Ranged Combat Ideas

Hey everyone, Bekido here. As of late i've been struggling with ranged combat. Even when i debuff opponents to negative dex and avoidance i have a very hard time hitting them for any sort of damage. Stacking blind / blinding shot / disabling shot and having the ranged spec at 80 i can easily put players into negative dex and avoidance. So ive been wondering where the problem is, even with over 100 difference in our dex i cant seem to stop missing them / doing more than 10 dmg a shot on them. So heres just a list of things ive been thinking about figure i would post it and see what others think. feel free to tell me its stupid or agree or have whatever comment cuz thats the idea here, maybe im just jaded by all these fucking heavy armor mages running around. duno. moving on.

Dex - Why doesnt it mean ****? As i said i can have 100+ more dex than someone and still miss them constantly and not seemingly get any increased crit out of it :/ Maybe i just dont understand the math here but having ranged damage based on dex instead of str would be cool, atleast to me. iono maybe next armor set ill focus on str instead of dex

Piercing shot - This **** still sucks, granted its better than it was. Blind / disable shot get a pretty cool extra bit with specialization, maybe we can do the same with piercing shot. Give a 30 second debuff to damage resist or armor rating or something. Just floating that out there iono

Poison - Why cant i poison an arrow? For real i want an answer on this one. Plz give us poison or atleast some reason we cant have it. I can get an opponent low and then just watch them heal it all back in 2 second or hit me with a death ray kill me. (looking at you ox null! )

Range - Why can a mage out range me with his magical arrow, ive got a skill boosting my range and all. Come on man atleast let us be equals on this one. (more saying lower the magic arrow range than boost ours, im not unreasonable here)

Think ive got more gripes i just cant recall them at this moment. Thanks for reading, more to come later. Let me know what you think. - Bekido, the disgruntled postal worker of ranged combat.

 

Only fire arrow has more range then bow skills, and that is with other skills and a fire range gem proc chest.

I think one day when they finally give bows gem procs, might help, maybe a lot. Shield still needs gem procs too.

 

yea forogt about the whole gem thing, ill add it to my list when we exit the vale.

 

On top of my head:

- Special crafted arrows (poison, fire etc) We needed these yesterday!
- Better AOE skill, if you want to give us one, then at least give us something usefull. Allthough i still think that ranged should be focused on only one target.
- I think that having a passive that decreases charged attack times (Not auto attacks!) would help as well (drawspeed?) That or a shorter charge bar.
- One handed crossbows that we can dual wield. Downside would be your accuracy and range.

Dex needs a addition compared to the other stats, i agree. Not sure what, but it should NOT lower fizzle rate as someone has suggested.

Asked for this before again and again. No response, may have to make it a question for a livestream.

Try using a crossbow it should give you more range then fire arrow.

 

The only thing that will inflict changes in bow is a force GM to pvp against other classes for 5-10 hours by archer. To be able to defeat mid-skill mages like Billy Joe I have to perform circus performance by archer while i had godlike experience in playing archer and best of class gear

 

You can decrease your charge attack time a lot already with attack speed.

 

I do quite a bit more than 10 dmg a hit with a bow. Somethin like 70 80ish. Crit for in the 200 300 range and crits arent too uncommon with very high dex.

For things i cant beat with melee, i switch to abow and only use the basic attack. This is how i’ve killed every cabalist so far

 

Yea i agree, with flurry / fleet flute / attack speed gloves i fire full charges very quickly already.

 

Have you tried vs players? Most of this is pvp based guess i didnt really clarify that much

 

Everyomegot 30% max dmg resist so even cloth armor has 65% maxdmg resist. With defensive stance and earth skills this stopsa goodchunk of all incomming physical dmg.

But even so i get ripped apart in seconds by archers. Likely because i dont use defensive stance.

Death shield is gonna negate an additional 25% of your dmg as well.

Platemail can stop all of an archers damage at the moment.

