Artefact Bows Nerf - Announce 3940

Sylvance

What's the verdict, @Sena? Or anyone else, I guess.

Particularly interested to hear if non-Serpents have noticed a sudden difference?

Dunn

Not large enough of a nerf. You still can barely (if at all) tank a Lupine. I'd like to see more firewall kills other than rainstorm so we can shift the meta away from LoS because that shit is boring.

Tesha

I liked Dunn's post, but it was just because of Lucy. Not that I agree with him. Okay, I might agree with him. But Lucy is adorable.

Aedin

Dunn said:

Not large enough of a nerf. You still can barely (if at all) tank a Lupine. I'd like to see more firewall kills other than rainstorm so we can shift the meta away from LoS because that shit is boring.

Believe it's at around 85% or so right now, but that was with marksman with Santar within d-form. Like to see it without the marksman trait though. However how many people actually own an artie bow and doesn't have the trait is the question.

Iocun

I was hoping for some huge nerf that would warrant offering a full refund for traded in bows, so I'd have a good opportunity to do so. Alas, no such thing. Highly insufficient nerf.

Arditi

THIS CHANGES NOTHING.

Xith

I was wondering why I was getting hit so often all of a sudden with 18 dex, acrobatics, and arrowcatch.

Jonathin

It's not really a nerf, more like a bugfix.

Taraza

It wasn't that much of a nerf, as stated previously. 

Santar

Yeah. 

The larger part of the bug was fixed, but from my understanding, marksman might still be providing too much benefit. So I'm guessing that's gonna be lowered to bring the accuracy back close to what it used to be(I hope).

I don't think line-of-sight will be a problem once this gets straightened out. It'll still be a strong, viable tactic, but it won't be the end all strat. Lately it's just been retardation-shoot achaea. The strength of retardation has stemmed from the overpowered bows and the fact that every Mage has one. When virtually anyone can shoot arrows into retardation with guaranteed hits, gets pretty ridiculous. So we should see a reduction in effectiveness of both of those things. 

Mizik

Dragons get traits now?

Jarrod

@Mizik Dragons get the minor traits carried over from your lesserform, but the major traits are disabled.

Dunn

Negatif.

Santar

Dragons get minor traits.

Mizik

Just make marksman major. Certainly worth it

Triak

Mizik said:

Just make marksman major. Certainly worth it

I did wonder why marksman was a minor trait instead of major..

Santar

edit: Decided differently on this post.

Katzchen

Seriously going to regret buying the shooting upgrade for my bow if they nerf it anymore. As it it's pretty meh. No point using it in dragon when I can lesser and hit more accurately. And upgrading is so much more expensive now.

Hopefully they will give us the opportunity to trade in bows or shooting for full price.

Dunn

Doubt it @ refund. This is where they were prior to the addition of marksman, roughly. I remember, as a younger player, hearing about bows generally missing a bit for non archer classes.

Tecton

When I was investigating this issue, I noticed a great many inconsistencies with the way bow accuracy in calculated, with completely random accuracy boosts being added in at strange places. One example of this was if there was an icewall in the way, accuracy was reduced, but if there wasn't a wall, accuracy was increased (random, I know). 

This has persisted in the bowels of the code since bows were added back in the late 90s, so I took the time to rewrite it and have it work properly. What this means is there may now be some deficits due to it not having this horrible logic with nonsensical additions, so we're currently monitoring this, and we'll be making tweaks over the next few hours/days to try and find a nice happy place.

There will still be a large malus if you're not a bow-using class (with access to wind, aiming, snipe etc.), but I'm not sure it will necessarily be as great as it is at the time of this post.

Xith

If someone's occupying a slot with marksman (as many are) I think the accuracy bonus should be worthwhile.

But at the same time, moving it to major traits might be something to consider for the next trait changes.

Changed my mind. With only 3 slots for majors and one nearly always occupied by a bal/eq trait and one by a stat, moving marksman to major trait would be unfortunate for the non-bow classes that need major traits for more relevant things than raid application or retardouching.

