After taking playtesting and community feedback into consideration, we would like to announce that the recent changes to ranged will be reverted. The pinnacle of un-balance is the discovery that the current War Composite Bow (previous Horn Bow) with its 23c and 6 requirement deals the same damage as the Arbalest if used with a STR archery build corresponding to meta. Compare reload time, slots, upkeep and tier, and it becomes evident that something is very wrong here. The only people who currently play crossbow do so out of style or because they are unaware of the fact that archery is strictly more powerful in the current balance, not because they face fair trade-offs compared to archers.
The new balance creates more problems than it solves. The old crossbow system used 4WM for Hunting Crossbow, 5WM for Light Crossbow, 6WM for Crossbow, 7WM for Heavy Crossbow and 8WM for Arbalest of WPF investment into crossbow to get the most narrow crosshair size possible. None of the crossbows were pin-point accurate. This transparent increase of requirements used to be sophisticated and easy to understand; the absence of pin-point accuracy retained a certain player-skill requirement to use crossbows over large distances, and fairness. This system has been abolished with the change of damage and accuracy values on crossbows. Currently, you dump around 125 wpf into crossbow, and you can use any of them with pin-point accuracy. This is plain bullshit and not offset by increased STR requirements.
The already cancerous STR archer meta is further promoted by the increase of bow requirements. If you increase the requirement of a bow, you buff it. Keep in mind that you can skill up to 4 PD more than the requirement to get 14% bonus damage per PD. With PD increasing accuracy since the Tydeus Era, there is no reason not to always skill PD exceeding the bow requirement you are using by 4. With 7 PD requirement bows available, every archer skills 11 PD to max out damage on all bows, and won't face any malus other than the opportunity cost of not having more athletics. This opportunity cost is not very high since the weight on quivers makes kiting impossible in the first place. 7 PD requirement bows and PD increasing accuracy are pure madness. The result is an archer who hits as hard as an Arbalest user with similar accuracy, but at 6 or 7 times the rate of fire.
Although we highly appreciate the work Raylin has put into contributing to cRPG and would like to emphasize that the majority of the new items since revival patch were made thanks to his tireless efforts, we realized that it is not economic to keep working with his balance patch. cRPG is facing a difficult crisis due to the broken compiler and unavailable devs, and especially at a time like this, we cannot let internal politics undermine the progress of the mod. Permanently compromising balance to express gratitude for the outstanding work he has done in the past is no option.
The balance experiment has been an excellent attempt to improve the mod and provided important new perspectives on which changes are possible, but given the current state on the servers and the community's reactions, we have to put it ad acta as a failed experiment. Instead of breaking a somewhat functional balance in one swoop and dedicating resources to progressively making the unbalanced state balanced again, we go back to what we had before and make minor adjustments where needed.
We would like to discuss these minor adjustments with you.
(1) Since the change of the leveling system, no STR-requirements have been adjusted. Nightingale and me are working on this right now. High-agility builds with fast weapons threaten to break animations and make combat less enjoyable. Increasing requirements is one way to avoid this. In the past, STR used to be your ticket for using heavy armor. This is no longer the case. But it will be again. We are looking forward to your input once the STR-requirements patch is online. Right now, point (1) is more of an announcement than an invitation to discuss; but we'll have the discussion later.
(2) Fast-paced combat makes the game interesting, but high levels and weapon speed stats only work with correct sweetspots in the animations. We observed that many players block based on expectation instead of observation, since the window of observation is short and the relative position of the enemy gives away the most likely attack direction. In other words, blocks tend to be preemptive instead of reactive, because as soon as you actually observe the attack direction, you are most likely already hit. New players do not have any expectation, which makes the learning curve unnecessarily steep for them. Experienced players will notice difficulties to keep up the pace in combats with weapons of slightly varying speed, such as MW Crusader Sword vs Iberian Mace. Go to duel and try it. The Crusader Sword seems infinitely faster due to the interaction between the slightly higher speed and the early sweetspots.
A possible remedy is going back to the pre Tydeus-era sweetspots, meaning that most attacks connect with the enemy's body later in the animation than right now. As a result, the animation is as fast as before, but it won't seem anymore like you have been hit way too early, before you had the time to get the block up, although you identified the attack direction correctly. The old sweetspots have the downside that some attacks tend to bounce off armor if you have the incorrect positioning and speed bonus. Take onehanded as an example: The leftswing and overhead stayed the same. The pre-Tydeus rightswing was a slow, strong and wide attack that received the highest damage if it connected late in the animation, like it still is in Native. Now, the rightswing is exactly like the leftswing; a fast, near instantly connecting hit. Same for the stab. The pre-Tydeus stab used to be higher damage (all stabbing swords had more damage than they have now), but it took time to build up. There was a short delay in preparing the stab and executing the part of the animation that connected with the enemy's body, meaning that stabs used to be best when they hit the target late. Now they are connecting instantly and never bouncing off the armor even though you are standing way too close to the enemy. The element of strategic timing (as well as the very rewarding holding of the left mouse button for higher damage) in the rightswing and stab have been overwritten and now underlie the same spam mechanics as the rest of the combat. Post-Tydeuus, you are trying to hit the enemy faster than he can react, instead of provoking him into reacting with the wrong block direction.
Since sweetspots and combat animations are a very controversial topic and subjective to bias, it is an absolute necessity to discuss this topic before implementing anything at all. What are your opinions on the topic? Is there anything that needs to be clarified before you want to answer?
Edit: grammar