It isnt ranged thats unbalanced right now, its armor

 

I feel like polearms and swords cut through armor fairly well though. Even with defensive buffs up i still eat some big hits from them.

 

I wear leather and i am kinda wrapped in paper regarding others arrows.
But making lots of moon magic plate is not so much my thing...

And i want to set arrows on fire, come on it is soooo old school

 

Yeah Bekido im not a low lvl archer by any means yet a mage can tear us up and we can't do damage for crap against them, its sad how things are guess i wont pvp untill i see a differance PVE for life for an archer it seems

 

This thread fills me with anxiety.



Archery isn't that bad, when used with something else. But, indeed, when you look into how the ranged tree itself works, it feels like something is missing.

One exemple is the AOE cases : I just read in another thread that someone was able to finish a siege in 6 minutes easily (cabalist included). It will take me more than twice this time with my bow. Why ? It's not because the bow is trash. It's just because enemies run into the rings of fire and the meteor showers instead of trying to avoid those. The result is that with AOE spells, as long as you are trained enough to resist the attacks (not so hard when you train things like death shield/field and healing skills), you simply can stay in the middle of the crowd and cast whatever other attack spell you have. With magic skills, it will be fast and easy, as long as AOE spells do MORE damage when you fight MORE enemies, without any limit.It's not just my imagination. People around me used to look into the logs with parsers. In a 8 person party, the AOE spells generally deal between 60 and 75% of the damage in a control point, with only 2 maybe 3 casters. In other words, only 3 spells of 30% of the team made something like 70% of the job. With melee weapons, at least, it will be satisfaying when you slash three targets at a time. With swords and spells... Well ok, I think you got it. Of course, an archer can try to use the proper spells, too. But, again, the efficiency won't be on the bow side of the equation : it will be on the magic side. Also, the archer generaly try to hit things remotely, one at a time, which means that they are not supposed to stay in the middle of the crowd, waiting for the enemies to walk into a ring of fire. But, whatever... At least, archery gameplay is much more motivating than just spamming your 1 - 0 keys with a cup of tea in the other hand.

Now we have the multi shot. It's not that bad, but it can't be compared to any other AOE spell. When others are fire-and-forget things, or leach life things, or slow-them-all things, or mesmerize things, we just have a CHANCE to hit "hard" (not so hard honestly) multiple targets, sometimes multiple times (sometimes, we don't hit anything and THAT is quite frustrating, especially when this skill is rather focus expensive). I already saw critical corpse explosion dealing things like this :

I never saw even 30% of the same with multi-shot, even at a very high level with the best bow/crossbow.

Also @EMPstrike is right : armor can do a lot against bows. People will probably think about damage avoidance, but I personally think that damage resistance's role is largely under estimated. As far as I can tell, people with heavy armors are a pain when I use my bow. That's why piercing shot is not that bad. But well, let's be serious : spawning a low damage skill like this all the time against people who are prone to be HP bags is totally useless. The heavy armor melee warrior is probably the rock when we are the scissor. And it's ok.

The problem is : I don't see any paper here, or maybe we are talking about light armor melee people (heh, that would be funny , given that they generally hide until they can sneak attack you ; without any reveal skill in the archery tree...). Mages generally can blink/dash out of range easily when they feel like they will lose. They can protect themselves with shields, and healing over time. Some of them will stun, sometimes they run like crazy, some of them will leach your life, some of them will slow you down, and all of them do lots of damage (especially if you are not a mage yourself because your attunement is 0), etc... This is not for no reason that most of the pvp leaderboard is filled with mages and hybrid mages. So yes, archery is far from being OP for pvp, but I expect to see some changes coming with new arrow types (still in the dev plans, I think). Until then, archery is the hardcore choice for people who want to feel the thrill.

And I don't even talk about that shame about Sprint being the worst movement buff ever (even wolf speed potions have greater interest), light armor being the top choice for archers.