Is archery nerfs fair? (Updated 03.05.2013)

[Paul]

Well, air friction got lowered to back Native levels. This is one hidden buff that seemed to stayed off everyone's radar. This especially positively affects high cadence ranged like archery. I also base my opinion on current play experience, so it is prone to change. I'm on noone's side, never was. I don't have any preferences either.

[CrazyCracka420]

I doubt we'd notice the air friction being at native levels unless the missile speeds were the same.  Wouldn't the current (aka cRPG missile speeds) and the native air friction just allow the projectiles to travel farther, not faster?  Wouldn't there be less drop on the missile as well (compared to previously in cRPG)? 

I'd assume archers would have noticed this right away.

[Molly]

In that case, let me show you a few quotes about your opinion concerning archery from the past. Please keep in mind that you posted some of those pre nerf.


There is so much more between it. The ability to hold the closed reticule for a long time, the far better awareness due reloading, the higher shot speed...

I know, a skilled archer can compensate all that to a certain degree, even more when fully loomed. But the average player is more dangerous with an arba than with any bow.

Infantry are the round decider of this mod. Along with cav, who mostly profit from ignorance of other players, they are the most powerful factor in this game. In comparison ranged is on an all time low in terms of significance towards the outcome of a round.

However we will nerf ranged further. Afaik after the end of WSE2 beta and with the installation of the WSE2 clientside endlösung, we plan to add wind(with a fixed vector per map or round) to the game that deviates the path from projectiles significantly, making aiming more skillbased.


All those points you list are the same that archers still complain about today. In every of those posts you give reason for archers being an overall inferior class compared to its competitors. And I repeat, some of those statements were made when archery was a lot less nerfed than today.

So what happened Paul ? Why the sudden change in attitude ?

I may be wrong but none of those quoted statements were about the fun-factor of the class.
Maybe it's not fun for you anymore but the archer population and their score on Eu1 tell me otherwise every day.

[OttomanSniper]

Well, air friction got lowered to back Native levels. This is one hidden buff that seemed to stayed off everyone's radar. This especially positively affects high cadence ranged like archery. I also base my opinion on current play experience, so it is prone to change. I'm on noone's side, never was. I don't have any preferences either.

Is it a placebo? I don't feel any change.

[chesterotab]

I'm actually having fun as an archer. Even as a (money problems related) dismounted horse archer. Doesn't seem overnerfed.

Never played as an archer myself, but I took this screenshot a couple days ago and something doesn't seem balanced about it.

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[BlindGuy]

I like shooting ppl with my bow, and I have played mainly as an archer since before crpg existed, these days: I shoot horses, especially to down HX and HA, I shoot other archers to stop them shooting me,  and I shoot melee enemies to soften them up for killing in melee; but let me give you an example from TODAY:

On eu2 I had 86 points, ZERO kills, defender, 2 stacks of arrows, warbow ('loomed gear of course ) and a dagger. Got 2 dagger kills, respawnd without bow, just my Mighty Fighting Axe (a true gentlemans weapon I might add), chopped some guys for a while, pressed tab again: 114 points, TWELVE kills. Each arrow hit gives 1 or 2 points, so that between 40 and 80 players who I shot without killing a single one.

Im not the best melee player, probably 40% of players I fight 1v1 eventually kill me when I whiff and they spam (blocking all day is off course very easy and possible but the temptation to hit back is too great, blocking never killed anyone), but Im FAR from the worst archer, I dont much like to complain, but my problem with the weight nerf was the opposite to kiters: Now I must drop all my shit to fight, else every douche holds his S key down, safe in the knowledge I cannot close the gap while I carry arrows. The weight addition killed my melee as archer, and that was NOT meant to happen. Fucking kiters ruined everything for me. But still I am happy because kiting was the very fucking ugliest thing in the mod at the time. But I would LOVE to see a solution, and I am not 100% serious but a good example I would liek to make is a League of Legends character: Tryndamere: if you run from him he has an ability that when he uses it calls enemies a chicken for running: if they are running from him they slow down, if they are facing him it has no affect. Something like that would be so nice instead of arrow weight.

TL;DR very happy theres no kiting, but sad that now my arrows dont kill, and I must drop all my archery gear to not be a freekill in melee

[Nordwolf]

The same picture as always.

I think everyone should understand, that people complain not about average player, but about those who kill them.
Of course they are just going to shout OP! everytime they see a good archer doing their job.


Archery requires a rather high lvl, abandoning anything other than archery, taking small amount of arrows and you still nerf them?
Really, only point to nerf them was to remove kiting, while the first time it proved viable, some 34-35 archers still were able to kite someway. But that is not an average archer, so I think that the second time weight nerf was not good.
I still think that there should be a better way to remove kiting.... but I'm not really sure how



For example, today I've been playing and have seen a good archer, aimes, kills. But who's that? An archer I've seen for more than 2 years now. And usually that picture is repeating, average archer is so much worse than any average melee player.
But think, that archer was very good, but in battle there were at least 6 melee/cav players superior to that archer >> top archers are like average melee/cav or even worse.

