Goblin Squad Member
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For some reason, the bow attacks have damage modifiers significantly in excess of nearly any other attacks I've yet seen, the sole exception being one of the two-handed attacks. While most attacks have damage ratings between 0.5 and 1.5, bow attacks have ratings between 2.5 and 3.5 for the most part.
I guess the issue boils down to DPS of different weapon types. I think the DPS of bows should be significantly lower than melee to balance out the significant benefit of attacking from range.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Counterpoint: Passing Step Thrust, wind-up, Cleave, Wrath Guard, Wrathful Strike, Hoist.
This is just exactly my point. These are all Greatsword abilities and are the only attacks stronger than the bow. It has been stated that, per design, the melee fighter should be able to do enough damage that he cannot simply be ignored. At present, unless the melee fighter gives up his shield to wield a greatsword, the paltry damage he can put out pales in comparison to the bow and is completely ignorable. And he has to close to melee range to do any damage at all whereas the bow is putting out superior damage from the safety of max range.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Counterpoint: Passing Step Thrust, wind-up, Cleave, Wrath Guard, Wrathful Strike, Hoist.This is just exactly my point. These are all Greatsword abilities and are the only attacks stronger than the bow. It has been stated that, per design, the melee fighter should be able to do enough damage that he cannot simply be ignored. At present, unless the melee fighter gives up his shield to wield a greatsword, the paltry damage he can put out pales in comparison to the bow and is completely ignorable. And he has to close to melee range to do any damage at all whereas the bow is putting out superior damage from the safety of max range.
First: Are shields supposed to improve defenses or mitigation? Are they supposed to be mutually exclusive with greatswords and bows?
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Is this the first nerf request? This may be the first nerf request. I'm very excited! ;)
Longbows should be pretty similar to other 2.3 speed weapons. What jumps out about bows that makes them feel more powerful than Greatswords and Arcane Staves?
There are a number of details that aren't really in yet that should make them feel less powerful:
- Ammo consumption
- Wider availability of attacks to take advantage of the Opportunity provoked by most bow attacks
- Wider availability of Interrupts (2.3 speed damage is more than twice 1.15 speed damage because it's much more vulnerable to being interrupted)
- Greater restrictions on the effectiveness of kiting
All that said, I may be undervaluing damage factor in my math, such that it should cost more of an attack's "budget" to scale up higher.
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Goblin Squad Member
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First nerf request, not first nerf. I'm not giving up my accidently earned title so easily! :p
Is there a global cooldown, or can you play whack-a-mole with anything that's not on cooldown?
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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It's the 5.7 delay damage factor that is bad- it allows for burst damage that, with a half-draw followup attack, can drop early mobs before they can close the distance.
A longsword (or shield!) charge attack, and making a couple more bow attacks Stationary, would be the most I would suggest at this point.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Is there a global cooldown, or can you play whack-a-mole with anything that's not on cooldown?
It may have been my ping (UK -> Servers = Sad Morbis), but it sure felt like there was one. It wasn't long, and it may have actually just been because you can't cancel attack animations.
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Goblin Squad Member
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First nerf request, not first nerf. I'm not giving up my accidently earned title so easily! :p
Is there a global cooldown, or can you play whack-a-mole with anything that's not on cooldown?
I have not yet noticed a global cooldown, which I hope continues to be the case.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Yeah, I'm somewhat concerned with the standardized cooldowns of 6 seconds (they're listed as 5.7 since they don't start until after the first 300 ms validation of the attack). A fast weapon can use all three cooldown attacks and then have to use a regular attack, while a slow weapon can just cycle the three cooldowns.
That said, cooldown lets an attack cost MORE stamina, but doesn't give any break to cost, so you'll blow through your stamina really fast just cycling cooldown attacks. They also generally have a lot of their "budget" wrapped up in conditionals, so if you're not using the non-cooldown attacks to activate conditions, you're wasting stamina.
Part of the perceived issue may also be with the arbitrary number we set Stamina to currently and its flat regeneration rate. That is, you have 400 points of burst stamina before you have to be concerned about regeneration. In a long fight, it shouldn't be an overwhelming advantage, but if you can finish the fight before you're out of stamina, you can just wait for it to regen between fights. We may tinker with that some to feel better.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah, I'm somewhat concerned with the standardized cooldowns of 6 seconds (they're listed as 5.7 since they don't start until after the first 300 ms validation of the attack).