Keeping the marksman benefit around a qualitative "half" between non-trait and bow-class levels seems fine.

Santar

A minor trait slot is next to worthless.

I'm not even USING 2 of my minor trait slots.

Tecton

Ok, so I've just loaded up some changes that bring things back up a little, some of the details:

• 4% overall increase in artefact bow accuracy.
  
• 5% overall increase in accuracy from the WIND ability (Subterfuge and Chivalry)
• 10% overall increase shooting at an "aimed" target. 

To give some rough numbers (assuming a normal, unafflicted, unobstructed target):

• Artefact bow, no trait, no abilities, 2 or more rooms away - ~40% accuracy
• Artefact bow, trait, no abilities, 2 or more rooms away - ~50% accuracy
• Artefact bow, trait, no abilities, adjacent room - ~65% accuracy
• Artefact bow, trait, abilities, no aiming, 2 or more rooms away - ~80% accuracy
• Artefact bow, trait, abilities, no aiming, adjacent room, ~95% accuracy
• Artefact bow, trait, abilities, aiming, 2 or more rooms away - 100% accuracy with a bonus through ice/stonewalls.
• Artefact bow, trait, abilities, aiming, adjacent room - 100% accuracy with a larger bonus through ice/stonewalls.

Of course, things are not always this black and white, since it's entirely possible that you'll get unlucky 5 times in a row due to bad random chance in cases where you're under 100% accuracy. 

Jarrod

Marksman SHOULD be Major. Xith's argument against it is exactly why it should be. If you want the accuracy, you should have to sacrifice something to get it. As is, there's so few worthwhile minors, that if you have access to all of them you'd be foolish to not take Marksman, even without a bow to use at the time.

Santar

Disagree heavily with the decision to make snipe miss for Serpents.

I just tested 20 shots, and hit 15/20 in Serpentform, with a level 3 bow, marksman trait.

Time to change class? Lmfao.

Tecton

Santar said:

Disagree heavily with the decision to make snipe miss for Serpents.

I just tested 20 shots, and hit 15/20 in Serpentform, with a level 3 bow, marksman trait.

Snipe still has the same accuracy boost as it's always provided to regular shooting.

Jarrod

20 shots is an extremely small sample size. 95% adjacent is really good, 100% distance is REALLY good. Aiming is easy, sacrifice a small amount of shots for guaranteed range damage that only range classes can have.

The -best- a non-bow class can hope for is 65% and the worst for a bow class is 75%. This is perfect, imo. Encourages melees, gives Serpents/Knights a distinct bow advantage.

Good changes.

Achilles

Santar said:

Disagree heavily with the decision to make snipe miss for Serpents.

I just tested 20 shots, and hit 15/20 in Serpentform, with a level 3 bow, marksman trait.

Was that from 2 or more rooms away without aim?

Also Knights should share the same accuracy as Serpents, the benefit of snipe I believe is it masks who is shooting not any boost in accuracy.

Santar

Tecton said:

Santar said:

Disagree heavily with the decision to make snipe miss for Serpents.

I just tested 20 shots, and hit 15/20 in Serpentform, with a level 3 bow, marksman trait.

Snipe still has the same accuracy boost as it's always provided to regular shooting.

Regardless, I'm missing a very significant portion of my shots on normal, unobstructed targets. 

This is never how it worked before. My snipes have been hitting 100% accuracy for years, and now it's cut down to 80%. Massive Serpent nerf. Thought the idea here was to revert things back to the pre-bugged state and give us back exclusivity to our class skills, not nerf everything across the board, including the class skills. 

Jhui

pretty spot on to me

Jarrod

You're missing shots on people without aiming at them? Perhaps you should utilize all of your class' skills. Complaining that the class suffered a 'massive nerf' when you're refusing to use one of the class' primary abilities regarding the situation is asinine.

What you're suggesting is that aim serve no purpose, which is the wrong way to think about a set of skills.