Archer changes including two new categories

[bpat]

Archer is super weak at defense but I like the idea of a glass cannon. These ideas try to preserve that theme while making them have at least decent defense, though still far weaker than that of other classes.

Merge Aim and Rapid Shot into one talent, giving access to both sustains. Also remove the stamina sustain cost.
Add a new talent Desperate Shot into the third slot of Archery Training

Desperate Shot
Cost: 5 stamina
Use mode: activated
Cooldown: 35
Use speed: Archery

Fire a shot dealing 100% weapon damage, increased by 1.01-1.65% for each for each 1% of missing life or stamina. This talent cannot be used unless life or stamina is below 50%

Comments: Archers take a lot of damage, so this makes a nice finisher when in a tough situation. At best it's weaker than Vital Shot at a much longer cooldown, but sometimes that's exactly what you need.


Class category: Archery Specialist (1.3, locked)

Point Blank Shot
Cost: 35 stamina
Range: 2
Use mode: active
Cooldown: 16
Use speed: Archery

Shoot at close range for 200-371% damage, knocking your target back to your maximum archery range.

Comments: While Intuitive Shots is great, it's unreliable. This fixes that.


Opportunist
Cost: 40 stamina
Use mode: sustained
Cooldown: 10
Use speed: instant

Never miss an opportunity to fire a shot. You automatically shoot for 100% damage at the target of your Disengage and Heave talents, as well as any enemy moving away from you within range 3-5. This can only trigger on any particular target once every 4-2 turns.

Comments: More damage! Also makes Field Control more appealing.


Escape
Use mode: activated
Cooldown: 30
Use speed: instant

Increases your stamina regeneration by 10-23, defense by 37-101, movement speed by 214-335%, and all resists by 40% for 6 turns, ending prematurely if you use any talent. Using this talent disarms you for 4 turns, ignoring resists. Also passively prevents you from getting hit by your own arrows.

Comments: Makes you fast and hard to kill, you can't use it like a Movement Infusion since you can't actually fight for at least four turns. Pure defensive ability that you can use to get out of bad situations.


Unload
Cost: 30 stamina
Use mode: sustained
Cooldown: 15
Use speed: instant

Quickly unload your quiver or pouch into your foes, causing your shoot talent to take half as long but also reducing all your damage by 52-33%. Using any talent aside from shoot causes this talent to end. This powerful talent drains 0.1 stamina per ammo in your quiver or pouch per turn.

Comments: Just does lots of damage and makes ammo and on-hit effects more meaningful. Eats your stamina and prevents you from spamming attack talents though.


Generic category: Archer's Focus (1.3)

Archer's Focus
Use mode: activated
Cooldown: 20
Use speed: Archery

Focus on your target for 5 turns, giving yourself vision of it and increasing your damage to it by 10-25%, but reducing your damage to all others by 80%. This talent's duration is refreshed whenever you hit your focused target with a shot, and its cooldown is reset if you kill your target.

Comments: Mini-track that boosts damage. Notably takes a turn so you won't spam it on trash and will only use it in longer fights.


Eagle Eye
Passive

Your focus increases your accuracy by 15-36, critical chance by 5-12%, and critical multiplier by 10-24% against your target. If your critical chance exceeds 100%, your shots have chance equal to your excess critical chance to land a Headshot, which deals double your critical damage.

Comments: More damage! Accuracy is nice since Perfect Strike is in an awkward category (not that you'd need it). Also super crits to make Aim better late game.


Ignore Distractions
Passive

You disregard all enemies aside from your focused target, reducing the damage they deal to you by 45-72%. This damage reduction is halved for foes higher rank than your target.

Comments: Huge defense here, but doesn't work well against the targets you actually want to defend against. You can Focus a boss and take little damage by its entourage of elites, but the boss is the actually scary target so it's not that great. And you can't target the elites because the boss will still do high damage to you.


Disrupting Shot
Cost: 25 stamina
Use mode: activated
Cooldown: 6/5/5/4/4
Use speed: Archery
Travel speed: instant

Your focus is so great you can predict and interrupt your opponents actions. The next time your focused target attempts to use a non-instant talent within your range, you immediately fire a shot for 25% damage causing the talent to fail and go on cooldown. This shot is instant and cannot miss. Additionally you put 1/1/2/2/3 random other talents of the same type (Technique, Spell, Psionic, etc) on cooldown as well.

