NPC Archers... wtf?

What I’d like to know is what ranged skill archer NPCs suddenly have that causes an interrupt. They’re not casting something and they are at distance. How are they interrupting? I don’t have any ranged skills that do that.

Also they are most definitely critting too much now, it’s back to how it was right after R53 came out, since last night. They’re getting side and back hits on me standing in a 30 degree cone in front of me. Something is definitely not right. Of course you can mess with them now by rushing them which is also pretty stupid.

 

As @Trihugger stated body slam works wonders if you are using heavy armor which I use (bronze chain specially crafted by @Mac2 for str and dmg). I specialized both sword and tactics and use my water Elemental for heals. Engage opponent is your friend for these running archers. Also consider bezerker stance which at 12o helps two shot most archers. Not familiar with the rise but some of the archers in crags will die from a heart attack when they get body slammed by me at 300 str.

 

Two main tactics I use for archers. Run at then and they want to scatter. Find a nice choke point or a corner and set a trap with ring of fire etc.

Just be thankful that npc archers, unlike player archers, don't shoot while they run.

The new siege engineer were only harder at first. Once I started to tactically move them around and get them to stand where I want them to stand using trees, tents etc to break line of sight, I had no problems.

Spung

 

As archer in leather I tried to farm Rise room, sure I was able to do it but it was the nightmare. I get like 300 crits from them. Btw Multishot works perfectly when full agro of skeletons run on you I think that high lever fire/air archer in bone will kill room in 2 aggro attempts max. 1 attempt will be still to risky, and time economy would not cost it. This room always give me a lot of fun anyway, sure it should be even more complicated, probably add some skeleton mages with confusion and etc there.

 

And I thought I was going crazy, thank goodness that other people are getting maimed also.

 

I can't manage to hit the broad side of a barn if I pump my strength up nearly that high. My poor, poor Dex cries.

On a related note, I specifically messed with archers last night and honestly they're only a problem if there's a swarm of them. And by swarm I mean 3+. Otherwise all it takes is some semblance of non-robotic game play and thinking to deal with them. Really quite enjoyable if I'm being perfectly honest. They are, however, harder than their equal level counterparts if only slightly due to their rather high crit rate.

 

Archers were always op in SoTA, with recent defence changes though (that prevents people from doing 100%), archers hurt even more. Welcome to the shield build times...

 

@Trihugger : to get to 300 str I use my armor, weapons strength then add strength of earth, inner strength, torpor, zerker at 120 and a potion of might, last time I checked it hit 305. I keep my dex 85 and int at 73 and in crags only use bear steak and potatoes and crocodile skewers. Have not had any problems hitting anything there. R/Boris/El Pirata.

 

I wish they would raise the party XP level there. I was able to kill the 4 archers at the beginning, the two footman at the base, and slowly clear the the throne. I was sometimes able to isolate the Lich but could never clear fast enough to get the chest solo.

 

Urrr Disabling shot interrupts.

 

Hope this is not considered raising a dead thread, though I am very passionate about mob/npc leashing - particularly in open world and also have observed the what seemed to be imbalance with archer monsters. The two aspects combined make combat quite frustrating.

Mob leashing :

It has been a long time since I played an MMO where mobs were not on a short leash, often at times with an almost predictable invisible threshold of where they would 'reset.'
There's some significant issues with this type of system.

• It makes for shallow and borderline exploitable tactics
• Combat can become boring and equally infuriating
• It limits what you can do with strategy and play style as it cuts down viable options, particularly for ranged classes whom use distance and the management of distance, as well as status abilities to control the battlefield
• A knock-on effect of the last point, is that it reduces feasible classes or what abilities a player would or could use, because they'd be made a moot point

I can slightly understand if you are in a dungeon and there's a big obvious doorway leading to a 'boss' and pulling it out of the tomb past the doorway, would be cause it to reset.
However in standard combat scenarios, particularly out doors, mobs should rarely leash if ever.

The original EverQuest had it right. Should you aggro something, it chases you across an entire zone until either it dies, you die, or you leave the zone in some fashion/method.

And before you give the rebuttal about it making things too difficult, let's not be cheeky and act like people don't abuse the system now. When they make a mistake in a dungeon, and pull too much, they can often run down some stairs and take a few corners to make mobs trigger a leash and reset.
How is that fun? How does that install a sense of fear, or give you pause about turning that corner or running into that room?

