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So! I despise gunslingers and now i'm gonna, respectfully, write why :3
1- The class doesn't have an identity
I believe that the gunslinger fundamentally doesn't have a mechanical idendity.
-it Isn't a crit fishing class: weirdly enough the +2 doesn't really make Crits something the gunslinger excels at:
-they're not common, sure It has the +2 of a fighter but a fighter also sets up his own buffs and with reactive strike It DOUBLES the already augmented chance of critting. The other crit fisher of the system, aka longbow flurry ranger, still has a higher chance of critting by pure virtue of striking a LOT.
It doesn't even benefit that much from crits, base damage Is quite low (even with fatal) so its crits are not worldbreaking (in fact, a gunslinger's crit Is worse than a starlit span's hit!) and neither do they apply great debuffs like a fighter can do (cause, let's be honest, the best thing about fighters Is that at High levels you basically cast "shut his PC off" with each crit)
This also ties In with, i think, a wrong pov the community has about gunslinger: "oh! He needs support, he really benefits from It" but... Who doesn't? If you give a ranger with a gun the same support he's gonna rock the same if not Better, everyone likes support! Gunslinger benefits a lot because it's much much WEAKER without It! So the difference Is more felt
-The class doesn't have a proper identity
I think that the class, other than cheesing encounters if there's a Cliff but that's something everyone with a gun can do, doesn't have a clear identity and that hurts its design tremendously.
Let's take barbarian as an example, no matter what you do, no matter how you build him, he's gonna be a chonky boy that hits hard. What's gunslinger's deal? Not crit fishing, not damage, not really support either (fake out doesn't count, like, sure it's broken af but It shouldn't be an auto pick for everyone); many people would Say it's action compression. But. BUT. What are you gaining from It? Likes guns have AWFULL action economy and so you fix It with your various reloads. You Haven't gained anything! The gunslinger, as a class, uses weapons that are purpousely made bad so he can fix them, it's a net nothing overall! Capitalism the class! (Create a problem and buy the solution)
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I don't like guns in my fantasy, so we don't use the class. It is one class I know nothing about.
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I think the main problem with the gunslinger is that its limited by the fact that firearms (and ranged weapons in general) have to seemingly be worse than bows for whatever reason that was stablished in the fantasy genre (bows are even better than most guns in Starfinder 2e too, which is weirder), with PF2e firearms in particular having built-in action taxes in the form of reloads, which the gunslinger class needs to fix to make firearms usable.
I think Guns & Gears is probably the book with the worst content in PF2e. In the case of the gunslinger, I don't think its bad necesarily, but in an ideal world bows wouldn't be the gold standard and all ranged weapons should be made equally, and in that ideal world the gunslinger would just be a fighter.
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I think the main problem with the gunslinger is that its limited by the fact that firearms (and ranged weapons in general) have to seemingly be worse than bows for whatever reason that was stablished in the fantasy genre (bows are even better than most guns in Starfinder 2e too, which is weirder), with PF2e firearms in particular having built-in action taxes in the form of reloads, which the gunslinger class needs to fix to make firearms usable.
I think Guns & Gears is probably the book with the worst content in PF2e. In the case of the gunslinger, I don't think its bad necesarily, but in an ideal world bows wouldn't be the gold standard and all ranged weapons should be made equally, and in that ideal world the gunslinger would just be a fighter.
One of the many reasons I don't like guns in my fantasy, they never do them right. Guns made man-powered weapons like bows obsolete and are far, far, far, far, exponentially more powerful than bows, crossbows, or the like. Yet in fantasy game rules due to balance, they end up worse or equal to bows. That should not ever happen.
Putting the two weapons next to each other ruins the verisimilitude for guns and for bows at the same time.
I understand some folks want the steampunk feel to their game and don't care about accurate power. I just can't get past it. It's too much to buy into for me and I enjoy buying into dragons and wizards.
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We run a dual-class game for a test with 2 Gunslingers. I will admit the base Gunslinger is just a fighter with less hit points and less attacks then a double shot/triple shot Fighter or a Flurry Ranger with Hunted Shot . The thing though this high-lights that guns aren't great when they need to be supplemented by other classes to be good however the fact that they are being supplemented makes them go from mediocre to high tier, as someone who is playing a Barbarian Exemplar they can routinely hit as hard as me when they use their supplement from their dual-classes. So really Guns are odd, they work well on a Thaumaturge and Investigator vs the Gunslinger.
The point is high attack vs low damage is not ideal for many fights. I suppose I am jaded at this point by D4 weapons and not adding any flat damage or attacking multiple times a turn.
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Yes, Gunslinger is niche, IMO too niche for a class, but it had the momentum from PF1 to require one...in a system that doesn't suit its crit-fishing playstyle. It could really be that the class exists so that gun and crossbow concepts can compete. It does fulfill those specific tropes, even if at great cost to maintain adequacy...is what I'd say if it weren't for many Gunslinger players regaling the forums with stories of being dominant contributors to their party's damage output (and yes, alongside respected classes).
