As always, buff marksmanship. (and fix animal AI)

[fuffens1]

How am i sitting at 125 perception * 95 marksmanship. q30 hunter's bow and q25 metal arrows and im doing 18 damage per arrow on a moose? This kill will cost me over a quiver of arrows, a long and dangerous chase when it flees and 15 minutes to kill this moose. Meanwhile im watching my MC and UA friends stinging them shits for 150 damage.

Same point goes for PvP. As soon as the enemy has bronze and steel armor i can only hope to tickle the bottom of my enemys feet in larger fights all the while staying on par stat and ability wise.

What im trying to say/ask:

Is there really no way we can make marksmanship a factor in this game without making it broken? It does not feel optimal for PvE or PvP and never does. What is the cause of this? You could say its just an armor thing, but really its the animal AI and it being prone to being cheesed by melee that was/is and will continue to be a big part of the problem. Also buff armor pen on all arrows 5-10%, what is the worse case scenario if you do? I cant come up with one.


PS. I really like the new system, its fun, more satisfying and has a good learning curve. I like the fact that i can 1-3 shot any sprucecap trying to take my salt. I like the fact that if i find myself in a 1v1 situation and they catch up to me im kind of screwed. What i dont like is that i dont have a chance of doing any meaningful damage to armored foes before they get to me.

[Sevenless]

Is there really no way we can make marksmanship a factor in this game without making it broken?

10 years of the only times MM has been good being un fun or broken suggests not.

[fuffens1]

10 years of the only times MM has been good being un fun or broken suggests not.

While your words ring so true it hurts i wont give up hope. If they actually sat down, ran some simple tests in-game and brainstormed for a bit i believe they would find some decent balance changes. However i believe the situation to be more like: Archery is bad and ill-advised > No one uses archery > No one complains about it or whiners are few and far inbetween > the issue gets put far down on the priority list and is often forgotten or ignored.

I do honestly try to see the bigger picture when it comes to this problem. I hope that w13 realm PvP will be more meaningful and having a good group of fighters in your realm is necessary. Maybe then Jorb and Loftar can risk having some outrage when reworking animal AI and making sitting in a boat fighting fucking bears not a thing anymore. I dont think the best PvP:ers and the best hunters should be the same group of players necessarily. It would be cool to have one group of people managing politics and taxes, and whatnot via PvP and another one supplying said group with food, farmers and hunters... I easily get side-tracked on this issue.

[Amberlight99]

it seems to me like the system is currently trying to stave off the (unfortunately uninteresting and frustrating) reality that ranged combat without extremely complex and active combat systems will always be better, or, be completely useless.

The difficulty of balancing in a (mostly) nomagical setting to allow for both meaningful and useful ranged attacks and meaningful and useful melee combat, is that if you are being realistic, ranged is always better.

A spear will always be better than a sword (on average) a javelin will always be better than a spear, a bow will always be better than a javelin, a gun will always be better than a bow ect.

The nature of ranged combat excludes melee combat. in a realistic setting, ranged isn't just a combat style or a preference in weapon choice. Ranged combat in reality is a decision made to directly counter melee combat. To begin the arms race of "I will win if you can never hit me" via the everlasting chase for better armor and better reach. To use a bow or a sling or even if there were a such thing as thrown weapons, is a decision to try and engage in a one sided fight, where only you can make attacks on your enemy, and they cannot attack you.

As a result of this, games who want both melee AND ranged combat to be viable, need to balance not only damage values and direct addition of stats and numbers, but the abstract and difficult to calculate values of utility, primarily the concept of Kiting.

with Kiting you suffer a difficult balance:
If they have a longer range AND don't move slower than me, I will lose unless I ambush them or otherwise surprise them.
If they have a longer range and move a little slower than me, I will lose unless I can take enough hits to reach them and kill them first.
If they have a longer range and move incredibly slower than me, they will lose, they cannot attack as fast as me and cannot escape me.

And these scenarios include all kinds of issues like damage numbers, movement speed, fire rate, lag, controls, armor, weapons, material accessibility, skill accessibility and so on. In a game, this is a tough balancing act that most fantasy games that you see tend to rely on extremely fantastical and unreasonable abilities to try to mitigate. Such as allowing people to leap around and throw things and temporarily slow, stun, tie down or otherwise to each other and still you'll find that in all these, the one solution that worked was to give the melee characters a similar 'range' to the ranged characters. not in the form of their direct attacks, but in their ability to suddenly be somewhere else.

Of course, you can't do that stuff here in H&H it doesn't fit in with the fantasy. so you are stuck with the Kiting issue, and that is only one of many other issues, like how to balance ammunition.

In real history humans popped off because we figured out how to throw pointy shit really well and that kinda has been the history of arms races ever since, even if we did use melee as a strong backup, hitting someone from range is always the first step, and unless you want a meta where everyone at least needs a sling or an archer in their party, archery is gonna probably be stuck in a gutter.

despite all this, I would like it to be at least useful for hunting if not pvp.

[fuffens1]

despite all this, I would like it to be at least useful for hunting if not pvp.

This, this is what it boils down to. If we cant make archery viable cause of the reasons you framed so well. Why cant i atleast be useful to my village by being out in the forest stalking prey? Why is Olaf or w/e getting all the game, all the women and all the curiosities because of his "bob-and-weave-in-my-fucking-canoe-technique". I do actually have a shred of hope of filling some sort of niché in PvP this world with enough work. But me shooting a moose point blank in the face should not do 18 damage with decent equipment and stats. come ON NOW JORBUH-SAMA!!!

