Holy crap guys, if y’all didn’t want bows in the game, just say so (Players, not devs). This nerf to the range in conjunction with the damage drop off feels horrid to me.
I will agree that bow was strong before, but this is extreme. I essentially have to be within most enemies’ melee range in order to deal full damage, completely defeating the purpose of having a ranged weapon in the first place. Additionally, any bow build like mine that revolve around stamina regen with cloth armor is the equivalent of walking around naked now.
I made a full cloth-armor build so I could keep a relatively high stamina regen, and shoot more while focusing on evasion, and of course, that trade off is less armor. I already died from single hits from the Echo Knight before, and with the mobility of every enemy including the Echo Knight itself in this game, that was hard enough to avoid. However, with this nerf to bow, I’m not sure how I’m expected to survive anything. Even with the previous range (which I’m not suggesting we have to go back to given that it could be considered stronger than necessary), most, if not all, enemies had so many ways of dealing damage at range, or even very rapidly closing the distance, I didn’t think it was necessary to shrink it to this extent.
Worst yet, even though bow’s range got nerfed, all the enemies that have ranged attacks that already went further than the original bow range still have that same reach. That hardly feels good to play against.
I don’t know, maybe I’m having a knee jerk reaction to this, and I’m curious what others think, but it feels like an over-correction.
It was a joke based on why I actually made the account lol I hadn’t intended on participating in the forums before this point, and it wasn’t meant to shut down conversation. I also wasn’t sure how toxic people were, so I didn’t want this traced back to my steam account to be harassed there shrug
I think its good that you participate and share your ideas whether its in the forum, discord or reddit even if we can sound harsh in some discussions/debates its a really nice and awesome community!
I realized that devs love to babysit bow, rod and bcr haters with this patch. If they wanna make them happy they must remove them anyway like you said. But if they wanna make it right they have to fix the main imbalance between the classes/weapons/runes with hard way instead cheesing with butchering numbers.. no offance to anyone xd
This is an old clip, but the point remains. I equip Heavy on my Archer. We have blink, and it’s fairly cheap. When something rushes you, just blink a couple of times and keep shooting.
As far as power… players are rabid and will abuse every inch afforded. Bows were outta hand. I rather a heavy hand nerf, and then edge back up. Because I guarantee you people are already experimenting devising ways to make it OP or strong again in-spite of the nerfs.
The people who copy builds or just use the straight-forward OP things won’t be the ones to figure it out. The people we hear complaints from first will be the people who aren’t doing that creative experimenting.
This community is so weird. People get annoyed when someone has fun with a build that they don’t use. If their build is broken it’s ok, but if someone else’s build does well, it needs to get nerfed.
And then devs actually listen to this and overdo a nerf.
It was the same thing with the whispers (that time me personally was against the free travel between whispers) then I came a realization that if it will be optional that would hurt nobody which is it works super fine now (the current whisper system) hope they can make a fair solution to this balancing and “keeping both arpg and souls fans happy” situation as well
When a build you don’t play is OP, it affects you regardless. Because then because of the disparity, there is crying to bring the others that aren’t OP up to that level.
And before you know it, everything is OP for the content. And the pace of the gameplay is more like Diablo 3-4 and PoE 1-2 more than it is the slower and deliberate encounter-focused combat that the developers intend for the game.
Some people do not care an iota about the overall health of the game. They just want to be OP and have the build or tools they abuse to that end never be balanced. There are many games that revolve around power fantasies where you steam roll everything. I personally do not want this game to turn into that.
Bro wake up this wasnt a balance patch they basically increased overall hp of the mobs and decreased all the dps which results in every class affected same so broken mage builds are still broken they still one shots but other mechanics burried under ground bc of global nerf before global balance..
I saw this topic and decided to test the changes. I did a crucible run and cleared out a plague area.
The nerfs are too strong but the intention was correct.
I’ve always asked for damage fall-off to be added to bows, because this game needs to push players to be more aggressive with ranged weapons to be balanced and fun.
