Melee are incredibly weak

Nah I run my 3 types and Blade is also light, subterfuge based... but 12 Green mobs? That's going to be tough on anyone in a lot of tier 5 zones.

 

If that's so, they are rather interested in seeing everything over again from top to bottom, because as it is now, the combat system is nowhere near to be good enough if you ask me. And as long as Old Style RPG are now niche games (like turn based strategy games aka Europa Universalis, and things like that), they better have not to mess with their player base.

The OP didn't mention subterfuge. Then, I'm not sure that you have the same play style.

I would recommand him to go for a shield or dual blades with strong investments in parry... and train every single magic skill of course

 

Archery sucks! That is why I am a crossbowman.

 

No it doesn't !

 

Ok, so you lost me here.

1.) You choose not to use anything else and want to be a pure archer only and complain that you can't compete with other builds. I don't know what to say other than you're doing it to yourself. You even admit it. There are no advanced archery or archery subtrees to continue to boost archery skills beyond its current state other than to keep pumping up the already existing archer skills.
2.) AoEs in this game are varied. Some point blank, some ground targeted, some spread out from the target. Not sure what you're saying here... you want only one form of AoE (PB/GT/TAoE)? Having varieties keep it from being the cookie cutter design like you were complaining about earlier.
3.) I honestly don't know what youre doing to not get much experience. I can do circuits in The Rise and get somewhere between 500k to 1 million an hour solo. My wife's archer can do almost as good, she probably could do the same if she wanted to move around more, but doesnt. Still she gets a good bit there. I don't know what some of these others do that say they can make more in shorter time so not gonna bring their experiences into it bc I dunno and I feel like they are truly the exception or some exploit is going on. I know you can do the various Control Points and earn max xp even without double xp rewards, so there is that too, but those are group events. How much experience do you think you should get per hour? The ones that say they get it in 10-15minutes, are they in Control Points? I find it fishy and like I said, definitely not the normal player and I bet VERY FEW can do that, if doing valid, non-exploity things.
4.) You don't have to manually charge your attacks to train archery. You can simply spam your attacks... passives just let the auto-fire spam on mobs, it's pretty friggan quick, both the training and the auto-attacks. You don't always have to run from mobs... also, you can rebind keys to make it easier for you to move and charge attacks if you like. I have to do it running around chasing mobs or trying to pull a group to me, ramping up buffs and skills as i go in plate/melee, should be able to do it to in archer form. Guess depends on your playstyle and how you have your deck.
5.) Not gonna argue with anyone who thinks bonuses to speed and bonuses to attack speed are something to scoff at. Ive seen the value of them first hand. If it wasn't so good, then there would more plate/bow users. It's not just good, it's d*mn good. Just because your base resists are not as high or the extra STR you get from the Heavy Armor tree isnt there, doesnt mean you wont see better damage from those in the light armor tree. I can get over 300 STR... but my attack speed is pure garbage and I still get dmg numbers half to two-thirds (at most) of my wifes normal crits. She crits for 600-700 all the time. But that can be a play on gear and +crit bonuses as well, gear plays a part as well as skill builds. Also, Archers can get in a ton of shots between or in the same time block as me and usually crit'ing while they do it. It's a lot of damage but people don't look at all the little attacks, they only want to see the big attacks. Those same speed/attk spd bonuses help blades, hell any weapon really, as well.
6.) Archers are one of the largest base of users. Archers can pretty much do all the content. Not sure what you're talking about here. If you're still saying you only want to use "archery" skill tree and nothing else and then complain about not being able to do what others do, then yes there is a problem, but not on the game's end. You would have to redo all the skill trees to be something like RIFT in order to stay pure to a skill and have subtrees to diversify (within the original skill arc), which is not really what this game is about. It's actually closer to the likes of Elder Scrolls where you can make pretty much whatever you want, but if you choose not to support your primary skills, that's completely on you atm. The game could always add more skills down the road that made each non-magic combat tree more powerful on it's own, but still... nothing stopping you from taking other skills/passives other than total experience earned and the number of skills allotted to a deck.

P.S. - Black Desert is an amazingly horrible grindfest It has some nice things but yeah... the way they do gear there is horrible.

 

Yeah, I mean, you have to play to your strong points... if you're good vs melee or taking/shrugging off damage, then 12 green mobs that are melee types might not be so bad... if you have a hard time mitigating damage from ranged npcs (magic or archers), and half of those 12 are ranged, then yeah, you're going to have to some serious issues if you can't line of sight them and play musical chairs while you deal with the rest of the mobs and/or keep yourself healed/buffed. And that's another for tactics, gotta learn what to do in those situations.

 

Like 3rd or 4th line in dude....

 

Do you realize that pure archer was a build who was used in a promotional video for this game or ???

Well, ok everything is fine with combat in this game.

I'm tired of trying to argue with deaf ears.

 

My mistake. I didn't see that.

I just suppose that we should look at the details to compare your situations. But I'm done with this discussion, sorry.

 

Melee is top 1 in boss-hunting and extremely dangerous in pvp on high level. Many schools begin to work on pretty high levels.

