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Starfinder 2 seems to maintain if not increase Starfinders melee supremecy.
If something has hardness 10 not being able to damage it on a crit with a d6 or d4 laser pistol feels terrible.
Not being able to afford enough bullets at level 1 feels terrible.
Having to reload after 3 shots feels terrible.
Melee is still double the damage of ranged and reloading has gotten more annoying.
I'm getting flashbacks to that version of startrek where the crossbow was a better weapon than a phaser...
saving an action walking isn't an incentive to shoot if my third action is a shot at -10 for no damage. Or if i need to reload about as often as Bitey needs to walk in between things to chew on.
I don't know if lasers need super agile with only a -2 MAP or something but as is I'm looking at another edition of bringing rocks to laser fights.
Being in the monsters face isn't that much of a drawback. If the monster WANTS to bite someone, it will come up and bite someone.
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I can't think of any ways off the top of my head to debuff hardness. Adding some might help
A soften target spell.
A skip-shot pistol that actually skips armor or hardness.
A blasting grenade that reduces hardness.
A laser that can do extra damage to a target for each action spent. Basically holding the laser pointed at the target long enough for it to heat up either doing more damage to overcome hardness or normal damage but bypassing the hardness, or high ACs.
Armore pricing ammo.
Supper cold weapons that make hard targets more brittle.
Targets with a hardness that is also weak to electricity or other energy type. Metal with hardness being weak to electricity makes sense.
Corrosive chemical grenades to weaken hardness may take a full around to take effect.
Drilling nanocite ammo
Lower MAP for simple to use light low damage weapons is an interesting idea. Maybe at the cost of not getting a 3rd shot with that weapon. Or do it SF1e style and use all 3 actions to get -2 to 2 attacks. Or baing able to tack 2 action for your second shot to reduce the MAP.
Special gun scopes or cybernetic eye implants let you see weakness in hardness, which lets you bypass X amount of hardness depending on the level of the scope or eye implant.
An option for guns with the automatic trait to concentrate fire, it costs 3 actions and lets you roll damage twice the first damage roll is applied to reduce hardness, and the last damage roll does actual damage. Or concentrate fire could be taken as 1, 2 or 3 actions each action used reduces the target's hardness by 1.
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Frankly, this feels like an opportunity to open up room in the Starfinder space for melee specialists to remain useful in Starfinder, but given lack of movement benefits melee specialists get, that is still problematic.
I'll miss my 1st level Shobhad (base 40 foot move) Evolutionist with 3 mutation points being able to move 50 feet and then make a melee attack with 10 reach with just his fist. As a melee character, he's got better range than some guns.
For me the biggest reason it's good to have large playable species have fast move speeds is so they don't slow down the rest of the party in narrow starship corridors. There have been some fights in a starship that my Shobhad character would have never made it to the fight in time if his base speed had been lower.
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Although Hardness and resistances shut down gun damage big time, I think the issue has to do more with enemy balancing than our own weapons: I think it's a bit silly to balance damage resistances around the same benchmark used for melee when we're mainly using guns to fight, but I also think it subtly imbalances the enemies by making them a lot spongier than they ought to be, when range is normally costed on enemies with lower durability.
With this in mind, I think we need a new set of benchmarks for enemy stats in Starfinder 2e relative to Pathfinder, which ought to just take all of the benchmarks for durability in Pathfinder and shift them down quite significantly. The low end of HP ought to be the average range in Starfinder, the minimum range of resistances ought to be the medium amount in SF, and so on. Although this wouldn't address every problem with gunfire (rolling 1 on your gun's damage roll still means you'd deal no damage to an enemy with Hardness or resistance), it would prevent some enemies from being outright impossible to damage at all, and would make combat drag on significantly less overall.
In practice, when I tried making most Starfinder classes fight in melee, things didn't really turn out so well: unless you're specifically building for melee, your class features like Aim or Primary Target won't work with a melee build at all, and even when you do build for melee, the Envoy in particular is pulled in one direction too many with having to boost Strength, Dex, Con, Wis, and Charisma. Banking on melee is also risky because if you don't have good ranged options still, you'll get picked off by enemies firing at a distance or flying out of melee reach at low levels, which is one of the reasons why the Solarian performs so inconsistently in my opinion. If nothing else, Starfinder's class design does successfully push its classes to fight at range for the most part, at least in my experience, it's just that ranged combat doesn't feel as good or as interesting as it ought to be in my opinion right now.
