Been a while, are bows still trash?

[Hobo_The_Wise]

Your critical assessment of the bow is a bit flawed.

There are already things that compensate for the bow requiring resources in terms of arrows to attack. Namely you can fight someone at range and thus engage them and start doing damage long before they can if they are using melee, While the bow may consume arrows on use you have a choice of ammunition type at your disposal which a melee build does not, A sword has one kind of style it can attack you with. the bow on the other hand can use low damage cheap arrows which cost next to nothing to craft and they can spam you with shots in an attempt to keep you forever crippled or switch to a harder hitting ammo type to do some raw damage, this action of swapping ammunition also allows for one to directly influence how much damage you do with the bow without needing to put perks into archery to do so. A sword however will do x damage no matter what unless you up strength or something such as this. Not to mention some of the arrow types can be really powerful, using explosive arrows you can damage structures, goodluck swinging your 2H sword at that door all night, the gas arrows aoe is great for taking out clumps of thralls or NPC’s.

Another thing is the high rate of fire one can achieve with a bow can make it a formidable foe, using the normal left click arrow spam you can keep someone crippled to the point where they arent ever going to get up to you.

So think of melee as the simple straight forward approach to combat, you go in you do x damage and you swing until you or the enemy dies, where as bows are versatile and give you options, sure they cost resource to use but once again you have options in the types of resource to use and are compensated for this with a variety of ammo types to suite different situations. Far from trash or useless

[Taemien]

If he’s playing just the vanilla game, then he kinda has a point. Why bother farming feathers and such when you can just throw on a melee weapon and heavy armor and right click spam just about every enemy outside the Arena Champion? The PVE game is literally that easy unless you mod it, or change the settings for NPCs to do more damage.

If you have a thrall, you don’t even need to do that. Even with their nerfed dmg and hp.

[CritsKrieger]

Yeah that’s basically what I’m getting at. We’re not doing PvP at all. We’re on a private PvE server just having fun. It’s a challenge to balance all the different ways people can play this game, I totally understand that. For me, the bow is ineffective, or at least a factor of degrees less effective than any given melee build. And the resource costs vs melee are as Taemien said, it’s almost better to sacrifice wanting to play the way I want to and just throw on a melee weapon so I can make better progress, not wasting materials firing them off into the ground and such (or those times we play together and my cohort runs in front of me haha “damnit dude my arrows, your back, not ideal”). There’s a lot I’m not going to reiterate again because many people are just going to have that “git gud” attitude, or “the bow isn’t meant to be a main weapon” despite having it’s own dedicated stat and such. All I’m saying is I think the bow can find a better balance. Not perfect, better. I don’t think the arrow variety is so amazing to make up for the damage disparity and resource blow. The bow isn’t useless, but it’d be nice if it was more than just a utility. (and apparently I’m not high enough level to get those explosive and gas arrows yet, the end game isn’t the whole game)

[CodeMage]

@CritsKrieger

or “the bow isn’t meant to be a main weapon” despite having it’s own dedicated stat and such.

You hit the nail on the head there. This is why people complain and will keep complaining about the bows. The very concept of having a weapon that isn’t meant to be a main weapon is something to approach with caution.

Have you ever heard anyone complain about throwing axes or javelins as much as people complain about bows? There are reasons for that. Javelins and throwing axes are very clearly not meant to be more than a thing to help you supplement your main combat style under specific circumstances, if ever. Same thing with orbs. But bows are presented front and center as an Important Thing.

There are 10 legendary bows. There’s 1 legendary javelin that is never used for combat, but rather to freely navigate one specific dungeon. There are no legendary throwing axes. No legendary orbs.

Several of the accuracy perks specifically reference bows. Not “all ranged weapons”, but “bows”.

Of course people will expect bows to be a viable main weapon, because the game sets up that expectation and then fails to deliver.

There are two possible fixes:

1. Make bows into viable main weapon. Somehow.
2. Clearly relegate bows to the similar role as the throwing axes, javelins and orbs.

I don’t believe the first solution is feasible, but that might be my limited imagination. If there is a way of doing it without turning bows into the New Ultimate Meta in PVP and without a humongous amount of development effort, then I just can’t think of it.

I also don’t believe the second solution is every going to happen. If you think people are complaining about archery now, wait until the complaints you will see if Funcom officially makes it a second-class citizen. All the people who are currently playing as archers with the “this sucks but it’s the best I’ll ever get” attitude will come out and raise hell.

So, yeah, bows are most likely always going to be “trash” if you expect them to be your primary weapon. Sad, but true.