So yeah, I'm not so interested in investing just to catch up to where bows begin (being IMO rightfully at the top of the curve re: fantasy ranged weaponry). But others are, and many have enjoyed the class. Instead of bashing on Gunslingers, maybe ask them what's working that you (and I) aren't seeing. Is it a difference in enemy types? Difficulty? Somehow making better use of hands or equipment or stats? I dunno.
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I'm playing a sniper gunslinger with the Crossbow Crack Shot feat and, even when I'm having a blast with it and when possible I can deal some really nasty damage, ideally I would prefer to reloads to never be a thing if possible. What Deriven said about guns outclasing everything that existed before it was a thing IRL but I also wouldn't want to just replace bows with guns either. Luckily one of the few drawbacks that early firearms had in contrast to the more traditional ranged weapons of the time (besides the minute or longer reloads) was that they required to be used in close range.
With that in mind, I hope a future edition could keep bows as the "standard" for ranged weapons, while firearms would be stronger but limited to close ranges (like 30 feet at best). In a sense that's already a thing since bows have way more range than firearms already, but the range of most firearms is usually more than enough to hit most targets already and they still need reloads. Crossbows are already the worse of both worlds so you could easily leave them as is but remove reloads.
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I think the problem is less that the Gunslinger lacks an identity and more that just the identity it has (being the best at guns/crossbows) is weirdly narrow and suffers from the fact that guns and crossbows are bad on purpose.
Reload is a huge downside but the game barely treats it as one, to the point where even if reload compression actions line up perfectly they barely put you ahead.
What I really don't understand is why Paizo decided to recreate the PF1 paradigm so precisely: the fact that in PF1 guns were generally terrible but there was one specific class that had features designed to make them good was one of the major points of criticism against them. And then here we are again in PF2 with guns being bad-by-design and the gunslinger offering some very specific tools to make them a bit more usable.
Can't imagine the game would have been somehow irreparably harmed if guns were just reasonable weapon choices for anyone and the gunslinger had been adapted more broadly like people wanted.
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This would be libel instead of slander since it is written. But the distinction between the two is small to non-existent. Both are classified as defamation.
Also, it isn't defamation if it is opinion except in very specific circumstances. And, well, I didn't see any statements of fact in the OP.
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I agree with the other comments that the Gunslinger suffers from having to bend over backwards to make reload weapons better to use. It's not great being "the crappy weapon class", and despite how many features revolve around action compression and damage boosters I don't think the Gunslinger really solved that problem either.
I do think the issues go a bit deeper, however:
So in this respect, I agree with Fabios: the Gunslinger doesn't have a super-solid mechanical identity, because most of their mechanics are about remediating systemic problems they have to deal with rather than giving them something to do that stands out. They deal damage but not really enough to write home about, they have a smidgen of utility but nothing others can't do better, and their core gameplay mostly revolves around dealing with the clunk of their designated weapons.
I think there are at least two ways to address some of the class's issues: one drastic approach could be to roll the Gunslinger into the Fighter, and have the latter inherit their gun-based feats, and another could be to make the Gunslinger more self-sufficient, and thus better able to support their team instead of needing lots of support themselves. In both cases, it would help significantly to buff guns to be on par with other weapons, and even more to properly flesh out ranged combat in 2e so that it offers more tactical gameplay and mechanical hooks for character mechanics to build upon. It'd certainly work wonders for Starfinder's ranged combat, and would also make for a nice little bit of improved compatibility if the Gunslinger could adapt seamlessly to sci-fi guns in an appropriate setting.
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I think the main problem with the gunslinger is that its limited by the fact that firearms (and ranged weapons in general) have to seemingly be worse than bows for whatever reason that was stablished in the fantasy genre (bows are even better than most guns in Starfinder 2e too, which is weirder), with PF2e firearms in particular having built-in action taxes in the form of reloads, which the gunslinger class needs to fix to make firearms usable.
I think Guns & Gears is probably the book with the worst content in PF2e. In the case of the gunslinger, I don't think its bad necesarily, but in an ideal world bows wouldn't be the gold standard and all ranged weapons should be made equally, and in that ideal world the gunslinger would just be a fighter.
One of the many reasons I don't like guns in my fantasy, they never do them right. Guns made man-powered weapons like bows obsolete and are far, far, far, far, exponentially more powerful than bows, crossbows, or the like. Yet in fantasy game rules due to balance, they end up worse or equal to bows. That should not ever happen.
Putting the two weapons next to each other ruins the verisimilitude for guns and for bows at the same time.
I understand some folks want the steampunk feel to their game and don't care about accurate power. I just can't get past it. It's too much to buy into for me and I enjoy buying into dragons and wizards.
This really isn't true, and they do go to some effort in Guns and Gears to establish a reasonable technological space for firearms to occupy that makes them comparable to, but not superior to, other ranged weapons. It's not like everyone abandoned bows or crossbows the moment a firearm was invented - there were ~200 years of overlap between the bow, crossbow, and firearm in western europe - ~1350 to ~1550 they were all used. That's comfortably in the time period from which Pathfinder draws from - full plate armour was basically unheard of before ~1400. By the end of that time period it was pretty clear the firearms were superior but economics might stop your force from relying on them, but earlier in that time period there were benefits and disadvantages to each of these options. There's no reason to say that guns necessarily have to be "far, far, far, far, exponentially more powerful than bows" - that's obviously true of modern guns, but the technology level of the Lost Omens setting is clearly drawing from a period of overlap of all 3 of these weapons.
