Reducing shotgun spam

This is a first for me, posting something in S&I. I... I feel kinda... dirty.

Anyway.

Just posting to gauge people feedback for an idea I've been mulling over for a while now:

Make arrows fired from the archer's shotgun attack decay/break sooner.

In effect, I'm suggesting that arrows fired shotgun-style only fly ~half a screen (mid zoom) before breaking mid-air. Tops. Maybe even less distance.

Why?

Because the single biggest difference between skilled archers and pleb archers is that one group uses carefully aimed shots, at a variety of charge levels, to make life miserable for the enemy, whereas the other group uses a constant barrage of mindlessly spammed arrow-shotgun to make life miserable for the enemy.

One group, although individually tricky to deal with (due to their skill at being slippery-bastards), are generally few in number and hence can be dealt with, one way or another.

The second group, otoh, are legion; however many you kill, there're always more--and their spam is irrepressible.

If we make shotgun strictly a short-range attack then it can continue to be used as it was intended (allow a ballsy archer to 1v1 a knight) without allowing plebs to spam endlessly (clogging the very air one breaths) in the vain hope of being even remotely useful. Suddenly long range archery becomes a matter of needing to aim, and those wishing to employ shotgun will need to come the fuck out of their campy towers!

So, um yes. Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter?

 

No, you mentioned it in this thread (twice-- the second time replying to your own post). It was never discussed, and in fact appears to have been ignored/lost in the general flow of conversation. If you want an idea discussed, make a distinct thread for it! As it stands you broke the first rule of S&I:

Otoh, I looked through the list before posting and, funnily enough, this idea wasn't present.

Add to the discussion or not, but don't accuse me of failing to take all due care before wading down into this foul corner of the forums.

I did my research, sir. Maybe next time you'll do yours?

 

I really just want legolas back. Shotgun is annoying for everybody except the one shooting it. There are so many ways that legolas could have been changed instead of making it into a shotgun, that was too drastic in my opinion.

 

I'm intrigued about the love people are spouting for legolas. Both attack styles seem intended to capitalise on the shield-break effect that occurs within 10 tiles of a knight, but that really makes them a cqc attack. What other highly-useful abilities can you ascribe to legolas (but not shotgun) that wouldn't be made useless/impossible by the suggested change of having arrows from 3x attacks break sooner (possibly almost as soon as they've exceed that 10 tile shield-break range)?

Ah. That was your first mistake. Everyone knows I don't have a sense of humour; I am actually a spam bot from the future that fell in love with @Shadlington's mighty chin-cleft and @Geti's wavy golden locks--and have been jealously guarding their forums ever since. Beep bop beep bop.

 

I actually don't really find that archer spam is all that annoying (in pub matches that is, gather/tickets mode is another story) because I can try however many times I need to, to either get past them or kill all the spamming archers. Because of the decay, you don't really have to worry about being shot until you get close to their tower, so archers aren't overpowered at long range.
I feel like the archer class in general is constantly up for debate because people always want to play archer in 2 ways: close-midrange ninja, or long range pro sniper. The archer population seems to be split in half because of this. As it stands, if you were to make archer tip slightly more in one style, the other half won't like it. Personally, I think no matter how people look at it, this is probably going to be the most balanced (in mechanics, items are still up in the air) it will get.

 

Ideally, this kind of change would solve some of that, as you'd have to be within ~10-12 blocks for the arrows to be reaching at all.