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Even without hardness someone is doing more on a melee hit than the pew pew laser does on a crit.
In practice, when I tried making most Starfinder classes fight in melee, things didn't really turn out so well: unless you're specifically building for melee, your class features like Aim or Primary Target won't work with a melee build at all, and even when you do build for melee, the Envoy in particular is pulled in one direction too many with having to boost Strength, Dex, Con, Wis, and Charisma. Banking on melee is also risky because if you don't have good ranged options still, you'll get picked off by enemies firing at a distance or flying out of melee reach at low levels, which is one of the reasons why the Solarian performs so inconsistently in my opinion. If nothing else, Starfinder's class design does successfully push its classes to fight at range for the most part, at least in my experience, it's just that ranged combat doesn't feel as good or as interesting as it ought to be in my opinion...
Is this SF1 or SF2e? Because in SF1e the cramped corridor design around encounter maps led to melee turning several big setpiece fights into nothingburgers. Casters, cramped corridors, and doshko-wielding murderhobos don't mix.
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Starfinder 2 seems to maintain if not increase Starfinders melee supremecy.
If something has hardness 10 not being able to damage it on a crit with a d6 or d4 laser pistol feels terrible.
Not being able to afford enough bullets at level 1 feels terrible.
Having to reload after 3 shots feels terrible.
Melee is still double the damage of ranged and reloading has gotten more annoying.
I'm getting flashbacks to that version of startrek where the crossbow was a better weapon than a phaser...
saving an action walking isn't an incentive to shoot if my third action is a shot at -10 for no damage. Or if i need to reload about as often as Bitey needs to walk in between things to chew on.
I don't know if lasers need super agile with only a -2 MAP or something but as is I'm looking at another edition of bringing rocks to laser fights.
Being in the monsters face isn't that much of a drawback. If the monster WANTS to bite someone, it will come up and bite someone.
Yes, the "Ranged Meta" mentioned on Field Test 5 p4, does quite work out.
Is this SF1 or SF2e? Because in SF1e the cramped corridor design around encounter maps led to melee turning several big setpiece fights into nothingburgers. Casters, cramped corridors, and doshko-wielding murderhobos don't mix.
SF2e, 100%. Paizo I think very much realized just how easy it was for parties to dominate with full melee in 1e, and implemented more safeguards in the playtest. It doesn't feel like it, because guns have a few issues, but the classes in this playtest don't interact with melee as well as guns as a baseline, not unless they opt into it or are a Solarian. Although encounters are still often quite cramped, the presence of flying enemies, more hazards, and other terrain features does make it difficult for even a Solarian to engage in melee as well, so guns are needed at least as a backup.
Even without hardness someone is doing more on a melee hit than the pew pew laser does on a crit.
If you roll low on the crit and average to good on the melee damage roll, sure, but otherwise this statistically more likely to be false than true. If you crit with a commercial machine gun, you will deal 2d8 damage, so 9 damage on average. If you hit with a plasma sword, you will deal 1d8 + 4 damage, so 8.5 damage on average. As players get higher-grade weapons and accumulate damage dice, plus add weapon specialization, this smooths out over time: a paragon plasma sword on a level 20 Solarian will deal 4d8+4d6+6+7 = 45 damage on average on a hit, whereas a paragon machine gun will deal 4d8+4d6+6 = 38 damage on average on a regular hit, and 76 damage on a crit on average, so much more than a regular melee hit. It's just at low levels that gun damage is particularly awful, which I think Paizo should remediate by doing away with +damage upgrades and instead increasing weapon damage dice with every new grade.
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If you want to test ranged meta in SF2e look at the maps used in Wheel of Monsters, one of them is 150x240 feet.