There are some really interesting analyses of the change between longbow and firearm in the English army in particular, as they had to discuss it very heavily due to how much they'd previously relied on longbows. This is an interesting article discussing the topic: link to JSTOR article.
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As for the gunslinger itself, I found it interesting. My partner plays a gunslinger in my Kingmaker game, and he often does the most damage in the party when he gets those critical hits, on top of dropping a lot of persistent damage. Crits are common enough I see them trigger the big numbers quite frequently. If Pathfinder 2E "does not suit crit fishing," it certainly suits it much more than 1E ever did.
I'm playing a sniper in Kingmaker myself, and it totally rocks there. One shotting an ogre with a 52 damage crit at first level was hype as hell, especially since we pulled it off with magic weapon and other buffs/debuffs from the whole team making it a group effort. The 200 foot range on my Sukgung is frequently relevant on the big outdoor maps, letting me deal big damage where my allies are wasting turns getting in range. And we often fight multiple enemies which means I have an easier time landing frequent crits. And I have a built in way to make enemies off guard, which never hurts.
And it plays quite differently from other classes in a fun and engaging way too. Covered reload and running reload make my positioning super important and have me examine the map in three dimensions to look for cover. I'm also not strictly focus firing with my team the way many damage dealers would. My huge crit spikes let me one shot weaker enemies before my allies can reach them, or dole out persistent damage which actually gets to tick multiple times before the enemy gets killed anyway. My free archetype alchemist further supports this with Quick Silver Mutagens, poisons, or the odd elemental attack to trigger weakness.
It's also one of the safest builds you can play, between the long range, focus on repositioning, and cover/hidden conditions applying so frequently. I very, very rarely get hit and usually can get out of dodge when I do. Coupled with not needing strength (which I would if I used kickback guns) and I'm able to invest more boosts into wisdom and intelligence. The campaigns frequent downtime and low market access means I'm getting a ton of mileage from crafting my own items.
Now, this is essentially the perfect campaign for the build, and a cramped dungeon crawl would look significantly worse. Other Ways never looked as good on paper to me. But ranged builds in general suffer in campaigns where their range isn't needed, because they then deal less damage for no reason. Also, to really maximize on the advantages of range you need allies who aren't immediately throwing themselves into melee. Allies who instead can switch hit means you often get free damage against brute enemies with no range game of their own.
I do find it interesting that people usually compare reload weapons to "bows" as if the bow was a single, monolithic weapon. Shortbows have lower damage and a shorter range, where longbows suffer from the awful penalty of volley. Unless the campaign really tailors itself to one or the other, archers wind up wanting both which presents problems for rune upgrades and action economy. Reload might be a pain, but two handed reload weapons strikes hit harder than a longbow, at longer range, and with no volley penalty. That reliability is really nice.
My biggest gripe is that reload weapons are so bad with activated ammunition. They really should have made some action compression abilities apply to ammo activation, IMO.
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Paizo wanted people to have a gun option, and wanted it to have potential for cool guns rather than face the limits of the earliest firearms (who wants to try a realistic muzzel loading wheel lock pistol against a kraken in a rain storm?). They also didn't want them to be literally just crossbows, so they fudged a few things and mostly developed guns as low Rate of Fire, big crit weapons.
Outside of action compression abilities, this works with how guns were used for centuries - as the one-shot surprise ultra wammy to tilt a melee in your favor. Guns in their modern form only came about in the 1800s.
It's worth keeping in mind that PF2 firearms also have a strong baseline crit effect and a bunch of fancy ability options no other weapon gets. Concussive, scatter, kickback, and double barrel all have their use, and a ton of firearms are either combination weapons or can be combined with melee. Also there is the spoon gun.
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I also feel it doesn't help there's a little dissonance with firearms and how they were implemented in the setting. Arcaian's comment about how most of Pathfinder borrows from the 1300-1500s era is actually correct, but firearms in particular come mainly from Alkenstar that is clearly inspired by spaghetti westerns so its closer to the 1800-very early 1900s in its aesthethics. Also, most of the people that likely play PF are from the US, so most people instinctively think about the mechanisms and power of modern firearms even if they are looking at a medieval-renaissance esque setting.
As a plus to this, most fantasy settings with guns usually make them visually archaic but in practice work like a modern gun would. This is one of the reasons why I'm kinda against trying to be "historically accurate" or "maintain realism" in fantasy because you are never going to really be either of those things when magic exists and even regular mundane warriors can defeat mighty foes like demons or other dimensional beings with relative ease.