Bows with Charged attacks like Yew Longbow are almost unusable while fast bows like Short Bow are mostly ok.
The damage fall-off It should be less prominent with charged attacks and runes.
The fact that damage fall-off is also applied to runes is strange, it essentially forces you to use runes only when you are very close.
The fact that the arrows fall is a welcome change as clearly the enemies were not able to handle the infinite range, but it is not very consistent, the Cerim aims at the center of the enemies and therefore against short enemies you have less range than against tall enemies (the old problem that when you are melee against enemies sometimes the arrows are missing is still there).
Maybe now that damage fall-off has been added it’s a good idea to reduce the stamina cost of bows, or maybe they should simply increase the damage and/or reduce the The damage fall-off.
I really like that when I get close to enemies I do more damage than when I’m far away, but I don’t like that from far away I only do 25% of the damage or even less.
i tried bow for the first time with this patch because i convinced my friends to pick up the game and holy hell does the bow feel like trash to use. its also damn near impossible to play with friends if everyone is melee because of the friendly fire. if they want people to play together with friendly fire then they need to give us avenues to play that way. the game should not be balanced around the no lifers.
I believe the bow nerf is too harsh. Damage falloff is too aggressive and range with the arcing feels a bit too short now. I’m not against having damage falloff or arcing arrows but it needs tweaking.
Something that could also be done to help is either a red, orange, green color change to the locked on enemies indicator to determine range and damage potential at a glance.
I did a bit of testing. This distance was 100% effective, and every tiny step past that was a 5% reduction; and by the railing just out of the pic to the left was 90% reduction. So the drop is fairly sharp. It does need a bit of a re-work, as being in melee range being 100% effective doesn’t make sense for a bow.
It would probably be better if the drop off is not linear, making it 0 within 5 steps, then 1% within 10 steps, down to 95%.
The following 10 steps will be -2%, -2%, -3%, -3%, -4%, -4%, -5%, -5%, -6%, -6%, down to 55%.
Anything beyond that adds another -15%, going to a minimum of 40% damage.
With the added arrow fall off, the maximum distance will be determined by physics, no need to worry about infinite range.
I never played bow, but just looking at the nerfed range and falloff i really think they nerfed it too much. I was excited to create a new character to play with bow and now i simply don’t really want to anymore… Please devs find a middle ground between then and now..
I think a strong damage fall-off is needed to force archer playstyles into being risky.
With the short bow, which I use with parries and kicks and its great side-hop attack, I only feel encouraged to stay slightly closer to the enemy. My playstyle is affected for the better.
Though even I will concede that I sometimes get reduced damage while still being in a fair, risky range. Drop-off might begin a tiny bit too close to enemies. This doesn’t change that damage should be near zero at a risk-free range.
Some weapons’ movesets do not support this playstyle; Lombix_4 mentions the yew longbow, for instance. A cynical view is that the yew longbow is currently not intended to be played at all, being too weak at range and too slow in melee. Fired point-blank, it’d need to slap like a cannon to be worth its risk.
Is this a good solution? The reduction to damage at range don’t make cheesing impossible, just tedious. Won’t this just bring far-range cheesing back up? I think melee-incapable bows should be redesigned instead.
I absolutely concede that the yew longbow’s charged arrow is slow and could have no drop-off while still being a tedious way to kill things. But I feel that making it an effective attack sends the wrong message: that this playstyle is an intended one.
Ranged runes doing more damage again could be perfectly fine if focus generation was risky. Focus from bow attacks would need a range drop-off. Then the limiting factor to strong ranged hits would be focus generation, and focus, not damage, would enforce the risk-taking.
(And if a woodsman/hunter wants to generate focus for his ranged kills from other woodsman activies like fishing and logging, then that seems flavourful enough to me. That’s a matter of gameplay-loop design though on which I feel unqualified to speak.)
This is a great idea! Doesn’t create screen clutter either.
