Nah. HA serves no purpose but to be annoying to every other class in the game
I was playing on my naked swordsman the other day (15/30, no ironflesh) and took 3 shots to the head and still had over 25% life
Seems legit
HA used to counter cav and that's what it should still do. Then it would have a perfect place in a rock-paper-scissors -balancing world. I remember from two years ago when we regularly tried to get one or two HA mercs on our side for the pure purpose of dismounting the enemy cav and stop them from harassing archers and spawnraping infantry. HAs used to do very little damage on heavy armored guys targets, but were easily able to take down any light to medium targets, like horses.
I never quite understood why this balance was changed. With the current soak and reduce values it seems like the options are that HAs do no damage at all on anything (current), or become overpowered due to ability to kite and kill anything (what we had half a year ago). Do we still have active devs that could look into the possibility of tweaking the values so that heavy armor would actually protect against horse archers, but not so much against regular longbow+bodkin archers? It seems like this balance is tough to get perfect with the Warband engine though...
Anyway, HA needs a buff as it's not usable atm. My archer char survives four headshots from a HA - and he has no head armor.
Mounted range has no place in multiplayer.
removing the damage cap will fix horse archery; it was fine last patch before the damage cap was overlooked by the revert.
So, you may recall that server pop was topping on NA was topping at 30ish and averaged at 20 during that period. Folks like kojiro were topping the charts with with their damage scores. Additionally no one was viably playing light cav at that time on NA. Without an arch curve nerf, cav and agi builds are going to get trolled hard from this, as well as everyone else in the open.
The simple fact is that Horse damage is all about the speed bonus and hit area. When chasing a fleeing cav, generally only a lance is viable so even if he can reach him because the attacker has no speed bonus and probably a penalty the damage done to the HA horse is minimal, while the HA has full advantage of the speed bonus and the head of the horse which will be facing him. This is why the arch is so important in cav battles. Having an arch will force the HA to actually engage the Cav, instead of an agonizing cat and mouse chase.
What you propose is returning to the equivalent of a melee chasing the kiting archer, but in this case he is actually able to shoot and kill you as he makes his escape. Can you imagine the rage on the forums if archers could do this? Why allow it for HA?
How can it be argued that Lance cav should have the arch nerf but not Ranged Cav?
The angle isn't the problem and never was the problem. if you take that from Horse archers you will have them just as useless as they are now. The way Horse archers have to play to get ANY kills is high risk; bumping and then shooting which does reward a lot of points but often times not many kills. So the class is "annoying" but hardly considered "effective"
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angle restriction is unneeded; Horse archers already have a -20% speed -20% damage and limited ammo; they already get ran down by even much slower horses simply because even with high riding the speed penalty for using a bow is harsh enough for them to be caught and killed. Besides one can argue that the most effective spot for cav to attempt to lance was directly in front of them which is still allowed; where as the most effective location for an archer on horse back to shoot is behind them; if this angle restriction was set in stone they would lose their most effective spots being the sides and the back.
Balancing the game according to what the people want is the most idiotic form of balance there could ever be. Besides that poll means nothing, 30% of that vote alone is targeted at one specific type of range which is throwers and I myself can not argue that throwers are fine currently they do need nerf in more ways than one. Looking even further into the bias of this poll it should be taken into consideration that cRPG has always been ANTI range. Also those 11 votes do matter if you are truly concerned with what the people want; trolls or not they play the game and their vote should be considered all the same. Following your logic of balancing the game according to what the 53% want.
You could make another poll and name it "buff what" and you will find that the numbers flip flop because people vote with only one person in mind, themselves and "nerf what" to the individual is "what class annoys me the most", not "What class is most deserving of a nerf."
I think you are taking this way out of proportion; lance angle works fine for melee cavalry but would destroy range cavalry making them less viable than a level 1 peasant.
I base my opinion on playing horse archery for over the course of 2 years (off and on) and yes I have no respect for the cRPG communities biased opinions on balance as you shouldn't have any respect for my opinions on balance but here we are debating in a thread that will have absolutely zero impact on future balance discussions.
Desire, have you ever even been melee cav? Because if you haven't played both and really every class you don't know what you are talking about which is what is sounds like. And that last part about the disrespect, no wonder this community can be so shitty sometime. I think our leaders ought to have a mutual respect with the community, I'd bet alot that had you and other of a similar opinion not only would this mod be in a better state and population, but MG:BG would have been kick started.
I have played every class the same as you; melee cav its exceptionally easy to ignore horse archers and go about your business its when you get frustrated and play right into their hand that you become mindlessly baited into their game. I've played heavy 1h cav and extremely light lance cavalry and never once did I have any problems with any horse archers.
Uh, see for me, thay would follow me around the map keeping their distance and shooting at me until I was dismounted forcing me to hang out by spawn near our range the whole round making any sort of light or even medium cav unplayable, then if I brought in a heavy horse they would still do the same this time farming me for valor and they were not chargeable, always able to outrun me.
I don't know why you were never targeted, I guess they never perceived you as a threat. Infact I've never seen you at the top or near the top of the boards. The experience is completely different when you play competitively people react to you differently as do you to them, this is how I've treated all the classes, and without that experience, you really don't even know what this game is really about, you haven't c-rpged.
Well I stopped trying about a year before you got decent at the game. Just before tydeus started to ruin the game in general. To be honest before recently my only knowledge of you was that you gave admins trouble and stalked a player irl and that you were to be watched when present in the server. You have either no knowledge of what my alts are or simply never seen me topping the boards because you must of started playing after I quit playing battle/siege. I'm not saying I'm great or even good but I've definitely topped the boards my fair share in c-RPG history. But you are right I don't play this game competitively anymore, in my opinion its current state is to broken to be considered a "competitive" game.
To say I don't really know what this game is about and that I haven't played it is just 100% wrong.
So, i was editing while u were posting, but I agree my favorite balance was in 2011, but it feels good right now, I really hope you give it a try.
And as far as derailing anything, lol, I'm pretty sure nothing Ive ever said on here has made any difference to what you guys with the colored bars above your picture do, so yea...
As I've said in this thread anything we discuss here will probably never make any sort of impact on balance discussion (The balancing community is much much smaller than you would probably like to believe and admins are not part of said group.)