The point of a fantasy setting is that it isn't Earth or doesn't take place in "our" Earth, so it doesn't have to be limited to whatever thing existed or was possible on Earth on whatever time period or not, and while Golarion as a whole IMO succeds on this on being a fantasy settings that its similar enough to Earth for people to quickly have a grasp on the setting but also different enough to be its own thing, I feel most of the tech-y stuff was either handled by people that aim to make Golarion "realistic" and/or they just didn't want firearms to become prominent since there's a ton of people that don't like firearms in fantasy.
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This really isn't true, and they do go to some effort in Guns and Gears to establish a reasonable technological space for firearms to occupy that makes them comparable to, but not superior to, other ranged weapons. It's not like everyone abandoned bows or crossbows the moment a firearm was invented - there were ~200 years of overlap between the bow, crossbow, and firearm in western europe - ~1350 to ~1550 they were all used. That's comfortably in the time period from which Pathfinder draws from - full plate armour was basically unheard of before ~1400. By...I think the main problem with the gunslinger is that its limited by the fact that firearms (and ranged weapons in general) have to seemingly be worse than bows for whatever reason that was stablished in the fantasy genre (bows are even better than most guns in Starfinder 2e too, which is weirder), with PF2e firearms in particular having built-in action taxes in the form of reloads, which the gunslinger class needs to fix to make firearms usable.
I think Guns & Gears is probably the book with the worst content in PF2e. In the case of the gunslinger, I don't think its bad necesarily, but in an ideal world bows wouldn't be the gold standard and all ranged weapons should be made equally, and in that ideal world the gunslinger would just be a fighter.
One of the many reasons I don't like guns in my fantasy, they never do them right. Guns made man-powered weapons like bows obsolete and are far, far, far, far, exponentially more powerful than bows, crossbows, or the like. Yet in fantasy game rules due to balance, they end up worse or equal to bows. That should not ever happen.
Putting the two weapons next to each other ruins the verisimilitude for guns and for bows at the same time.
I understand some folks want the steampunk feel to their game and don't care about accurate power. I just can't get past it. It's too much to buy into for me and I enjoy buying into dragons and wizards.
This may be true in the real world, but gun tech would have advanced at a rapid pace assisted by magic and hyper-intelligent users of it. PF2 has the capacity to blend metals, fashion metal, and advance chemical reactions at a much faster pace than the real world.
To me it ends up not making sense why gun tech would be slow or why it would even start with single shot muskets and such. Given the smithing mastery of fantasy dwarves as well as the magical ability to manipulate and advance tech, it seems some wizard king or warrior with wizards would have implemented magically driven research to advance gun tech by leaps and bounds over the bow or crossbow.
But we're expected to believe guns have developed in such a world like they have in a non-magical world like ours. It's too nonsensical for my tastes.
It means in these games guns end up appearing far too weak than they should be. I can't enjoy them knowing they should be much better.
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Given the tech that already exists in Golarion, and the many magical ways of obtaining knowledge, if technological progress spread and advanced at the same rate as in the real world, then the setting would quickly become sci-fi or close to it. I think some degree of suspension of disbelief is in order so that we can enjoy our kitchen sink medieval fantasy setting.
I think the reason why firearms were undertuned is closer to what Exequiel mentions: the designers wanted to avoid firearms becoming too common in play, and so they implemented a multiple whammy of uncommon access and harsh balancing. Paizo often implements a double, triple, or even quadruple whammy of cautionary measures when trying to enforce a point of balance, so this isn't an outlier: for instance, casters have lower Strike proficiency, a lower Striking attribute, worse weapon specialization damage, and usually a lack of Strike power boosters in their class features all to make sure they don't Strike better than martials. I do think the multiple whammy ended up backfiring for firearms, though, because uncommon rarity could probably have been enough to let GMs put the kibosh on guns in their setting if they wanted to, and the end result is that guns just feel terrible to use even on the Gunslinger.
I think another subtle problem with firearms is that they don't interact so healthily with Pathfinder's three-action economy: regular Striking works just fine, because your multiple attack penalty means that you'll rarely want to spend your third action Striking (unless you're high-level and have gone for a specific build), and will instead want to do something else that'll be a bit different every turn and inject some variety into combat. Firearms essentially double the number of actions needed to Strike, as you need to reload each time after, but this means it becomes all too easy to loop between Striking and Interacting to reload across your turns, particularly as fighting from range puts little pressure by itself to use other actions. In an ideal world, firearms could be weapons you Strike with just once per turn and spend your third action doing something else (with the Gunslinger having various ways of offering more bang for your buck, so to speak), which would allow them to be far more powerful, but in practice that's not how the implementation turned out. A world in which firearms are as desirable as other weapons is a world where firearms users risk using up all of their actions to either Strike or reload without contributing much else or switching things up, so I can understand undertuning those weapons to avoid that issue. It does also mean that firearms are weak and don't feel good to use, which impacts the Gunslinger, but that might still be the lesser of two evils.
Would a rune that allows a firearm to use special ammunition without the user needing to pay the action tax of activating it do much to make firearms more appealing? I haven't used the class myself, so I can't be sure what it needs.
