Possible bow adjustment, tell me your opinion

[Regios]

These are just suggestions (a rant basically) by a 1.2k+ hours bow user. All of these are for PVP.

Bow right now it’s quite bad, both damage wise and the way you deal it. It is supposed to reward you with big single hits since it’s hardest weapon to deal damage with, but the damage it’s too low compared to the effort it takes.

It’s not exactly it’s damage that is too low, we know it can deal ridicolous damage (which is the reason why many non bow users say it’s broken), but that only happens against target that are in light, with no resilience, low gs, and no fortify; but when you meet someone with decent gear (full resilience and gems) and a constant fortify, bow damage will drop considerably.

This is what i believe it’s the main problem with bow: the gap between it’s top end and bottom end damage it’s too big.
Since it’s the weapon with the slowest fire rate and the biggest damage per hit, in a normal group fight, with bruisers, mages, healers ecc, a lots of heavy armor and fortify and is constantly applied, the damage reduction a bow suffers is the biggest compared to all other weapons.

I suggest this possible adjustments:

• Fortify and armor penetration perk

• allow crit damage modifiers to stack with headshot modifiers

• changing resilient, so it reduces only the crit part of the damage instead of the whole damage, or making it so it doesn’t reduce headshot damage too

This is only about damage, bow has many problems about its fluidity, the way you get paralyzed after each skill/shot, the inconsistency of arrow hitboxes, the non-existent poison shot hitbox, ecc

[Silversure]

These you mention are only few of the many problems of this weapon, but you’re right, probably apart from the hate-trolls / people without hands, the most cry posts about bow are from totally ungeared-for-pvp people. The sad part is that AGS listen to them without any kind of critic eye, I sometimes wonder if there’s someone actually taking decisions out there or just randomly picking “suggestions” from the forum.

The weapon is plagued by supposedly fixed bugs, such as:

• Not being able to activate skills while aiming - very game breaking, but who cares.
• If you don’t immediatly roll after any shot, you get animation locked for around 1.5 seconds without being able to sprint/dodge/whatever. Also very game breaking, but again, who cares about bow.
• Sometimes after finally being able to shot a skill, e.g. Penetrating shot, skills sound effects proc but nothing actually happens, and you have to recast. Same as before.
• If you dodge while aiming, after dodge you get LOCKED into aiming animation again (where you move as slow as a snail), effectively killing you because you have to wait for the aiming-exit animation which renders you unable to swap weapons to keep running or make further dodges. Same.
• Can’t count the number of times arrows go through torsos, heads, and whatnot. Arrow hitbox is pure garbage, and should be fixed and increased in size.
• Poison shot dissapears through the floor - also related to the last point.

I’m sure I’m leaving behind more game-breaking bugs who nobody cares about - I’m positive on this as latest bow changes were only nerfs instead of any kind of fix for those bugs.

Also, lets discuss a few skills mechanics of the so-called OP weapon:

• Rapid shot: ironically the slowest skill in the game, roots you in place for around 4 seconds!!! you can’t dodge out of it either. Exquisite skill. Also, shots 3 arrows slighly faster than regular auto attack, equally harder to land all of them, so chances are the three of them will have high probabilities of missing.
• Evade shot: or so called, you can’t evade shit because it doesn’t have iframes and it works in slow-motion, laughable.
• Rain of arrows: Good damage and area but obscenely long animation and arrow travel time that forces you to see in the future around 3 seconds where your targets will be unless they are taking a nap or you encounter a melee dealing with other matters.
• Split shot: AHAHAH. *ehem* sorry. Arguably the most laughable skill in the game. Just grab a bow and try land some shots on any living person, then come back.

I’ve taken a look at bow-hate posts around the forum, and it amazes me to see lots of people talking about “15k shots”, “insane damage”, “etc”. LOL. These guys must be Heinekens running on 0 perks, no resilence, light armor, and a glass cannon build with 6k HP, buthurt because a random penetrating shot landed on them after going through other 4 people (it increases damage), situation which could happen once every moon.
The real day to day of current bow after several random nerfs, using full buffs from 40 DEX food, OPR damage food, and sharpening stone (4%) sitting on 380 DEX, is:

• 3k-5k on light armor, depending on headshot, etc. Maybe some random 6 or 7k (!!!) after multiple-penetrating shot happening after many moons.
• 1k-2k on the average medium-armor player. Laughable, you can heal through the damage with potions still having enough time to refill the CD.
• 500-900 (XDD) on heavy armor (there’s some post of a guy claiming heavy armor takes 12k shots!!! Incredible drugs).

Im talking about crits here. Hello.
Please also remember when looking at these numbers that this is not musket where you can click at the spot and that’s it, no - instead you need to foresee into the future where your arrow will land and where people will be much, MUCH later, due to the slow projectile - we miss like 50% of our shots easily, strokes of luck aside. Seems low damage to me taking that situation in account. You need high amounts of skill to do something relevant with this weapon, yet we do not get any reward for that - questionable damage and difficulties instead.