Comments: Now this is what you'll use to stop those bosses from killing you. Shuts down mental and magic classes pretty hard which you really need to be able to do. However this will drain your stamina pretty fast if using it on cooldown.

[grobblewobble]

The Escape skill is something I would really like to see. Being killed killed by your own Vital Shot is lame and super frustrating, it's what made me stop trying the class.

[Sheila]

The only thing I disagree with are aim and rapid shot being the same talent, because I want one at 1/5 maybe 3/5 at best and the other at 5/5 cool ideas otherwise.

[Radon26]

" because I want one at 1/5 maybe 3/5 at best and the other at 5/5"
yeah, that's the thing. why would you invest in some of the talents otherwise?
i don't know if activating one disables the others, but if they do, then that's an exact reason why they should be merged.

like chants tree... you will never really invest in any other than the best, and will never use any other.
but if you let them be powered from the same points, the other ones might see play more often. AAAAAnd it makes room for a new talent, if i take this right?

[Mordy]

But the issue here is that both Aim and Rapid Shot include detrimental effects when you turn them on. And those effects scale with talent level. In the case of Aim, it's an attack speed penalty. But since bows base attack speed is 125% you are still using less than a turn for one attack when using Aim at 1/5 and 2/5. Above that, you start using more than one turn per attack.


Also, yeah you cannot use both Aim and Rapid Shot at the same time.

[Sheila]

But the issue here is that both Aim and Rapid Shot include detrimental effects when you turn them on. And those effects scale with talent level. In the case of Aim, it's an attack speed penalty. But since bows base attack speed is 125% you are still using less than a turn for one attack when using Aim at 1/5 and 2/5. Above that, you start using more than one turn per attack.


Also, yeah you cannot use both Aim and Rapid Shot at the same time.

The thing is that aim is still good at 1/5 and 2/5 because its effects scale with dexterity.
rapid shot only scales with levels, so if you want to use it, it needs to be 5/5

[bpat]

Hmm that's annoying about Aim. Maybe add 5% physical resistance penetration per point or just make it worse at 1/5 and better at 5/5. Also Blakmane pointed out that perhaps Archer's Focus shouldn't use weapon speed since it would be effected by Rapid Fire and Aim, so instead if could take a regular turn.

[jenx]

I've been running dozens and dozens of archers on insane RL, to try to understand the class better, with the new changes to the game and archer, like prowess.

Haven't even got to Fortress yet, but with most other classes, I can do that no problems (except ROGUE, which I can't ever get to work).

They suffer one major problem compared to other classes, they can't defend against large magic attacks. With armour you can get around melee and archer npcs, but then you open a chest, out pops a dragon, and bam, game over to 300+ lightning attacks one after the other.

AM is not an option, as it needs buffing.

All the successful classes have ways to mitigate dmg (reality smearing, solipsism, crazy shields, etc).

So, what about we change the talent in archery prowess (Which is locked until lvl 18), so that it works against all incoming dmg? You can still instadie, as it won't always work, but it will improve the odds. That and good use of shielding runes and lots of life, and I think I could clear insane.

[Zizzo]

The Escape skill is something I would really like to see. Being killed killed by your own Vital Shot is lame and super frustrating, it's what made me stop trying the class.

You want my Stop Hitting Yourself! addon.

[Blakmane]

I just completed an embers of rage archer on insane/adventure so have a lot to talk about in terms of rebalancing the archer. I'll split this into three posts to make it easier to follow my chain of logic. First off I'll talk about my experiences playing archer on insane and go on a bit of a rant. Then I'll make a post summarising why/how Archer currently doesn't work well in a rough sense and the main elements a fix needs. Finally. I'll talk about your changes Bpat and maybe give some of my own ideas.

The TLDR of all this is that the Archer is currently weak and tedious. A new category or two will help the archer diversify, but ultimately it needs substantial quality of life improvements to the current array of talents to bring it up to date again.