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I think there's a weird interaction that allows someone with the Eldritch Reload feat to reload as a free action if they use special ammunition that requires a free action to activate. You can't get that earlier than level 10 and I personally haven't tried it, but I don't think it would be too OP really.
However, I'm playing a sniper gunslinger (6th level) and the action economy is certainly the worst thing about it. The first round of combat usually goes smooth, going with the classic Strike-Reload-Strike routine or recently with the Sniper's Aim-Reload routine (it also helps that the GM handweaves cover to me since he thinks a character like mine that requires cover for Covered Reload would always be taking cover before a fight unless ambushed).
The problem starts when fighting enemies that aren't stupid (which in this case its every encounter because we are doing an Alternate Earth type of campaign in the 1500s, so pretty much next to no monsters and tons of human foes) which immediately recognize that they can shut me down only by virtue of staying as close to me as possible. I have Running Reload so moving and reloading isn't a problem, but at that point I'm effectively subclass-less. I initially took the Munitions Crafter feat but I retrained it very quickly since I just didn't have the action economy to use special ammunition and it really wasn't worth it most of the time.
I still think the playstyle of the class is fun and unique, plus doing crits on a strike that benefits from Gravity Weapon + Crossbow Crack Shot feels really satisfying, but I won't deny that having a whole type of weapons that were made bad on purpose to be "fixed" by a class its IMO bad design, more so when PF2e aims to not have as many trap options as earlier editions. Also, when people play a class thats named "gunslinger", they want to feel like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne, not having to plan around 2 turns in advance in case your routine gets denied by very simple enemy positioning.
All the "if X then there would already be Y" argument does is imply X should be banned.
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I like guns in fantasy. I don't think "I use this one specific subtype of weapon" is a coherent class identity under the PF2 design paradigm, and like many others, guns being kind of bad mechanically unless you play The Gun Class feels like one of the most bizarre facets of PF1 to bring forward.
Really hoping for something different in PF3, ten years from now :p
EDIT: I admit, seeing how much more fun the SF2 Operative and Soldier get to have than the Gunslinger stings a little! It does give me hope for the future of Paizo design, though.
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I think "good with a gun" can be a viable foundation for a mechanical identity, even if it's not the whole identity by itself. The Fighter's mechanical identity starts from "good with weapons", but reinforces this with good durability, Reactive Strike, and an expert-to-legendary proficiency track that gives them the best Strikes in the game. Thus, picking a Fighter means you'll have a character in the party who will be able to deal really high damage, control their area, and survive a fair bit of damage as well.
The problem is that the Gunslinger, despite having an expert-to-legendary proficiency track themselves, doesn't succeed at that same identity, because firearms are weak weapons and they fight from range by default. You could in theory buff the Gunslinger to Strike as well as a ranged Fighter, and the class does deal extra precision damage on-hit, but the amount they got isn't enough, and I suspect they're not allowed to be as good at Striking as the Fighter just to avoid niche overlap. This by itself could be fine if the Gunslinger could contribute something else that was properly meaningful, but that meaningful contribution isn't really fleshed out, is the problem. "Can do something while reloading" isn't really a contribution, it's just a thing you do that's internal to your character, given that reloading has you do nothing but reload your own weapon. Powerful Strikes and utility on the side could be a valid class identity, and it would certainly be very appropriate for many fictional gunslingers who quip or intimidate enemies as they reload, it's just that it's not fleshed out enough on the current class to be there just yet.
I think part of what holds the class back is that they could be this really interesting damage support with a lot of independence and agency over how they get to assist their team (which, again, would cohere with the fiction of a lone ranger while still fitting with a party dynamic), but in practice are exceptionally dependent on their own team to function, more so than many other classes. In order to make the most of their fatal weapons, they need buffs and also someone to make their target off-guard, and when they don't get that support, they just kinda flounder. Even the Fighter, who will synergize really well with a whole bunch of different team mechanics, has the means to take matters into their own hands thanks to Athletics maneuvers, Feint, and many of their own feats. By contrast, the Gunslinger has Pistol Twirl, and that's mostly it at low level.
What I really don't understand is why Paizo decided to recreate the PF1 paradigm so precisely: the fact that in PF1 guns were generally terrible but there was one specific class that had features designed to make them good was one of the major points of criticism against them. And then here we are again in PF2 with guns being bad-by-design and the gunslinger offering some very specific tools to make them a bit more usable.
I think the problem of "a bit more usable" is that it still doesn't get them up to the level of just using a bow, in terms of damage output.
Reloading is honestly such a major action tax, and the Gunslinger ways aren't really attractive (to me) unless those actions were already something you were very interested in doing. And of the Ways, the only one I consider "good" or something I would pursue is the Sniper one, assuming I wanted to make a Sniper character (which honestly doesn't fit well with traditional parties).
Assuming sort of the "best" rotation with a reload weapon you start combat loaded, you fire, reload action, fire. On turn 2 your reload, fire, reload (repeat these two turns). So you end up with 3 attacks over 2 turns. And that assumes you don't want to do anything else.
Compare that to a reload 0 longbow or shortbow and you can easily make 2 attacks in the round and have 1 action left over to do something else.
