How to nerf archery, without destroying it.

[Zlisch_The_Butcher]

Patch 2.14 remove katana plz

[Grumbs]

Just make ranged harder to play. Reduce missile speed and reduce armour penetration

Try to make real pro's / con's to playing a hybrid xbow user so you either go for armour+melee and noticably worse ranged or best ranged, bad melee. This is hard since manual blocking is such a powerful ability available to all, but there should at least be some more difference between normal melee and melee with xbow

[Joker86]

Aaaand back to reality..

What measures do we have?  (We don't have much beyond buffs/nerfs/changes to stats at this point)

I think that's wrong. The devs can achieve pretty much everything, if they want to. I think with Tydeus we finally have someone, who also brings the reasonability and the openness for new ideas which we are in dire need at this point.

Buffing archer melee (Actually it is just buffing archers.) -Tried, doesn't work.

Agreed.

IMO we have to make the class as lame to play, as the lameness it imposes on others.  (For Archers and Xbow: Make them weaker aka Nerfs ffs)

An eye for an eye? If you spoil my game I spoil yours, so the game is spoiled for everyone? Not a good approach, in my eyes.

The same can be said about all classes, but also in the positive sense:

Make classes fun to play, that creates fun for others.

Only then will we see a game that is most enjoyable for most. A simple Kantian ethic..

This is much better already.

Imo, if you want to kill people in this game without dealing with manual melee combat, you should be a freakin master at what you do.  Nerf ranged weapons to oblivion but increase headshot damage, accuracy and speed i.ex. Nerfing helmets could be done, would reward everyone that has enough skill to go for the head, melee and ranged too.

This won't work. Unless you make body damage from ranged so low that you don't even get stunned when hit any more, the problem of the many archers will persist. They will pepper you with arrows and bolts, never mind how little damage they deal, since there is enough of them to reenact the landing on Omaha Beach. People who prefer to be archers now WILL prefer to do little damage over range over dealing good damage in melee and requiring skill and patience for it.

Basically you are saying: "We can't change anything on the archer problem, so let's at least kill their fun if they kill ours", leaving the game in a state which is best described as "in a wheelchair". The game would become a good portion more unfun to play for archers, while for melee almost nothing would change at all. Even with lower ranged damage dealt you would still die regularly to ranged attcks, since you lose HP during melee with enemy infantry, being backstabbed by cav or simply running into so many ranged enemies that their lower damage isn't even noticeable for you, you still die within moments after being stunlocked the first time. Now the only ones who would notice a change would be the ranged players, and they would start leaving the game. The more of them leave, the weaker the rest becomes, and a vicious circle starts, where you will end up with only the few most fanatic ranged players. The games would feel like on the melee only server, and we all know how popular this server was. In short: nerfing ranged is a good way to speed up the dying process of cRPG. A good game design suggetion shouldn't have such a result.

Completely forget about the idea of making archery more unpleasant to play, it will NOT make the players choose nother class. Most ranged players probably consider melee less fun to play than archery, and this does NOT neccessarily have to do with the kill counts, which usually are higher for melee players. It has to do with the gameplay itself. Now if you make archers more unfun to play, people won't suddenly switch to infantry, since the reason why they stop playing archer are the low stats (= balancing), but the reason why they haven't played infantry is the gameplay (= mechanics), so what happens if most classes in a game suck for you? Yes, you stop playing.

Do not nerf archers, I tell you. Btw. you should get rid of that hate against archers, it drips through every line you write, and most of your posts about nerfing archers read like a plan for revenge, for all those things they have done to you.

IMO Shielder should be weaker than 2h/pole, as you don't have to block.
There should not be an easy choice to just grab the most expensive 2h/pole and armor and go to town. There should be real dilemmas which there are not.
Cav should truly be high risk/high reward. Now it has the lowest risk.
Ranged is incredibly lame to die from. Should be equally lame to play.

All of this could and can be done by item stat adjustments.

anyway.. I guess you all know my positions on all of this by now.. I'm also a bit wasted so sorry to digress..

This is pure lobbyism I won't comment on.

[Thomek]

Archery was fine for a very long time, we had few, but good, dedicated and high level Archers. (And I shut up about ranged) This was in EU terms the golden days of Hetman and Blackbow. That alone is proof that nerfs work. (And they have worked many many times before)

Then they got buffed, lets rather say the class got much more accessible. More accessible than any other actually, since you could deal full damage with no looms.

Now we have a ranged infestation, since as me and you have predicted many times, ranged breeds more ranged. (Both by people countering ranged with ranged, AND with melee quitting or switching to siege, so we get more ranged per melee target, so the remaining melee are squeezed on 2 fronts.)

Now I'm fully aware that I'm not taking the manly POV of sucking it up, or adapting. Simply because lets face it, cRPG is not very well made for adapting. The investment in looms and levels are simply too large for people to adapt!

