Thanks/Archer Feedback

[ohioastro]

First off, thanks much for all of the work on ToME! It's quite a lot of fun, with many of the better features of rogue-like games retained, the annoying/tedious ones removed, and some very clever ideas in the mix. I've run a few classes up into the 20s, and didn't see much about archers. Since that's the class I've done best with, here are a few aspects that I noticed:

The class is pretty flexible - with a phase door rune, cure, heal/regen, regen for infusions, and an emphasis on dex+con it's surprisingly durable. I was able to run through with only the occasional death through the introductory 7 dungeons. Strong single target damage, some crowd control ability (especially with scatter shot/stuns), and tracking gives decent info on opponents. There are also some nice combinations that you can use; disengage/heave also fits well with the class style. However, there are some problems with the class:

1) Stamina is far too easy to drain, and tedious to restore. Mages have the mana runes; it'd be nice to have some capability to get stamina back, even if only out of battle. Waiting 100+ turns between them is a lot of downtime - archers are actually much worse than mages in this regard. Mages can at least take out many opponents per mana, unlike archers - given that the latter has many fewer multi-target options. I find myself resorting to shot-shot-steady shot instead of using other things because the downtime is too severe. This takes some of the fun out of the class.

2) Arrows are pretty heavy, and most of them don't seem to have much impact (except for the rare blue ones, which pack a whallop.) They also seem too valuable per pound. I'd suggest making them lighter and less valuable. (In fact, the game really seems to favor light things in the value-per-unit-weight department.)

3) The weakest point of the class is when you lose all stamina and have a lot of mobs to kill. This can be painful/deadly.

4) It's a bit odd that archers get no particular penalty at close quarters, since that's usually a tradeoff in ranged melee classes. In particular, this means that you don't seem to have a lot of reason to get better at melee skills.

Of the various abilities:

Steady Shot seems nicely balanced, cheap and quick to refresh.
Aim is very handy when you need to pick off a pile of critters - I use Rapid shot less often, but could see how others might prefer it if they could trade off less damage for more shots.
Piercing Arrow is very handy if you can line it up properly, but doesn't seem to scale up well and drains stamina.
Scatter Shot is very nice and can park a lot of foes for a long time. Volley of Arrows is good AE damage if you can line it up right - it's not clear from the description what it does (e.g. where the radius is counted from.) You can kill yourself with Scatter Shot at close range...
Pinning Shot also gives you some breathing room and I use it. Crippling Shot seems like a less effective variant.
Critical Shot is far too costly for something which isn't radically better than Steady Shot.
Dual Arrow doesn't seem to have an obvious role (see crippling/pinning shot above.)

Archers seem to have rather more stats that they can benefit from than would be typical, given that gameplay seems to very much favor raising con (survival) and the prime class skill (dex.) Are you supposed to need to raise will (stamina), cunning (crits) and strength (damage from bows seems to depend on it)? That's....everything but Magic.

Hope that helps...curious if anyone has gotten archers far in the game, or if slingers play differently.

[Canderel]

I entered on the wiki about archers/slingers...

Personally I think rapid shot sucks. Aim outperforms it so much.
I agree with the crit shot... Steady shot out performs crit shot a lot of the time, AND you can crit your steady shot too.

But the cooldowns are a bit high (all except steady), so you need crit shot to be able to go with another ability while steady cools down.

I would suggest lowering cooldowns of most, but increasing steady by 1 or 2.