Heck, if the gunslinger had just gotten a generic Way to move (where ever they want) and reload at the same time that would help (basically Running Reload at level 1). As would if Risky Reload wasn't a flourish ability with a chance of causing your weapon to misfire.
The way I see it they wanted Gunslinger to do a lot of stuff besides just standing a firing their guns. But I think many people would have preferred an option that just allows them to fire as often as a bow user would.
Anyways, I'll stop rambling and just say with the state of reload weapons such as they are, I'll stick to either my longbow or shortbow for ranged weapons.
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I do agree the fire-reload-fire loop is an issue, though I also think there is value in having a weapon that you'd only fire once per round, assuming the weapon was strong enough to justify it. If you had, say, a recoil trait that meant each Strike counted as two attacks for the purpose of your multiple attack penalty, but also added your Dex mod to your damage rolls or a similar damage increase, that'd create a paradigm where you'd spend only two actions per turn on shooting a firearm by default (one to Strike, one to reload), but all of your damage would be front-loaded into one Strike, so your weapon would be defined by big, explosive bursts of damage. That, I imagine, could feel quite strong.
This could also add a few more hooks for a Gunslinger to build on: for starters, the basic model of having two actions to use your firearm and one to do something else each turn would mean that being able to use a skill action while reloading would genuinely make you exceptionally good at skill-based utility. If you're a two-gun combatant, that could be easily enabled by trading off that special recoil trait for the ability to fire and reload two one-handed guns simultaneously. It wouldn't fix the class single-handedly, but making sure firearms don't take up more than two of your actions per turn (but also feel appropriately powerful in return) would go a long way towards making them more palatable.
This is not to say that there aren't other ways to achieve good class balance. Or funner feats, etc. Just to say that game balance may constrain much of the solution space. Reload as a game mechanic is not fun because the player doesn't get as many actions to do stuff with, but it's at least thematically related to a realistic aspect of early firearms. Getting rid of it (and modifying other firearm stats to maintain balance) might improve player experience, but for the folks who already think flintlocks in their fantasy are disbelief-suspending, rapidly firing them makes the suspension of disbelief problem worse.
I feel like this is the kind of problem the Rarity system exists to solve. I'll never understand why they didn't just make Firearms equivalent o other ranged weapons, but Uncommon.
Anyone who has a problem with fast reloads also probably won't like using the blast from your gun to fly around, either, but that still apparently felt appropriate for low-level Gunslingers; I don't think an equivalent action economy to everyone else in the game is more audacious than that. Why design for people who will never use the thing on principle anyway?
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Highly realistic guns would have everyone using them, which really causes the fantasy setting to suffer.
Highly realistic gun class would make the gunslinger superior to other martials. That also causes the setting to suffer.
I don't think nobody here is arguing for firearms to be better than bows (except for maybe Deriven, though he's mostly arguing he doesn't like guns because they are usually worse than bows) but rather that firearms should be better and at least as good as bows.
This is why I would really want for the simple-martial-advanced paradigm to not be ported over to PF3e because I feel that's a really vestigial system whose whole purpose to exist in the first place isn't really a thing in PF2e anymore, but because it still exists it forces a weird design logic of having weapons made to be worse on purpose than others for no reason. Even the supposed "strongest" type of weapons, advanced weapons, are usually considered worse than martial weapons because of the feat investment (not to mention some are actually worse than martial weapons too).
This is also the reason why weapons like daggers are only ever an option for rogues or other classes with similar damage steroids because a fighter or barbarian isn't going to pick up a dagger over a greatsword or better one-handed weapon if they want a free hand or shield because why would they? In a system where weapons are balanced against each other, a fighter that chooses a dagger over a greatsword would still deal less damage (because it makes sense for a big chunk of iron to deal more damage than a small one) but it would have other stuff to compensate like deadly, fatal, or whatever thing Paizo comes up for a future edition.
If they still wanted to gate certain weapons to be used by certain classes, like a wizard going around with a greatsword at 1st level (though I feel the system would already encourage that by making cantrips a better option) would be something like the current Strength requirement thing that armors have, but including Dex in some cases like for finesse weapons. Change it so most simple weapons have a Str or Dex requirement of -1 or +0, martial weapons a +1 or +2, and advanced weapons be a little more wacky with something like +3 Str and +1 Dex, or +2 Str and +2 Dex, etc. Make it so when a martial increases their physical attributes they also gain acess to new weapons to symbolize their training. This could also allow for specific magic weapons or artifacts to require a +5 Str or higher if its a giant weapon or require even mental stats like Wis or Cha to symbolize you have to be worthy like King Arthur to take Excalibur.
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I've played a Sniper Gunslinger from levels 1-8, and feel that I've made an effective character. The game uses free archetype, and all my archetype feats have gone into Rogue, which I mostly took for Surprise Attack to make my One Shot, One Kill turn better.