I don't think ranged meta means there won't be melee, it just makes ranged a more viable option than PF2e, it also means SF2e characters are not restricted from flying at 1st level.
Since ranged weapons do less damage than melee weapons and have a harder time dealing with hardness, I wonder if an encounter is designed to be ranged that using 1 lower CR when designing the encounter might help.
I don't see close-quarter combat completely away. Ship maps could be improved, but there will still likely be encountered in buildings too with narrow hallways.
Because no 2 parties are going to be the same, part of the solution might be like in SFS scenarios there are adjustments for playing high or low-tier, something similar could be done for adjusting an encounter for a range-only party or melee party. Sometimes this could be done right in an adventure and or could be GM advice in the SF2e GM Core.
Note on fighting in narrow corridors, use smoke grenades to smoke out the opponents to a bigger area (if there is room.) Unfortunately, smoke grenades in the playtest provide concealment, instead of being an irritant gas grenade. Both have their uses, I hope in the final SF2e we get both.
I wonder how fighting a creature with the swarm trait on a starship would go with narrow corridors. A swarm can occupy the same space as a PC. This would prevent each side from being stuck on the other side of a corridor.
Even without hardness someone is doing more on a melee hit than the pew pew laser does on a crit.If you roll low on the crit and average to good on the melee damage roll, sure, but otherwise this statistically more likely to be false than true.
Even ignoring the d12 Unwieldy doshko there are d10 melee weapons including the painglaive. Thats an average of 5.5+4 or 9.5 vs 8.5 for a crit with the rifle.
Low levels are where a lot of the game happens. Most campaigns don't hit 20.
If hardness and dr mechanics are going to be a regular thing, that exacerbates it.
Being sorted into pistol user with more investment required to get the ranged rifles exacerbates the problem.
They tried just making ranged the meta in 1e and it's just not sufficient to get it working. There has to be some kind of tangible benefit to ranged in general and pistols specifically or people will just do the same things they did in sf1, go with big honking guns and melee (brimming with movement options if they're smart).
Even ignoring the d12 Unwieldy doshko there are d10 melee weapons including the painglaive. Thats an average of 5.5+4 or 9.5 vs 8.5 for a crit with the rifle.
There are also d12 ranged weapons, so I'm not sure what this attempt at shifting the goalposts is meant to achieve. I picked the plasma sword and machine gun because they're representative examples of the basic martial weapons for their respective ranges. The comparison and underlying principles hold for all weapons.
Low levels are where a lot of the game happens. Most campaigns don't hit 20.
I am literally talking about levels 1-3. If none of your campaigns get to level 4, I don't know what to tell you.
Being sorted into pistol user with more investment required to get the ranged rifles exacerbates the problem.
Literally every single martial class in the Starfinder playtest begins trained in martial weapons, and so can pick up ranged rifles with no additional investment required.
They tried just making ranged the meta in 1e and it's just not sufficient to get it working. There has to be some kind of tangible benefit to ranged in general and pistols specifically or people will just do the same things they did in sf1, go with big honking guns and melee (brimming with movement options if they're smart).
I look forward to seeing how this turns out in your playtests, but in the ones I ran extensively, I can tell you this very much was not the case. It is actively difficult to opt into melee as a Starfinder class unless you're a Solarian, and even when you've committed the subclass, attribute boosts, and feats, you are still going to need to pack a backup gun in case you run into flying enemies or wide, cluttered, and/or hazardous battle arenas. Your class features will frequently not work in melee, and so you will often deal less damage overall than if you'd just taken potshots from a distance. This was the case with my Envoy, my Operative, and my Soldier, all of whom ended up favoring range. Even my Solarian ended up investing in options that improved their ability to fight from a distance, because otherwise they had no good options in certain encounters.
There are also d12 ranged weapons, so I'm not sure what this attempt at shifting the goalposts is meant to achieve.
you can't pick weapons from different groups, nit pick about half a point of damage and then complain I'm the one moving the goalposts.
This is the goalpost: What is fun about ranged combat? -We are going to design encounters so that melee has a hard time- is not an answer.
What is fun about pistols? They were supposed to be a thing but only operatives had a reason to use them. What is the advantage pistols have? Mechanically.