Without further ado

Character impressions:

Here is the character vault:

http://te4.org/characters/167506/tome/3 ... 2775ffc12c


I played on Embers of Rage because AoA is long and honestly Embers is enough for archer tedium. This is the first Insane archer win on any mode, but there isn't actually even a nightmare archer win on Embers. This goes to show how deeply unpopular the class is. I did also play some AoA to compare: AoA is harder but I think an insane win is actually doable there too -- it's not THAT much harder. I used the vault but my build wasn't dependent on it. You could certainly optimise more. Even with Rapid shot I comfortably reached 100% crit and ~112 accuracy fully buffed which was enough to make talents stick reliably on any enemy in the game. This continued to cement my belief that Rapid shot is considerably better than Aim as crit chance and debuff power are supposed to be Aim's big selling points. At no point did I feel like Aim was necessary to get debuffs to stick. Rapid shot was also invaluable to give time to move out of the way of incoming projectiles. I definitely felt like regardless of the Aim/Rapid shot debate, building archers was braindead as you have enough talents to invest in everything and didn't really effect how you played tactically at all. At most an Aim build might vault across different items but that's it.

I lost a life to three bosses: one in ritch tunnels, one on observatory path, one in final stage of slumbering. They were all higher movespeed than me or in tight confines. The ritch boss put me to sleep and then killed me in one hit. Observatory boss was an avoidable death. Slumbering boss was nightmare (through unstoppable salve) into inner demons vital shot. I also lost two lives to my own vital shot against last boss. In total, vital shot was responsible for three of my five deaths.

I had to scum the last boss once because of how buggy randboss talents on the last boss god pieces are (oozemancer summons at level 999 with 150 million HP, and whenever the eye awoke it time prisoned me without invulnerability so I got to watch my character freeze and then the enemies take turns until I died). The version I won still had BS talents (Nature summons again at some weird overflow talent level and the Nature heal ability for 36,000 HP) but it was doable. I strongly recommend making a backup save before you fight last boss on insane with any character as some combinations are literally unwinnable due to how buggy it is.

Being careful to double check every rare for some talent that moves me into my own shot was probably the biggest and most annoying source of tedium. The most ridiculous aspect of playing archer was that self deaths are such a threat lategame and arrows are so slow (especially with slow motion which is a very common talent on rares) that you spend most of your time fighting rares by standing next to them and unloading point-blank. This tells me there is a fundamental problem with how archers function currently. The other main source of frustrating was just how tactically bland their aggressive options were - it's nice that the class is simple but currently it's just cycling through shoot talents: the riders are all generic enough that you basically just apply them in sequence. A class can be relatively simple without being boring (Zerker, Summoner, even Alch is better). I actually found the lack of any mental debuffs other than silence actually a big issue for the class in-play as until I got gloom on-hit I couldn't cope with spine of the world.

The class's weakest point was at the very beginning when you have no escapes at all but they actually weren't as bad as some melee classes. The biggest weakness was actually a dip in midgame before you get vital shot running when your ability to kill things starts to run out and bosses are applying lots of debuffs. The most difficult enemies were summoners including necros generally, although that's more of an insane+ thing, things that moved fast and/or could apply lots of debuffs especially sleep, and anything that applies ranged damage without a projectile (such as dragon breath and beams). Melee enemies were never intimidating and once I had rush + bullshot + disengage online to run away from them they were free kills... until lategame where I had to fight next to them to avoid self death from some nonsense talent or other.

Medical injectors substantially improve the class and are basically essential (you need two slots for move infusion if you aren't a whitehoof and archers have no innate debuff clearance). I didn't actually feel squishy or glass-cannony exactly as I had plenty of HP and kiting potential - it was more an issue of not being able to do anything if things went south and no way to cope with situations that couldn't be fixed with 'apply arrow debuffs to face'.

All up I did actually have some fun playing the Archer. Being able to apply large amounts of damage and and entire list of debuffs to a single target was the funnest part of the class and I don't think this should change. But, never going to touch it again unless there's some changes as it was really tedious. Hopefully an insane win gives my opinion on how to make the class funner and a bit more viable a little more credibility.

Summary:

- I played and won a whitehoof archer in embers on insane adventure to catalogue my experiences

- Vital shot self-death, lack of escapes/buff-debuff clearance and a homogenous talent selection were the most frustrating things about the class.

- Dishing damage and applying a million debuffs were the funnest parts of the class. I didn't really feel that much like a glass cannon honestly so much as a one-trick pony who just couldn't cope if a situation couldn't be fixed via liberal application of arrow.

[Blakmane]

A short summary of why Archer is unfun and roughly how this could be improved:

Archers actually have two main problems that both make them unfun to play.