I’m taking my chances mentioning here some gm, @Luxendra for example, to see if there’s any chance any of these problems will be addressed at some point, or more seemingly unneeded nerfs will come instead, just to prepare myself for it.

I’ll also give some suggestions of possible changes which could improve the weapon without excess, based on my years of experience on bow in this and other games:

• Arrows need to be fixed in various levels:

  • Arrows should aim to the actual crosshair. It is not happening, currently.
  • Projectile speed should be much faster. You should need to have the hability to predict movement with a bow, but you shouldn’t need to be a fricking seer - projectile speed would fix this greatly, if you think this is unbalanced or something, think again, just look at the musket, hello hitscan. I can smell you mages out there about to post something like “OMG then all magic weapons could ask for this too!” - no, think again, the arrow projectile size is negligible when compared to a magic projectile size, this is why.
  • Increase the hitbox slightly or, coupled with the previous change proposal, at least fix it so it doesn’t miss when it should land.
  • There’s two tree skills related to arrow speed that aren’t working at all, or are negligible at best: Aim True and Arrow Range. Rework those into some more useful ones, or at least fix them please. Also Spoiler: extra damage on 100% HP targets is virtually useless in general, at least IMO, please prove me wrong - If bow were like an assassin-like weapon where you can one-hit pleople would make sense, but that would be outrageous.

• Some skills need serious rework. Basically the ones I mentioned:

  • Rapid shot: looks like a potentially great skill, but should honor its name, that is, make it actualy fast shotting arrows, like 3 arrows in 1 second - maybe with reduced damage in this case, and of course allow dodge at any point.
  • Evade shot: the animation needs to be faster, please, it should allow you to actually evade something, I’m not even speaking about iframes here, just make it a fast jump backwards, it doesn’t even need to shot an arrow - it should be a mobility skill with a relatively long CD. I’ll tell you a secret boys, for those who claim that bow has insane mobility - tell what, it has no real mobility. Rapier does. Only mobility here is that or light armor roll. End.
  • Rain of arrows: slighly reduce the animation to load the arrows or the arrow travel time - both of them is overkill IMO.
  • Split shot: please. This skill is a joke, I think everyone is with me on this one. Just remove the 10m split thing or change it to something completely different.

I think these changes together with the fix of the mentioned bugs above should improve bow viability for the time being. Note that I’m not even metioning anything about damage. I think damage is fine I’m going to edit my post after some time because I’m not confortable with this this here TBH, I said this because I don’t think addressing everything at the same time was going to be good in the case some CM reads this posts, but I need to give some nuance to this sentence: damage is fine to light armor, but to medium or heavy is very underwhelming or non-existent (see numbers above), but I know it is going to be very difficult to tweak it without making damage to light armor OP. My opinion, shared with other similar posts: some base armor-penetrating percentages to arrows (maybe 10%?) to allow slighly more damage to those armor types. The problem is still to actually land shots and do damage, anyway.

On a side note: Regarding heavy armor, I think it’s fine it tanks a lot, it has its tradeoffs regarding dodge. However the problem is that whereas in heavy armor you can wreck heads the same, damage amps from light/medium are a joke if they even work. In my opinion, heavy armor should have a reduced damage modifier (ready to attract all these WH/GA users hate, including devs ), letting those who want to tank, CC, and hold points, etc do that, and moving those who want to wreck heads to medium armor, where everyone can compete on damage over that fortify and stuff. Don’t tell me the expected “uhhh but I could not get to rangeds before I die”, please, just wait for all of those new gravity wells with root and sword leaps pouring on top of your head at OPR, I don’t see how rangeds are going to flee from that.

Well, I’m done. To be honest I don’t hope any of this will make it live in the future, but at least hope these game-breaking bugs are fixed at some point. Cheers.

[LOLZEN]

Really good post.

I would add only 1 more thing:

Heavy Attack needs some serious rework, because it’s almost never used.
We never use Heavy Attack, because it means we have to be a sitting duck for 3 seconds, so it becomes a highly situational attack.

My suggestion would be to either:
-decrease its cast time & damage
-make it so that the longer you draw/cast, the more damage it does, with a linear increase every 0.1 or 0.25 seconds.

[Sutra]

Heavy ahora 1,5 secs like others weaponts

[bobo197401]

+1 Bump, as a bowman myself I agree with the said above

[GhostingMyEx]

Bump this. Stop listening to bow haters and listen to people who actually use bow

[BlackNows]

Great thread. The biggest point for me is the root after shot, they need to remove this. Melee now have all animation cancels on the world.

[zacekr]

X2
potion shot root you

[Nourri]

bow is extremely poorly designed. There is no reactive concepts to the class design, its very primitive and feels like it was thrown together instantly in a 15 minute span.

The problems dex range are experiencing are not actually native to the class but are part of the heavy armor system doing to much protection, and light armor to little. This being paired with that bow has way to many +20% damage talents, and nothing to help arrow or heavy charge speed breaks the class.

On a more in depth look at the class, there is also other related issues like the repetitive spam of talents in skirmish tree that slow and fundamentally do the same concept without any form of interaction between them.

[Sutra]

AGS do mi laught.
28k players, web dont need see more for understand It.