If hardness is going to be a meta because robots that extra damage vastly increases in importance.
I am literally talking about levels 1-3. If none of your campaigns get to level 4, I don't know what to tell you.
No. the item levels are one to three. This is where starfinder 1 also ran into problems, just assuming that every character popped into existence with a full level of gear and you don't. Paizo's own APs assume you use way more gear than you do so your characters wind up with gear well behind their level. If the Vesk was doing 1d12+ strength and a half another d12 is...nice. If you're shooting ranged weapons missing out on the extra die is half your damage.
My PF clerics make pretty good uses of crossbows but didn't have a striking rune filter their way through the party till level 5 or 6.
you are still going to need to pack a backup gun in case you run into flying enemies or wide, cluttered, and/or hazardous battle arenas. Your class features will frequently not work in melee, and so you will often deal less damage overall than if you'd just taken potshots from a distance. This was the case...
Making melee suck does not make ranged fun. Making laser rifles worse than a longbow does not make ranged fun. Not having moving parts to fiddle with for ranged does not make ranged fun.
Backup weapons are a serious problem in a pf2 style economy because you can't afford two on level weapons. Unless they let you use a twin rune on a cutlass and saber you'll either do 1/2 1/3rd damage, which means you better make sure you can get into melee.
you can't pick weapons from different groups, nit pick about half a point of damage and then complain I'm the one moving the goalposts.
As a matter of fact, I can. I picked standard weapons for their respective groups (and because one is melee and the other is ranged, they were bound to be in different groups, making your own criticism a pointless nitpick), demonstrated that your claim was factually wrong, and did the math to demonstrate that the gap, which starts out at its worst at level 1, lessens dramatically over time. Just admit that you didn't expect to get fact-checked on the random nonsense claim you made.
This is the goalpost: What is fun about ranged combat? -We are going to design encounters so that melee has a hard time- is not an answer.
Okay, so first off, this is distinctly not the goalpost. The goalpost that warranted the math was this specific claim you made:
Even without hardness someone is doing more on a melee hit than the pew pew laser does on a crit.
Your claim is, as demonstrated, false. Let's take a look at the title of this thread:
I think the stick is still mightier than the laser blaster
Looks an awful lot like the discussion is about melee supposedly being stronger than ranged weapons in Starfinder 2e, itself a false claim. Perhaps the body of your thread might suggest a different topic:
Starfinder 2 seems to maintain if not increase Starfinders melee supremecy.
If something has hardness 10 not being able to damage it on a crit with a d6 or d4 laser pistol feels terrible.
Not being able to afford enough bullets at level 1 feels terrible.
Having to reload after 3 shots feels terrible.
Melee is still double the damage of ranged and reloading has gotten more annoying.
I'm getting flashbacks to that version of startrek where the crossbow was a better weapon than a phaser...
saving an action walking isn't an incentive to shoot if my third action is a shot at -10 for no damage. Or if i need to reload about as often as Bitey needs to walk in between things to chew on.
I don't know if lasers need super agile with only a -2 MAP or something but as is I'm looking at another edition of bringing rocks to laser fights.
Being in the monsters face isn't that much of a drawback. If the monster WANTS to bite someone, it will come up and bite someone.
Nope, still about power levels, rather than fun. Not only are you wrong, it is you who are demonstrably trying to shift the goalpost after being called out on your false claims made in complete absence of facts, evidence, and experience.
But let's address this new goalpost anyway: what is fun about ranged combat in Starfinder 2e is how it uses the three-action economy, its various conditions, weapon traits, and several other effects to make for dynamic and interesting combat, in theory at least. You are correct that designing hazards that make melee more difficult does not address the question of fun, but they certainly disprove your claim that melee is more effective. That you would decry any form of interactive challenge as giving melee "a hard time" speaks to how you appear incapable of dissociating fun from power.
What is fun about pistols? They were supposed to be a thing but only operatives had a reason to use them. What is the advantage pistols have? Mechanically.
