Marksmanship is useless for progression

[icepie]

Arrows are much harder to raise in Q than it is to raise your survival skill. This combined with arrows softcapping animal quality, you will never be able to get higher and higher quality kills from pure marksmanship. I suggest simply removing the arrow softcap, and hardcapping kills based on your marksmanship the same way it is with meelee and survival. I want archery to be useful for hunting.

[Avu]

Seems reasonable.

[azrid]

archery is a noobtrap

[Quariator]

Marksmanship has been utter garbage for 3-5 years now (except for like 3 weeks in w9) so I'd say it is time for it to get some shine as well. I'm sick and tired of it being a dead stat, while melee has been meta pretty much since the game release. Jorbtar please look into this

[MadNomad]

I suggest you to stop being noob, that helps a lot when you want to hunt anything of value

[Lojka]

you can get like moose with archery, but it will be 17q

so... not worth time i suppose

[MarcusXDead]

I have several ideas about marksmanship. Jorbtar, hear me out, please.
So far I’m trying to play as an archer with a group of people who fight with melee combat. I do so because I prefer to take less common roles in different games, for better role-play effect. It’s never interesting having bunch of exact same op builds in a party. In Haven, people can choose between using unarmed and melee combat, melee being impossible to use til you gain some good moves with unarmed and maybe getting some iron for better weapon. That’s fairly easy tho. Using a bow, on the other hand, is quite different. It forces you to invest in unarmed (or melee, but due to equip changing timer it might be a bad idea) to at least be able to reduce incoming openings, since stances use either melee or unarmed stat in formulas. One might also have some points invested in combat to chase and finish of fleeing animals. It’s kidna okay, but when investing in marksmanship you face a problem. If I’m correct, marksmanship stat is useless above ~35 in early game. The best roots I’m capable of finding with 97 survival and completed forager credo is 60q. Let’s take a 10q bough, I can’t have any better until a tree is fully grown, and make 35q bow. As I know, aim formula is capped on the worst q of arrow/bow/ lvl of marksmanship. I currently have base stat of marksmanship = 90, didn’t notice any major changes. If I had 90 base melee/unarmed it’d be much more rewarding. So my suggestions are:
1. Add a battle-stance that uses marksmanship stat as a modifier in def formula. We discussed it a lot, overall we have some people for it and some against, but overall we came to conclusion that it should be fair and won't break ballance.
2. Add some aoe-buff items like a warhorn, that use archery and charisma/psy stats to buff alies in party that are nearby on some minor stat bonus (Like +5 agi, scaling with q of horn, and user stats, but scaling with negative geometry progression, so overfeed won't give +100 agi buff in late game) It should have "using" time, so you'd have to stay still and blow it for ~15 sec to affect nearby party members for 1 min. Marksmanship may be used here to reduce "casting time" instead of being used for bonus amount calculation.
When we raided anthill dungeon I mainly was luring [totally fair infinitly spawning waves of ants in certain rooms] and very rarely being able to make a good hit on black and striped ants before we brawl into close combat. Having an item that I could be using to help my party without investing more in melee/unarmed would be quite awesome.
I also like the idea of using marksmanship for defining q hardcap for the hunted animals.
On one hand - ranged weapons are op when you're sitting in a boat and keep hitting poor animal. Having low q animals is quite fair. But on the other hand, you're kidna blocked by material q here - you basically do the same thing with unarmed/melee and survival with only difference of being able to get hit when making a hit yourself. Not that it's a problem when you lay your hands on a spear. My point is - as I find having good q animals when hunting with a ranged weapon unfair, I'm sad that if I hunt fairly, in a deep forest rather than in a boat, being slashed and bitten I get 30q hide as well. My suggestion is to make a marksmanship stat affect the hunted animal, but only if you invest in marsmaship heavily. For example, for every 5 points of Marksmanship, reduce a q penalty by 1. If I hit an animal 3 times with a 35q arrow and 30q bow with hunter credo completed, it won't be *so bad* as it is now.
I also suggest to add special flee stat to creatures if they're being hit with ranged weapon and can't fight back. I mean they do break stockpiles and boats when they can't hit the attacker, so it isn't hard to add a flee action to the AI , using special flee var that is usuall flee HP/3, if they're hit with ranged damage, is it?
Overall I want some additions to a ranged system as it is now, I find in interesting to use, and hard to master, and maybe it *should* stick to being usefull when you have high q materials so people won't abuse it early game. Whar are your thoughts on it, devs?