Maybe because the devs thought it would be a giant nerf.
I dont know the actual numbers, but i.e. a black hand thrall roughly looses 1/3 or more when hit by 10 stacks per second? (I have never been able to build up these many stacks on them.)
So while snake arrows wont be used anymore for killing normal enemies such as normal thralls in a camp, normal crocs, hyenas or any else low HP enemy, those arrows will be used for bosses and stuff. Even more if more than two or three people are working together to kill something.
I dare to claim that most people who use archery in any way will use it to kill certain bosses keeping that dot up. At least one certain boss hits like a truck so staying out of range is wise - and he requires ~40 (maybe less) snakearrows to die. Most damage being dealt by the dot. (Using the first bow with snakearrows.
But maybe I am completely wrong. I am not too certain.
Without any Agility spec, and with a dragon bow, it takes in the neighborhood of 40-50 snake arrows to down an armored, player-trained Vathis The Hierophant. Thatās if you are careful, and performing a timely refresh of the 10-stack poison DoT. I performed this on an Official PvP server just last night.
I expect that with a nerf of the direct damage, youād be looking in the neighborhood of 60-80, or more. That is substantially more, and will cost more zeals with the zeal-costing in mind.
Hmm. Perhaps the solution is a no direct damage, DoT-only snake arrow. And also an additional, epic quality āblessed snake arrow.ā The blessed snake arrow will give flexibility for more power at considerably higher cost. That way, you have a ranged DoT solution, and you have an expensive, higher powered ranged DoT solution that you must empty entire cities of souls to fuel.
As you said yourself:
You spend 10 arrows once for building the stacks and then use an arrow every 5-8 seconds to refresh the poison.
Your informations mean roughly 1320-1650 damage are being dealt as direct damage.
If armored means (any) epic heavy armor, that should be a damagereduction by 77%, right?
I will just assume that armorpenetration just reduces the reduction ā 77-17= 60. (IF I am correct. Most likely wrong though?)
This means only 40% of those 1320-1650 are being dealt as direct = physical damage. Thats roughly 528-660 damage.
I had to spawn Vathis myself as I thought the wiki is outdated on these numbers - though I am using 3 mods currently I dont think this is due to these three: He is listed as voltaries_of_skelos_sorceror_master_darfari. I cant wait to see the changes to themā¦
Anyway, back to the topic.
ā He got a total of 6150 HP.
528 to 660 of these 6150 HP have been ripped off because of direct damage.
5490 to 5622 damage are being dealt by those poison stacks.
Meaning the direct damage when using an unchanged bow (didnt think about mods, only about 30 str perk, sorry) AND those arrows make up roughly 9 or 10% of the overall damage dealt to Vathis.
Then again, in case of 40 arrows and 528 damage having been dealt, 10 and thus a quarter have been dealt to build these 10 stacks of poison.
Also while the overall direct damage makes up 10% of the overall damage, when thinking of a dragonbone bow with snakearrows but no mod, this means that the direct damage of these arrows covers roughly 3% of overall damage.
Direct damage being cut off means a 3% nerf for engame equipment.
The only ones which might rebel against the direct damage being cut off are low level toons which use snakearrows for farming thrall camps. Then again lowlevels use snake arrows because of their dot againā¦
ā¦
Now guess what would happen if they didnt cut the direct but rather the poison off those arrows?
This forum would probably be on fire.
Btw. I do think that Ymir arrows need a change. If the cost wont be changed, then they should get a special something. ā¦!
What about a 50% armor penetration on them?
(Dragonbone bow 9%, arrow 50%=59% + 40 acc perk= 59+29,5= 88,5% armor penetrationā¦ OUCH!)
Login to game at half health and blood splatter on screen. eating something restores the health immediately but blood splatter is still on screen. one way to remove it is to damage yourself to below half health and heal up again. It doesnāt happen that often on Live, but it is happening every time I login to testlive US3.
Private Testlive PvE-C Server - No Mods
Issue: Placing Chests
I thought I had read that the large chests could now be placed on shelves?, yet now I canāt get either the small ones or the large ones to sit on a shelf.
Iām also having more trouble than normal stacking the large chests on top of one another. They wonāt align correctly, instead Iām forced to stagger them at funky angles to achieve this and you often need pixel precision else it claims it canāt be placed.
Testlive_US3_PvE is in bad shape at the moment. NPCās are skipping around and will suddenly appear right in front of you. This server needs a restart badly.
Iām not suggesting this as a workaround, Iām simply offering this as a partial explanation: if you Alt+mouseroll to change the boxās roll, then crouch, and Alt+roll it back, you have a much greater chance of placing it atop the chest without it being all squiffy. This suggests to me the placement system is being incrementally tightened, because weāve had this chat before.
