Marksmanship Sucks

[ghandhikus]

I am heavily dissatisfied with how early world hunting is working, it's impossible to hunt big game without wasting metals. You need either boar spears which have way too high chance to break(even though they should have wear like any other equipment). Or rush ranger's bow which most people won't be able to do for the first month. In my case with the hides way over 100q, strings q60, leather q40, bough q25 the bow would turn out to have a pathetic 67 damage on 41 quality. And that is if I wait a week just to have a tiny bit better trees or something. Right now I can only craft a 34q bow, that will have 64 damage tops. With q20 metal arrows surprise surprise! I will have 95 damage. So let's say I want to try this on a bear, and I deal 30 damage! So much! Oh yeah the Armor penetration thingy doesn't work on animals, at all. So I would need around 30 arrows to kill one bear. 3 bars, where as you can get like q40 bronze sword and on half of openings sting it or cleave it for 50-100 damage. Even with the hunter credo bows deal way too little damage. And provide no significant advantage at actual hunting than just attacking the animal with a bunch UA alts. Bows need higher PvE damage, or penetration to work. On top of that they suck in PvP. In every game bows always have some agility advantage where they can dash, roll or gain some distance even for a short period, but in haven you are like anyone else but with more combat cooldowns. As a dev I would honestly advice on sitting down with some tea and writing stuff down on what can be done about MC and Marks to make it more PvE viable. Maybe some combat moves?

Some bullet points:

• Buff bows in PvE
• Make all weapons have wear
• Remove chance to break, instead change the wear value of arrows and boar spears
• Rethink armor penetration in PvE
• Maybe changing animal behaviour overtime to be exhausted from running or fighting could be a thing. Maybe after 2 minutes they could enter exhausted state where all their stats are lowered by 50%? That could make hunting easier
• Make arrows float on top of water, they have pieces of wood in them, they could float, same could go for boar spears
• Simpler arrow type with just sharpened tip and feather back? branch+feather (with sharp tool)
• Code projectiles to remember position before entering the collider/cliff so that they can be spawned back a little before the collision

tl;dr: good bow is not a very good weapon against a bear, and marksmanship needs a rework for other reasons

Edit:
Archery target should show damage done instead of points, or both.

[Audiosmurf]

I think combat cooldown on bow should be reduced somewhat, certainly.

[Fostik]

I like the way how this man thinks.
Take a broken and limited playable mechanic, consider himself as ideologist of this mechanic, and oppose to other mechanics that actually working, like they should be nerfed.
Iono, how weapon wear will help to marksmanship, do we even need to discuss that?

[ghandhikus]

I like the way how this man thinks.
Take a broken and limited playable mechanic, consider himself as ideologist of this mechanic, and oppose to other mechanics that actually working, like they should be nerfed.
Iono, how weapon wear will help to marksmanship, do we even need to discuss that?

Nothing I stated directly "oppose"-s other mechanics, stating contrast to other mechanics is a valid argument that doesn't imply they need to be worse. Please don't start nit picks rants. "Make all weapons have wear" is just one point that devs can think through. If you actually have some opposing statement to make instead of "do we even need to discuss that" then it could greatly contribute to the discussion thanks

[shubla]

PVE in general is a bit retarded dont you think?
Hunting and animal mechanics + behavior should be completely reworked.

[abt79]

Nothing I stated directly "oppose"-s other mechanics, stating contrast to other mechanics is a valid argument that doesn't imply they need to be worse. Please don't start nit picks rants. "Make all weapons have wear" is just one point that devs can think through. If you actually have some opposing statement to make instead of "do we even need to discuss that" then it could greatly contribute to the discussion thanks

You made the thread, why not offer some explanation as to how these points will help MM? Especially making all weapons have wear, that seems rather disconnected from MM

[ghandhikus]

Nothing I stated directly "oppose"-s other mechanics, stating contrast to other mechanics is a valid argument that doesn't imply they need to be worse. Please don't start nit picks rants. "Make all weapons have wear" is just one point that devs can think through. If you actually have some opposing statement to make instead of "do we even need to discuss that" then it could greatly contribute to the discussion thanks