Well, let's see: they use up only one hand, so they're handy in a pinch in combat if you need another hand to do something else, they're cheap and easy to purchase, they're simple weapons and so are accessible even to a Mystic and Witchwarper, and the fire damage of a laser pistol can come in quite handy against enemies weak to fire damage. They're easy to use, reliable, and situationally quite powerful, so I'd say they're quite fun in addition to being useful even on martial classes as a sidearm.
If hardness is going to be a meta because robots that extra damage vastly increases in importance.
Correct, Hardness does have a much higher impact when your base damage is lower. This is why Starfinder creatures with Hardness should probably have lower values than equivalent Pathfinder creatures.
No. the item levels are one to three. This is where starfinder 1 also ran into problems, just assuming that every character popped into existence with a full level of gear and you don't. Paizo's own APs assume you use way more gear than you do so your characters wind up with gear well behind their level. If the Vesk was doing 1d12+ strength and a half another d12 is...nice. If you're shooting ranged weapons missing out on the extra die is half your damage.
It's rather clear you're not speaking from experience with 2e, because 2e explicitly makes it clear that characters are expected to get gear appropriate for their level as they progress, and generally have the income and access to that gear. If you're starting an adventure at level 4, then you will have level 3 items, in large part because you're expected to get those level 4 items pretty soon. Once more, levels 1-3 are not even the full range for starter adventures, nor even the big playtest scenario we got from the start, so while the problem ought to be addressed sooner, it does diminish very soon nonetheless.
My PF clerics make pretty good uses of crossbows but didn't have a striking rune filter their way through the party till level 5 or 6.
That is entirely on your GM, not the game. Literally no amount of rules can prevent a GM from withholding or neglecting items that are key to their adventuring party's progression.
Making melee suck does not make ranged fun. Making laser rifles worse than a longbow does not make ranged fun. Not having moving parts to fiddle with for ranged does not make ranged fun.
Backup weapons are a serious problem in a pf2 style economy because you can't afford two on level weapons. Unless they let you use a twin rune on a cutlass and saber you'll either do 1/2 1/3rd damage, which means you better make sure you can get into melee.
To be clear, the topic of discussion so far has been: "is melee more powerful than ranged in the Starfinder 2e playtest," and the answer has so far been a resounding "lol no". It has not been about whether ranged or melee are fun, and it is strange that you would have this conversation take such a sharp turn. As it stands, however, your claims here are either false or baseless: melee generally does not suck, it is simply not the most effective form of combat available to most Starfinder classes, and having more interactive environments rather than featureless white rooms is, in my opinion, more fun (though playing a Solarian currently does suck, in my opinion, regardless of environment). The laser rifle has the same damage die and range as the longbow, and while it lacks the deadly trait, it also lacks the volley trait, which I can guarantee you makes a big difference in certain encounters and makes the weapon far more versatile. Your last sentence in this tirade appears garbled and intended to say the opposite, in which case: yes, I agree that having to track expend values onto a gun's magazine to determine when it needs to reload and how much it will all cost me is not particularly fun. I would very much like that to be streamlined.
I also don't quite understand why you're judging a backup weapon's value based on its ability to match a main weapon on upgrades. The entire point of a backup weapon is that it's a cheaper option you're not investing as many resources in as your main weapon, but that still comes in handy when your main weapon isn't as effective. This is all the more important in Starfinder 2e, where many more weapons deal energy damage and will be hitting immunities, not just resistances. If all of this is a dealbreaker to you, Automatic Bonus Progression will give you all of the benefits of fundamental runes free of charge.
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I am personally fine with the state of things, Operative feels like a great attempt to give players who want to play a ranged rogue the right tools, and in general, a lot of the power that is related to guns is part of class design.
I agree on operative, Aim and mobile aim are huge improvement over trick attack. My SF1e operative just got to 2nd level, their very last attack roll at 1st level was the first time they mannaged to succeed on both rolls for trick attack and to hit.
For the soldier auto fire + primary target looks good too despite not having managed to hit anything with it yet but that's expected when I haven't rolled higher than a 5 yet. fire + primary target is also much better than the old trick attack, it's still 2 septate rolls but succeeding the first roll is not required to make the second.