Does this 300 ms reduction in the listing of the cooldown apply to all attacks? What I mean is if an attack lists a cooldown of 0.8 s is it really 1.1s?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't know that you're undervaluing damage factor as much as you're undervaluing range. With a longbow, I can solo camps of five to seven bandits as half the camp needs to cross 35m or more before they can start doing any damage to me. That is simply not possible with either a greatsword or longsword/shield. Melee weapons necessitate taking damage from ranged opposition before the melee attacks can begin dealing damage. That delay results in dead melee whereas a ranged attacker is able to leverage their range to put out way more damage than is reflected by the damage factor.
Consider factoring range into the "budget" such that any range greater than "Melee" reduces the damage factor accordingly.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Yep. Primary/non-cooldown attacks have their cooldown set to exactly equal their animation time. A 2.3 second primary attack has a 2.0 cooldown because I'm assuming the 300 ms validation. Basically, it has an internal cooldown that means you can't immediately try to activate it again if interrupted.
But I'm not sure there's a ton of value in that, since it's very rarely going to come up but it's giving even non-cooldown slower attacks an extra bump to effectiveness (because the longer internal cooldown also lets them cost a little bit more relative to speed).
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Range does significantly impact damage. It's just that it's largely countered by ammo consumption (which isn't working yet) increasing damage. I didn't want to fiddle with all the ranged attacks to temporarily take out the ammo factor and then forget to add it once it's working :) . Once ammo starts working, I expect that people will by asking for ranged attacks to be buffed.
Also, how does bow feel against other players? The creatures are extremely stupid right now, so there are probably quite a number of ways to do very well against them that won't work as well once their AI is improved. Unfortunately, I don't think we can use their behavior as much of a meaningful gauge right now.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Range does significantly impact damage. It's just that it's largely countered by ammo consumption (which isn't working yet) increasing damage. I didn't want to fiddle with all the ranged attacks to temporarily take out the ammo factor and then forget to add it once it's working :) . Once ammo starts working, I expect that people will by asking for ranged attacks to be buffed.
Also, how does bow feel against other players? The creatures are extremely stupid right now, so there are probably quite a number of ways to do very well against them that won't work as well once their AI is improved. Unfortunately, I don't think we can use their behavior as much of a meaningful gauge right now.
Without charge attacks, bow vs. player is almost a win condition because of kiting. I've yet to use a charge attack; I only know the counter from training all the abilities so as to make my spreadsheet.
You know, we could spend more time testing things and less time gathering information if we were to find a spreadsheet listing the information that we're looking for. It would also help us impatient fickle folk find something "productive" to do. Just saying. ;)
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Goblin Squad Member
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The lack of LoS makes kiting really, really easy right now. You can literally just run away from people and shoot through yourself at them. Once LoS is added, I think that it will be fine.
If it isn't, my suggestion would be to have bow attacks force the attacker to stop during the attack animation.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Range does significantly impact damage. It's just that it's largely countered by ammo consumption (which isn't working yet) increasing damage. I didn't want to fiddle with all the ranged attacks to temporarily take out the ammo factor and then forget to add it once it's working :) . Once ammo starts working, I expect that people will by asking for ranged attacks to be buffed.
Also, how does bow feel against other players? The creatures are extremely stupid right now, so there are probably quite a number of ways to do very well against them that won't work as well once their AI is improved. Unfortunately, I don't think we can use their behavior as much of a meaningful gauge right now.
I don't believe ammo consumption will prove to be an effective counter balance as players will always be willing to spend gold for a marked advantage on the field. If I'm going out to PvP, I'll spend however much gold I need to load my inventory full of arrows knowing that arrows allow me to kill faster, more often, and more safely than any melee weapon in which I could invest said gold.
I have only killed one person so far in game and, yes, it was with a bow. It took three shots, was done from max range, and in chatting with the victim afterwards I was able to confirm that she had no idea what was causing the chunks of health to disappear but eventually concluded it must have been another player.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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The lack of LoS makes kiting really, really easy right now. You can literally just run away from people and shoot through yourself at them. Once LoS is added, I think that it will be fine.
If it isn't, my suggestion would be to have bow attacks force the attacker to stop during the attack animation.
I would very very much prefere the second solution. LOS will add a big action aspect to the game which, even though a significant part of the players would consider it an amelioration, it is not the case for everybody, and because I think that a game like PFO should privilege strategy than hand/eye coordination.
But yeah, you shouldn't be able to run in a straight line, shooting and casting stuff to people behind your back. Maybe a simple solution would be to make it so that every distance and attack is channelled, and only launched at the end of your channelling.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I don't believe ammo consumption will prove to be an effective counter balance as players will always be willing to spend gold for a marked advantage on the field. If I'm going out to PvP, I'll spend however much gold I need to load my inventory full of arrows knowing that arrows allow me to kill faster, more often, and more safely than any melee weapon in which I could invest said gold.
