Hello, after the patch, the bow feels a bit bad seeing it can’t be played by itself anymore. I would like to suggest one thing to turn it back into a normal weapon to be able to be used, without making it broken again. I did not finish the old content even, just finished the sewers and can barely use the bow now, with the normal arrow costing more focus now than previous to the change to stamina.
My first suggestion would be, to turn it into a 2handed mainhand weapon, give it stamina cost and focus generation like melee weapons. Remove the arrow as a rune and simply make it a normal attack. This could also allow for bows to feel different, some charging attacks, others firing faster. Like the melee weapons with different types of attacks.
That would also give the upside of not using enchants on the “mainhand” weapon without ever using it. The attack would not be buffed by rune ring anymore and could be easier balanced while giving us archer lovers the bow back as a viable playstyle even early.
Big Agree with the changes proposed, making the bow a main weapon might make it an entirely new category of weapons and it can be expanded upon with introducing new types of bows in the future (Longbow is slow but hits hard, shortbow is fast but hits less hard and has combos etc.)
Bows are useless right now. They nerfed them because they are clueless on how to not make bows OP. With bows being like other weapons and ranged, you can cheese most of the enemies. Especially that it’s very easy to glitch the enemy on environmental assets like trees, cliffs and stairs.
What I would suggest is making the bows 2h and their range much shorter so you can’t shoot enemies from miles away. IMO bow range should be maybe 5-6x range of spears max or more or less 1/3 of the screen. Make them like other weapons so they cost stamina to use and they generate focus. Maybe add craftable arrows - 10 arrows per any type of wood. And decrease the base dmg so 3 bow hits equal 1 melee hit on average. There needs to be a disadvantage for using ranged weapons like bows/crossbows. Maybe also add some kind of delay so not only bow dmg is weaker compared to melee weapons, but also the delay between hits is much longer.
It worked in their old version, with topas in pants and being able to get enough focus back. My guess for why it is an offhand and focus is that the range is quite powerful in this game and makes certain bosses too easy. Range is incredibly powerful in No Rest
Once they swapped it to stamina, kept the old enchantments it was waaaaaay to easy to build and use. So I understand their choices their, but there were so many things that made it broken through the system.
Rune attack counting fully even on stamina, focus on focus use working as focus on rune use instead, regaining focus on damage dealt and so many arrows from the scattershot.
While it also made it broken in bad ways, which one is still an issue. Multishot of the shortbow being just useless, dealing less damage than a normal arrow per hit but costing so much