[1057] Lack of Archers in Competitive Games.

So I just finished a "Challenge the Zens" match and noticed this. Archers tend to be generally under represented in public games already. But in competitive games, you can see a team that's 100% knights and has no problems at all. It seems like archer is the only class a team can go fully without, as a team of all knight with a builder once in a while will do just fine. Yet if a team had no knights, they get utterly destroyed.

I can see how archers are balanced on paper, but in practice, it's just not there. If it were, knight would not be the "correct" class when playing. While an archer can take a knight 1v1 most of the time, once a game gets chaotic, the archer can't do much since they can't take a hit. A well balanced class-based game should not have a "right" and "wrong" class to play. I've never seen a team complain that it had too many knights, yet I get yelled at for playing archer when I'm the only one on my team sometimes.

Regardless of if think there's a balance issue, I think people need to admit that there's at least some problem when 1 class turns up far less in serious games.

(Yes, I know Trumbles is an amazing archer who wrecks knights for breakfast. But you SHOULDN'T have to be THAT good to make the class viable.)

 

The sort of skill cliff that you had to climb for b800 archers was a lot more shallow than they are now.
In essence, you just needed to learn you could stumble any class with a mid shot, and do about 1.5h with a good upper shot. You could take one hit, and you didn't need massive tracts of land to fit a knight.

But now, you have to become Trumbles which is a tall order.
Grappling prevents you from starting a shot; you need to just grossly spam 1h good mid shots for days, and you need to give up massive tracts of land to keep on fighting a knight.
All in all, there is not real difference between Trumbles, and a scummy archer, nowadays, other than the fact that he actually deals damage, and you feel like you are fighting someone. There aren't that many that have the sort of skills, or persistence that Trumbles has, and usually opt towards camping, shotgun stunning (which works not much of the time, I might add, and just adds to nonsense stalemating) and part timing as an archer to give off a stray bomb hail: "easier" things.


I suppose the issue is not that an archer could take a knight on, 1-1, but the larger issue is that is it worth your god damn time (Archer-Knight combat takes considerable amounts more time, effort, and land than in b800) and is it worth the man-time you could otherwise spend doing something else as something else. (You can easily figure out the value man-time of an Archer compared to a Knight, and even a "minecrafting" Builder)
Because of that, yes you could say they are underrepresented, number-wise, but value-wise they are as represented as they should be.

 

*shouldn't

 

1v1 archer can still take a knight no problem, I can wipe the floor in small matches, and can do much more than stall. The problem is, once a match gets anywhere close to normal sized, you have nowhere to go. All the dodging in the world cant save you when there are attacks flying everywhere and you can only take 1 hit.

--- Double Post Merged, Mar 29, 2014 ---

Ah thanks, fixed it.

 

I end up getting saved by an archer whenever they try to shotgun stun, let alone stun me, so, that's the weird part; their class defining abilities bite them in the ass.

 

I think I get what you mean. But in any of those situations, I think a second knight would be just as helpful...

--- Double Post Merged, Mar 29, 2014, Original Post Date: Mar 29, 2014 ---

At least vs an archer, I can shoot him down before going after the knight

 

I don't think knockbacks are all that counter-intuitive, you just need to know how to use them properly.

If you're attacking from the same direction as your knights, you don't want to knock an enemy back, because that means a missed slash from your team. In this situation, you should either spam half-shots like nobody's business, or attack from a high angle when you're aiming to stun. This negates most of the pushback in normal situations, and actually makes your stuns useful to your team.

Flanking is a whole other story, and it's one of the situations where knockbacks are immensely useful. Sending a stunned enemy straight into your own knights is awesome.

The other situation where knockbacks are super helpful is when an enemy is trying to scale/bompjump up your wall. Jump on their head and legolas, odds are the fall damage will gib them, netting you a spectacular looking kill.

^I've landed on mid-bombjump knights and done this. It's really goddamn cool.

Not to mention all the times knockbacks have saved me from bomb-holding knights.

 

Archers have a ton of fun ways to mess with bomb jumping knights. I like shooting the bomb away when they go for the jump. (Bonus points if they're carrying a keg.)

 

Most knights have just learned to hold their bomb until the last second, though..

If you time your shot, you can totally negate their bomb jump with a single arrow hitting them from the opposite direction they're going.

 

Who Kegs and Bomb Jumps?

 

Good players? Lol.

Kegs explode instantly when thrown from a high place, so bombjumping w/ a keg has all kinds of advantages.

 

I love the tittle of the thread because it is where my opinion fits perfectly.
"Archers are fine, people are the problem."
So yeah, in general, they're not well represented, since we see a lot of campers doing pretty much nothing but to be annoying for both teams. However it is a matter of the way plebs are playing it, not on the classic mechanics directly. I'm not even being arrogant here, if you ever saw me in a server you can tell by my K/D that I'm not a great archer, but I'm always at the front, helping in the push, and even when I'm forced to stay behind base's walls I try to be at the edges making enemy life's a Hell, if you're doing a great job as an archer, I bet your team won't want you to switch your class.

 

Well, I think that Archers are pretty important.
Example: Capping flags by climbing over the wall, Bomb arrowing their bases, Annoy people And even help Knights with figthing.

So I don't think they should be underrepresented. ;)

 

That's mostly stuff that either relies on taking rare opportunities or does very little. A knight is useful all the time. They drive the game. Archers are important, but they're nothing compared to knights.

 

I hate all this "archers are useless" nonsense. It's about the player, not the class. IMO archer does pretty well in it's current state, but very few people know how to play it in an effective manner.

The archer's skill ceiling is much higher than the knight, even at competitive levels, there are very few players who have become proficient with / mastered archer.

 

Nerf the bombs and the game would be a bit more balanced! (Make them more expensive, 80g per bomb?)

 

^ l2play

 

....no.

That's so bad lol....

"lol bombs now cost as much as mines"

Do people even think anymore?