Yes, archers can sometimes be a pain for cav, but when it comes to killing the rider, my total ~56 body armor can survive 3-5 hits with no speed boost. Yes some archers can kill me from 2-3 body shots, but they are usually those fully loomed longbow archers - not an average archer at all


Also I would say that term "average archer" has lost it's meaning, because what I see now is some good dedicated archers, alts or new archer players, who probably abandon it in a short time.

[Tydeus]

I've had similar experience with archers taking 12+(The ss I have is with 12 arrows sticking out of my character) arrows to kill my 50~ hp 62 body armor, character. Can't say I like it for balance exactly, but at the same time I know the HA is using a weak bow with a weak build(low PD). That same HA would also be a much larger headache for the player of a light armored Agi character.

[Teeth]

I love how the OP comes up with realism arguments about bow and arrow weight after calling the removal of jump shots illogical. Maybe you should provide some drawings of Ottoman warriors doing 360 jump shots.

[XyNox]

I cant agree more with BlindGuy and Nordwolf.

Dont get me wrong. It is still possible to get kills with bows obviously. But at what price ? I can share exactly the same problem as BlindGuy when it comes to melee'ing. While having a bow equiped even 60ish armor people can backpaddel faster then you can accelerate forwards when trying to hit them. Fighting a ninja with bow and arrows on your back looks like a scene right out of benny hill. Current archery balance is like "if someone charges you and you cant shoot him down before he touches you, you are dead". The "ranged" advantage has still to be payed with massive drawbacks while buying heavy armor and a greatsword in comparison makes you killing machine without much personal commitment.

With my loomed, lvl 34 archer build I admit that it is not as bad as for new archers, still I think in comparison melee has too much Strengths that simply come by default. Just watch what happens on the battlefield. 2H's charge archers on an open field like never before because they know how easy it is to dodge and how many arrows their armor can soak up.

I also really despise the lack of long range damage for archers. Missile speed already got nerfed several times and making long range shots is certainly not easy, yet the damage reduction over long range is very drastic. I am still going for longrange shots every time I get the chance because its fun but more often than not its a waste of ammo if you count all the hits out of all the fired shots ( needless to say after the first hit people usually figured out that they are getting shot and start dodging ). We have a lot of unrealistic "features" in the game which are fine because they reward player skill, such as hitting an opponent instantly makes his weapon all his momentum. Why not go the same route for archers and reward longrange shots by removing or toning down damage reduction over distance ?

All in all I think we need some changes regarding archery that make the class more fun again without making it unfair. And if I knew that devs are actually looking for suggestions regarding that matter, I would be pleased to sit down and give thoughts to an archery overhaul that hopefully pleases everybody.

[Joker86]

All in all I think we need some changes regarding archery that make the class more fun again without making it unfair.

Fun derives from success. Success derives from effectivity. So raising fun means raising effectivity. Which is... well, not acceptable. Not with the current conditions, and under the current circumstances.

I agree that a single archer is seriously UP. Okay, some AGI-HAs shooting enemies a dozen times before dropping them is a little bit exaggerated and definitely not the norm, but still I can see how one archer can have a hard time against heavy infantry.

But I say again, that any stat buff or nerf won't basically change anything on the problem. Buffing archery in ANY way you are going to suggest will only cause more complaints. The problems come from a few very basic directions:

- Infantry and basically all other players too are completely unwilling to use any kind of teamplay, outside of clans

- Battle mode which is simply no game mode for infantry, the same way siege is not a game mode for cavalry

- Upkeep system, which does incredibly bad in restricting equipment in a fair and balanced way, reduced the range of actually "viable" items and made some classes basically disappear (e.g. heavy cavalry, which would be a factor for balancing archers). It is slightly connected to the slot system, which also has a few flaws, next to the bunch of advantages it undeniably brings.

- The limited variability of viable builds for a lot of classes, not only skill wise (there were times where literally 90% of all archers had 18 STR and 6 PD), but also equipment wise (see above).


I can again write a wall of text about the different levels of flexibility for infantry on one, and archers and cavalry on the other hand, about choice of targets, acting and reacting gameplay, about how the nerfed classes lower the effects of the rock-paper-siccors-elements and how this further discourages teamplay, the limited choice of viable builds for certain classes and what not. It's like a huge gordian knot where everything is connected with everything, and thus everything would need and overhaul. But explaining all that would help nothing.

It's much more important to get the playerbase organized. Smoothrich made a topic about conquest mode. I think it reached 2 pages. I made my own topic a few months later, I think it didn't even exceed one page. As long as people do not get where the actual problem is, nothing will change at all.

In this community egoismegocentrism is really strong. You don't care about the problems of the others, you only care about your problems. In fact you want to PREVENT the others from solving THEIR problems, because you automatically assume that it will become YOUR problem instead. Archery is killing you and ruining your gameplay? Get it nerfed! Don't care about the fun of the archers! You are an archer and your class has been nerfed? Lobby for some buffs, and don't care about the gameplay of the others you are ruining.

