Game Development: Bagpipe Brawl

[darkulrich]

Melee/UA hunting is super easy and much less time consuming than marksmanship hunting. And I am for sure in the "casual gamer" category.
I can easily melee hunts bears/moose with 55UA/130MC and about 100AGI/100STR (this values AFTER bonuses and with low quality bronze gear). If you have a horse you are set.

The idea of traps/snare is super good. You could also implement, I don't know, poisons to apply to arrows to make it a bit more fun and use debuffs. Animals running away are definitely a problem until you get a horse.

Thank you for the updates and for trying to make the game better.

And, I mean, Jorb and Loftar push an update every week, the updates cannot be perfect. You should be grateful that they are developing the game with so much input from us.

[ChildhoodObesity]

Melee/UA hunting is super easy and much less time consuming than marksmanship hunting. And I am for sure in the "casual gamer" category.
I can easily melee hunts bears/moose with 55UA/130MC and about 100AGI/100STR (this values AFTER bonuses and with low quality bronze gear). If you have a horse you are set.

archery was much easier before and instead u would only need like 100mm and some perc

[ven]

Honestly sometimes it really feels like you guys have no idea what the impact of your changes are going to be before pushing them.

That is an issue I have too. And nearly half my w8 kin list quit mentioning variations of this as a reason.

But here's the thing about this update:
Melee combat is becoming more complex. Archery is useless for hunting unless you have a good bow or a horse. Do we really expect new players to have access to q100+ bows, or to have enough ua and combat experience to be able tame a horse or to kill things on melee?

How could new players even kill a fox in that scenario? They'd need to find a wild horse, find the target animal, have a boat nearby so they can escape if the animal doesn't flee, be close to a river, and manage to kill the animal on a horse before they're out of pony power and despite the longer cooldown on mounts. That's too many variables and too much RNG dependency.
There's already a lot of information that new players have to absorb,including unspoken community behavior in-game. Now there's also hunting.
You can say "git gud", but the game needs to be accessible for new players. If it's not, the game will die.

[DDDsDD999]

Hunting with bow was an one of the few interesting things in the game.

Yeah ok.

[apoc254]

Honestly sometimes it really feels like you guys have no idea what the impact of your changes are going to be before pushing them.

That is an issue I have too. And nearly half my w8 kin list quit mentioning variations of this as a reason.

But here's the thing about this update:
Melee combat is becoming more complex. Archery is useless for hunting unless you have a good bow or a horse. Do we really expect new players to have access to q100+ bows, or to have enough ua and combat experience to be able tame a horse or to kill things on melee?

How could new players even kill a fox in that scenario? They'd need to find a wild horse, find the target animal, have a boat nearby so they can escape if the animal doesn't flee, be close to a river, and manage to kill the animal on a horse before they're out of pony power and despite the longer cooldown on mounts. That's too many variables and too much RNG dependency.
There's already a lot of information that new players have to absorb,including unspoken community behavior in-game. Now there's also hunting.
You can say "git gud", but the game needs to be accessible for new players. If it's not, the game will die.

At least somebody else can see the real issue here. ^

[Jesus_Smith_Nandez]

words

This is correct. As a noob, the only animals I can still kill consistently are boars, badgers, and foxes, that's with knowledge of the combat system. I guess it would be different if you had a horse but way too tedious to do without access to a metal weapon.

With the new archery, if something moves faster than you when it flees, it's basically out of bounds until you have enough stats to tank it and a good metal sword, at which point you're not a noob anymore anyway.

[boreial]

Waiting for next update on Archery before abandoning MM for MC, being that I do not actively pursue PvP, Prior to the nerf I put very few points into MC Vs. MM since hunting with a bow was both easier and safer for character and armor wear than Melee. I do hope that some of the nerf is negated but even if not it is not, to me, a game breaker, it just means I have to follow a different path than I wanted.

[maslov2]

Nothing changes yet? Jorb just ruined archers life in hafen. Hope that will ruin Jorb life

[MadNomad]

Stop crying. Working as intended.

[AbsK]

Okay, I've just read through the whole thread, and it is a long ass thread i didn't need to go through. Regardless, I'm glad i did because now i have a few suggestions i think are worthwhile.

Suggestion 1- Varied arrows

There should be three different arrows because this is a game and simplicity and accessibility trump realism

Stone arrows should stay right about where they are in terms of damage (perhaps even a bit lower), but should also deal a small amount of extra damage to armor, should damage exceed armor absorption, and less to the wearer.

Bone arrows should deal 2* damage to enemies with no armor, and 1/2 damage to armored foes, and should not penetrate armor at all, except leather armor. Bone will shatter before metal does. They should also give a speed penalty proportional to damage caused and give a small and visible bleeding effect. The idea here is that they are mainly used for hunting as opposed to literally everything.

Metal arrows need to be introduced! (Perhaps 2 nuggets per arrow?) These would be the armor piercing arrows. and should have maybe 50% armor piercing, and cause no bleeding effect. Objects in wounds stop bleeding. That's why you leave the object in the wound before you get to A&E in the real world, and this concept should also apply here, although to a more limited degree.

For shits and giggles, all arrows should have a low chance of causing an "Arrow in the Knee" injury, which should go away on it's own (for now) and severely reduce movement speed except when on a boat or mounted

Suggestion 2- Armor/arrow interaction + shields (special cases for certain armors)

NOTE: I don't know all the armors in the game so some may be missing from these suggestions

Leather armor shouldn't really block arrows, after all, the same arrows that pierced the hides of the animals should still pierce the hides of the leather

Chain mail armor should be less effective at blocking arrows, because the arrows could go in the holes. This does not mean they should not block arrows at all - they should - just less than other metal armors.

Shields should have a reasonable chance at blocking arrows coming from in front and to the sides of you, and should not block arrows from behind.

Plate armors should have a small chance of deflecting arrows coming from any direction.
EDIT: having done a small amount of research on Vapntreyiu it seems that they should have double absorption against arrows so that they block more arrow damage, but break faster because of it. This should apply after the plate armor where applicable.

Suggestion 3- Aim speed and special skills

I think aim speed should be kept the same, but with special skills you could purchase from the lore and skills page of your character sheet that improve both aim speed and damage. These should be unlocked once you reach certain milestones in increasing your mm skill, e.g. 10, 25, 50, 100, etc.
These should cost in the region of 5k-15k lp and have diminishing returns, so the first may double the aim speed and add 25% damage, the second may have half of the increase and cost twice as much, and so on until you reach the last one.

For the record I'm not against special skills for ua or mc, but this is specifically for archery.

If this is not feasible, increasing the aim speed by a lot and increasing damage so it's around 75% ish of what it was originally may be in order.

The Bare Minimum

The bare minimum I describe here is the minimum required to make archery viable for hunting again, and is designed so that it can be implemented in (hopefully) the shortest possible time. To me, the PvP aspect is secondary to this.

Increase bow damage to 75% of previous values.
Increase bow aim speed back to 75% of previous values.
Add speed reduction for damage to animals.
The accuracy change is negligible. My testing shows that you can't hit anything unless the aim bar is at ~70% or higher anyway.

I think this change has reduced archery to useless, as if you can't kill an animal in your first shot and it runs faster than you, there's no point chasing it because you probably won't kill it with your second shot either. With my characters skills it'd take 8/9 shots to kill a moose, and it runs faster than me and if i miss and it aggros me I'm still done for.