Additionally dying is not a big deal and with decay going it will be even less. However I am speaking more about down time from having to return to where you were at the time of death. Because of the respawn points in dungeons, you aren't ever that far away. It's not as (again to reference EverQuest) that you would have to run across two continents, take a boat and hope to fight your way back, naked to a corpse three hours later.

In that respect the game is very forgiving.
If people don't want corpse runs and old school punishing death experiences - which clearly Shroud doesn't intend - then we can at least achieve some measure of challenge, risk and thrill by an accumulation of little things - such as, ensuring that mobs don't give up easily on a chase.

This opens up a lot more flexibility and possible outcomes/variety in gameplay and reduces irritation:

• Classes of all types can become more strategic and playstyle can diverge some as you have more room (literally and metaphorically) to work with
• Should you pull something around, you do not have to worry about all your work going to waste as it resets and rushes back to it's spawn point, all the while being near immune and healing rapidly; while you sit their sucking wind and waiting on your vitals /focus to regen before you can try again and furthermore in that time, other mobs respawn, putting you back at square one
• Threat, challenge, fear, risk...

Which leads us to ...

NPC archers :

It has always been, to my knowledge that ranged(weapon or magic) mobs are the deadliest when left unchecked or managed. They deal massive damage, and can hit from afar. On the flip side of them dishing out a lot of damage, they also took lots of damage; making them susceptible to dying quickly.
In old MMOrpgs it was learned very quickly that in multi-mob encounters, a rule of thumb was to burn down ranged(predominately ranged were casters), as soon as possible for obvious reasons. It also removed one (or more ) worries from the group's focus and in particular the crowd controllers, like Enchanters.
The older games used to be centered a lot around management of mobs and navigating the chaos (on top of the other normal aspects).

That brings us to Archers in Shroud. The issues are :

• Unlike their mage counterparts, they do not have low health/low damage mitigation
• They hit harder than their mage counterparts
• They do not miss
• They run around too sporadically sometimes to their own detriment

That last point is particularly glaring for two reasons :

1. It would be a clever tactic, if they were more intelligent about it, rather than running straight for an enemy such as a wolf's proximity
2. If they intentionally ran towards other like mobs, to create social aggro
3. They leash and it's done in a very random way. For example, the mob will run past you /away from you to avoid your hits, and then cross it's own leash threshold and reset itself. I have had numerous encounters in my short time here where an archer would attack, I would attack, it runs past me to get away and then resets. Before I can turn around I see it come whizzing by in super 'go home E.T.' speed mode.


My proposal would be :

1. Unhinge/disable leashing on mobs except in rare or special /extenuating circumstances
2. Remove the return home /spawn point speed acceleration and set it to normal walking (if albeit unique for that creature type) pace
3. Remove the accelerated extra healing for mobs out of combat. I say extra healing as there seems to be three modes : In combat regeneration, out of combat regeneration and returning home /leashing fast out of combat regeneration. The latter is the issue.
4. Optional - bonus? Set mobs to not always go back to their spawn point, or at least not directly. For instance they could stay in that same spot or walk another direction for a bit, then start pathing back.


In summary and in theory, a combat system could be amazing, yet if the way the targets/mobs and the environment they reside in, is not arranged and reacts well, then it's all pointless. I'd rather have super interesting mobs and varied encounter possibilities, with a very basic simple combat system, as opposed to an 'in-depth' combat system and useless predictable targets.

With no intention of being disparaging, I am quite surprised that by this stage they haven't addressed this. I cannot imagine Richard is happy with the behavior of NPCs and how currently they react pretty much like every mob in modern MMOs. It doesn't bode well for a game that aims to provide a 'classic' experience.

 

Another simple yet ignored bit of advice from the past.

1. Damage is fine. It should be hard if not blocked or in the back.
2. Always hitting is bogus. This goes for avatars as well.
3. Interrupts and minimum distance! No archer can shoot while blocking a melee shot (or a good arrow hit for that matter). If blocking there is chance to lose the bow (for just a bit since this is a game).
4. Summary: hit big but limit how often this can happen because of fight mechanics (i.e. tactics).