That said, I do have one problem with it. The character was far more fun to build than she is to play. The strategy in movement that Captain Morgan brought up is definitely true, and I play in a campaign where most combats are in rather open areas with lots of cover. That said, in the fights that don't have that sort of battlefield, there's little stopping Snipers Aim plus Covered Reload being the best course of action every single round. My ability to be satisfied by big numbers kinda saves it for me, but without thatbI probably wouldn't enjoy the class.
Also, as a little rant. Munitions Machinist might be one of the worst feats in the game. My character uses alchemical ammo, but due to the action cost normally just preloads it into her weapon and uses it only in the first round. But here's the thing about the feat. Unless you have Risky Reload or are quickened, it's literally impossible to use the ammo you make with it. One action Quick Alchemy, one action activate the ammo, one action reload. Oops, it's the end of your turn, the ammo loses potency. I was actually interested in taking Precious Munitions down the line, but I refuse to spend a class feat on Munitions Machinist out of principle.
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I do agree the fire-reload-fire loop is an issue, though I also think there is value in having a weapon that you'd only fire once per round, assuming the weapon was strong enough to justify it. If you had, say, a recoil trait that meant each Strike counted as two attacks for the purpose of your multiple attack penalty, but also added your Dex mod to your damage rolls or a similar damage increase, that'd create a paradigm where you'd spend only two actions per turn on shooting a firearm by default (one to Strike, one to reload), but all of your damage would be front-loaded into one Strike, so your weapon would be defined by big, explosive bursts of damage. That, I imagine, could feel quite strong
This is probably my favorite idea I've seen.
Imagine if you had a d12 firearm, with fatal d12, and this "recoil" trait that made it count as two attacks for MAP AND could only be used once per round, and maybe let you add some sort of damage bonus, and it's a two-handed martial weapon. Maybe we imagine it as sniper rifle with a bolt action. So your normal turn is fire weapon once, deal as much as most bows would in two attacks, but you spend your next action to reload and can't fire that weapon again that turn. And you have another action that is flexible.
That would put it roughly on par with a composite short bow, although probably would have a longer range. So maybe no additional damage bonus. Err...well all the damage runes that you get double the benefit of for two attacks don't get doubled so maybe we do keep some sort of bonus for this imaginary gun.
That let's you do a "single" big hit each round that would at least keep you close to the damage output of a composite shortbow.
I'd play that character.
Also, to address something that was brought up, historically the biggest reason for the adoption of early firearms was that they took a lot less training than a bow to use well. Let's ignore whether a bow or gun did more damage, the bow took years to master and generally required permanent standing armies to train with them. Meanwhile, you could hand a peasant a gun and in a few weeks they'd have the training required to perform group fire tactics. The gun was basically the crossbow 2.0. All the things that made crossbows good, were doubled down on by guns in the sense that it had the training benefits, but were more powerful.
guns being kind of bad mechanically unless you play The Gun Class feels like one of the most bizarre facets of PF1 to bring forward.I think it may be a 'least worst' option.
Highly realistic guns would have everyone using them, which really causes the fantasy setting to suffer.
Highly realistic gun class would make the gunslinger superior to other martials. That also causes the setting to suffer.
So Paizo making guns sufficiently bad that the gunslinger with feats + gun combo is only 'on par' with a fantasy martial swinging a sword, is maybe the best choice available. It makes space for a gun-totin' PC, without making either the weapon or the class so powerful that they become the one and only optimized choice.
The problem Is that guns aren't as good as a martial swinging their sword, they're an awfully useless class of weapons that, in any other case, would be considered bad.
Fatal IS a trait that's basically only useful on fighters and to dpr calculators, and It works Better in both of those cases when you make a lot of strikes per turn
This is why I would really want for the simple-martial-advanced paradigm to not be ported over to PF3e because I feel that's a really vestigial system whose whole purpose to exist in the first place isn't really a thing in PF2e anymore, but because it still exists it forces a weird design logic of having weapons made to be worse on purpose than others for no reason.Well the reason is some verisimilitude helps players get into the fantasy. When the dagger does exactly the damage of the claymore, many players don't like that...and they dislike it as much or more than 'you have to get martial proficiency to use the claymore' or having other skill, feat, or cost barriers to better weapons.
There are certainly games that go the 'action hero' route where every weapon is comparable. And there are games which do something like you suggest, where maybe raw damage is different but is made up for by weapon specialization powers evening it out. Paizo seems to have gone in halfway, i.e. some differences, but lots of comparable weapons with tradeoffs too.
In any event, I don't think Paizo intentionally tried to make firearms really really bad. I think they used the same simple/martial split you don't like in regular weapons (meaning: simple firearms are worse than martial firearms), and they thought traits such as concussive and fatal would bring the higher cost martial firearms up to parity with higher cost bows that don't have a reload. Did they miscalculate? Well personally I don't know as I've never had a gunslinger in game. I'd say it sounds like from this thread that they did, but then again, threads tend to be started and supported by exactly those folks who desire a change, so they're not exactly a representative sample of player experience or opinion.
I think PF3 will be well served to make weapons that make sense for the world without much care for balance or the current three buckets weapons fall into. Then they should look at the characters they picture using each weapon and design them to be at par while using their iconic set of weapons. If any weapons just aren't seeing uses at this point, treat them like spells that see similarly low use and have them as niche or NPC focused options.
