Carefull shooter and trigger-happy in terms of skill points.

[Zawarudo]

Lets say you have a guy with shooting 10 but trigger-happy and a fast fire rate weapon and another guy without trigger-happy but 15 points in the skill. Which one would you pick?

If you could measure these traits in terms of skill points, would you say carefull shooter equals 5 skill points in your experience? What about trigger happy?

[dnrob7]

careful shooter with a fast weapon.

[Astasia]

A few years ago trigger happy was a decent trait. Then weapon cooldowns were rebalanced, and ranged accuracy was changed, and trigger happy was never updated. Now it's a very bad trait, all you can really do is give them a minigun and let them spray in the general direction of enemies hoping their misses become hits.

Trigger happy is -5 shooting skill.
Careful shooter is +5 shooting skill.

The difference in aiming time is pretty trivial. -50% aiming time is generally less than a 25% DPS difference, while the 25% difference in accuracy is generally much more than 25% DPS difference because of how accuracy works in the game (it's per tile multiplicative).

[Grishnerf]

like astasia said: only with a minigun the trait gets useful.
infact it is (dependend on your base layout/entrance) a very good surpressive fire on mass enemies.
you can force like 10 pirats to take cover just with 1 guy and a minigun.

[MisterSpock]

At a certain point the diminishing return drops in. A level 15 with bionic eye is good. Triggerhappy or not. doesnt matter

So its the triggerhappy guy.

[MisterSpock]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1558992729

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1558992820

So at 30 tiles the default shooter has 33% higher hitchance. On overage triggerhappy require approx. -25% less time to shoot, which lead to a +33% increase of dps on longer fights.

I would not prefere triggerhappy on long range guns. But in late game they are good on charge rifles.

[starkmaddness]

I rather like trigger happy. They are great at close quarters combat, such as inside your base, or on a firing line that is being rushed. Give em a shotgun and watch them go nuts.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by MisterSpock:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1558992729

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1558992820

So at 30 tiles the default shooter has 33% higher hitchance. On overage triggerhappy require approx. -25% less time to shoot, which lead to a +33% increase of dps on longer fights.

I would not prefere triggerhappy on long range guns. But in late game they are good on charge rifles.

That's not how it works and your screens are a good example of what I'm talking about. Trigger Happy only reduces aim time, every weapon has an aim time and a cooldown time in addition to the actual firing animation time which determines how often they shoot. For most weapons the cooldown time is the same as or longer than the aim time, for example a Charge Rifle has a 1 second aim time and a 2 second cooldown, it also has a 0.6 second fire animation time, so on average it fires every 3.6 seconds. With a trigger happy colonist only the aim time (1 second) is reduced, meaning that 3.6 second fire time drops down to 3.1 seconds, which is less than a 14% increase in fire rate.

So now lets look at your screens, a charge rifle has a range of 26 tiles, the trigger happy colonist has 56% accuracy at that range, the other colonist has 71% accuracy at that range. For simplicity we will say the charge rifle does 10 damage per attack:

Trigger Happy - (10 / 3.1) * 0.56 = 1.8 DPS
Other - (10 / 3.6) * 0.71 = 1.97 DPS

So the trigger happy colonist is doing 10% less DPS in this situation. The results are dramatically worse for trigger happy colonists without bionic eyes and at longer ranges.

[MisterSpock]

Hm ok this isnt so nice. Especially for the charge rifle.
But how about carefull shooter, is it worth it?

[Astasia]

For the same reason trigger happy is so bad, careful shooter is so good. The added 25% aiming time means almost nothing to overall fire rate, so the trait is just a large accuracy bonus.

[starkmaddness]

Both traits are good, you just have to pair them with the best weapon for their traits.

Weapons have different Aim to Cooldown ratios.

Low Aimtime ratio = careful aiming
High Aimtime ratio = trigger happy

Also, DPS isn't the end all, other factors matter such as stopping power. Getting the first hit quickly can make a big difference, both with stopping power and also with damaging/killing them before they shoot you. With burst weapons, you are almost guaranted at least one will hit, so having a shorter cycle time helps with stun locking. In addition, crowd control favors throwing as much lead downstream as possible, as even misses can still be hits.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by starkmaddness:

Weapons have different Aim to Cooldown ratios.

Low Aimtime ratio = careful aiming
High Aimtime ratio = trigger happy

There are only a handful of weapons with high aim time ratios, and they are weapons that require the most accuracy to use effectively. The bolt action rifle, the great bow, and the sniper rifle, you never want to give one of those to a trigger happy colonist, and a careful shooter with one of them can do amazing things.

There are a few weapons that on paper look like they have high aim time ratios and would be great for trigger happy colonists, like the minigun and the LMG, but it's actually not the case because both weapons have long fire times which drastically reduce the benefit of reducing their aim time. The minigun is 2.5 seconds aim, 2 seconds fire, 2.3 seconds cooldown. The LMG is 1.8 seconds aim, 0.72 seconds fire, 1.8 seconds cooldown. Those are the best weapons to give to a trigger happy colonist, like I said in my first reply, but not because they significantly improve them.

