I am sure that what I am about to say in regard to agents has been said countless times before, and I am also sure that other people in other professions could really give a damn about us, but I could care less. So ...
Help us Funcom! Rumors that 14.0 will be the "agent patch" leave rocking back and forth between excitement and dread. Will we get some of the tweaks to our profession that we are so missing, or will they be made worse and called "fixed" for the time being? As an 89 agent on RK2, here are a few reasonable, and quite logical changes that I believe should be looked into.
- Aimed shot: As an agent, Rifle and Aimed shot are our only green weapon skills. That's nice and dandy, but can we please do something about Aimed Shot? Its "recharge" time is long, but that I can live with. What I want to know is why is its success based on the perception of the MOB? We are penalized by its lengthy recharge time already, so why hit us with a 2nd penalty that not only makes it often times hard to use, but also damned near impossible if the MOB is already provoked into combat? We get only one weapon attack method, yet it has a long recharge, can only be used once during the course of an encounter, can not even be executed if the MOBs perception is too high, and really does not do all that much damage. Surely this cannot be correct ...
- Concealment: Again the perception of MOBs is our enemy in relation to this skill, making it hard to reliably sneak past even grey MOBs in missions with 900+ points in concealment. Perhaps the levels of perceptions for MOBs should be checked accross the board?
- False Professions: Okay, this style of nano is pretty much the only thing we have going for ourselves since we are stuck with rifles that do piss poor damage, cannot sneak about undetected, and can only fire off aimed shots if it is a full moon on a Tuesday evening, falling on an even numbered day in the first week of the month. Again we are double penalized for trying to do what we are made to do ... I can understand having the nano init -2000, but if that has to be, then lift the penalty points taken away from all our nano skills while being false profession'd, and reduce the length of the nano. Or keep the nano length and the nano skill penalties, but drop the obscene nano init penalty. I cannot tell you the number of times I've died in a hunt because I've FP'd to buff another member one way or another, and then cannot save myself with a root or a heal or whatever because it takes 2 minutes to fire off a nano program. And as for the 22 worthless Agent nanos that make up the Mimic and Assume profession class, have you put any thought at all into these? Who in their right mind would even bother with making a -80 or -140 sacrifice to all their nano skills for a slight reduction in nano init and length of program? (granted, mimic is only -750 to nano init which is better, but still with a -140 skill penalty, why bother?)
- Rifles: Please give us something decent? Using my ql200 Stigma, I can't even dream of coming close to doing the kind of damage that a shotgun weilding engineer with a ql120 bot can do. At the least, make shotgun skill greenish so we can have a little more flexibility? Maybe give us some sort fo shotgun nano buff?
- Cost of living: I know ... There is little that can be done about this, but since our bread and butter as an agent is the ability to run the buffs of other professions, we must first be able to afford not only our own nanos, but all the other nanos from other professions. If you were to tally them up, an average high level agent has spent a few million on nano programs... I guess this just kind of points back to the whole concealment and sneaking missions thing. If that issue were addressed, we could more easily raise the funds needed to buy other nano programs.
Thanks for listening to my rants ... I am sure I have forgotten something, and I'm too tired to proof read, so I apologize for any typos or grammatical errors. Exhaustion will also be my first defense if you try to point out any flaws in my logic so consider yourself warned.Now I lay my weary head to rest ...
