How to stop worrying and love the bomb?

Archers can literally fly across the fucking map at speeds no other class can match, and stun knights who are holding bombs and make them blow themselves the fuck up. If you get hit with a bomb its your own fault for being a scrub. You also has access to both the best explosive (outside of the Ballista), and a fucking ranged, spammable, unblockable stun. Even with this archers still bitch, and when i get hit with a water arrow i just ... ... ...

"y 1 slas i kill!?"
"y bom go boom nd i ded!?"
"noob knit bomfly every day!?"
**Actual fucking quotes

 

Weighing in with my two cents:

• When I play as a knight, bombs might as well be free. It is a rare occasion that I don't have 4 bombs every life. I definitely feel like they should cost more, and 25 - 30 feels about right. 4 bombs ought to be close to or as much as a keg.
• Decreasing the max-damage blast radius is a great idea. A precision throw deserves to waste an archer or builder, but getting caught on the very outside of the blast should not feed the enemy a kill; it rewards haphazard spamming of bombs far too well
• Having arrow collision turn bombs against the enemy is a fantastic idea and probably the coolest proposed mechanic I've heard so far. Makes water arrows potentially more interesting as well...

This is worth mentioning twice. I don't think anyone is more qualified to comment on what is genuinely unfair to archers.

 

Of course archers still die to slashes more. The difference is, when I die to slashing, I usually deserve it. The issue with bombs is my deaths to them tend to come out of nowhere. Plus, in higher skill games, most knights can cook a bomb fairly reliably and knights will always have a bomb on hand. A good knight can hit an archer out of the air with a well timed bomb, a good archer doesn't have much to do about that but run. With slashes, I can mind my distance and shoot to stun when the knight charges up. Since knights can shield while cooking a bomb, I'm not left with many options.

 

It annoys me so much to see the knights considered "good" and they will just light a bomb whenever they get in a fight. Usually I am smart enough to stay back before they throw it, but they will light another, and another, and another until eventually they kill the guy, even if they didn't need the bombs, but somehow they still have enough bombs for the next fight.

As someone who plays as archer alot, one of the best counters is water arrows, if you stun someone and it explodes while they are holding it they die. However, it is the hardest thing ever to succeed at. You must hit them right before the bomb explodes, but also not have them notice you charging or the arrow flying in the air. If they have a shield up (which every knight should around archers) then you have to hit them directly. You don't even get any coins from the kill, so you won't be able to buy more water arrows, and coins are not that easy to come by as an archer, not to mention if you buy alot of water arrows you won't be able to buy fire arrows/bomb arrows/siege weapons/mines/keg and bombs for knights, that you should be buying in order to end the game.

Tl;dr bombs should not be free and needs better counters.

 

I thought it was safe to say "alot" on these forums because I thought nobody here had seen those, but I guess not. You got me there.

 

In a vacuum, sure, you can watch the timing of a knight cooking his bomb. I can usually get away in a 1v1 fight.
Once I'm watching for incoming arrows and trying to back up my knights, that all goes out the window. I can't watch every knight for bomb cooking all the time. Knights can't watch every archer either, but the difference is, a single arrow doesn't insta-kill them. Once you take an arrow as knight, the archer gets your attention. If you take a bomb as archer, you're dead.

 

Reducing the blast radius does not necessitate that it be reduced to the point of being useless. Knights have lots of creative ways of using bombs and straight up throwing it at a forward-facing enemy knight is probably the least likely way to score a hit with a bomb to begin with.

Edit: And the suggestion isn't even to reduce the blast radius as a whole; only to spread it out more appropriately, with less damage on the outskirts.

 

^THIS

As long as the insta-death-for-non-knights radius is smaller, I'm happy. Bombs that hit me and don't kill make for some of the most interesting fights. You go flying and have to think fast to recover. As long as there still all the stun and knock-back, it's still going to hurt like hell. But then, getting bombed out of nowhere as an archer goes from punishing to challenging. Which i think is what we want, because bomb SHOULD be a challenge to archers. Right now there a sudden game over. Sure there will still be the odd direct-hit random bomb from nowhere, that's never fully going away. But if the kill radius were reduced, this would also result in more of those challenging, fly-through-the-air-stunned moments, a good knight can go for the kill like that, a good archer can maybe save himself. Thats where it gets interesting. I want more of that.

 

>Implying that not watching 3 knights for bomb cook times = blatant ignorance of surroundings.

And no, knights don't throw them "Randomly". They throw them AT things. Sometimes they miss. In heated games with heavy knight melee, this happens a fair amount.

And I know archers are supposed to be a support roll, that's USUALLY when we get bombed. If I'm rushing a knight, I'm watching him for bombs and can respond (even though that basically means dropping what I'm doing and running away, see the other points this thread). It's when I'm trying to support a big knight melee that a bomb catches me off guard. Knights don't watch for every incoming arrow, I can catch them off guard even when they're minimally distracted. The difference is, they take a heart or two of damage, then notice me and can respond to the threat. You're expecting archers to have a level of awareness that is required of no other class.

I also don't get this implication that archers don't play any other classes. As the support class, we usually have to pick up a second class for when teams have too many archers or when the situation calls for something else. @kodysch started this thread and he's a solid builder, as well as an archer. I play builder myself about 30% of the time. Builders watch their surroundings least of all I find, and yet as a builder I rarely have this problem, that extra heart makes a world of difference.

I get that it's suppose to be a fast paced game. Getting thrown around by bombs rather than insta-killed would not change that.

 

This

 

At 0:07 you can actually see the thrower!

 

For a half second, yeah. Geez Oodle, pay attention for once! You were probably just staring off into space at those 4 knights in front of you. Psh...

 

That seemed to be a well aimed shot from the top of the tower.
Comparatively, no one seems to find issue with archers that hail special ammo --or really, any ammo-- from a similarly obtuse distance/angle.
(for all the bickering about mobility not being enough, and too much; arrows being strong enough, and weak enough, I can only look in awe of most of this.)

Anyways @qstrahl, bombs do have a bomb gradient: you probably want it more compact (thus concentrating it, but calls into question tile damage), or increasing damage drop off with respect to distance.
@BanakaI1, the issue there seems that bomb ownership (thus who get coins) only changes if you pick the bomb up, and toss it back. For the most part, there is a pretty hefty fine on the person that ends up killing themselves. Even if you don't profit out of it directly, it is a considerable blow to the person on the other side.

For the most part, archers seem to be vastly dependent on coins and special ammo, making them a coin-dump, "support" class; this could be taken as a[n ineffectual] means of preventing eternal special ammo hail.
(To be more risque, they have some pretty heavy pay-offs in terms of destruction, so being a, expensive, glass sniper cannon seems warranted.)

 

The issue there is, a single well aimed shot from a knight kills an archer, a few well aimed shots from an archer wake up a sleeping knight.

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 8, 2014, Original Post Date: Apr 8, 2014 ---

I should add, nobody seems to mention the second half of this in their responses which is: While, if you see a knight pull out a bomb, you can dodge, it means dropping whatever your doing and just running away, even if the bombs not going to be aimed at you (Since it's extremely difficult to tell where a knight is going to throw it.) Even if Oodle had seen the knight cook that bomb, it's unlikely that it would be aimed his way. So you're left with the absurd dilemma of running from every bomb or getting surprise exploded one in a while. Unless there's plenty of mechanics built around it, an unpredictable attack shouldn't be a 1 hit kill. Especially in such a chaotic game like KAG.