Believe me, the ONLY thing I want to do to cRPG is to lessen (Not Remove!) things that make the game boring, lame and frustrating for Melee players. Stuff that remove the chance of an intense Melee battle that makes your heart pump. (Yes Paul I do see Melee fighting as more worthy and unique than Ranged fighting, so shoot me if I'm wrong.  I do see S keying with large Melee weapons much more Anime Cartoonish in concept than a freakin katana..)

[Adamar]

You dont need to remove or nerf anything from ranged, you just need to change the classe's functionality. Your first mistake is to give in to your hate and thinking that nerfing is the only way.

[Paul]

But on a serious note.. This is actually how I see it, although I'm fully aware that this is not something that will happen! The "Classes" that we have should give rewards according to the effort, skill and brains involved in playing them.. Or we will always see this unbalance once the skill level hardens and good players actually start playing and abusing their classes power.

In cRPG no class stressed me as much as playing foot archer. The frailty combined with cadence induced tunnel vision was horrifying. Crossbow is so relaxing compared to it. Reload in cover with a calm 360 scan to access the situation. Archers got my respect, crossbowers not so much. For me it took less effort, skill and brain to play a successful melee, cav or xbow char than a semi-decent archer.

Back in Warband beta I started out as a melee-centrist; hating on cav, ranged and even shielders for being easymode low-skill classes. I hated because I didn't know. I rarely played anything different than melee. What opened my eyes was the Nationscup. We had a team consisting of almost melee people only. We even had to take in chadz as a crossbower. But we were still rather successful. Even with ranged 10 times more powerful than in cRPG you could win with an inf pile if you played with MotF. It was doable and for me it was fun. Russians finally defeated us with a nicely done scatter and shoot crossbow squad tactic. But I didn't hate on them for that. I respected them. I started to respect decent cav and decent ranged, knowing that it does take skill to be successful with them against an organized oposition.

This is probably what cRPG lacks. The will of the players to organize and play for victory - even if it means going for MotF. Instead I have seen shieldless melee players charging an archer hill one after the other and complaining about it afterwards. It's like they claim the right to be retarded and still win. I might be alone with that but I think cRPG is about winning rounds. There a semi-organized inf pile defeats a cav and ranged horde anytime when playing for MotF cleverly. Ranged and cav feasts on stupid players but I don't think that this is reason enough to nerf them. Instead a more prominent MotF(maybe with spawned cover) and a penalty for survivers of a MotF loss would be my solution.

[Grumbs]

You love to go to extremes were people who complain about ranged are "2 hand retards that charge archer hills". There is a middle ground were people use tactics, camp behind cover, use shields etc but its still not especially fun to play. ATM I feel like I have been forced into playing as a primary shield class with a 1 hander when I don't even like playing with a shield (but I am now, 5 shield skill and 3x melee). You finally get to a xbower and he has tonnes of armour and after 1 shotting guys is then a good melee player too. You get shot in melee, you have mounted ranged so you need to protect on all sides etc

Its poorly balanced and all this ranged makes for dull gameplay imo

[San]

Problem is that if you camp with the ranged disadvantage, you'll just have a slow and steady defeat. Once the troop difference becomes large enough, there is little chance to fight back. That's why trying to get lucky with a good charge early on is usually the better choice despite the risk. Without enough ranged on your team, you need a pretty specific makeup of a variety of melee types or the disadvantage is too much. Despite the existence of MotF, I think there should be better offensive options against ranged camping in groups for shielders and 1v1 for shieldless melee.

I think spawned cover or gear (shields, spears/pikes, xbows mostly) with MotF is an excellent idea, though.

[Dalhi]

Apart from what I think about about how crpg is played and my personal preferences about different classes what I would love is see is reducing the ammo for archers/xbowers (one slot for quiver/bag of bolts). That would make them be more carefull about what and when they shoot, having 15-20 arrows is still a lot. In my opinion it would greatly reduce the "archers spam". Not a direct nerf to their pew pew abilities, but I do consider top bows as way too accurate and missile speed is too high wich makes it just silly. Xbows are a different storry (I love the diversity in xbowers builds  ) and I would love to see some kind of skill (power draw/pull or however you want to call that) requirement for both crossbows and bows.

[Leshma]

Back in Warband beta I started out as a melee-centrist; hating on cav, ranged and even shielders for being easymode low-skill classes. I hated because I didn't know. I rarely played anything different than melee.

I'm still like that, although I've played almost everything (never touched HT). That's because melee is the best thing this game/mod has to offer. I still hate cav, because the way Turks implemented cavalry is plain awful. And on top of it being awful in native, you even fucked up lance angle to make it even less desirable for me. Right now playing cavalry consist of bumping (like we're playing Carmagedon) and press X to win (couched lance). Crossbow is basically like playing sniper in any online FPS, point and shoot from distance. Don't understand how can people play that for such long time. Snipers are in general the most hated class in FPS, no one like people who choose to play as sniper.

