My thoughts and suggestions on Archery

[Archiplex]

It's TIME

Archery is, currently, in a healthy spot. The only reason for this is because of the massive increase in armor quality (I personally believe melee is in an unhealthy spot due to the nature of 1-hit 1-kill) Let's lay down some facts before going further.

Archery damage is based off arrow and bow qualities, as well as aim bar (Meaning, to a lower extent marksman and vitality of a bow.)

Bows and stone arrows (And boar spears) have 80 base damage. The damage increases the same as stats (80 at 10q, 160 at 40q, 240 at 90q, 320 at 160q). Bone arrows have 100 base damage. To calculate damage, you calculate total damage of the bow and arrow, and add them together (A 90q bow with 90q bone arrow deals 300 + 240 damage, 540.)

Arrows do not deal HHP damage and may not kill, at all. You can sit shooting arrows into an unconscious body for hours and never kill it.

After you receive this damage, this is your 'base damage' for a shot. Let's use that same 540 damage. The final factor into this is aimbar, the formula is (Aimbarpercent)^2 and that is the modifier. If you aim your bar to 95% exactly, and fire, 95*95=9025, thus the modifier is 90.25%. This means that you will deal 90.25% of that 540 damage, for 487.35 damage (487 damage) This is your real damage.

This is the damage that shot will deal before armor. Perception nor agility impacts this.

Now that we have that, lets look at the other things.

Vitality (Of both the arrow and bow) affects maximum aim, and growth of aim speed alongside Marksmanship. They are both equally as valuable (In the formula for bar growth and maximum there's probably sqrt(vit*marksman) somewhere)

Essence affects your penalty to the aim bar when moving and aiming (Done with ctrl+clicking) and switching aim directions. It provides a "floor" of sorts. For example, with high (150+) marksmanship, and around a 80q essence bow/arrow, you can aim and move while maintaining 75% aim bar. If you have under this percent and move, it will still raise, just slower. If you have over, it will drain the aim bar- just slowly as it approaches 75%. No formulas on this nor aiming due to their complex nature, but this explains their purpose.

Bows have a maximum range of 17 tiles. This is not based off anything, as is a constant.

Now that we have that, I want to share my issues with archery and bow types, arrow types and general mechanisms.

Currently we only have a single type of bow, with the possibility for Ranger's bows in the future. We have two types of arrows but one is clearly superior than the other, and is better in all ways.

Boar spears are absolute garbage in terms of a ranged weapon as well- I won't even bother to talk about them.

Archery is a dangerous field to simply add more damage because it is difficult and different to react to than normal melee combat (Although arguably much of the same things still apply)- One wrong movement can spell death in a world without extremely pumped up armor values.

So, any future changes to arrows should seek a different change than simply increasing damage.

There should be more types of bows, short-long/composite.

Short bows should aim relatively fast and have shorter range and damage than long bows- but should also pierce armor (To allow for a whittling sort of combat.)
Long-bows should take a long time to aim and fire, dealing much higher base damage and have higher range
Crossbows (If any ever) Should have a VERY fast aim time, and deal moderate damage- but requires a longer "loading" time (It could snap to a certain percentage after a few seconds instead of requiring a charge time).

Longbows should scale off perception as a secondary stat, shortbows off dexterity and crossbows off strength.

Arrows as well should be a bigger focus, Currently there is no reason to use stone arrows at all since bone arrows scale harder than bone- There should be simple differences.
In general, bows should factor into damage much more than arrows- For the 180 base damage of bone/bow, it should be more around 150 base from a bow, and 30 from the bone arrow.

Stone arrows should break a fair amount of time when being used- should deal more damage but take more time to aim and fly a fair amount. (Stock for pvp)
Bone arrows should break much more commonly, fly further and much faster but deal less damage. (Hunting)
Metallic arrows should be expensive to make, deal a large amount of damage but fly less and take much longer to aim (Niche strategies).

Then finally one of the most important notes is changing how firing arrows work.

It is not fun to get hit by an arrow (But it is extremely satisfying to hit and KO someone with one). The problem is in the nature that they are absolutely instant- you can't tell how well-aimed someone is and when they release, it is determined at that spot. Any one minor mistake will cause certain death.

In my view, the margin of error (The cone radius for arrows firing that is dependant on the aim bar) should be reduced drastically once the final 10% of the aim bar begins to be filled- but shooting an arrow causes a minor delay before it is fired. This should also be based on the bow- Crossbows should not have a delay (Or have a very very small one). Short bows should have a small delay, with longbows the longest. The delay should be no more than .5 seconds, and for a crossbow it could be around .1 seconds.

Alternatively, adding travel times for arrows seems like a much more plausible solution (For extremely reactive people), but I am unsure what the limitations of the system are.

These are my thoughts, and I have a lot more that I will cover later, but these are the bases of it- as a person who has sparred with archery for a long time (And for a short time been in pvp with them) and fully experienced the system.

(Yes there are lots of tricks with archery such as selecting the portrait, but this isn't a thread for that either- I think they are fine.)

[_Gunnar]

Nice analysis. I think making arrows "fly" rather than instantly hit could be a little intensive in terms of the server but I agree it would be awesome. It is quite sad that perception doesnt affect anything, I thought it worked quite nicely in previous worlds. I can't really comment much beyond that since I have never been much of an archer but I agree that arrows should not be a one-hit kill on an armoured character with a reasonable amount of constitution. I disagree that melee shouldn't be high damage though, but thats not really relevant to the thread :p

[Archiplex]

Other suggestions I had was for archers to provide a role of utlity, perhaps arrow wounds would increase and bleed out if not patched up in time, perhaps arrow wounds could cause enemies to slow down for some time

Perhaps arrows could be poisoned (I don't see why swords not either... but perhaps we should change their nature to be more attrition based first and leave ONE SHOT MURDERS to b12/cutblade... but this is unrelated) for new wound types, etc.

And at the same time a new sort of defense should be available other than the current movement-based defense that people are forced into (You have to find other objects/people to block shots for you.) Like, example- if we had tower shields, players could possibly set a defensive stance that would cause the shield to block all arrows in one direction- but be very slow and take a timer to unlock shield mode/change directions.

Uh, cool stuff.

[abt79]

I agree with most of this, my only suggestions are that there should be some sort of puncture wound from arrows and they should deal some HHP damage, and that perc should affect something, maybe shot range?

[donatas]

Yes I did read it, but how do you use archery. aim and shot where the mouse is pointing or is it like radius scale, I am confused. I always miss my target.

[Archiplex]

Yes I did read it, but how do you use archery. aim and shot where the mouse is pointing or is it like radius scale, I am confused. I always miss my target.

When you aim, you set a "cone" basically, think wwhen you're tracking scents or prospecting. That cone, at 0%, is 180 degrees.
I don't know the formula, but as you aim, the cone gets smaller and smaller, I assume that at 99.99% it is about 1 degrees

[Thedrah]

the aim bar is only damage
you 'aim' in 1 of 8 directions and will hit the first thing in that direction if it hits at all (such as you can hit chickens when hunting a fox). practice with an archery target, it's what its for
you can aim ahead of the target as well

[Archiplex]

the aim bar is only damage
you 'aim' in 1 of 8 directions and will hit the first thing in that direction if it hits at all (such as you can hit chickens when hunting a fox). practice with an archery target, it's what its for
you can aim ahead of the target as well

I'm thinking the "8" directions thing might be 16 but I haven't tried much to test.


The aim bar also very clearly affects accuracy.