Weapon Locker is Bogus
 

Thanks for screwing up Herolab once again and making it just painfull to use why the hell was this stupid weapon locker enabled i now cant have four throwing darts, gauntlets, sword and a buckler bash cause thats to many weapons
Now i have to store a weapon in my locker and if i wanna use it i gotta go pull it outta the locker so i can see what its bonus/damage


Who asked you if i wanna carry twenty weapons i can turn this update off

[Edited to remove profanity]

I just noticed this last night too and have been wondering where it came from as it's causing me grief too.

Is there some rule that I missed that states that you can only have 6 weapons at a time?

If HLO treated throwing weapons as Hand Ammunition it might not be that bad, but as it stands the Weapon Locker is the "screw up any character that uses thrown weapons" system.


I don't think the devs realized how many characters it was going to affect.


EDIT: Does it make a difference if the throwing weapons are in a stack?

[Edited to remove profanity]

Looks like animal rage barbarian gets bugged by this. It thinks you have 14 weapons when you choose that rage ability

Weapons in a stack count as only one weapon for the purpose of the weapon locker. Say you have 12 daggers but they are stacked together that will only count has 1 of the 6 weapons you can have out.

@Kharmakazi and @charlieluce: I understand that these are unprecedented times and there's a lot of pent up frustration for most of us. But that's no excuse for using profanity. Please conduct yourself in a civil manner or your posting rights here on the forums will be suspended.

@Everyone: The primary motivation behind this change is that weapons are extremely expensive to keep "live" within the Hero Lab engine. Due to the vast array of different customizations and ways in which weapons behave, there are a ton of calculations involved with each one. This was causing performance issues on the server for characters with a bunch of weapons.

The server is a shared resource, so one player with a ton of stuff can negatively impact all other users. For example, after a few scenes with the standard mantra of "loot the bodies", the party "pack mule" can end up carrying a dozen or two weapons that they have no intention of actually using - they're just carrying them until the weapons can be sold. With this change, the "pack mule" now puts all those weapons into a locker where they incur no performance overhead on the shared server.

We chose a limit that we believed was going to work for the vast majority of users. We needed to find a number that struck a balance between the server performance implications and what makes sense for a realistic usage scenario.

As for the example @Kharmakazi cited, users absolutely CAN have "four throwing darts, gauntlets, sword and a buckler bash". There is absolutely no reason to keep each of those throwing darts as a separate weapon. Simply stack them as a single weapon entry and mark them off as they are used. You'll still have two more weapon slots available. :)

This was definitely an oversight on our part. We're working on a hotfix right now to address this issue, which should be out soon.

Edit: The hotfix has been deployed. This should no longer be an issue.

Some additional notes about this change:

1. We made sure it's straightforward to swap weapons in and out of the storage locker.
2. You can instantly toggle on/off infrequently used "built-in" attack forms, such as the fist and natural attacks.
3. You can customize which weapons are available at any time.

For the typical thrown weapons specialist, the loadout might consist of:

• Favorite thrown weapon with all the perks on it for the initial use
• Two different backup thrown weapons with various perks for use after the favorite
• Stack of generic versions of a thrown weapon that is the fallback once all the special ones are exhausted
• Primary melee weapon
• Backup melee weapon
• Disable the built-in Fist

Rob, in the future, when springing major changes like this, it might help if some warning could be given to prepare players. People are working (or not working), come home, go to play and then find out stuff doesn't work as planned and impacts playing/fun time increasing stress levels rather than relieving them as intended. If the steps and recommendations could be put up a couple of days before rollout, players could prepare.

Cool, thanks for the info. I wanted to make sure it wasn't some rule I was missing since I use HLO a lot to verify I'm not messing up rules. :-)

I was a bit confused by the change, which is why I came here. Likely not super critical but the interface to bring back weapons out of the locker is a bit confusing.

That's a fair request. I'll do my best to be mindful of things like this and give everyone a heads-up a little bit in advance. Please don't shoot me if I forget, though. :)

What would you recommend we do to eliminate the confusion? In what ways can we improve how it works?

If you want to move an active weapon to the locker the "move to" interface lists "Weapon Storage Locker" as a possible destination, that is pretty straightforward.

If you want to move a stored weapon back into active use, the listed destination is called "Remove (to Character)"... that disrupted learning how to do this. Maybe call it something like "Move to active weapons
" or something like that?
That might include having to rename the "Weapons" list slightly.

A very well-prepared alchemist with each bomb is already over the six weapon limit, very annoying.

I have had to rebuild my alchemist as the original sheet seems to have locked in bombs that are no longer there. Even when I rebuild, as soon as I add an alchemist bomb on it comes up with the six weapon error (i have dagger, sling and fist on the sheet as well).

Not sure what is happening with this, I will log on an error report.

@talsharien I've been seeing that same Alchemist wonkiness

Just a heads-up. We've been making some refinements to the way the weapon locker - and weapons in general - behave. In the release going out tomorrow, there should be some improvements with how all of this stuff works. A few of the most important items are:

• Single-use weapons (aka self-destructive) will now only count as a half-slot. That includes grenades and alchemist bombs. So an alchemist will be able to now take 8 different bombs, a backup missile weapon, and a melee weapon. That ought to cover the vast majority of alchemists out there, plus it will ease things a little for certain other types of characters across game systems.
• Infused alchemical items can now be created in quantity and will automatically merge into an existing stack, which should eliminate a major annoyance that exacerbated the active weapon limit.
• Merging and splitting gear is now vastly more accessible, as it's been moved into the item's vertical ellipsis menu instead of in the item details.
• When we report the maximum weapon limit, we'll include extra messaging that prompts users to merge similar weapons into a single stack and/or disable unused natural attacks to free up weapon slots. That's something we should have done last week but simply didn't catch it prior to release.