Originally posted by starkmaddness:

Also, DPS isn't the end all, other factors matter such as stopping power. Getting the first hit quickly can make a big difference, both with stopping power and also with damaging/killing them before they shoot you.

Absolutely. Which is why you don't want those first few shots to miss. The DPS comparison wasn't to show there was a large difference in average damage, it was to show the small aim time reduction doesn't make up for the large accuracy penalty. The accuracy penalty is really the most important part.

Originally posted by starkmaddness:

With burst weapons, you are almost guaranted at least one will hit, so having a shorter cycle time helps with stun locking. In addition, crowd control favors throwing as much lead downstream as possible, as even misses can still be hits.

Burst weapons have very little stopping power, they do fairly low damage and getting a single hit with say a LMG isn't going to be anywhere near as useful as getting a hit with a sniper rifle. Those weapons also tend to be very short range and by the time they are getting hits (usually on melee enemies) you are generally already under fire.

If you have several trigger happy colonists with miniguns against a large group of enemies entering a killbox, then that is going to be somewhat effective, but that sort of role restriction is a pretty big downside for the trait.

[Immortalits]

I personally preffer going heavily trigger happy with snipers, they have a long aim time and increasing it by 25% makes it insanely long, enemies are up at your face before they finish aiming... and the accuracy isn't that bad if the shooters are good baseline, like over 15 skill, when you actually reach endgame and start to truly min-max things.
and I think carefull shooter is best with medium accuracy weapons to seriously up their hit chance.

[Immortalits]

-50% aim time isn't just dps, purely, if the attackers are pure mele, then you have to shoot more before they arrive, but +25% aim time you're dead, especially if you don't have run and gun mod.
I've one-hit killed a ~20+ panther and on second time cougar manhunter pack with 4 uranium slug turrets supporting and 10 colonists (8 with charge snipers - mod, some with trigger, 2 with carefull and charge riffle)... there weren't too many shots missed even at 20-30+ range, haven't checked the exact accuracy, but I think the loss isn't that big.

Althou I now have a big question.
Is shooting capped at 20 or can it go 25 with carefull shooter?
Because if it is hard-capped at 20, then carefull shooter has a serious drawback in the endgame.

[Astasia]

Base movement speed is 4.6 tiles per second, snipers have a range of 45 tiles, so they get 10 seconds to fire before the enemy reaches them on flat open ground. There's plenty of time to get a couple shots off even for a careful shooter especially if the terrain isn't floored. This is mostly moot in any case because you usually don't have your snipers out front tanking enemies, they are standing behind shielded melee pawns so they can keep shooting even after the enemy closes right?

Originally posted by Immortalits:

Is shooting capped at 20 or can it go 25 with carefull shooter?

It's not capped. A careful shooter can effectively hit 25 skill while a trigger happy colonist would effectively be at 15 skill.

At 45 range a careful shooter at max skill has a chance to hit of 77.5%
At 45 range a trigger happy at max skill has a chance to hit of 43.4%

That's a pretty big difference and that's why you don't equip trigger happy colonists with sniper rifles.

[Immortalits]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Base movement speed is 4.6 tiles per second, snipers have a range of 45 tiles, so they get 10 seconds to fire before the enemy reaches them on flat open ground. There's plenty of time to get a couple shots off even for a careful shooter especially if the terrain isn't floored. This is mostly moot in any case because you usually don't have your snipers out front tanking enemies, they are standing behind shielded melee pawns so they can keep shooting even after the enemy closes right?

Originally posted by Immortalits:

Is shooting capped at 20 or can it go 25 with carefull shooter?

It's not capped. A careful shooter can effectively hit 25 skill while a trigger happy colonist would effectively be at 15 skill.

At 45 range a careful shooter at max skill has a chance to hit of 77.5%
At 45 range a trigger happy at max skill has a chance to hit of 43.4%

That's a pretty big difference and that's why you don't equip trigger happy colonists with sniper rifles.

My experiences are that most enemies either stay far away so it doesn't matter how many mele you have and even better to have none, because the few mele attackers are killed anyways before they reach you or there are so many that your mele's going to get butchered.

If numbers are realy like that, then I just do a quick calculation.
0,775/1,25 = 0,62 'dps'
0,434/0,5 = 0,87 'dps'

or with 50% reduced effectiveness of the aim time related damage:

0,775/1,125 = 0,67
0,434/0,75 = 0,58

if we simplify things to only aim time and accuracy and take damage as 1 unit, then trigger happy wins, even with bad accuracy, then only if aim time is at most around 50% of the damage are you right.

At absolute max range, you have better dps, but enemies are coming closer so you're in their hit-range, also you onl start aim, when enemies enter the max range and the actual shot is ofthen made to a closer enemy. I'll check things if I get home, but I realy feel that in medium-large and not extreme ranges, it will turn out to be better to have trigger happy and is more like a prefference in the long run or something like a weapon specific trait, you can either go to the extremey with stacking sniper and carefull / miniun + trigger or can go counter the disadvantages of certain weapons differently and go sniper with trigger, so you shoot more with still good accuracy and improve accuracy of burst weapons.