Archery ranged attack does 0 damage unless in contact

patch 315

First, here are my stats
Ranged attack 13
Aimed Shot 25
Disabling Shot 13
Ammo Scavenger 8

Location: Savrenoc Timbersland
Area:Novia_R4Forest01 Loc:87.8, 31.0, 168.8

Since wolves run as fast as i do, I make for the a large rock formation with a timber wolf and a large timber wolf nipping at my heels. I make it to the rocks and climb out of reach. Both wolves stay in range of my bow and I start shooting.

Aimed shot 0 damage
Disabling shot 0damage
Piercing Breeze 0 damage

I'm gaining skills while all this is happening, but what's the point of ranged skills that don't do any damage from a distance?

I'm hoping this is a temporary issue or just some sketchy math.

 

I feel your pain. You need to hit to gain. Requires the easiest of creatures.

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...rney-or-sell-everything-and-buy-arrows.36470/

 

It may be that you're on the rocks and out of reach of the wolves so you don't do damage, I've noticed this in an earlier release.

 

I was hoping they fixed that this release. It makes sense with a sword, but by definition a ranged weapon is meant to keep you out of harms way while you're dealing damage. If I have to stand and go mano-a-mano to do damage with my bow, what's the point?

 

Sounds like a pretty standard anti-cheating mechanism; if the enemy can't hit you, you can't do damage to it. Makes it so players can't exploit geography. Yes, it means you can't play a sniper in this game, but it prevents things like mobs summoning. I'd really rather see mobs run away when they can't reach you but you can reach them; seems more logical.

 

More logical would give mobs the ability to climb up to you.

 

You're stuck working with slowing them down. Disable and Ice Arrow

 

I've never used a bow in SotA, but I don't like the the idea of not being able to hit from a safe vantage point. As a mage I have often climbed a rock and and effectively fired ranged spells at mobs. And mobs can shoot arrows at you and hit you from an out- of- reach spot (e.g. in the Spectral Mine dungeon).

 

I have never tried archery but mob archers hurt more than mob mages. They also never seem to miss, they seem to rapid fire and their arrows go around corners and through walls and large rocks. Sounds like the player archer is not shown such love.

 

And I thought exploiting geography and cover strategically was kind of the point of archery.

More seriously, no matter how common practice it is in other games, applying such "anti-cheating" mechanisms would be just band-aiding a bug or design flaw with another design flaw. Fortunately this is apparently not what it is implemented here, as in most cases the enemy does indeed run/back away when it can't reach you. Any kind of I-can't-reach-u-so-I-become-invincible would not only be a major immersion breaker, it would also ruin archery.

This might be the same bug that I've reported -- under certain conditions, the enemies become impossible to harm in any way. One can probably see it from the wolf's expression (a bit of grimacing, like in here).

 

More logical, but a lot more work to implement.

The way the game was originally being developed, this would not have been an issue because players could not reach those spots either (as there was no jumping). Now that you can get to a location, the mobs need to be able to get there too. No combat should be 100% safe.

I hear you about it not being fun to be an archer, but you can still do what mobs do; find an overpass where they *can* get to you (by running a distance) and snipe from there. In Spectral Mines, kill the skeleton archer and take his spot, then you can reach a bunch of others using archery. As long as you kill them before they get inside, they can't reach you. Maybe eventually mobs will jump/climb and that lazy immortality mechanic will go away too.

 

You are on the rocks and therefore cannot be hit by them , so the mechanic is you cannot hurt them, GtG. There are some rocks where oyu are lower and they can barley hit you and you can hit them but again if you cannot be damaged you cannot deal damage

Archery is a Support skill ATM sorry :-(

 

Sorry folks, I'm still not convinced. I repeat my original question ... What's the point of a ranged attack if it's only valid when you're taking or eligible to take melee damage? Let's overlook for the moment that you probably need to spend several days in North Valeway, Kingsroad, and the like in order to be able to raise your skills without spending most of the day running for an anhk. With the changes in animal attack speed, when they're not zooming away at warp speed, it's impossible to create enough separation to stand and wait for an aimed shot without getting hit. You can still maintain separation with humanoids, but other than the lowest level skeletons you really don't want to deal with them as an archer at the beginning.
On the first R21 pass on the QA server, with auto attack on, you could run around and keep shooting until something was dead. I thought, OK ... at least there's a reasonable mechanism to get skills started. I haven't been able to do that since R21 went live. At least for me, that no longer works. I don't keep firing.
I would even settle for a compromise.
If a creature attacks me and I make it to a safe vantage point, I should at least be able to attack it and do damage while it's in range.

 

Amen to that

 

In FFXI, mobs can break the rules (no climbing, no jumping) and run up cliffs to get to you if there are no ramps/stairs, though apparently only in certain places, so they may go the long way a bit first. (It's possible that these climb cheats for mobs are all over the terrain data.)

Yep, players can't cheat with sniping, but mobs can cheat like crazy! I was in Tower of the Shuttered Eye twice so far this weekend and it's a lot harder now due to mob behavior (I plan to start a topic on it later), but even when I was on the first floor as far away from the stairs as possible in a side room, the Lich Mage could still root bind and fireball me. And then there's the skeleton archers/mages, who run away like little girls in all directions so that you have to constantly move your camera as well as yourself.

Since SotA is, you know, "pre-alpha", I'd rather see semi-exploitable stuff like sniping be proven how exploitable it is by letting it happen until a sensible solution is found (better pathing and climbing for mobs, or even having them move to cover or out of range), rather than a ham-fisted nerf. (But I started in R20, so I wouldn't know whether they already gave it a good try or not.) I mean, it's not like we aren't going to get wiped again, right?

EDIT: maybe they have to worry about PvP sniping too, in which case, they could restrict the nerf to if (target.type == player)