Rapid Fire

Who here thinks that Rapid Fire is no longer useful? I found myself using it less and less and I finally just removed it from my hotbar.

 

As someone who has only ever wanted to play as a hybrid archer build, there is a significant inflexibility to archery alone. Attempting to widen the class even somewhat makes you lose usefulness in group PVP. PVE archery is fine. I don't expect to be able to handle anything that comes my way in PVE, solo, but my issue is with the inherent flaws with the actual Statistic design.

I believe that with our classless design, stats should be the single largest control for how we play in any scenario, PVE or PVP, group, or solo.

Dexterity is incredibly useless when compared to Intelligence and Strength. We have many roads to get 300 Strength, Intelligence is precariously viewed by the Devs as being very game-breaking if too much is attained. Yet, 250 Dexterity, no one bats an eye, because why would they? It is meaningless.

I know good and well, that future combat in a classless system needs all base statistics to be where true capability comes from. There should be benefits to min-maxing that can be overcome by balanced approaches, with the defining edge between the two approaches being strategic use of hotbars and skills, and then equipment.

 

Do something to all stats that forces any build, at any level, in any environment or situation to consider their statistic balance. It doesn't seem very hard to imagine 100/100/100 is the ideal statistic situation

 

I use rapid fire all the time. Rapid Fire and Aimed Shot form the basis of 99% of my attacks. What is it about Rapid Fire do you find not useful?

Fenris

 

I do more damage over time with auto-attack and Flurry than Rapid Fire. If I charge Rapid Fire to 6 then it probably does more but during that charge time I can charge up Aimed Shot a couple times and ultimately do more damage.

 

Rapid fire is waaay too slow to try to charge to 6. You are better off locking aimed shot and using that while having Rapid Fire in your drawn glyphs. I typically can hit a 3 stack doing it this way and I feel that that is just fine.

 

Since they nerfed it and nerfed it and nerfed it again, it's just not worth the hassle.

 

Charging regular attacks is good enough since there's no real benefit imo to using the skills, other than disabling shot. You can toggle to auto attack while using skills and spells to soften a target.

 

I can't say it enough, dexterity needs to be made more competitive with strength and intelligence. Since our system is classless, it seems naturally intuitive that the three main attributes should matter more in how the skills on the hot bar are chosen. I don't care if I have 100 GM'd skills. I can only use ten at a time.

Strength dictates health and damage, strength only helps damage for certain melee skills to a substantial degree. It does help against movement debuffs. Intelligence helps magic damage, and maybe critical chance with spells. Dexterity helps with Dodge and critical hit chance, but critical hit chance is muted too much to be significant with 250 dexterity. Whereas, 250 strength or intelligence would be significantly more powerful in effectiveness.

Maybe more frequent critical hits is not the answer, but instead, have dexterity buff movement or attack. Reasonably so, but enough to balance against a mage with 150 intelligence or a warrior with 250 strength and high damage resistance.

As an archer, it always comes down to a mage killing you faster with their flexibility+range and a warrior killing you faster because they can resist or absorb almost all of your damage. You don't even get the benefit of kiting a mage since their range is better, and you can't kite warriors because they are never fighting alone.

Light armor needs a way to resist or break movement debuffs like the water circle has, because the triple-whammy of slowing, stunning, knockdown is regrettably OP against an archer in a multi-build combat scenario.

Archery needs a redesign of the crowd control skills so that an archer can tactically apply debuffs to multiple attackers if they are grouped closely. The strength of a ranged archer should be in a "stick and move" approach. If the archer can think fast and react fast, he should be able to maintain a safe distance while still applying DPS.

Things are already quite convoluted and not at all holistic in effective ability. I think a step back, and then a top-down design needs to happen in order to make combat fun.

I don't want to grind for experience just so I can appreciate significantly diminishing reward. I don't want loot. I want to play the game and not be hamstringed the instant more than one mob or player decides to gang up on me.

 

Interesting. I have Rapid Fire locked on my bar and the charge time (while not quite as fast as Aimed Shot) charges to 6 quite rapidly. I'm going
to have to do some personal testing to compare with a charged shot/flurry.

I'm curious now.

Also, though it may be my own interpretation, it seems that the constant hail of arrows from Rapid Fire tends to disrupt spell casting over the period of the shot. I'll have to see if

a) that's true and not me hallucinating, and
b) if charged shot/flurry hits quickly enough to do what i perceive is happening

Fenris

 

my main archery skill is 125, specilization is gm 100 and my rapid fire is 110 and I dont really have an "archery" build on my gear (just a mix of mid tier chain with str and dex to burn grinding) yet I use it all the time and Im fine with it.

I charge it to 6 all the time pre-fight and it slams stuff in the Rise and Tears.

Archery needs 1 better area attack and needs some kind of PvP love all around (its fine PvE)

 

Yes, that's certainly an advantage.

 

Oddly, Multi Shot is one of my favorite skills.

 

I think they just need the old typical "rain of arrows". An area cast like meteor / Ring of fire

 

Multi shot is another story altogether. I unlearned that a long time ago. I'm hearing rumbling that it is actually worth the XP now. Any thoughts on that?

Fenris

 

That would be pretty sweet.

 

Like I said, it's one of my favorite skills... now that they've fixed it.

 

Please say on about how they fixed it.

 

Each target is supposed to have a chance to get hit with three arrows. There was a bug that prevented any target from receiving that third arrow. That's been fixed. The chance to hit with each arrow was also improved at some point.