This nerf is murder on dedicated throwers.
What's worst about it is that everything felt perfect in the previous patches, as far as balance between ranged and melee went. Shielders 'beat' archers and throwers. Archers and throwers 'beat' cav and 2Hers. Cav and 2Hers 'beat' shielders. Isn't that balance?
The nerfs in this patch go too far for archers, and they shouldn't have been applied to throwers at all. Archery and throwing play completely differently and any kind of blanket tweak to both is hard to rationalize. Is this another case of the game being balanced around strat mode, to the detriment of siege/battle?
Artie has 10 Power Throw and uses balanced jarids with 43 pierce damage. Pre-patch, that meant 77 pierce damage. Sounds about right compared against the values for melee builds, who have the benefit of armor, possibly IF and/or shields, and weapons with unlimited uses and superior stats to the melee modes of throwing weapons.
Before this patch, I could reliably one-shot cloth, 1-2 shot leather, 2-3 shot mail, and 3-5 shot plate. There were exceptions; these are just averages.
Keeping in mind that I get only 12 jarids each time I spawn, if I give-up having any kind of melee weapon, this seemed pretty balanced to me. I did a lot of damage, but my running speed was kept low by STR and WPF requirements for my PT, meaning that, if I wasted jarids, I was a sitting duck, without any armor or powerstrike or even wpf in melee. As soon as I ran out of throwing weapons, I became a peasant. That's fair.
It now takes TWO balanced jarids (77 pierce w/ PT 10 remember) to kill someone with
55 HP in NO ARMOR.
For someone in medium-tier mail, the number goes up to 4-5 jarids. Plate has become godlike. That means that, best case scenario, I can get a maximum of about 3 kills each time I spawn, depending on how many jarids miss and what kind of enemies I come across. Sure I can make some headshots now and then, but at the kinds of ranges that make headshots more than a matter of chance, I only get one opportunity to throw before the enemy is on top of me, and when you're a pure thrower that means death. I can shoot from farther back, but then headshots are just luck.
Effectively, dedicated throwing is now broken, at least with the high-damage, low-ammo weapons. I guess you could loom your throwing stones to MW and try for headshots, but it'll still take two of them to kill anybody besides peasants, and making more than two headshots is a feat with a ridiculously low probability. If there wasn't the WPF requirement for PT, and if throwing weapons didn't have such low ammo, this nerf wouldn't have broken dedicated throwing - but after having played with those changes for a while, I think they were in the best interests of balance, and I'm glad they came along.
I thought that things were pretty well balanced before this patch. Throwing felt right and archery felt right, and the only reason why anybody complained about them was just because there were so many people playing ranged, which has more to do with player preference/curiosity than with stats balance.
My vote is for all ranged to go back to how it was before this patch. But, if the devs need to nerf something to get people to stop whining, then I think the changes in this patch should be nulled and the following implemented:
1) Increase repair costs for the best bows and arrows, or maybe even charge a repair cost based upon how many arrows an archer fires that don't do damage to an enemy player, their mounts or shields; that is, punish archers financially for being poor shots. This would thin out the spam and lowered overall damage from archers by reserving the best equipment for the most talented players.
2) Lower damage done to shields by all bows except for Xbows and Longbow.
3) Make archers slower when they have their bows drawn. This forces them to find tactical positions and/or get support from teammates to be effective, which seems about right.
4) If you have to do something to throwing, why not pick on the hybrids instead of the dedicated throwers? Reintroduce the multi-slot throwing weapons, but keep the final sum for a full loadout of four slots to the same as it is now. That way, hybrids can't go OP with the terrible troika of PS, PT and massive weapons/shields, but dedicated throwers can keep doing our thang.
In the end though, it's a free mod and the devs will have it the way they want it, and that's fine. But if there is a specific kind of gameplay that they're working towards, that breaks certain builds, then it's only fair to give the players with those builds some kind of heads-up or free re-do so that they haven't wasted all their XP, gold and looms.
