[b21] Bows & Arrows & Quivers etc Ideas and Questions

[jenx]

I've just won with a Cornac Temporal Warden, majoring entirely on archery. Melinda, Limmir, etc were a cinch, I hardly have to even move around. Just 1-2 shots and they all fell over (Melinda's guards took more than this as I was lower level).

Some thoughts:

1. The problems of damage with arrows has come up in several places. You need to get greater power than your bow. Another annoying thing, relating to all weapons, is that if you do enough physical damage with a weapon, the elemental damage isn't displayed/calculated for some reason. I was trying to crack 6000 HP with a single arrow damage, and got close, but as few creatures have this many hitpoints, I could only work on maximising physical damage. Why can't the elemental damage always be displayed as well? That way we could truly see which character packs the biggest punch.

2. My biggest gripe with arrows is that you can't buy them, so you are reliant on finding them. I barely used any in the whole game, as I found very few that were any use. If in the next beta, goods are put into dungeons more, can this be taken into consideration? Or have specialist bow and arrow shops?

3. Changing arrows mid fight to adjust to a particular creature is not worth the effort. Can we have a quiver with multiple slots, and importantly the option to shoot with no arrow if need be? Sometimes I forgot that I had loaded a great arrow set for a particular battle and then realise later that I just kept shooting with them.

4. Re bows, it would be nice to have more variety. There seems to be less options than with weapons. Only artifact bows have an extra effect, and there's only 2-3 of these that I've ever found.

5. It would also be good if someone could explain how range works. It seems to be the case that arrows do more damage if shot from afar - but is this true or just my impression?

[Hedrachi]

1. The problems of damage with arrows has come up in several places. You need to get greater power than your bow. Another annoying thing, relating to all weapons, is that if you do enough physical damage with a weapon, the elemental damage isn't displayed/calculated for some reason. I was trying to crack 6000 HP with a single arrow damage, and got close, but as few creatures have this many hitpoints, I could only work on maximising physical damage. Why can't the elemental damage always be displayed as well? That way we could truly see which character packs the biggest punch.

It doesn't truncate everything but physical, it's a kindasortamaybenotabug, but basically if you're doing more than one damage type in a round, and the thing dies before all the damage types are dealt, it only goes up to the damage type that it was doing when you killed it. So, as an example with the mindslayer I had with an artifact sword that also dealt light and darkness damage, with thermal and charged aura jammed through Conduit and a crystalline voratun battleaxe, I very rarely saw anything other than arcane, fire, and lightning. Now against the Master, I did see arcane/fire/lightning/physical/light/darkness all in the same round. Are you sure that you're getting damage truncation message when things don't die? I'd get damage truncation (still do when I do more than one damage type), but only when something dies.

And I agree with #4, there's hardly any ranged egos compared to melee weapons, armours, and staves.

[jenx]

Yes, I meant only when they die. Almost everything died on the first hit with my TW Archer, so I rarely saw it. In going for the record amount of HPs per single hit/shot, I wanted to know what the total damage was. Sounds like Mindslayers will top 8000 HP per hit. The highest I got was just under this. Unerring Shot against a sandworm, though this was AFTER I had won the game. Before winning, just under 7000 was my best physical hit.