IRL, you can't transport more than what ? 30 arrows ? I think that the point of ammos isn't the price, but your capacity to transport it. EvE being a big inspiration for this game, I would be very surprised, to be able to transport 2000 arrows.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Range does significantly impact damage. It's just that it's largely countered by ammo consumption (which isn't working yet) increasing damage. I didn't want to fiddle with all the ranged attacks to temporarily take out the ammo factor and then forget to add it once it's working :) . Once ammo starts working, I expect that people will by asking for ranged attacks to be buffed.
Also, how does bow feel against other players? The creatures are extremely stupid right now, so there are probably quite a number of ways to do very well against them that won't work as well once their AI is improved. Unfortunately, I don't think we can use their behavior as much of a meaningful gauge right now.
I don't believe ammo consumption will prove to be an effective counter balance as players will always be willing to spend gold for a marked advantage on the field. If I'm going out to PvP, I'll spend however much gold I need to load my inventory full of arrows knowing that arrows allow me to kill faster, more often, and more safely than any melee weapon in which I could invest said gold.
I have only killed one person so far in game and, yes, it was with a bow. It took three shots, was done from max range, and in chatting with the victim afterwards I was able to confirm that she had no idea what was causing the chunks of health to disappear but eventually concluded it must have been another player.
"Faster" has an interesting meaning when the cost of doing something faster is time. What if an arrow cost 2 minutes of gathering and crafting? Is it worth 6 minutes of prep to win a fight 30 seconds faster?
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Goblin Squad Member
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We're crowdforging = things can change.
We're in alpha = things can change.
No ammo = this will change.
AoO not in yet = this will change.
Dumb AI = this will change (leashed mobs.)
Kiting is easy = this is going to change.
Stamina is being played with = this is changing.
With so many things up in the air, allowing the devs to tweak things is probably the best we can hope for now to get a more balanced perspective on weapons and their usage.
The kiting camps thing would be directly related to dumb AI and is hopefully a temporary issue that GW are aware of and are looking to address somewhere down the track.
Ammo consumption by itself may not make bow+arrow more balanced, but the range of options that they are looking at is certainly moving in a useful direction.
At this point in time, it looks like bows are insta-win, but there are a lot of options that GW have (already thought about) to address this. It has been good to raise the point, discuss options, get official commentary on the opportunity and now we wait to see what the outcome will be in-game (and prolly here on the forums too.) It's all a big test before the flood gates open for EE which will be a big test for OE which will be a test for 1 year from now when Gunslingers, Alchemists and Inquisitors are introduced. Did I say that out aloud? YES!
- Jascolich, friend to the puppeteers you are hunting in alpha
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Goblin Squad Member
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It's worth paying someone ELSE to spend their two minutes of time, sure. That's what gold is for.
Balance cannot come from limiting the number of arrows one may carry; that just yields an overpowered attack every 10 minutes instead of every 5 or whatever, condemning archers to 9 minutes of boredom as the price for their 1 minute of fun.
Better to balance the attack in the first place so everyone has fun all the time.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Lol 2 days and an nerf report...
Come on people, don't think something needs to be nerfed until you have thuroughly tested everything else in comparison. I'm guessing there is a better combo that hasn't been discovered yet.
IMO, ranged attacks should be more powerful 1v1 as a general rule, that is why humans invented ranged weapons in the real world.
And I'm guessing this phase of alpha was the "Does it work" test, not the "is it balanced" tests. Those come right before the "let's try and break it" test.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I havent seen a game where ammo consumption makes a real difference in ranged combat. it most often ends up with the vast majority of the ammo being easy to get and stockpiled and a some of the "good stuff" kept just in case.
its one of those very difficult things to balance since you dont want to restrict a player's access to ammo, since that will invalidate that style of play, but the "good stuff" can push it over and beyond other forms of combat. For a lot of players thats not a big deal but you end up with wealthy players/organizations being able to use that as standard ammo.
I would say requiring the same tier arrows as the bow to get the max damage of the bow (if you use T2 arrows maybe you do 80% of the damage the bow is capable of), but the damage of the bow shouldnt be high because it uses an easy to get consumable.
If that is the case give me "ammo" for my sword thats just as easy to fab as arrows and let me do increased damage.
Now if shooting an arrow when an opponent is in melee allows the opponent to take an AoO, i think that would be great.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Now if shooting an arrow when an opponent is in melee allows the opponent to take an AoO, i think that would be great.
(This is not directed at you, leperkhaun, you just provided a handy example.)
Did you guys actually *read* Stephens post? Ammo is one factor, he then went on to list several more. No, ammo by itself is not sufficient. They know that.
