Thought on bow hunting and how to make it gud.

[Liss12]

This is quite popular topic these days so i guess i can add my 2 cents aswell. I apologize in advance for my engrish, i learnt it in mostly videogames and not very competent in expressing my thoughts besides talking about intercourse with other people mothers.

First of all i think most of us can agree on 1 things: current state of hunting mechanic is not good and full of mandatory cheese. I would point out such problems as

1) MM being suboptimal when hunting, it is more time and resource consuming compared to boat cheese with boar spear, there is absolute to reasons to hunt with bow even with 100+q ranger bow and ton of MM simple because high Q b12 with ton of melee will always outperform bow while also being more convinient.
2) Boat hunting itself. It so much more convinient than fighting animals mano-v-beasto in fair combat no one even bother hunting without boat, unless its super high Q spot far away from land. In this case you would just cheese the other way.
3) Why cheese is possible at all: fleeing and reagro mechanic. This is the root of the problem, animals will just stand still and eat hits and i should admit this is very nice of them but encourage cheesing. It apply to every single animal in the game from fox to whale, they all act the same when it comes to pathfinding.

To solve said problems i came up with 2 step solution, there is in short
1) Make MM great again
2) Make cheesing hunting less convinient than bow hunting, make bow hunting more affordable stat-wise than melee hunting.

First lets talk about MM and bow hunting. In real IRL life hunters dont have to kite or fight animals in hand to hand combat every time they an arrow into it. They usually drop dead on spot or flee and drop dead later. Cases when hunter being attacked by wounded animal do exist, but this certanly not what you would call a normal flow of a hunt.

I would like hunting in H&H to be like this: you search for an animal, you wait for a perfect moment to shoot, you track wouded animal and claim your prize. There are couple of mechanics that supposed to make hunting to look like this, we already have bleed damage and tracking, they just dont work too well. So there comes my solution.

1) Implement a new mechanic that would force wounded animal to flee instead of attacking hunter. Right now unless you kill animal instantly or almost kill it with first shot you have to enter normal combat which should not be the case. I was thinking for quite some time about how not to force hunter to fight with animal without making his stats and skills irrelevant and i think i found an elegant solution. When animal being hit by an arrow and combat begins there should be a skill check if an animal shoul flee or attack. If hunter passes the check- animal flees, if not- it attacks. The skill in question would be stealth. Yeah, this useles noobtrap of a skill, if animals cant tell where the arrow came from it cant attack the hunter right? So the skillcheck would go like this: Hunter's (Stealth*survival*int) vs (static value depending on animal type*randomized number from 0.7 to 1.2). Extra factors influencing this check could be distance to the target, terrain type and time of day. Shooting from afar in the middle of the night in dense forest would be more likely resulting in animal running away than shooting it from point blank range during the day.

2) Alright, our stealthy boi managed to pull sneaky on an animal and it is running away bleeding profusely. Whats next? First: bleeding damage should be buffed greatly, up to initial damage x7 or x8, and should tick more offten. Ideally i would like to see a boar shot with q90 ranger bow and q90 metal arrow to drop dead not further than 1-1,5 grids away from where it was initally hit. Newbie hunter with makeshift bow and arrows may have to track animals for a long time, and perhaps shoot it more than once, but still should be able to kill an animal as long as he is able to stay hidden.

3) Tracking could be improved to work like crime scent tracking. Instead of being just a splat on minimap it would be picked and examined to point general direction on the animal. Accuracy of tracking be based on surv*per*exp.

4) Animal armor values should be nerfed to be more reasonable, even shitty arrows shouldn't just bounce off. Right now they have their armor to prevent early world cheese an i hope that it would be unnecesary one day.

Some animals such as bear, whale, troll and mammoth will always attack the shooter, only way to deal with them is glorious melee. In other hand some animals such as foxes, stoats and deers will always flee when hit by an arrow thus being more preferable targets for nooby hunters.

Now lets talk about boat hunting and cheesing. There are 2 reasons why it is so effective: first animals standing still doing nothing when they cant reach player and second animal can be reaggroed when fleeing. Both problems should be adressed in order to nerf the boat cheese.

1) Animal being passive when they cant reach player. I am positively sure real animal dont behave like that. I suggest that animals should immediately start to run away if they dont have valid path to the attacker. Sure there will be some flukes when animal runs away when it clearly shouldn't but i dont think this will be such a big problem if majority of players will either hunt with bow or just ran into melee and beat the shit out of animal without kiting.

2) Reaggroing. This is just plain stupid, animal being fearful and running for its life just makes 180 police turn and going back is a silly mechanic. The solution is simple- there should be a timeframe after animal start fleeing while it cant be aggroed again. Lets say 15 seconds.

These 2 things should hurt boat/shore/cave/etc cheese pretty badly.

Finally lets talk about manly way to hunt: head first with b12 in hands. I think it should be buffed if anything, people being buff enough to facetank bear- should go and facetank bears. I suggest removing fleeing on low hp mechanic entirely. Instead, each animal would start to run away after being in combat for a certain time. If animal cant kill its offender quickly- it will flee. If you are death machine and can kill an animal in this dedicated timeframe- good for you, otherwise you will have to chase or track it. In general i think 300/300 guy with highQ weapon should be able to kill every animal before it start to run.

Some extra thoughts: removing cheese hunting will make hunting more tedious thats for sure. I'd suggest increasing gain from each carcass to compensate it. Also hunting with bow can be rage-inducing rn because of irratic move pattern on animals. to solve this i would suggest adding specific animation for every animal like grazing, diggng, lying on the groiund etc that will indicate that animal will be standing still for at least next 10 seconds to give hunter a perfect window to aim and shoot.

I know there probably are dozen of oversights and downsides to my suggestions, feel free to point it out afterall this is what this forim is made for.

[Reiber]

true. ranged combat and hunting need to be made viable somehow,
but getting rid of the deaggro mechanic is stupid, if you disable cheese, people arent gonna wait untill they can make an q 90 bow and metal arrows too get bearcapes ,
they will find other cheese, and when the time you are able too kill your first bear, dosn´t rely so hard on metal q as now, but instead in alts you need too box animals in, the gap between high end factions and everyone else further increases.

and boat hunting without an snekja that has some serious quality, isn´t any more effective than an horse and an cart anyway,

the values you would need to actually 1v1 an bear while standing still, or on foot without caves,walls or other cheese, is far greater than what 90% of heremits have when they stop playing.

[Sevenless]

the values you would need to actually 1v1 an bear while standing still, or on foot without caves,walls or other cheese, is far greater than what 90% of heremits have when they stop playing.

Bearhug just screws any chance of fighting bears "legit" without faction fighter stats. One mistake and you can be very fucked up.

[Liss12]

the values you would need to actually 1v1 an bear while standing still, or on foot without caves,walls or other cheese, is far greater than what 90% of heremits have when they stop playing.

Or they can just cooperate. It is MMO, remember? And solo player not being able to 1v1 bear or mammoth until reaching insanely high stats is perfectly fine. Besides, i suggest also nerfing animal armor values which are part of the reason bears are so tough.