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One thing I will say is this:
In PF2, you largely sacrifice consistent, modifier-boosted damage if you want to be ranged.
In SF2, you're assumed to be ranged, and therefore you are by default stuck with damage that isn't modifier-boosted.
It would be nice to have flat-damage-boosted ranged weapon options for people to pick if they're allergic to the dreaded "crit for 2 damage" possibility, even if the average is the same as other guns. That reliability could be an avenue to get more gun variation.
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To some extent I wonder if the concerns are maybe getting too macro here. A lot of the complaints are actually pretty specific. Like the takeaway here could just as easily be "hardness is a really obnoxious mechanic especially at low levels" rather than a fundamental indictment of the combat system.
The bigger one is str to damage, but that's sort of awkward to address because of how it scales (or doesn't). A +4 in strength basically doubles the damage of a d8 weapon, and on average is better than a d6 weapon basically by itself... but it also scales really badly and becomes an increasingly insignificant chunk of total damage per strike as you level up. Any counterbalancing change would likewise probably need to fall off pretty hard.
re: damage bonuses for guns. While not flat, we sort of see shades of it in the Operative, which gets to basically add sneak attack to guns on top of having fighter grade proficiency. I don't think it's a coincidence that the game's only real ranged striker has something like that, which is basically unprecedented in PF.
But there's been some pretty strong negativity surrounding that damage bonus too.
SF2e, 100%. Paizo I think very much realized just how easy it was for parties to dominate with full melee in 1e, and implemented more safeguards in the playtest. It doesn't feel like it, because guns have a few issues, but the classes in this playtest don't interact with melee as well as guns as a baseline, not unless they opt into it or are a Solarian. Although encounters are still often quite cramped, the presence of flying enemies, more hazards, and other terrain features does make it difficult for even a Solarian to engage in melee as well, so guns are needed at least as a backup.
One problem I have is that it feels like SF2e largely tried to make ranged more appealing by making melee less.
The Solarion is very clunky and has a weirdly bad damage mechanic for a dedicated martial, the soldier and operative melee features both are kind of awkwardly implemented and are a little bit of a pain to integrate with the rest of the class, and no one else really has any specific melee support.
Rather than making ranged combat more interested, dynamic, or giving them unique tools to overcome some of their weaknesses we just have only one specifically melee class and its garbo.
It both makes the melee options less fun, the ranged options still have problems, and threatens to break down if you bring a 'real' melee class from Pathfinder.
Guns need to have some kind of flat modifier to damage if they are going to make sense and be balanced with melee.
Should parity be the goal? I mean, the whole reason melee tends to do more damage is because it puts extra requirements on the character, and SF has mostly maintained or increased those penalties. Melee being stronger when you can make it work is more of a feature than a bug, and the most significant problems are focused on low level interactions and specific enemies more than anything else.
A bucket o dice for ranged weapons would make them different but not overpowered compared to melee. And since NPCs dont use PC rules anyway the wild swinginess wouldn't result in perforated PCs.
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A bucket o dice for ranged weapons would make them different but not overpowered compared to melee. And since NPCs dont use PC rules anyway the wild swinginess wouldn't result in perforated PCs.
The great thing about using a bucket full of d4s for an attack is if you miss and all the d4s land on the ground they create hazardous terrain.
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One problem I have is that it feels like SF2e largely tried to make ranged more appealing by making melee less.
The Solarion is very clunky and has a weirdly bad damage mechanic for a dedicated martial, the soldier and operative melee features both are kind of awkwardly implemented and are a little bit of a pain to integrate with the rest of the class, and no one else really has any specific melee support.
Rather than making ranged combat more interested, dynamic, or giving them unique tools to overcome some of their weaknesses we just have only one specifically melee class and its garbo.
It both makes the melee options less fun, the ranged options still have problems, and threatens to break down if you bring a 'real' melee class from Pathfinder.