Edit:
To respond to leperkhaun:
Wider availability of attacks to take advantage of the Opportunity provoked by most bow attacks
This is literally the second thing on the list, immediately after ammo.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Time can heal all wounds, especially for humans who usually die before everyone else ;-)
I think Leperkhaun added a useful option (if the GWs don't all work out) in that you can look at the tiers of bow+arrow and reduced effectiveness if they are out of balance.
Another, much simpler option is to limit the availability of bows or make them more "costly" to craft. Bows can't be overpowered if no one has one, can they? ;-)
I think the "cost" aspect is going to be more important in the formative days because there is no set economy, so if you want to make some money and if bows+arrows are overpowered, then why not focus on providing these? Then they nerf arrows and greatswords become the height of fashion... and so on. Some folks will be crafting bows+arrows regardless (i'm looking at you pointy ears!) but the market and economy will influence how this all works out at the macro level. If folks have fun crafting bows+arrows, then they will do it regardless. If they can make money off it, then all power to them. There are a lot of mechanisms around to measure the flow and power of weapons, mainly your eyes when you are out and about. Does it work for you? Are you having fun? Oh noes, you can't be as effective in enchanting or crafting or the million other things to do! But you can hug your bow+arrows and pew-pew to your hearts content if that is what you want to do...
- Jascolich, arrows only hurt squishy fleshlings anyways
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Will an arrow always hit, if yes is there a way to incorporate a chance to miss? What about when a target gets within melee range can the bow still be used?
Ranged attacks use the same system as attacks.
Bow attacks cause the attacker to gain the "opportunity" status, and many attacks have additional effects like "Slow 60" or "knockdown" (a short stun) when used against targets granting opportunity.
I think range might get pretty powerful if there's a reason you can't be reached. I want to be able to shoot down from the top of a cliff like Mister Beaver! But I don't want it to be insanely unfair. Alas, decisions, decisions.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Will an arrow always hit, if yes is there a way to incorporate a chance to miss? What about when a target gets within melee range can the bow still be used?Ranged attacks use the same system as attacks.
Bow attacks cause the attacker to gain the "opportunity" status, and many attacks have additional effects like "Slow 60" or "knockdown" (a short stun) when used against targets granting opportunity.
Is strafing speeds in the works? So you can't move backwards and side to side at the same speed as forward.
If a ranged attacker can keep the distance what's the point in an opportunity attacks?
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Will an arrow always hit, if yes is there a way to incorporate a chance to miss? What about when a target gets within melee range can the bow still be used?Ranged attacks use the same system as attacks.
Bow attacks cause the attacker to gain the "opportunity" status, and many attacks have additional effects like "Slow 60" or "knockdown" (a short stun) when used against targets granting opportunity.
Is strafing speeds in the works? So you can't move backwards and side to side at the same speed as forward.
If a ranged attacker can keep the distance what's the point in an opportunity attacks?
That's half the point of charge attacks.
I'm betting Shot On The Run will have related benefits, though I'm not sure how. Maybe it allows a single shot that you can make while sprinting without decreasing Stamina? Eh, I dunno. This is one of the many, many reasons I ain't a working goblin.
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Goblin Squad Member
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With not everything operational, please don't ask for tweaks. THis is second day of testing and a lot of things are not implemented. Let the devs put the plan together. It does not even matter is some alpha characters "waste' exp on fabulous archery only to have it been a waste. THere will be a wipe at EE.
Push the system to break the system. Breaking things not implemented is not "breaking the system".
Report bugs to devs. Don't ask for crowdsource. THIS IS ALPHA. I know many of you are accustom to some major vendors of business software rolling beta out as finished software. GW is better than that. But this is not even MVP.
GO out there and break it. Report the results. DO not design. THat is not what you are being paid paying for.
But do let us watch the fun, even running around in skivvies.
By the way, how do things get marked as threaded?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Counterpoint: Passing Step Thrust, wind-up, Cleave, Wrath Guard, Wrathful Strike, Hoist.This is just exactly my point. These are all Greatsword abilities and are the only attacks stronger than the bow. It has been stated that, per design, the melee fighter should be able to do enough damage that he cannot simply be ignored. At present, unless the melee fighter gives up his shield to wield a greatsword, the paltry damage he can put out pales in comparison to the bow and is completely ignorable. And he has to close to melee range to do any damage at all whereas the bow is putting out superior damage from the safety of max range.
A 2-handed melee weapon that requires you to give up the shield does more damage than a 2-handed ranged weapon that requires you to give up shields...
I'm not really seeing the problem here?
Also is there a mechanic comparable to regular Pathfinder where heavy armor limits your dex (and therefore how accurate your ranged attacks are)? And do melee classes have any gap-closing abilities such as a charge yet?