Until all that lobbying shit does not stop, the game will not make any real progress (apart from the fact that it's dying, see my signature. The last patches are only the beginning of a long, painfull chemo therapy which will ultimatively end in exitus). The lobbies keep boxing from the left to the right and back again, and the devs are - more or less consciously - following this struggle in the desperate attempt to "fix" the game, but only few people see that the truly needed movement is lying on a completely different axis, e.g. up and down or forth and back.

We have to face it: cRPG is for medieval battle games what CoD or BF are for shooters (Medieval II or something like that would be the pendant to Deus Ex in my example). And the average community member fits to this. I don't say they really ARE the average CoD-kiddie, but they do behave like this concerning cRPG, be it on the forum or ingame. You want to connect to the server, you want to kill shit, you want to have quick, immediately rewarding fun without great intellectual effort, and you react stroppy if you don't get it.

Unless the community matures, steps back a bit and looks at the whole matter from a totally distant point of view, all this "nerf this, buff that, make the game fun again"-talk is nothing but waisted air/ink/whatever you waste when you write on the internet.


Phheeeewwww, I guess I got carried away a little bit while writing this 

[Alexia]

Well even if Im a new player, I know about times where archery was fun to play and better balanced.

Its was hard to come from native to crpg archery but that was what i wanted actually. We all are here too have more fun or a higher skillcap.
Even with the little tricks to oneshot people (eye spots for example they have 0 armor rating --> oneshot for decent archer with a bit luck) i must say, that a normal bow with 7 pd is sometimes more viable than a longbow/rusbow just for the fact, you cant hunt down enemys with 50+ armor anymore. Even if it sounds stupid, but i was a Yumi user with 7 pd (i know not the best weapon and in my eyes totally fucked right now :x ) and I have to get around 8-9 hits for a enemy with medium armor in the body. so i though hey lets get at least a decent melee weapon? good thought right? fuck it really.. 7 PS isnt enough for most enemys too cuz youre so fucking slow, that even a snail can hunt you down.
Fact is, paying 770 gold nearly every round for a longbow to repair it, is just too expensive, and the gold/usable ratio is really bad.

All in all i must say, i see very good archers like Nox, Bagge, Blackbow and Tenne. Because of them i wanted to be a archer cause they saved me soo fucking often with epic melee shots. This guys are still "viable" archers cause they got loomed gear and good skill trained over a long time i guess. but for a newbie like me its a pain in the ass.

[Spa_geh_tea]

Well even if Im a new player, I know about times where archery was fun to play and better balanced.

Its was hard to come from native to crpg archery but that was what i wanted actually. We all are here too have more fun or a higher skillcap.
Even with the little tricks to oneshot people (eye spots for example they have 0 armor rating --> oneshot for decent archer with a bit luck) i must say, that a normal bow with 7 pd is sometimes more viable than a longbow/rusbow just for the fact, you cant hunt down enemys with 50+ armor anymore. Even if it sounds stupid, but i was a Yumi user with 7 pd (i know not the best weapon and in my eyes totally fucked right now :x ) and I have to get around 8-9 hits for a enemy with medium armor in the body. so i though hey lets get at least a decent melee weapon? good thought right? fuck it really.. 7 PS isnt enough for most enemys too cuz youre so fucking slow, that even a snail can hunt you down.
Fact is, paying 770 gold nearly every round for a longbow to repair it, is just too expensive, and the gold/usable ratio is really bad.

All in all i must say, i see very good archers like Nox, Bagge, Blackbow and Tenne. Because of them i wanted to be a archer cause they saved me soo fucking often with epic melee shots. This guys are still "viable" archers cause they got loomed gear and good skill trained over a long time i guess. but for a newbie like me its a pain in the ass.

It takes 2-3 arrows in the chest from a fair distance to kill my character in 50armor. That sounds reasonable to me considering I can't hit back or block. Now a tin can...well shit everyone but high blunt damage has trouble killing them. 7ps and it takes me 4-6 hits to kill them with a pick.

[Konrax]

Body damage might have been nerfed too much imho.

However with Bodkin arrows against heavy armour it still does hurt!

[bruce]

I'd honestly say the damage, especially and particularly of non-heirloomed bows (and you know, if any hypothetical new players come to crpg, that is what they will be using) is really bad now.

I mean yesterday I was headshotted (12 str, 1 IF, 33 head armour) by a non-heirloomed HA, and it took only 50% off (granted, I was riding away). This is really bad. The reason why you see those HXs (which I like to play, but I did play that when archery did about 3x the damage it did now with super-precision) and all that is because archery is so bad only the die-hards bother with it. Putting non-heirloomed bows to the level of current heirloomed bows (which would too get better damage) seems good to me.

They can't really kite now, which was one of the huge annoyances really.