 

Do you know that you can jump out of stuns? That might be your main problem right there. Also make sure that none of the mobs are getting behind you. Additionally, as light armor melee, there are a minimum of 5 defensive skills that you should be using during a tough fight: Defensive Stance, Dodge, Parry, Evasive, and Fortify Defense. You can also throw in a Shield of Crystal for extra HP and an Earth's Embrace if you don't need to be very mobile. Add in a stacked Elysian Illumination and a potion or two and you shouldn't have any trouble with 12 green melee mobs. A water elemental can also heal you, or something like an earth elemental can distract a few of those mobs for a bit.

 

Well considering there are only 3 primary archtypes to choose from at the moment (Archer/Mage/Melee), I'm not surprised that an archer would be seen in a promo. I feel fairly certain the promo didn't say, "You can play using ONLY the archer skill tree and do everything just as well as any other player build!" Farily positive that didn't happen without seeing the video.

As far as saying everything is fine with combat in this game in sarcasm, not sure what you've been reading. I've always said they could do more. I've posted many times what they could do to make it better. I've even said multiple times in this particular thread that there could be improvements. Never said it was "fine".

I think you are just "triggering" on anything positive being said about Archery, to be honest. I don't know why really.

 

I mean the image shown as the introductory page (when you first go on www.shroudoftheavatar.com) shows an archer casting a spell (Unless you always have a magic circle appear above your head when shooting arrows ), so I'm fairly certain they want to show that any combat class can use magic.

 

Crossbows are for the people tripping over there own feet as soon they have to think about more than walking >.<

 

I think what most people overlook is that Archery should be ranged.
Lot of times in Sota i do not care anymore and do it the melee way because mobs in higher tiers are pretty resistant to snare or shake it off in seconds.
(If i solo)

Most content now (for groups too) is bigger numbers of mobs, so archers are kinda pointless, AOE rules.

I think the biggest problem is simple that this game has not "Very bad archer skills" (the tree should be bigger, more options and such, yes) but not content that allows archery to shine too, make it work in a group where the only thing right now that counts is how many AOE you can spamm, there simple is right now nothing what makes archer an terrible usefull class to have around, Tanks, mages, healers are what you want, archers and rogues types can not compete with the content we have/go against.

Again, not because they are terrible back but because they are focused on sniper actions and that is not terrible helpfull with 3-6 mobs in waves is the usual mode.

Scary larry is something where archers shine, you do them with one tank keeping aggro and then you need sustained long time ranged damage or the critter heals it all right up again, THAT is content where you want archers badly, but it is pretty much the only critter in Sota right now where you really badly want an archer, and it is the total trash mob not worth fighting at all.

Otherwise? I am glad most people in Sota are very lax about min maxing how a group is build or i would be forced into solo all times, no point in having an archer in your group.

And that is the real issue in my eyes.

 

The blades that have the highest advatages unique to blade weapons are actually the smaller 1 handed ones. When using those you have a high inherant crit chance and the highest poison/parry modifiers.

Leather armor synergizes with this by either providing crit chance or straight up weapon damage (i use a 20% damage boost suit) and benifiting from high dex with Dodge and further crit chance boosts, as well as attack speed from blade innates, light armor skill and masterworks. If your a specialist in light armor you suddenly see a drastic damage increase with flurry.

Due to the parry and attack speed, dual wielding is particularly deadly with light armor blades, with the ability to hold over 200dps consistantly with just 70ish strength

 

In SOTA, archery is whatever we make it. There is no "should" be anything or we would have a class system. With the latest changes, having very high STR and heavy armor is probably the way to go which basically makes us a melee fighter without cleave.

AOE is the only issue I have with Ranged right now. I can hit like a truck still. I gained over 100 points of damage on my crits just by using the STR buff. Our single Target damage is good, probably to good since I always steal aggro.

 

I have some guild mates with similar feelings, but in open pvp mages mages are still the king. Stealth is mandatory for any melee pvper atm if you don't want feel like you are running after a mage forever doing nothing.

Hope we see some pvp balance soon.

 

Except if the tooltips are wrong :
Base damage with daggers is 4-12, (20% base critical chance)
Base damage with shortsword is 5-15, (15% base critical chance)
Base damage with single handed sword is 6 - 18. (13% base critical chance)

Whatever the critical bonus is, you only get critical hits on a percentage of your hits and the bonus is always applied on the base damage. Even if the critical chance is a bit with shorter weapons (the max difference is around 50% and it's not a 50% boost on damage, just on your small chance to get more crit.), it would not compensate the fact that only a percentage of your hits are critical and that all of your hits have lower base damage (-30%).

I guess that you better have to use a lot of poison with your daggers to compensate this and the big strength bonus that heavy armor users have (on top of damage resistance AND avoidance when we have... dodge lol). Do it while you can. Archers can't use poisons for some reasons that I don't know well.

Now synergize what you want here. Flurry only improves your attack speed (eventually the glyph draw speed if you are specialized), not your damages. As long as light armor users are not as fast as they used to be, you can attack as much as you want, you won't do anything when you are knocked down with body slam or away from your target if a fleet flute is on use. So ok, flurry theorically improves damages with attack speed. But concretely, it's a bit of a smoke screen because attack speed is useful when you can attack your target repeatidly, which means that you are next to it in melee (not a good idea when you use a light armor) or that you use a bow.

Your eyes are focused on numbers and that's a good approach, but you only present the part that goes in your direction. Yet you couldn't ignore the issue here if you were looking for more competitive contents.

 

Currently, there is a "should". People should use AOE spells or they will have to grind even more for the same result. And you know that well. You already admited that you had a build with AOE spells for the grind...