TL;DR? Critically hit by a wall of well-formatted text for 9999 damage? Well GTFO my thread then you illiterate scrub!
I'm not entirely unhappy with the way archery works right now in cRPG, but I do play an archer myself and I would agree with the opinions that archery (and crossbow-ery...?) is missing something after it took a nerf to
every single stat: arrow speed, damage, rate of fire, accuracy, damage type.
One of my complaints with the game design in cRPG is the generic weapon progression where everything pretty much uniformly gets larger and more damaging as it gets slower (usually) and more expensive. Weapons aren't balanced with advantages and disadvantages. This linear weapon progression is boring and and flavorless. While I would be willing to retool the entire weapon list myself, and I have the coding skill to do so, I'm not sure chadz and the cRPG team would be interested in something like that.
The archery weapons, however, are few enough that I think a retool would be easy to do. It wouldn't dramatically reinvent the game and weapon balance either, and so I hope my suggestion here will be taken seriously. One thing that you must understand is that I care about game design. I want the game to be interesting and varied, and I want every "tool" at a player's disposal to have a distinct use in the game that makes it worth using sometimes and a bad idea other times. Hard realism is not in my interest. Bows shoot arrows. Shields block arrows. That's enough realism for me.
Anyway, I went back to play Guild Wars recently, and when I was playing my ranger I remembered they had a variety of bows. Each type of bow has advantages and disadvantages. I feel like it is a good starting point, and so I used it as the basis for my ideas on rebalancing bows in cRPG and making them more interesting to use.
Here is a link about bows in Guild Wars for reference:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/BowI am not going to attempt to put numbers on the cRPG bows because I have no way of testing hypothetical numbers. Instead I'll list the bows and imagine a possible role for the bow that fits with the stats we have the ability to tweak. These are only suggestions, examples of what I think could be done to make bows more interesting in Warband.
Strong BowThe horn bow in Guild Wars has armor penetration, which translates to restoring the strong bow's piercing damage in cRPG. It is the slowest bow, and it has average accuracy and arrow speed. It has relatively low DPS but hits the hardest per arrow against armored targets. I think the strong bow fits this idea best in Warband. The key here is to give the bow piercing damage, but to make sure the raw damage is merely average and the rate of fire is slower than other bows. There must be a sweet spot in armor where this armor piercing becomes the better choice, but before that it is not such a good idea. I would suggest somewhere about 50+ armor, which is what the expensive tier 5 horses have.
Khergit BowI propose making the Khergit bow the most accurate bow in cRPG. It already ended up being the most accurate bow with acceptable damage, so the changes would not be dramatic. It should have an average rate of fire and be very accurate, but the arrows should travel
very slowly. This makes the bow easier to dodge even at medium range if someone is paying attention, and the resulting high arc should make it more difficult to use at long range as well.
Hunting BowCurrently there are three peasant bows in cRPG and four "real" bows. That means two bows are pretty much a waste of space. The hunting bow should remain a peasant bow, although I might suggest giving it piercing damage just so it's not utterly useless. Even an archer can comfortably wear 30 points of armor, which makes it's current 15 cut damage a joke.
Short BowThe short bow had a place in Warband and it deserves to get its niche back in cRPG: it's the "very very light machine gun" bow. It is great for countering archers at closer ranges or harassing (stunning) players who don't have shields. This bow would do normal damage (not paper cut damage like it does now) but have poor accuracy and arrow speed, forcing people to use it up close. I would raise its requirement to power draw 3 (so that there is no bow at power draw 2) and give it a rate of fire more comparable to Native bows than cRPG bows. I would not allow the short bow to be used from horseback, because that would be too obnoxious against foot archers.
Nomad BowI don't have a good idea for the nomad bow, I'm afraid. It could be the mounted equivalent of the short bow, just not as good. I'm just not sure, but anything is better than having 3 out of 7 bows being "peasant bows"
War BowFinally we're up to the interesting bows. I would consider the war bow to be comparable to the recurve bow in Guild Wars. Kind of. It would have average stats all around, but better damage (though no piercing) and keep its 6 power draw requirement. It would have the fastest arrow speed. I'm talking Super Man travels back-in-time fast. The quantum arrows arrive at the target before they're drawn from the quiver. This would make its arc exceptionally flat and its arrows painfully difficult to dodge at closer ranges. (It would still be too inaccurate for reliable sniping at long range.) I think the current tactics that war bow archers currently tend to use would fit well with a bow like this, and it would remain the standard bow for foot archers.
Long BowThis bow is painfully bad right now. You work your way up to 6 or 7 PD and hope to wreck people with a 30 damage bow of doom and... you get this piece of crap. First, the size bug needs to get fixed so this bow looks impressive again. It also needs a major overhaul. I suggest bumping this bow up to actually require 7 PD. Only real archers need apply. It should remain the highest damage bow in the game, enough that it still does as much damage as the piercing strong bow against someone in full plate armor. I would give the long bow the highest raw damage, good accuracy (second only to the Khergit bow), average arrow speed, and slightly below average rate of fire. The bow would be well-rounded and a worthy counterpart to the war bow. The long bow would be accurate and hard hitting, something of a "sniper" bow, but the war bow would shoot flatter and have a better rate of fire.
I'm asking for criticism, but I'm not asking for a point-by-point critique of my exact idea on bow balance. It is merely an example of what I think could be done; I am not trying to say it is the best idea, only that it seems better to me than what we have right now. What I'm more interested in is what other archers (and even non-archers) think about rebalancing the bows in this way
or in a similar fashion that gives each bow an interesting flavor and niche to fill in the game rather than the generic linear progression we have right now which makes bows uniformly get bigger, slower, less accurate, but harder hitting with faster arrows/less arc. I hope if this thread gets some real attention that chadz and the other cRPG developers will consider doing something like this. There are only seven bows, so it is not as if I'm trying to rebalance the stats for a the entire game. (Although I think such an undertaking would be a positive thing... if I were allowed to do it, of course.
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