This I can very much agree with. The Solarian as currently implemented is completely dysfunctional in my opinion, and I don't think the latest errata addresses this at all. A lot of this I think can be chalked up to a knowledge and culture gap between the Starfinder team and 2e, and it's clear that some of the staff who worked on certain aspects of the playtest didn't really know how to make the mechanics work well or adapt them properly from 1e. I very much hope this changes over time, especially because right now as you mention, the Solarian's damage kinda sucks for a melee martial and they don't have much else to show for it.
On the subject of fun and guns, I also think some bits of the latest errata show how certain new mechanics aren't doing so hot:
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Unwieldy is such a crap trait that anytime it comes up, it has to be bypassed, which is presumably why the Sniper was made to ignore the unwieldy trait in the latest errata, and why the Soldier's feats and features so often state to ignore the unwieldy trait of the weapon being used. At this point you could probably remove the trait entirely and it would barely make any difference, given how the classes that use unwieldy weapons the most are the ones that ignore the unwieldy trait the most too.
Sounds like you're trying to say it's an unwieldy trait.
I just read over every use of unwieldy in the playtest book, and I actually kind of like it. I like using a feat feels like actually having to using a feat of strength or skill to overcome its limitations. I like that WHIRLING SWIPE gives any two-handed melee weapon the unwieldy trait until the end of the turn, in exchange for doing something extra with the weapon. Although I wonder if WHIRLING SWIPE should read until the start of your next turn so you can't do a reactive strike with it.
Currently, it does look like only some classes get feats to deal with unwieldy weapons, but it looks like all the weapons with unwieldy are martial weapons, to me that says you need to have had species training to use these weapons to their full effect likely military training that others don't normally have access to.
I suppose it would be possible to have a general feel anyone could get to help with using unwieldy weapons. One idea I have and really like is either as a general feat or added to the unwieldy trait rules, is that multi-armed species when holding an unwieldy weapon with at least 4 arms negate the unwieldy trait.
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Sounds like you're trying to say it's an unwieldy trait.
Favorited just for this!
As for the rest, if it were the case that one particular build was good at overcoming a meaningful limitation, then I agree that could be pretty cool. Kickback I think is a better implementation where building Strength means you get to overcome the accuracy debuff and deal more damage (as a matter of fact, I think that ought to be a feature on many more guns in Starfinder, especially AoE guns, as players seem to really want flat damage on their ranged damage rolls). The problem with unwieldy is that it gets ignored so consistently by the classes and subclasses that use it that it may as well not exist. All it does is signal to anyone else who might want to try out those weapons that they may as well not bother. It's one of those mechanics that makes guns feel worse than they ought to, even if the mechanical impact is minimal, and if the problem right now is that guns feel sucky, then taking out unwieldy and/or replacing it with kickback in some cases to me seems like it could be an easy win.
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To me it seems like the best way to have say a mystic use a machine gun the same way a soldier does would be to take the soldier archetype, or the Operative archetype if you want to use sniper rifles. Just having a sniper rifle doesn't make you a sniper.
That doesn't mean there isn't room to balance ranged combat better, and I don't claim to have an answer for that. Since I don't play a lot of characters that are big damage dealers, what I'm, curious about with ranged combat is what happens when a party is mostly or all armed with 1d4 damage pistols.
The very first PF2e game session I played, I was playing Fumbus. We get to the boss encounter and no one is having any luck hitting the boss monster, when our fighter did hit wasn't rolling very high damage, and the boss monster is making all of its saving throws. the fight dragged on for 6 rounds, but Fumbus was able to do 1 point of splash damage every round. We were one round away from a TPK when one of the fighters finally scored a crit hit and did exactly enough damage to kill the boss monster, so in the end every 1 point of damage Fumbus did each round mattered, as much as the big crit hit.
A lot of people like the big-damage play style, and that's fine, I feel safer in a party with at least one of those if not two. Most conversations online about game balance or optimization seem to focus on big damage. I'm less concerned that ranged weapons do less damage than melee, than making every shot count even if it's just 1 damage.
Not sure that answers anything but might explain where my point of view is coming form.
If you want to test ranged meta in SF2e look at the maps used in Wheel of Monsters, one of them is 150x240 feet.
That really hoses casters on the pf1 30 foot casting meta doesn't it?