---Problem 1) Archers are boring and tedious to play. This is because they---

a) Lack build diversity and depth. Aim/Rapid shot is touted as the 'big choice' but it barely effects your playstyle. You basically just pick up the shoot talents and then apply them one after the other. There isn't a lot of design space for archers as they are hedged between skirm, gunslinger and TW.

b) Even without vital shot, it is really really easy to get dragged into your own arrows. This enforces an extremely tedious style of play and eventually even melee range engagement on a large proportion of rares.

Fix:

a) Tweak Aim/Rapid shot to give a really tangible difference in how they operate. Possibly split them into two trees.

b) Slightly tweak some of the currently existing talents to have interesting utility and reduce the number of redundant 'do X% damage' talents.

c) Give Archers some way to either increase projectile speed substantially, decrease self-damage substantially, or both.

--Problem 2) Archers area weak class with very few options to survive difficult situations. This is because--

a) Very few ways to deal with positive OR negative effects

b) Extremely poor damage mitigation (poisons only)

c) Very poor mobility.

Fix:

a) Give them a way of clearing/avoiding effects on themselves and/or others, or a way to substantially boost their own saves.

b) Give them at least one other form of damage mitigation.

c) Give them mobility tree and unlock combat techniques.

d) The reductions in tedium will also make the class easier to play, which will improve their power as well (less frequent tedium induced mistakes).


....

To make it clear, nobody is expecting an Archer rework to make them anything but a vague mid-tier in terms of power. I definitely don't think archer should be better than e.g. TW. The concept of 'shoot things a lot with arrows' needs to be maintained and the archer as the 'starting ranged class' should keep a simple base. This doesn't mean we can't improve that base so there's some subtlety and actual viability rather than the boring mess it currently is in.

[grobblewobble]

Fix:

c) Give Archers some way to either increase projectile speed substantially, decrease self-damage substantially, or both.

Yes yes yes pleeease yes.

Did I mention that I agree?

c) Give them mobility tree and rush tree unlocked.

Mobility yes, but Rush? Maybe it's better to give them Step Up instead? (the Battle Tactics tree)

[Blakmane]

OK, your changes Bpat:

- First off I think they are great. I really like Archer's focus and think it should be implemented basically as-is. I like every one of the abilities, I like how it either improves aim or offsets the cost of rapid shot, and I think the damage mitigation is novel.

- I think archery specialist could be better integrated into existing trees. As-is Archer has enough things to spend category points on. The only dud from my perspective is unload, which is kinda just rapid shot all over again and doesn't address any of the issues with the class. The knockback shoot talent also already exists as part of Archery - Slings.

-More tweaks are necessary IMO. Aim/Rapid shot distinction needs to give more build room for archer and they need a way to address self damage (escape does not help as the threat is always death in the same turn as your talent use).

Here's how I would reshuffle the current class trees to encourage some build diversity and lightly improve on the existing framework. My idea is to create two possible avenues for the archer to build either as a long range precision sniper or as a legolas-style rapid shot archer. The archer can viably take both and swap into rapid shot as enemies get closer, or take only one and supplement with other trees like superiority or dirty fighting. The 'feel' of the archer is unchanged in that it still puts out arrows, is generally pretty glass cannon but now also has a niche not filled by TW or skirm (which are melee/range hybrid and defensive mobility respectively).

Simple changes:

- Combat techniques unlocked

- Give mobility tree unlocked at 1.0 mastery

- Let dirty fighting use shoot talent if ranged weapon is equipped and apply on ranged attacks. Why is a melee tree here in the first place?

- Strangling shot removes 1-3 positive physical or mental effects from the target (suffocating breaks their physical and mental composure).

- Relaxed shot clears 1-3 detrimental mental effects from you (as you regain focus).

More complex talent tree changes:

Archery Training: Move aim and rapid shot out entirely. Replace with Opportunist and Escape as per Bpat's post.

Archery Prowess: Remove and shuffle abilities into the two new trees as below


New Talent tree - Precision Archery (1.3, unlocked):

Code: Select all

Talent 1: Aim

Comments: No changes

Talent 2: Flare

Comments: At level 5, flare gives vision to all enemies in the radius for [TL*1] turns, reducing their stealth mod by X.

This has synergy with a longer range style and gives you a reason to level flare past 3.  Also gives some vision and utility that flare currently lacks.

