New World Devs. Please fix the bow

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So the basis for what i am saying is this. As everyone knows, there are very limited slots for Dex boys in wars. Why is that you ask? Well here is a little summary Twitch . I will go in more detail now.

I have been using the bow since the beginning of me playing this game, and here are some major issues that need to be looked at.

  1. The arrows are agonizingly slow, their speed needs to be increased a tad bit to make them a competitor in wars.

  2. The desync the bow has with arrows going right through targets and not doing any damage.

  3. Rain of Arrows. The issue with Rain of Arrows is that when you go to use it either in a dungeon or war, the ability gets body blocked by teammates. Causing the AOE circle to stop at your teammates feet instead of going to the intended target

  4. Sometimes you could be aiming directly at a targets center mass from a relatively short to medium distance, which you know the arrow will go where its intended. But SUPRISE, your arrows fly wide left of the target when you know you have a guaranteed hit on the player. My point with this right here is that arrows sometimes never go where they are supposed to go.

  5. The draw time for Rain of Arrows is incredibly long. Having to slowly drag the arrow upwards, notch an arrow, pull the string back, then a secondary pull, only for the arrows to finally release. the speed on the ability usage needs to be altered to a faster ability time usage.

  6. The good ole stand still till you die Rapid Shot. This is a big issue especially when it comes to dungeons. I know from personal experiences that not being able to cancel the ability while I am mid ability. This is a serious problem. I will be using Rapid Shot in a dungeon but i cant cancel it when a main boss is using a big ability that either kills me or takes 85% of my health, and i have no choice but to sit there like a rag doll and take the hit.

  7. Again the topic of Rain of Arrows. The greater the distance at which you go to use the ability the less chance it has at registering. And also when using the ability on an enemy/enemies standing on top of anything other than a flat surface there is also a good chance the ability wont register, or even somehow overshoot your target, or as stated above get body blocked by your teammates.

  8. This isn’t a part of the Bow, but the Great Axe’s Maelstrom abilities eats ALL incoming friendly abilities. Meaning every friendly ability being used while a friendly Maelstrom is being used, just disappears into thin air and not doing a single bit of damage. This has been tried, tested, and proven for months now. Not only does the Maelstrom do that, but it also makes it to where you can’t even drag your cursor over someone using Maelstrom.

  9. Penetrating Shot and Poison Shot. I know these have been noticed by you Devs at one point, but the issue still stands. Both Penetrating Shot and Poison Shot will sometimes make a sound like the arrow has been shot, but in fact the arrows has remained in the bow, causing you to 1, either realign your shot, or 2, repress the key bind in an attempt to hopefully make it shoot this time

  10. The cooldowns. Now for this I will also be comparing the bow to the fire staff, because this was brought to my attention yesterday and is an issue. Back to the Rain of Arrows yet again. Rain of Arrows, has 170% based weapon damage with a 30s cooldown timer, along with the reasons I mentioned above in points 3, 5, and 7. Compared to the fire staffs Fireball cast. it has a quick cast time, a similar impact zone, instant hit, deals 150% of your based damage, AND has a less than 10s cooldown. It is absurd how drastic these two compare.

  11. Poison Shot should be a bit more unforgiving than what it is currently. If you hit someone with it, it does max just shy of 300 damage per extremely slow tick. Compared to the ice gauntlet ability Ice Storm doing like 800-1000 damage every second that you stand in it. Now I’m not saying that’s how much damage the Poison Shot should do. But 1 piece of regenerating can heal for every tick of damage the poison shot does. All I am saying is that the poison shot DoT should tick for at least 400 damage every second. Make that ability more useful, other than just tickling the players armpits and nose hairs(terrible analogy, but what ever lmao).

Closing note: The Bow needs love. These are the issues with the bow that are making the bow unenjoyable to most, if not all players who have played the bow since they started the game. And because of these issues the bow is very unreliable in wars. And even in OPR, and open world PVP. I decided to write this all out in hoping that the New World Developers would see this and that the issues with the bow are brought to light and fixed.

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It has been already stated in several places.

On top of what you said: root after shooting, the arrow speed (I think you mentioned this one), the gravity, the arrow hit box, the 0 damage to medium/heavy armor guys (it would make sense for the bow to have armor penetration), and probably some more things that are missing.