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Well the reason is some verisimilitude helps players get into the fantasy. When the dagger does exactly the damage of the claymore, many players don't like that...and they dislike it as much or more than 'you have to get martial proficiency to use the claymore' or having other skill, feat, or cost barriers to better weapons.
But I'm explicitly not asking for the dagger to be as strong (damage-wise) as the greatsword.
In a system where weapons are balanced against each other, a fighter that chooses a dagger over a greatsword would still deal less damage (because it makes sense for a big chunk of iron to deal more damage than a small one) but it would have other stuff to compensate like deadly, fatal, or whatever thing Paizo comes up for a future edition.
A practical example would be longsword, bastard sword, and greatsword. Both the longsword and greatsword have versatile P, but one is a one-handed d8 weapon while the other is a two-handed d12 weapon. The greatsword is obviously stronger but restricts the use of your off-hand for shields, tools, or consumables, so its not like the greatsword is always the better option. Then there's the bastard sword, which allows the wielder to engage certain combats as if they had a greatsword or as if they had a longsword, but lose versatile P in the process. This is really good design because it allows the player to lose on some damage for extra utility.
With that said, why would a fighter that doesn't want a greatsword because they want to, for example, sword and board choose a dagger over a longsword? Of course the answer is "the dagger is a simple weapon, so martial weapons should be better" which is certainly true for the system we have, but the fantasy of a knife fighter does exist, but in this system, trying that out feels like actually nerfing yourself for no reason. Even most of the martial knives aren't really an option unless you are Dex-based, which already isn't optimal since most non-rogues or swashbucklers take a big loss on damage if they decide to go Dex-based.
The reason why simple weapons became a thing its because in 3.X not every martial had access to martial weapons and they also didnt want casters to carry around martial weapons when they runned out of spells (as if they needed that lol). PF2e already solved the caster problem by making cantrips infinite use (although this was in PF1e first) and heighten like regular spells but automatically, and since the Remaster even bards have access to martial weapons, with some casters also having easy access to martial weapons too if they want to gish, so simple weapons really don't have a reason to exist in the system anymore.
When I said earlier that "daggers should compete with greatswords" it could be interpreted as me saying daggers needed to be as strong as greatswords, which was the thing I meant to say just not in terms of damage necessarily, so I guess I'll change it to "daggers should compete with other one-handed weapons".
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My main pain point is not even related to gunslingers: For our Outlaws of Alkenstar campaign, everybody wanted to use firearms, but only the Gunslinger can overcome the horrid action cost of reload.
A Thaumaturge with an air repeater is mechanically sound, but who wants to walk around with a toy weapon in a city of gun smiths?
I would prefer if there were other benefits of being a Gunslinger instead of being the class that can actually use firearms outside of some niche combos like investigator+risky reload.
Using the archetype lets you wait forever to get something but risky reload, and even that is a lvl 4 feat.
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I suppose where I'm at is that I'd rather have a game where a Fighter, Rogue, Magus, and Ranger all might have reasons to pick up a gun than I would a game where there's one class that exists to make them suck less (with a peppering of gun-related antics thrown on top). I don't *think* I should have to pick between both, but guns shouldn't be so prohibitive that only the I Fix Guns Guy should bother.
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I suppose where I'm at is that I'd rather have a game where a Fighter, Rogue, Magus, and Ranger all might have reasons to pick up a gun than I would a game where there's one class that exists to make them suck less (with a peppering of gun-related antics thrown on top). I don't *think* I should have to pick between both, but guns shouldn't be so prohibitive that only the I Fix Guns Guy should bother.
I 100% agree with this.
Fighters don't make weapons usable. They use their better than average attack bonus and lots of feats that let them do specific things, to use those weapons in ways others can't.
Gunslinger needed to do something similar. And there are some gunslinger feats that do nifty things. But the core of the gunslinger is just getting guns into a place where it's usable enough, but everyone could still point at it and say "but it's still not as good for dealing damage as using a bow" and it's hard to argue that they're wrong.
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I think it's high time someone in Alkenstar invent a proper revolver to solve these reload problems.
Edit: Ok, that was like half joking, but I just found out there were revolvers in Ultimate Equipment for first edition, what's the deal? Why can't we have those here? I might actually be kinda upset now cause those would be a big help lol.
Slide pistol is pretty close to a revolver already.
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Slide pistol is pretty close to a revolver already.
A double-action revolver wouldn't cost an extra action for a follow-up shot. So it could be 6 shots as fast as you like, and then 3 to 6 actions to reload.
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Slide pistol is pretty close to a revolver already.A double-action revolver wouldn't cost an extra action for a follow-up shot. So it could be 6 shots as fast as you like, and then 3 to 6 actions to reload.
Precisely what I was going for, still something of a hassle to reload during combat that a Gunslinger might have an edge on using. But useful for anyone proficient in it to get a few shots without needing to reload, spend actions to change barrels or be relegated to an air repeater.