Talent 3: High velocity
Use mode: passive

You have honed the art of firing high-velocity shots that, with careful aiming, fly much further than a standard missile and penetrate targets more effectively.

The speed of all ranged attacks you make is increased by [TL scaling 100-500%] and missiles gain [TL scaling 1-5%] physical resistance penetration per tile travelled. When using aim, your range with any ranged weapon increases by [TL scaling 1-3].

Comments: This solves the issue of annoying long range kiting/death by vital shot one way by making your shots really fast so they hit long range targets quicker. The range increase creates a new niche and, given that bows actually have a pretty modest range anyway, never increases range out past what is feasible with other classes. Projectile speed would have to be balanced, I chose an arbitrary number here based off projectile speeds I saw.

Talent 4: Crippling shot

Comments: improve scaling to 0-60% so that it doesn't max out at TL 3. 60% cripple is fantastic and enough to make this a great ability, especially at range where it slows movement so you can get more shots off.

New Talent tree - (Rapid fire (1.3, unlocked):

Code: Select all

Talent 1: Rapid shot

Comments: No changes

Talent 2: Pinning shot[

Comments: At level 3 effects up to 1-4 (at TL 3-6) random enemies adjacent to the target (pins/entangles them together). 

Decent synergy with rapid shot as enemies will clump up as they approach. Not much more to say other than this may encourage people to take more than 1-2 ranks and provides some subtle tactical usage.

Talent 3: Close range archery
Use mode: passive

You have honed the art of firing at close-range, ducking between your own shots to expertly target nearby foes.

You take [TL 1-6 ~scaling 40-95%] less damage and no detrimental effects from your own attacks and your ranged attacks deal an additional [TL scaling 2-7%] damage for each tile less than your maximum range as long the missile travelled at least 1 tile. When using rapid shot you have a [TL scaling ~5-25%] chance to slow a target's move speed by [TL scaling 10-30%] for 1 turn on hit.

Comments: Encourages rapid shot archers to stand as close to their targets as possible without being in melee range. Fixes vital shot problem and also lets you put down scatter shot without fear. Synergises with pin and gives rapid shot users a way to keep enemies at that sacred 2-3 tile range even longer. The move speed reduction seems minor but it's an extra arrow. I'm not sold on it so up for suggestions if there's a more rapid-shot esque ability someone can think of. The other possibility is a scaling knockback that stochastically keeps enemies at that 2-4 tile range, but that could be annoying too. Alternatively some light damage reduction to offset the fact that rapid shot is sitting right in front of enemies.

Talent 4: Scatter shot

Comments: No changes. Already fantastic.

As you can hopefully see, this is mostly just a reshuffle and minor tweaking to improve the existing build options for archer. I've actually only suggested two new skills and they are both passives. Most changes should be pretty simple --- I don't know LUA but I'm familiar with code more generally so I can have a look at starting to implement some of these things.

Some or all of these things could be implemented as it's all pretty modular.

[Blakmane]

Fix:

c) Give Archers some way to either increase projectile speed substantially, decrease self-damage substantially, or both.

Yes yes yes pleeease yes.

Did I mention that I agree?

c) Give them mobility tree and rush tree unlocked.

Mobility yes, but Rush? Maybe it's better to give them Step Up instead? (the Battle Tactics tree)

They already get combat techniques locked. Currently it's basically a must-unlock with your first cat point to get rush. Without rush you don't have enough mobility to survive anything. Archers absolutely need rush or a rush-like targeted move ability so they can clear daze with infusion and then rush away from melee targets.

Unlocking combat techniques lets them have a bit more diversity for their level 10 cat point.

As an aside, disengage etc is not good enough to accomplish this reliably due to the unmodifiable trajectory meaning you can't break LoS from your target. Distance travelled is also pitiful without investment. If you improved disengage to allow for semi- targetable escape it would be OK, but just allowing people to put a point in rush at level 1 is a simpler fix (and changing disengage is beyond the scope of archery-specific fixes).

*Edit*

Total tangent - Shell tinkers should probably work with slings and bows as well, even if the verisimilitude is a bit odd. That'd help out archers a little too as shells are really good.

[Razakai]

I had a Bastion/Assassin style rework planned but it wasn't up to scratch so I scrapped the idea, so I'm glad to see someone else proposing changes.
I think giving them Acrobatics and Conditioning could easily fix a lot of their problems. Would give them some mobility, tankiness and debuff removal.