[fuffens1]

If they have a longer range and move a little slower than me, I will lose unless I can take enough hits to reach them and kill them first.

Also to add, ideally somewhere around here is where we could be right now. But the statement should be "I will lose unless i react in time and dodge and maneuver while closing the gap." It should be hard for me to chase someone down and trying land shots and it is right now, if im not really close. But it should also be dangerous to chase me. When i stop, turn around and start to aim you should have to react if we are on about the same level of equipment and stats. Right now, as long as you have some leather armor or better, its probably good that i stop to aim. That way you close the gap a bit quicker, sure you might take 20-35 soft hp. But that will heal in 2 minutes no worries.

Maybe arrows should be able to inflict some wounds atleast? I've learned Jorb loves wounds, yet archery dont have any. HmmMMMMmm...

[Amberlight99]

If they have a longer range and move a little slower than me, I will lose unless I can take enough hits to reach them and kill them first.

Also to add, ideally somewhere around here is where we could be right now. But the statement should be "I will lose unless i react in time and dodge and maneuver while closing the gap." It should be hard for me to chase someone down and trying land shots and it is right now, if im not really close. But it should also be dangerous to chase me. When i stop, turn around and start to aim you should have to react if we are on about the same level of equipment and stats. Right now, as long as you have some leather armor or better, its probably good that i stop to aim. That way you close the gap a bit quicker, sure you might take 20-35 soft hp. But that will heal in 2 minutes no worries.

Maybe arrows should be able to inflict some wounds atleast? I've learned Jorb loves wounds, yet archery dont have any. HmmMMMMmm...

I think wounds might be worth considering but my ideas would probably require more work than it is worth such as the ability to directly interact with wounds without a specific item.
I mean a basic one would be if you have been shot by an arrow, it's stuck in you and that is reducing your agility at least.

if you wanna stop to pull it out then sure good luck, maybe allow a 'break off' action that makes it harder to remove but reduces the penalty quickly for mid-combat shenanigans. Having a variety of arrow tip designs that allow for lower damage but higher wounds (such as a barbed tip) on removal.

I'm not familiar enough with pvp in this game to say much on the dodge and maneuver topic for avoiding projectiles. While, yeah, zig zagging is generally a good idea, it isn't exactly in the scope of the game to want to dodge roll or something.

Armor penetration is a hard one to talk about because being honest, armor is designed to protect against slashing and piercing damage, piercing damage especially. Leather armor isn't too good at it but even the most basic metals are pretty good at defending a few arrows shot from an average bow. It is sad to see that there are only two types of bows but still. Generally speaking in a game where anyone in a long enough lasting village's fighter group can wear metal armor, an arrow is not very threatening, and giving them unreasonable armor penetration seems to stray away from Jorb's goal in his game's level of simulation.

I'm confused (and frankly scared for my own sake) at the idea that you are only doing 16 damage in the face of a moose while your buddy is able to punch it and knock it's lights out. But I think that is because shooting seems to be outside of the combat system so it doesn't seem related to it's modifiers as well. Animals have tough hide, sure, but it seems like as a result of the combat system trying to avoid giving you the ability to deck a moose before you are a combat god, has completely hamstringed your damage.

[ghandhikus]

Just a few days ago I made a similar thread.
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=70390&start=10

Honestly how is marksmanship supposed to be for hunting if a rando with b12 or a boar spear can facetank something with the same stats. Honestly I don't care about marks in PvP. I don't expect devs to make it viable in PvP either. I just want to use marks for what it's been said to do, hunting. I want to be better at hunting and killing animals than random PvP spergs.

In the thread I also wrote some form of solution for armor penetation vs animal soak. Because what the fuck, armor penetration doesn't work with any kind of weapons.

- 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).

Edit:

Also every marksmanship thread ever https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/498837501843210244/831991367039189032/average_marks.mp4

[Archiplex]

as a major proponent of MM and loving archery style plays, archery will never be balanced as long as it interacts with a combat system that does not care about the melee combat system at all.

it will either be too shit (like what we currently have), or too powerful (the w8-w10 metas of people autoaiming archery bots which could oneshot anyone).


just tie it to its own move system: make moves that only work with bows and weigh off MM but specifically do not create a defensive stance that scales off mm; this means MM users will need to invest in UA or MC for their defensive weight, MM for offensive weight, and otherwise interact with melee combat just like spears already do minus being even longer range.

plus i mean, come on; the idea of having a shield+sling user is kinda cool

[fuffens1]

I think a unique moveset is something that devs should explore, but that wont happen. Atleast not for a very long time. My honest hope is that they atleast slap a band-aid on it this world rather then just sticking to ignoring it and letting all the archery/ranger larpers (since larping is all its good for) eventually quit and suddenly it does not seem like a problem anymore since no one is complaining. If the game is truly "eternally alpha" should we not treat it as such? Keep inovating and trying out stuff. Why does it feel like devs are scared to touch on archery? Are they not larpers at heart?

Tbf, getting a bow and shooting magpies and foxes does give the new player a true larping rush. It feels good. But once you start shooting at creatures stronger then boars you realise that this game was not made for you, little ranger larper.

Also, are we going for realism? Or fun and versatile game design? The state of achery proves that its not designed for either.

I love HnH its just this gaping chink in its armor that always turns me off, world after world. Projectile system was a huge step in the right direction, shame they did nothing to make it viable after all that work.

Again, add some wounds and increase the armor pen on arrows by 5% or create the longbow with some built in armor pen. Something this world, please.