Bowman UP?
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It may be my stats, or the fact that I am only using primitive weapons, but the bows seem quite underpowered.
Considering that the bows main advantage (which would understandably need to be accounted for with some damage loss) is it's ability to hit from a distance, the overview distance/screen size and the, frankly clumsy combat system mean that you firstly have too short an initial view distance, (which is a problem even for melee) too short an attacking range, and while you are trying to run away, you cannot attack because you use the same buttons.
Adding to this is the fact that a large number of enemies, particularly the difficult ones, have ranged attacks and can hit you from out of screen, because they are AI, and where a melee character need only press the button and face the general direction, an archer needs to target the enemy precisely.....I had a similar problem in Torchlight, if anyone has played that, I don't know if or how they fixed that in the later games.
As far as I see it, while parties, which are of course the focus, will be fine for archers, for solo, it still looks like 'sword and board' (Heavy armour and a big weapon) is far superior.
There is of course still the fact that any lag at all seems to turn a fight that, without lag, would leave you with half health, or barely scratched, into a fight that is likely to kill you, particularly for archers. Melee can at least still hit them with lag.
I would suggest a larger screen view distance, and some sort of targeting system, maybe? I can see that a lot of features are avoided to stop archers being OP, but as it is...
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Targeting is impossible, but many have asked for some way to mitigate the short view range on the screen, especially because it provides a significant advantage to some monitors compared to others.
The best proposal I heard in this regard, was to get the direction indicators from Ultima Online, and tie them to the Detection and Stealth stats. This way the distance at which you get an indicator toward a target, depends on how high is your detection and how low is his stealth.IMO it creates a good interaction, gives more value to 2 stats that right now exist only for 1 specific build, and removes the hardware disparities.
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@spoletta I like the idea, but I would personally just say increase the view size by about 50%, I'm sure there are reasons for the size, but particularly with building where the camera perspective can get very irritating, and running through the world where the enemy hits you before you even see them, I would really like a bigger view.
I do sort of like how the view allows you, as I mentioned in an old post, 'hide' from players that are chasing you along a road; if you move a certain distance off the road you can see their shadow as they go past, but they can't see you.
I also tend to approach places I know contain enemies by moving towards the corner of the screen to give myself a longer view distance, and I sort of like that you can do that, a lot of games have mechanical quirks like this, for example; moving at an angle (W&A/W&D) in Morrowind makes you move faster, and these are the sort of things that give a game character, but even so, a wider view would be nice, even just a little.
I also noticed that placing the pointer over an enemy near the edge of the screen can make the arrow either travel in that direction and not hit, or fire off in some random direction, which is really not good.
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When I was testing the different playstyles, I actually thought that the bow builds were a lot stronger than other builds. Especially considering the utility they come with.
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I think bow have only one powerfull abilitie, its Acid Arrows, rest is so, playable, but not so good, and without Acid Arrows really hard to kill "armored" and fat mobs... I started this playtest with bowman, and with full ablitie bar i can do less, as melee with 2 abilities.(I had respec stats and go to melee, have no skills, but can kill in solo ogre's etc.) And bowman need Acid Arrows to do this, and farm this skill solo as bowman - very very hard. But i think it will be rebalanced much time after)