You made the thread, why not offer some explanation as to how these points will help MM? Especially making all weapons have wear, that seems rather disconnected from MM

• Buff bows in PvE
  - Do you need explanation here?
• Make all weapons have wear
  - Why just make boar spears and arrows have wear if all weapons can have it?
• Remove chance to break, instead change the wear value of arrows and boar spears
  - Elaborates to the previous point.
• Rethink armor penetration in PvE
  - While I agree that any weapon with armor penetration can have the ability to cheese animals, it could have a simple fix. For example if bear has armor soak of 60, if I do some damage over it, let's say 100, it should trigger armor penetration for it, 20% would be 12 damage, so I would hit him for (100-60)+(60*20%*1)=(40+12)=52. But if I hit exactly 60 or less, it shouldn't penetrate any armor, thus (60-60)+(60*20%*0).
• Maybe changing animal behaviour overtime to be exhausted from running or fighting could be a thing. Maybe after 2 minutes they could enter exhausted state where all their stats are lowered by 50%? That could make hunting easier
  - It is really more of, let's just let people have animals they try to chase for long periods of time, instead of letting them run at super sonic speeds for 15 minutes or more. Because let's get real, some animals run all the time, and you only get one shot every 2-5 minutes on an animal that actually can run away.
• Make arrows float on top of water, they have pieces of wood in them, they could float, same could go for boar spears
  - People use hundredths of strings a week and losing arrows to one pixel of water isn't helping anybody.
• Simpler arrow type with just sharpened tip and feather back? branch+feather (with sharp tool)
  - In real life the fastest makeshift arrow was actually a sharpened branch with a bunch of feathers of leaves sticked to the back with resin or feathers. It could have no wear and be guaranteed to break, it could have base damage of 5 and no armor penetration.
• Code projectiles to remember position before entering the collider/cliff so that they can be spawned back a little before the collision
  - It's really a shame projectiles sink in water, get stuck in between trees, and on cliffs, when a solution could remember some position before hit where player could stand and pick it up well.

Edit:

I think the main point should be that, marksmanship doesn't scale well into mid-game, and is definitely not a good end game thing.

[Zyean]

Part of the problem with marksmanship is it's kind of always going to be in a weird place because it completely bypasses the combat system that's in place, it's either going to be way to strong or way to weak. The devs have said in the past they want to rework combat at some point, so presumably archery would come with that.

I suppose you could buff archery damage specifically against animals but it's just a bandaid fix at the end of the day, there's other glaring problems with hunting animals as a whole and I think it's personally better for archery to be weak until they fix that main flaw with it to encourage people to use and learn the combat style that happens to be better in PvP in case of an encounter, but I don't personally have a problem with a bandaid fix like that

[ghandhikus]

Honestly damage buff in PvE could be really good. The bows are incredibly low damage anyways. A q40 bow does 60 dmg, while q40 rangers bow does 120 dmg. Maybe doing reduction in armor soak for animals vs bows would be good. Or just some non cheesy way to do more damage than their soak.

[Archiplex]

Part of the problem with marksmanship is it's kind of always going to be in a weird place because it completely bypasses the combat system that's in place, it's either going to be way to strong or way to weak. The devs have said in the past they want to rework combat at some point, so presumably archery would come with that.

I suppose you could buff archery damage specifically against animals but it's just a bandaid fix at the end of the day, there's other glaring problems with hunting animals as a whole and I think it's personally better for archery to be weak until they fix that main flaw with it to encourage people to use and learn the combat style that happens to be better in PvP in case of an encounter, but I don't personally have a problem with a bandaid fix like that

this is why i once suggested that marksmanship can easily be made a part of the current combat system, by adding a new opening angle and embracing bows being a ranged alternative for combat (arguments for this being imbalanced in pve are redundant because boar spears already enable all the cheesing that could have been done with ranged weapons)

then again, the current melee combat system has almost no room for growth and as long as melee combat is flawed, so too will ranged combat, so the point is kind of moot anyways.