It seems trivial at first blush, but Iāll prioritize asking that on the next āAsk a Devā chat session. Perhaps they intend us to place one chest at a time, station by station, PVP-style. Maybe theyāll come up with a hardened rack that allows us to stack them 3-high and increase the aggregate damage. Iāve seen that bandied about in the mod world. It would be good to know, since I prefer a 3-stack on the floor for tidiness.
I did not see this anywhere else, so I will post here (point me if I need to post elsewhere).
I just DL testlive last night. I have over a hundred hours on GA. I play SP, not a server.
I love the graphics improvements. I have noticed on Testlive that I āstutterā, in that at certain moments (combat, harvesting, walking past a host of tame animals, etc.). This does not happen on GA, with itās lower graphics demand. I have a GeForce RTX 2070 card and the drivers are current. Game is set on high graphics settings.
Itās not game breaking. But I suspect if this goes GA the way it is many might start howling about performance issues. Iāll turn the graphics down tonight, and see if that has any improvement.
i agree, 5 zeal for 10 arrows are not cheap at all.
And it need time to farm the hearts, so you will have to run around lot for letās say 100 or more arrows.
I know, they wanted them nerved, and iām fine with that. But itās bit to much, especially the price now.
So archers are still more and more punished for loving theyr bows. I mean a melee fighter need just his weapon, a archer need to hunt for the arrrows now first, then is penalised with arrow-weight, bow weight, just to enjoy using a bow.
I agree, this could be one of the possible settings, but this means that all priests and arch-priests have to be for sure in game. If some are only purge related, and purge donāt work, or only spawn animals, this will not help lot.
I like using ice arrows but I think it would be an idea to have extreme cold effect on the arrows so when it hit the person, they freeze to death as their life bar goes down.
I personally think it ought to be 1 heart for 10 arrows. So on the cost weāll agree.
However understand that Snake Arrows are not the be all end all arrow. Obsidian Arrows and Serpent-Man Arrows do heavy damage with decent accuracy. You can equip more than one arrow type on your hot bar and swap them with a bow equipped (a feature added back in May).
This way you can stack poison, shoot with regular dmg arrows and occasionally reapply the poison. I believe this is the intended use of archery. And one that actually sort of works with live currently. Just gets easier with the testlive patch.
Thatās the point. Itās about balance, not about making stuff useless, so people donāt ever use them.
I remember, i chosed Ymir more often at character creation a time, but it became still more expensive, and useless. So iām sure, like i did, so did many other players, they chosed simply any other religion, like Set.
All religions should give similar boni and goodies. Or people will only chose some religion for a role-play aspect, and still, not sure.
I have an arch priest of Set. Takes 1 zeal and 10 branches. I have thousands before pre patch. I donāt find the cost unreasonable. Except I now have a ton of antidote I toss out.
I have a reason to make other arrows now. Which I didnt before.
Following issues:
Healing arrows make a splash. But no way to show their radius. They heal as intended and are not as heavy as they were. I like them quite a bit now. The vidios show a mist however. Which would be great. For a healing arrow though 7 damage hitting your friend still could do close to 62+ damage considdering I have 50% armor pen and 25% damage bonus on light attacks + the bonus to ranged weapons. If I hit you in the legs Iām likey to kill you before healing you. Luckily I aim well.
Ivory arrows are the same damage as Hardened Steel. Both do 15 damage. However ivory is much more difficult to make and I believe only stack to 25. These should perhaps do slightly more damage. Hardened Steel is easy to come by. However Razor Arrows are much more economical.
Abysmal arrows do 10 damage. The same as Steel Arrows which are easier to make and replaced fire arrows. While decent at level 30 at 40 you get razor arrows that do 14 and ar much more economical than both Ivroy, Hardened Steel.
Ymir arrows also do 10 damage. However they cost a ton to make. Require feathers and branches and to much ice shards to make it worth while. You can use ironhead arrows which do 9. For 1 damage difference you can make tons of Ironhead for the effort of Ymir. Ymir arrows look so much cooler though. The ice arrows should have a secondary effect. To simulate chill, you could have them cripple regardless of hit location.
There is little reason to make Starmetal arrows. Not economical at all. Star Metal is for melee.
Trick shot got sort of Wonky. But I still love it.
Overall the archery is much much better and I personally love the changes. I can now be the archer I want to be and switch from different arrows on the fly. I did this before but now it is much more fun.
Overall archery review
8 out of 10.
Pros. Much more fun to play and more strategic playtyle.
Cons: Arrow economy needs to change in order to match materials needed vs effort to make. Razor arrows are now top tier economy and Snake is still excellent as a backup. Poison Gas Arrows are now harder to make. But they should be considdering their damage output.
Light arrows still have 0 purpose. Or I have yet to find one.
ā¦! 
