[Poruku]

Anyone who has ever made a magic gunner knows the struggle. You're looking at the archer skills and go "Okay, which skills here aren't completely useless?" The answer is always the same, so you grab all the skills that aren't completely useless to you. Then you're still left with points left over... Ough.

Here's my proposal:

- Make keyshot work with guns too (Why not???)
- Make snipe work with guns, at least rifles (It's literally called snipe and you can't use it with a sniper rifle? I understand that range bonuses are really good, but still. You could just drop that clause for guns)
- Add at least one offensive ability that guns can use

The only guns that are good are
- Dual handgun for consistent on-hits and crits, probably using toyatori and maybe ryeser. 
- Excel sniper (but that got nerfed recently)
- Crazy coyote which is almost too powerful.

Meanwhile, guns suffer from complete lack of aoe (except DH) and a general lack of skills related to them. The VAST majority of the power of guns comes directly from Magic Gunner, which I think is a bit of a shame. Guns are a fairly unique and cool weapon class, and could be expanded upon. I think that making arbalest able to use rifles was a breath of fresh air, exactly the kind of thing we need to bring guns somewhere good. I think one of the biggest drawbacks of guns is that it's a guile weapon with almost no crit bonuses. Engineer gunners have one or two tools for that, but the others don't. Making gun builds overall better by making archer an actual gun/bow class would be a good start imo. Funnily enough, fortune wind is by far the best part of archer imo (and longdraw/snake shot for bows ofc), so it at least has that going for it. But still. The thing about guns is that they're supposed to be a basic attack weapon and have a lot of theoretical advantages, but not that much support for basic attacking (no crit/the only basic attack skill you have is parting shot, which isn't an offensive skill). Daggers basically outpace them in everything except hit (Kinda) ever since throwing daggers got introduced.

At least for demon hunter gunners, soldier still has some usefulness despite having no direct gun skills, especially with martial lawbreaker. Engineer is also ok since rogue is so versatile, although engineers with guns aren't really gunners, just grenade spammers, so you can hardly call it a gun class (flamethrower buff when? One more engie gun skill to seal the deal?). But I'm not gonna go on about those two.

And finally, please fix Soul Shot and Evil Force. It's been years, when can I make my edgy amalgama gunner

Edit: probably shoulda put this in balance fu

[Lolzytripd]

I do agree, would be nice if archer gave more of its kit to guns, maybe a few basic gun skills could be added to it, some sort of aoe, maybe an overwatch type skill for main class archer that for like 4-5m performs a basic attack on any enemy that steps within X tiles of you, trickery chance to reset and allow to attack more enemies that walk in range.

[Rendar]

Could literally move Covering Fire and Parting shot from Magic Gunner to Archer.

But yeah, some new gun skills would be nice for Archer

[Raigen.Convict]

PUHLEASE PARTING SHOT AND COVERING FIRE ON ARCHER! MAGIC GUNNER IS DYING FOR SKILL POINTS!!!

[caliaca]

I don't think guns need good scaling and free stat boosts from snipe and keyshot. They're already scaling off guile primary instead of str (excluding handshot). Str bows kinda need the help.

I say move some skills from MG to archer like suggested instead to assist MG sp.

[Poruku]

That would be pretty nice and give rifle arbalests more stuff. MGs just don't have enough sp to max out covering fire even though it's a decent skill in some situations