Archer Damage

[Leolus]

Archers deal large amounts of damage quickly with very little mitigation options in higher level zones.

[Leolus]

The melee mobs vs the archer mob block rate in leng cliffs.

[Leolus]

Damage income:

These come in packs of 4. If all 4 hit, which is very possible, you're looking at 60 damage a turn from one pack. With crits you could lose double that in really bad rolls. Two packs can one turn a magic user.

[Leolus]

We also have shield pent as med on some bow users, like the ones on cliff and the trolls in UK. This will bypass a lot of mitigation. Is this the direction we want to go?

[Leolus]

It also appears that weapon skill doesn't affect blocking for arrows? Unsure on this. But weapons should block better than MA for archers and if there is no DR increase for weapon skill in the formula that'd explain why it feels so bad once you get into higher level.

[dedmist]

On 18/7th thief on leng cliffs with +6 shield and fan, I can handle a few packs of swordsmen without much issues. Any time archers show up, I either have to deal with them first or run. If they were less common it would be about the same as a MU showing up. However, they're pretty common and often show up in multiple packs. Really tough archers, by design, need to be thinned out or in smaller packs. Else, archers should be hitting for about half per round what they're currently doing.

TT Oak archers are more reasonable, even though the block rate seems low.

To put it in perspective, leng archers in Storm hit harder than curse banshees from Lands.

[Wirednuke]

On 18/7th thief on leng cliffs with +6 shield and fan, I can handle a few packs of swordsmen without much issues. Any time archers show up, I either have to deal with them first or run. If they were less common it would be about the same as a MU showing up. However, they're pretty common and often show up in multiple packs. Really tough archers, by design, need to be thinned out or in smaller packs. Else, archers should be hitting for about half per round what they're currently doing.

TT Oak archers are more reasonable, even though the block rate seems low.

To put it in perspective, leng archers in Storm hit harder than curse banshees from Lands.

Or as Lux suggested, make the archers much weaker from a health/defense stand point so they can be dealt with quicker. High damage/low defense... having both is where it gets scary.

[dedmist]

I'll give it a try when it changes, but my thoughts are this: Ranged hits in line with MU damage, but are common events, whereas dealing a MU is a few times per quarter hour, dealing with ranged happens every minute or two and there are multiple packs. Hitting a little harder than melee isn't a game breaker, but hitting a lot harder is less fun to deal with. If you just get to an area and find a MU, you can leave for a few seconds and come back to clear out a small staging area; they're not too hard to keep track of and this is our "sense of danger glass cannon" in a zone. One area with significantly beefy archers is fine, but it's pretty pervasive and is tuned to having max shielders rather than tuned to a NT experience.

[Tenscore]

agreed. there's a heavy saturation of archers across many lands.

2 possible suggestions:

• MA no-hinder Armor. (like Troll leather, or Sandworm leather, or maybe Shidosha drops some serpent scales?)
• turn the archer spawns down a notch or two. ;p