been enough, but all of these at once is far too much.
This isn't the only weapon that got tuned too hard this errata, either. The magnetar rifle's 20 magazine capacity now makes it a direct upgrade to the machine gun, the best automatic gun in the game, and arguably the best AoE weapon all around at the moment. Due to how AoE weapons don't interact at all with proficiency, there's a high risk the Soldier will go for nothing but a magnetar rifle now and ignore the rest. Because the Soldier can spend all three actions making an Auto-Fire + Primary Target then another Strike at -5 MAP, there's a real risk the class will outstrip the Operative at single-target damage, especially now that the seeker rifle has been nerfed.
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Just tried out the above, disregard the bit about the magnetar rifle: because its Strikes still rely on advanced weapon proficiency, and the Soldier has no means of becoming proficient in advanced weapons, the magnetar rifle's Strikes are actually terrible. It can still be useful at covering a wide cone, but your Primary Target Strikes will suck, so it's still not worth using.
Speaking of Soldier this makes me want to make a post about it...I will go make it.
It's basically the heavy crossbow now, a weapon in Pathfinder that is only ever used by spellcasters who will fire it once and then never again for the rest of the fight.
It's just worse than the heavy crossbow unless you're a sniper operative who should be using a better gun.
The really puzzling thing is that there's a clear need for a projectile equivalent of the acid/laser rifles doing piercing damage with a reasonable magazine, and that was its role (replacing the intro level hunting rifle) in SF1. Making it an actual single shot sniper rifle because of some dumb legacy text carried over from SF1 in the weapon description is boggling.
Honestly Acid is just superior to projectile I think. I have yet to come across many things that make Acid look like a wrong choice outside of skeletons to be fair. Just the nerf is the silliest thing they have done and feels more like they want us to stop using the Seeker Rifle...