Bullets, and overall cost of the job

[Yinnyth]

It's been mentioned several times in other posts, but I felt the topic deserved its own thread to discuss. Bullets for corsair have always been just a little bit ridiculous, and I'm honestly not exactly sure why. I can understand attempting to keep COR weaker at ranged attacks than RNG, but some of th- well, just read on.

Way back in the day when the job was new, silver bullets were the god of all bullets, but COR never got access to those. There were the JSE bullets from the ENM battle, but that was a joke seeing as how you could get 99 of them once every 5 days assuming you win the battle. Then there were steel bullets which were still weaker than silver, a higher level than silver, and more expensive than silver. As of this post, dweomer(RNG) and oberon(COR) are the ultimate bullets. It should be noted that dweomer and oberon bullets are relatively equal in difficulty to obtain. However, oberon bullets are STILL weaker than silver bullets, yet heinously more expensive.

Most RNGs tend to use bows anyways since (even though they get access to stronger guns and ammo), the bows are generally stronger and cheaper to use.

As though more expensive and weaker bullets were not enough of a hinderance to COR, most equipment and abilities COR has been given lately is geared around increasing the speed at which they fire bullets, not the damage those bullets do. Hexaguns are the perfect example from back in the day. Weaker but faster, these guns required you to spam more ammo if you wanted to keep up with your RNG counterparts. What about recent times now that hexaguns are all but dead? AF3 has only one piece that enhances the DMG your ranged attacks do: the body. It's mostly centered around increasing the speed at which you can waste your money. The hat has rapid shot +10, the body enhances triple shot, the legs enhance snapshot, the feet augment courser's roll (snapshot roll).

I'm ok with COR not being as strong as RNG with ranged attacks. I'm ok with COR being designed around shooting more frequently for less damage. What I'm not ok with is the cost associated with doing less damage, and the difficulty of finding bullets. Considering the initial startup cost of buying dice, equipment, cards, and bullets, I really feel something should be done overall for the cost of playing corsair, and bullets are my primary area of concern.

Edit: Nacht is right, not sure what I was thinking when I made the post, but took out the part about gold and platinum bullets.

[Nacht]

I don't know what you're talking about with these gold and platinum bullets, since corsairs can't use those.

It's not difficult at all to get steel bullets. However, if you're shooting oberon bullets off like candy, then that's a different matter. I do agree that oberon bullets are ridiculously rare and expensive to make, though. But steel bullets is fairly reasonable, although it's more of an annoyance than a problem that they're more expensive and weaker than silver bullets. And on top of that, our best WS ignores the damage of the bullets.

[Yinnyth]

You're right, I don't know why I was thinking cor could use them- I must have had a phase when I was considering gun for my thf. The problem back in the day was mostly a lack of any bullets, then they released paktong and... tin I think. They were way too expensive and rare when I was leveling cor on a mule.

My major complaint about the steel and oberons is that they're more expensive than silver, yet they're weaker and have a higher level requirement. I can understand the higher level and weaker; COR (a support job) shouldn't outdamage RNG (a damage job). However, the fact that steel bullets cost twice as much as silver is ludicrous. Lower quality products should not cost more than higher quality products. My suggestion for fixing steel bullets is similar to what was done recently for oberons: make a synergy recipe involving 1 steel ingot + 1 firesand, NQ yield is 99 bullets, HQ1 is 198, HQ2 is 297, HQ3 is 396 (oberon recipe used to be nq 33, hq1 66, hq2 99, but they seem to have ninja fixed a while ago). As for oberons... it needs serious love in a lot of ways, or just a new ultimate bullet for COR.

And yeah, wildfire ignores bullet damage, but not every COR is lucky enough to have Armageddon. Plus, there are several enemies who are strong to magic and/or fire damage. Plus wildfire does its best damage while wielding a vulcan staff, and if you're wielding a staff, you need to shoot bullets to get your TP. Plus the aftermath is only good if you're shooting bullets.

Bullets are my #1 complaint about corsair. It's a fantastic job; both fun and useful. But equipment lately has been pushing COR towards being more of a ranger and less of a melee, which I wouldn't mind so much if our bullets were as cheap as RNG ammo.

[Nacht]

I guess it's easier for me, I have trouble with money, so I don't mind dishing out steel bullets. I'm also not on corsair -that- often, so I don't mind the bullet cost at all. And for availability, I just craft my own, so as long as I can find steel ingots, I'm OK.

Actually... I just checked the prices, and silver is 160k for a stack of pouches an steel is 195k, so it's not even that much of a difference.

[Yinnyth]

On fenrir, they're currently about 300k for steel, 150k for silver

[Nacht]

Sounds like some crafters there are making bank.
You should consider skilling up crafting yourself. It's not that hard to get alchemy and smithing high enough to make your own steel bullets though.

[Yinnyth]

I do make my own bullets. I farm djinns for their ash, buy sulfur off region vendors and turn those into massive amounts of firesand. I buy fool's gold and gold ore off the AH, and bug LS members to turn it into ingots for me, then I synergize those ingots into oberons. Back in the day, I used to make steel bullets for myself too. I could probably make a decent living off oberons if I spent enough time on it. But the money I make off crafting is a complete derail of the original topic.

Looking at the prices of steel ingots vs. silver ingots, CORs are at a price disadvantage even if you craft the stuff from scratch. Silver ingots go for 35k a stack, steel go for 60-70k a stack.

Another thing which had completely slipped my mind until now was the addition of dark adaman bullets. Mostly a moot point since the things never sell, so they're pretty much on par with oberons now I guess.

[Muse]

35k a stack is almost double what it costs if you were to craft the silver yourself. I can make a stack of ingots for roughly 17k a stack. But that's beside the point of this thread.

I do agree that COR's do need a better bullet selection, just giving us Silver Bullets alone would increase our damage output and cheapen our costs that go into bullets.

[Greatguardian]

Making Fools Gold Ore craftable with non-retarded mats would fix a whole mess of problems right now. Heck, even putting it in Mining locations or as a normal monster drop would be preferable to this "Campaign Union Only" crap.

[Kjara]

More bullet types for COR please!!