I know people who left the game because of this, and I’ll follow them if nothing changes in April. Balance releases should be quicker, on weekly releases, not once every 2 months…

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I gave up on the Bow and you should too… so AGS checks NW Analytics and wonders why nobody is using the Bow anymore.

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@Developer

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i am actually using poison shot as a second pen shot, just for direct hits. It hits like a truck but the hitbox is way smaller than pen shot. I said this a lot: Every bow shot should have the hitbox that pen shot has. Its still hard to hit a moving target with it.

Also another huge issue in my opinion that you didnt bring up: The bow armor perks are so useless. Compared to other weapon perks its a joke. Ice shower applies rend, root, slow, and blocks dodging without any perks whatsoever and bow doesnt even have a useful slow.

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I will never give up entirely on the bow, as it is one of my favorite weapons aesthetically!
I’m by no means a top tier player. I’m 615GS, (400 dex, 100 con) and mostly play alone open world and do opr/normal dungeons so understand where I’m coming from.

The Bow is a fantastic at two things, Padding meters and kiting heavy armor melee. This is perhaps why the weapon has been nerfed continuously. The amount of over all damage the bow puts out is maybe second to only firestaff even in its current state.

I constantly fire pen shot/rain of arrows into groups doing well over 25k+ dmg in a single skill. If I land poison shot on 3+ people that is another 15-20k of meaningless dot dmg every 30 seconds. This results in easy 700k-1mil dmg opr matches. These skills do entirely to much dmg per use while not doing any threatening amount of dmg to heavy armor/point men. unfortunately, The metrics, in opr at least, place a lot of value on dmg done over getting kills/objective play. This is why bows are often at the top of charts (with mages) in opr.

Out side of that, the bow can out kite virtually every heavy armor melee player (even with the root after firing) with ease, making 1v1s a long drawn out match that the bow user eventually wins, and is not fun for any involved. You could make the bow hit for 100 dmg, they would still eventually win as the melee could never land a hit. In these 1v1s, bow only wins due to being able to kite extremely well. Pair it with a rapier and no melee (even light armor melee) are catching you, ever, unless you play really badly. You either get the kill, or they run away and dodge your arrows.

Finally, bow does great dmg against light armor (as all weapons do), and poorly against heavy armor. Well, what do most mages/other aoe based ranged classes wear?! light armor. This allows for the bow to near 1 shot these players. making these fights also favored by the bow player. I cant tell you how many times I’ve pen shot someone in light for 5-6k+ and followed up with a 2-3k LA after finishing them off.

With all this in mind, there are few 1v1 situations where bow looses. further adding to the idea that bow is too strong when really, it is just the ability to kite and attrition your opponent. In Aoe, the bow does no meaningful damage to each individual target as light armor players do not tend to cluster on the point. My average pen shot per heavy is 2.5-3k crit, and rain of arrows is 1.5-2k crit. vs 5k pen on light and 4k Rain of arrows.

Where does this leave bows? it leaves them in this really awkward place where they are too good in 1v1 while being completely terrible at supporting group objective based combat. In addition bows get extremely inflated padding numbers placing them at the top of the Charts with few to no kills.

I’m not sure what the solution for bow is, but I would recommend Devs look at making the weapon either a single target or aoe weapon. In it’s current state it is a strange combo of both resulting in it being an easy weapon to top meters with while providing nothing meaningful to group play.

If you made it this far,
Thank you for reading!

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The things I have stated outside of cool down timers are not nerfs. They’re actual issues with the bow. And in response to your comment about kiting. Bow players HAVE to, because we can’t go toe to toe in a damn brawl with a bruiser, that’s just not happening. And dumb. So it’s imperative that bow players keep their distance when in a fight. People can disagree with what I said about kiting all they want. But it’s straight up facts. And facts don’t care about feelings😃

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check this one out

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9073 fire damage on a musket? and it looks like that fire icon has been photoshopped into it… notice how it’s less blurry than the damage numbers. Compare that fire image to the other fire image beside it and notice huge difference in the designs.

I’m sorry but this looks more clickbaity than anything else.

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Prob but if you actually watch it, the damage is pretty insane

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