[Taemien]

I think making bows into viable main weapons is easier than you think. Currently my character I play right now is an Archer primarily. And while I do not do the DPS of my melee guildmates. I don’t feel like I don’t contribute.

However. The server we play on has MUCH harder creatures to fight than the vanilla game does. Our server has dungeons that have a mix of AoC creatures and some Vanilla creatures with boosted stats through Pippi Spawners.

So you don’t need AoC to pull this off, just Pippi. But what you do is take some decently strong creatures and give them a 2x or 3x multiplier on their damage. Things like Cimmerian Berserkers, City of Dagon fish people, and wights become an interesting challenge.

I guess you could do this in server settings and set damage to x2. But that affects noob areas as well in a weird way. I prefer to do it in a more controlled manner for areas that are designed for higher level content.

But when melee is threatened, then archery becomes a bit more viable in comparison. Because right now, you can stand there and click things to death. Why use a bow that takes ammo when a melee weapon doesn’t?

But when the enemies you fight are dangerous and you need to dodge, block, and run to avoid attacks. The bow becomes more viable because the sustained DPS of melee goes out the window, and it becomes a burst style of damage while archery becomes sustained.

And some of the harder content becomes interesting when it is no longer soloable. When you need more than one person to effectively take it on. Then you start seeing synergy with melee and ranged. And that makes for some fun encounters.

Its a shame the game is built around solo play for 100% of the content in PVE.

And when you have enemies resistant or immune to cripple effects. You can’t simply kite them around and need melee to help you do the sustained damage. And melee needs ranged for the sustained damage so the encounter ends before the melee player gets too fatigued.

Its as simple as higher damage, or even unique debuffs. NOT increasing NPC health.

[vyanie]

I would have to agree it would be a simple thing to bring bows in line with other weapons. I will disagree with you on AoC making bows more relavent, if anything with the lower damage I honestly cant see people using them at all. Simply put, because you have to give up on any viable melee damage AND you now require a cost per attack (wether it connects or not) Bows should be top of the food chain for damage. Its generally how most MMO’s balance bows. I mean you are literally just throwing money at it so then it should be able to do a lot more than if you are not. If its not top then it should be very near and have some amazing effects

[Taemien]

@vyanie

I will disagree with you on AoC making bows more relavent

Go solo Rayth the Harbinger without a thrall.

[Arizer_FM]

As a sidenote in using a bow while mounted (and moving) be advised:
there are nice video’s determining/testing the best attributes etc for that , and there is a big diffrence in efficiency, check it out/google some on it /video. You prolly already have but,- 2cts.

[Muelee]

Yeah, saw it. And I also watched videos of people using a combination of bow and melee on horse, and it looked pretty mean. I only wanted to point out that it is fun and surprisingly easy to learn, so bows are not trash, Maybe they are not the best, maybe there´s a lot of tweaking to do, but imho it is amazing, how they implemented them. I mean, name me another game, where fighting on horse with spear or bow is as good! I on a Ghengis Khan power trip right now!

[Solarius]

Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord. Its even better.

[Muelee]

That seems to be a similar system, have to try it! Such an interesting new kind of gameplay (for me). Up until now, riding in games was just a means for traveling, but not fun. It is weird, but I want to compare it with car games, some feel good, like drifting in several Need for Speed games, some not. (The inertia experience!)
Surprisingly my biggest problem right now is, I am lefthanded, and the horse archery in Conan is made for righthanded persons lol (are there left and righthanded horses in reality).

[Solarius]

I don’t think you are able to shoot from your left hand in M&B2. There are directional attack when fighting in melee tho. And can you believe it you can also move while you are attacking, yes you can choose which direction to go while you are swinging your weapon.

[WhiteRabbit]

From my own experiences archery works best end-game, when you can respec for it at will, make the best armor to boost accuracy, have the fish and potions and such thing on deck to further buff you (this is in pvp servers). You really kinda do have to do a specialized build for archery because you still want vit, str, grit, etc. it’s not effective as most would like it to be but then again we don’t want it to be a meta where everyone’s using only bows. But it’s still fun to respec as archer for defending bases and stuff when you can have a secured position for a while and then run in and respec for fighter when the **** has hit the fan

A few more comments after reading all the posts(it’s a long thread). I think just need to give the arrows a bit more armor pen, not much and then for sure everyone who wants use now should always go for the best bow (Hollowbone, my opinion) just like like you would go for the best sword or axe. Even in rl old time battles a single archer never win the battle … if the battle was one by archers it was because of the high volume of arrows raining over the battlefield