Throwing is interesting, if not for the fact it's an insult for melee players. It's like saying, yo bro I'm gonna fight you and then you hit him with a projectile from five meter distance. Couldn't stand being a douche like that for too long. Melee is fair, because everyone can use it and everyone can block the same way and almost every weapon.

Next time you want to preach, don't forget you're part of the gang which:

• fucked up lancers, by removing wide lance which allowed freedom
• fucked up melee, by implementing turn rate bullshit nerf, again restricting freedom
• fucked up ranged hybrids, by putting two giant stones on their backs
• invented unsheatable mechanics which means I have to search for my long weapon on the ground, among three million other things which are mostly bellow ground texture level, which is unfun and tiresome
• intentionally lie about bad weather chance percentage

At the same time, you never fixed:

• blocking forcefield while mounted
• weapons going through objects (pikes)
• and ton of minor bugs present since december 2010.

Because of all above, I'm immensely happy I won't be seeing you as developer/balancer in Melee

[Thomek]

Leshma, you are the only person on my ignore list, but I regrettably read your post. Go die in a fire.

Stay the fuck away from Paul pls. He both tries and discusses things with us, while what he has done for cRPG is immeasurable compared to any of us. (Especially you.)

[Johammeth]

For me, the only truly rage-inducing thing about ranged is having a good fight interrupted by a 3 damage stun-arrow that cancels a critical block/attack.

A high damage arrow shot absolutely should stun. A peashooter? not so much.


Solution:
Arrows that do more than 25% of a player's health in one shot will stun. Others will not. (The exact damage/stun threshold will have to be fine tuned, of course).

A couple of possibilities:
Damage over X% Target's Max HP to stun.
Makes HP stacking much better against range.

Damage over X% Target's current HP to stun.
Gives you 1-2 free "resist arrow stuns" at high HP, but not at low HP

Damage over X% of Target's Max/Current HP where X is calculated from their armor value (eg. no armor = 10%, full tincan = 40%)
Gives high armor players an ability to resist arrow CC, but not damage.

Damage over X flat value.
Crudest and simplest option

[Tzar]

A simply solution.

Archers are the only range class that gets to use 40 shots. It makes sure they never run out of ammo, unlike throwers, which receive a laughable amount of ammo compared to the archer.

Reduce ammo on bodkins.

[Joker86]

Archery was fine for a very long time, we had few, but good, dedicated and high level Archers. (And I shut up about ranged) This was in EU terms the golden days of Hetman and Blackbow. That alone is proof that nerfs work. (And they have worked many many times before)

You are comparing apples to oranges here, since in the old golden days a lot of other factors (e.g. average melee skill, average equipment, etc.) were different, and I think it's the first time I hear a ranged-detractor mourn after that era of ranged balance, they had pinpoint accuracy, dealt high damage, had good skills and good armour, with some high tier melee weapons 

Then they got buffed, lets rather say the class got much more accessible. More accessible than any other actually, since you could deal full damage with no looms.

Now we have a ranged infestation, since as me and you have predicted many times, ranged breeds more ranged. (Both by people countering ranged with ranged, AND with melee quitting or switching to siege, so we get more ranged per melee target, so the remaining melee are squeezed on 2 fronts.)

I don't think that this "buff" is the reason for it. I guess you are referring to that balance change where the difference between loomed and unloomed bows got lowered, right? It did jack shit to the overall populace, it just came before the "regeneration of ranged players percentage" phase of the usual "nerf-counterreaction-reestablishment of old state-cycle". Which we went through a couple of time already, but people keep on crying for nerfs.

Now I'm fully aware that I'm not taking the manly POV of sucking it up, or adapting. Simply because lets face it, cRPG is not very well made for adapting. The investment in looms and levels are simply too large for people to adapt!

I agree on this, I am for a complete removal of the marketplace and let everybody reset his skills and looms as often he wants.

Believe me, the ONLY thing I want to do to cRPG is to lessen (Not Remove!) things that make the game boring, lame and frustrating for Melee players. Stuff that remove the chance of an intense Melee battle that makes your heart pump. (Yes Paul I do see Melee fighting as more worthy and unique than Ranged fighting, so shoot me if I'm wrong.  I do see S keying with large Melee weapons much more Anime Cartoonish in concept than a freakin katana..)

You don't want to make things worse for melee players, but your suggestion makes it better for them only on short term - on long term chances are good things get worse, since only melee players will remain and the gameplay will become plain and boring, like on the melee only server.

[Thomek]

I'm not talking the good old days 2 years ago, im talking before the recent ranged buff.

And I do think that recent buff has tipped the balance into the ranged reign we have now. Of course there could be some theoretical cycles elements but I don't think so. I think the small playerbase we have go ranged when they want to chill..