@Rob, would it be possible to add a "enable/disable" type button next to weapons as another option to Weapons Locker?

So instead of moving a weapon to the locker, you can just "disable" it which would disable any "maths" (whatever causes server problems, a grey out weapon name only if needed). "enable" puts the weapon back online with a error if you are a at max and that you have to disable another weapon first.

That way if you have, say, a handful of weapons you like to use and don't want to forget about some others you occasionally use you can quickly get to them? For instance, my ranger has a Bow, kukri, rapier, whip, dagger, & fists. A little mix since he does some melee and range. But now i find a low-grade silver short sword and a cold iron axe. I won't typically need those but I don't want to forget I have the cold iron axe and want quickly to pull it out, throw it, and return to my other standard weapons list...

I'll explore this possibility - or something like it - with the team. I know that this exact approach won't work, since the disable option would currently also short-circuit the re-enable behavior. However, there may be some extra hoops we can jump through to find a solution here that's more useful/efficient than what we've got.

Are there plans in place to allow us to move specific natural weapons other than the fist to and from the locker? Or is this something that's working out to be more complex?

Thanks, just tossing out ideas. Right now it's not "visible" from the Play screen and takes 4 clicks to get a weapon back, 6 If I have to toss a weapon into the locker first, so 12 mouse clicks to temporarily switch a weapon for a round.

Maybe the Weapons Locker could be shown on the play tab as well with the other weapons and can be hidden/shown? So just another category, Melee, Ranged, Weapons Locker.

And with that, the menu option to "move to character" can just be exposed directly as a button vs buried in a menu item?

I'm not opposed to using a weapons locker if it's easy to use, but as Jamz said, it's currently not. I hope you guys can find some kind of solution for activating/deactivating weapons on the play menu. "Equipped weapons" would be a cool way to delineate this. Not using a weapon? You don't need to have the math calculated.

@Koro I love that idea personally. A more cumbersome solution would end up being more work for some of the less techy folks around my table (and thus, me)

If it were that easy, we'd have already done it that way. :(

We've been discussing some possible approaches. However, we've also been in crunch mode getting everything into place for the new Bestiary 2 book for PF2 (which we weren't given adequate lead time on). So we haven't yet been able to try out those ideas and see if they will be viable.

@Rob, makes sense! Any notion of being able to move specific natural weapons in and out of the storage locker? I hope it's not some hardcoded way when they have the natural weapon tag or something similar that they all function as a group.

So, after reading this thread, I understand the server performance hit that "too many" weapons was causing. I'm completely fine with stacking multiples of the same weapon. However, I thoroughly hate this 6 weapon limit.

A no-frills warrior with a sword (slashing & piercing), mace (bludgeoning), shield (thus shield bash), fist for brawls, and a crossbow for ranged and backup dagger is at the limit. If he picks up a lance or a variant weapon like a silver dagger, I have to start bumping items to the Locker.

If everyone is playing and has a HLO account up & running, it's manageable but the only scenario where that works in my world is when it's just me and my kids. I run for a group of friends and I'm trying to limit electronic devices at the table and I can already see sessions grinding to a halt as players wonder why they can't find a weapon stat block on their character sheet.

I'm definitely in the pro-HLO camp, but this sucks.

I wouldn't recommend using HLO for this until it matures some more. right now there are still enough bugs that it's not trustworthy for rules-verification yet. double check everything with the real rulebooks (and published errata).

How about just raising the weapon limit to 8 with consumable weapons still counting for half a slot?

I'd love to see natural weapons count as half as these often tend to be "bundled" ie bestial mutagen, claws + tail + jaws for lizardfolk.

Fighter Weapon locker problem
 

I keep having problems with my Fighter with the Weapon Locker. Namely I keep getting issues with it saying I am at my 6 weapon max when I have less than 6 weapons. Currently I have a shield boss, a shortsword, fist and a composite bow, with 10 arrows in the ammunition and it says I am over the limit and won't let me add anything else. But I have had similar problems in the past with this character. I seems it may be related to having a shield boss on the shield, but I am not sure.

Do you have any alchemist bombs, holy water, et cetera? Sometimes gear like that shows up in the play tab but not in the character builder weapons tab.

No. In fact the Play Tab doesn't even show the shield boss. So it only shows 3 weapons.

As a somewhat low-tech player/gamemaster with low tech players, I am using Herolab to keep track of character stats and print out updated character sheets for them each session. I've noticed that by putting a weapon in the locker, it no longer displays on the printout. Have I overlooked something? I don't mind the concept of the storage locker for lesser used weapons being hauled out of a dungeon for resale or base storage, but if it's not on the character sheet my players may well lose track.

Follow up questions - does putting a weapon in the storage locker still reflect in the Bulk total?

While I'd prefer the limit be raised to 7 or 8 for reasons listed above, as long as the weapons and their bulk are listed somewhere on the printout I would be fine with it.

Another follow up question to my last post - if you put a stack of weapons in the locker, the locker only displays a single copy. So if you find 6 silver daggers and put them in the locker, the locker currently shows a single silver dagger. Clicking the item in the locker doesn't show that it's a stack either. Can that be fixed with even a simple "(x6)" on the display or such, maybe?

Well I feel like an idiot now, the Weapons Locker displays quantity just fine, I just made a different error beforehand and didn't realize it. If the mods would be so kind as to remove my previous post and not annoy the more savvy forum members with my ineptitude, I would be grateful. :)

Its there any way to remove the bulk from weapons in the storage locker?

I got more than 6 weapons, but I want to store it in a null-space chamber to reduce the bulk. I can't seem to do that with the weapon storage locker.