Legendary weapon balancing

I posted about this in the suggestions forum, but I think it's more of a balancing issue.

Every legendary weapon I've found is awful. They look amazing and have awesome effects and I really WANT to use them, but they seem to spawn with the lowest damage available for a tier.

I have found 5 legendary weapons (found my fifth last night). Not one has been comparable with dropped ordinary weapons on the same planet. Last night I started a new character and just towards being done with the first planet I found Starkiller. Awesome red sword which does some nova looking effect and does... 3 damage per swing and 3 dps. Meanwhile I was using a 12 dps ordinary spear.

People have said that the effects outweigh the DPS number and that makes them worth using, but I disagree. With Starkiller I was having to hit low level surface mobs 4 to 5 times to kill them while I could 1-2 shot them with the spear.

Also, there seems to be a damage delay preventing enemies from taking multiple damage hits too quickly. This defeats the usefulness of many scatter projectiles like the underwhelming Watersword legendary I found. 8 bubble spread sounds great, but when only one damages the mob even if multiple hit it's no better than an uncommon lightning weapon. Worse, in fact, because it's base damage is so far below equivalent tier weapons.

 

If they're buffed they should be a lot harder to get as well.

Though I've found a really good bonehammer that I would use if I till used melee attacks.

 

I agree with this honestly, but I also think they are FAR too common. I seriously find them everywhere.

 

They are more easy to find than they should if IF they were overpowered like you'd think a legendary weapon would be. As it stands they're already harder to find than uncommons so they should be somewhat better than uncommons.

I just want them to be useful, not necessarily OP. Just make them spawn on the upper end of whatever damage range is in your current tier.

 

Indeed, they need to tweak the basic and uncommon weapons to make them less strong, so the legendary weapons are, as they rightly should be, the top of the tier.

 

They would probably first try to balance out all the normal items, so that they have a good foundation in which to balance the legendary and others. Or at least that's what I would do. Make the legendary items better than normal, but decrease the drop rate a bit.

 

I don't know what you guys are doing to find so many Legendaries, so far I've found I think between three and five all the way from Copper to Impervium Tier. I'm fuzzy on exactly how many because out of those only two of them were any good and one of those was actually of a weapon type I cared to use. It was a MIRV launcher, and it was actually pretty legendary for a change.

 

As an aside, the bonehammer should not break blocks, it's more a frustration than anything useful.

 

Played with a lower-tier friend and he used that weapon to dig through dirt, as he had a pretty weak pick at the time. It actually worked quite well, but it was a little silly.

 

The vast majority are definitely not terribly useful, though the bonehammer is one example of a powerful one. The threat 10 bonehammer does significantly more than the crafted impervium weapons, and I've never found anything that could even come close to them before. Also, I found a legendary shotgun last night that I don't even know what it does. It has a special type of projectile but costs 585 ENERGY to fire.
If only the shotgun damage wasn't broken too.

 

585 energy... u wot m8

 

I've also found guns that require more energy to fire than you can actually have with impervium armor. Its obviously a bug so I'm not too worried about it. Its gotta make you laugh though!

As for legendaries in general. I found a useful one once. I was on my first planet and found a nifty sword in a chest. It had a little lower dps than the crafted 2h weapons, but shot a spread of 3 energy balls. With the effect, it put the damage on par with other weapons, but the added 'hit' of the energy effect gave it more knockback...and of course, helped damage things when I missed and gave me a medium range attack option. It was fun while it lasted. It didn't feel 'legendary' though. If it had more damage to pull it up even with its altneratives, the special effect would have given it the advantage a legendary requires.

Every legendary since that has been total crap. It reminds me of Diablo III's unique items, which I hope they fixed by now, but that crap loot system turned me away after the first month. Fortunately, Starbound has a lot going for it outside of loot. Legendaries shouldn't exist unless they live up to the name. Just mark them as uncommon if they are going to share the same stat scale. Finding something marked as legendary is a huge disappointment if it sucks, which subtracts fun. Its an anti-feature.

The problem may not be legendaries specifically though. I think generated weapons have a stat problem overall. I rarely find anything with stats compareable to crafted weapons of the same tier.
I'm sure the devs don't intend that... the numbers are just a little off still.

None of the stat frustration though compares to killing dozens of gun wielding humanoids and having them drop melee weapons. If they wield a gun, drop a gun! Its only fair. They could even drop useless broke trash guns 80% of the time and it would be fine... but use a gun, drop a gun!

 

Right. It's actually a disappointment when I see purple instead of a feeling of excitement. "Oh here's another junk legendary. Let's give it a couple swings to see the particle effects before throwing it in a locker forever."

 

Itemization and gear balancing is one of the biggest things I want to see worked on. They've been putting a lot of work on it lately, but its still so far from the mark. The future of Starbound post looks like some great things on the horizon, but seeing nothing about making 80% of the items you encounter useless will hopefully be addressed on the way to doing all of that stuff.

 

Yeah just ran into this myself. Gamma sector (able to make the green-rarity [uncommon] Titanium weapons. My crafted 2H green axe does 66 dps/53 per swing. Just found a legendary in a chest, was excited till I saw the damage: 32 dps, 35 per swing. Sigh

 

Legendary weapons are unbalanced,I agree.
I got "common" chair with more,than 4500 dmg/hit, while "legendary" star cleaver causes only about 2k damage. And they are both from 10-th level planet.

 

I dunno. I've been staisfied with it. My star cleaver hits for around 2600 at tier 10, and for me it is more the usefulness of the weapon than the numbers. My Star cleaver can hit twice per swing at 2600 vs a chair or hammer that might hit for more, but only once, slower, and with less reach.

The same applies to guns too. There may be times where you don't want your shots to be glowy sticky plasma, or want to provide cover fire for allies instead of the 3 shot before I'm out of energy rocket launcher.

 

You have a point. But as for guns, I can say that grenade lunchers are really better than everything else.

Still I prefer nightstick+riot shield. And I couldn't find any legendary onehanded weapon.

 

Not anywhere up to that level yet (I just started playing the game again a few days ago), but it does seem like some weapon-classes are just flat out better than others, on top of legendaries being kinda meh. This leads to you maybe having a green onehander that somehow ends up better than a legendary 2 hander, doing more dmg/swing.

 

Sad, but true. My favourite shotguns amazingly weak compare to any other weapon type.