[866][Gen] What would/do you like on archers and what do you not like?

People don't seem to understand that time=skill. If you put time into kag and get good at it, It is actually very well balanced. For example, I play a lot of kag with @Nighthawk (an archer) and even though he doesn't kill me very often, he's very good me away or distracted while his team gangs up on me. He will also go out into the middle of the battlefield and fight people at mid-range, just behind his friendly knights, and get quite a few kills. Did I mention he also spends a lot of time playing as archer, and wasn't nearly as good as he is now when he first started in beta? He put hours upon hours into the game until he got good. Just because you can't be good at something after an hour of playing archer, doesn't mean archer is unbalanced.

Also, I don't play archer that often, but when I do, I'm still pretty decent just from watching other good archers and how they play.

 

I still don't get why people want to use bomb arrows for killing knights.

Unlike bombs, they take down buildings and siege fast. Basically instantly. I mean you need 2 bombs just take down a single block of stone and good luck using them to get through a stone door (unless you can break the support so that they fall down and break, but then you aren't really breaking the door itself). I mean even if you have 4 bombs, I really doubt that you'll do much damage to a building unless it has a very strong weak spot in an area you can reach. Other wise if knights want to take something down, they have to use kegs and that involves having other people with you so that you can get to the building and protect the keg long enough so that blows up the area you need.

Bomb arrows on the other hand give 0 shits about buildings and you can use them from a long range. They are almost as good as a keg and unlike a keg, you generally can't block. Problem is most people suck at aiming or just want to use them for killing stuff.

WHAT

A

WASTE

Also, if you get the skill, you can totally 1v1 Knights regardless of how skilled other knight is (and even if they have bombs). Biggest problem really is that lag will be bit more punishing cause you have to be careful.

Biggest problem I see with any pub archer is that all they do is spam legolas shot from a distance. That's such a waste of time and arrows. Stop doing that, it's bad. If you are going to spam Legolas shot, you do it towards a building/siege with bomb arrows or you do it at close range against a shielding knight. Otherwise, just use a SINGLE charged shot to do long ranged damage, attack with a fire arrow or stunning with water arrows. Triple Shooting in those cases is simply a waste and you should feel bad if you do it.

If you are having trouble with bombs: work on grappling and being unpredictable. You know what most knights don't expect archers to do when they get a bomb ready? Getting closer to them, stunning them with an arrow before they about to throw it and causing them to blow themselves up. Fyi, at short range, not only do normal arrows stun, but they also cause push back so you have enough time to stun and grapple away safely. It's something that's easier to do if you have water ammo obviously, but it's still very easily possible with normal arrows. If you fail to stun them, then grapple past them instead. They'll end up throwing the bomb forward, but since you are already behind them, they bomb won't hurt you. Then you can either run away, harass them, or try taking them out with a triple shot. But nope too many times I've seen archers simply try running away without even using grapple and then they wonder why they get killed by bombs.

Basically if you are going to play archer offensively: Learn to get close and be unpredictable
How to get kills? Get close, release a single arrow, then run away a bit (generally about 7-10 blocks from them). Then start charging a triple shot, at this point they are either going to Slash or Shield. If they attempt to slash, walk backwards and and release the triple shot after they slash. If they they decide to cancel their slash, then just release the arrow instantly. If they shield, continue charging your triple shot, get within 4-5 blocks and release it in their face while still moving forward (to compensate for the push back). You'll break their shield with the first shot and do 2 hearts of damage with the 2nd. After that, just grapple away and repeat. There is a reason for that intial arrow. It makes them focus on you instead, and they become easier to read. Mind games basically. Alternatively, you can do the grapple + stomp + arrow combo, but that only really works in places where you have the height advantages. I'd only suggest being this offensive in a 1v1 situation though. Archer is suited to a much better role which offensive support.

If you want to be offensive support: Attack Siege and Harass.
How to harass? Learn to grapple effectively and use trees/walls to move around fast. Any area with trees literally makes it impossible for knights to attack you unless they use a keg. Let's say you have a single tree in the middle of some flat plains. Grapple the tree, then quickly release while you are it's half recoiling, let go and then grapple the ground, and then while the grapple is half recoiling again, grapple the tree and repeat. Do this towards the left side or right side while a knight is chasing you then go back and forth possibly going the same direction twice in a row just to simply throw them off. If you are in trouble at any point, just let loose an arrow in their general direction. It doesn't even have to really hit them, cause they'll automatically shield and once they shield, you can either continue harassing them or run away if you feel you've wasted enough of their time. Any additional trees nearby will simply increase the number of knights you can distract at the same time. With 3 trees, you can easily distract at least 4 knights by doing grappling -> tree -> tree -> ground -> tree -> ground -> tree -> tree -> tree-> tree -> ground -> tree -> ground or some other similar pattern. Basically stay unpredictable. And no, you can't say harassing isn't useless, if you are distracting 1 enemy, then that's already a an overall +0 contribution to your team. Any additional people you harass in the meantime just increases your usefulness. If the enemy is down manpower because they are being distracted, then obviously your team is at an advantage. For some reason people can't see this though because all they think is "Y SO KILLS HARD?? XD XD XD XD ARCHER SUXS QQ" instead of overall contribution to the team. Anyone who's played any sort of MMO classes knows that every party wants a Cleric for their support abilities, not because of their damage abilities.
Now let's say harassing is too hard for you (maybe you are too predictable, or you aren't great at moving around fast) but you still want to be offensive. In that case, follow a group of friendly knights but stay just slightly behind them. While the knights are fighting other knights, you should either target any person who is vulnerable (which happens a lot when there's a KvK fight), or use your arrow stun to protect a friendly who is in danger from another enemy. In this case you are helping keep your team alive by reducing casualties and helping them with their attacks, which let's your team move forward for a better push. Sure you may not even get any kills, but KILLS DON'T MATTER. What really matters is that your team pushes forward to the next flag or to the hall. Killing people in TTH does absolutely nothing for your team if you aren't moving forward and in CTF it's just a small coin bonus. Honestly, if people just changed their mindset from "LOL K/D" to "Shit I almost got the flag", pub matches wouldn't be so bad. If simply killing people is important to you, then play TDM, that's why it's there.

If anything really should change for archer, it should simply be the addition of a cool ability to use with space. I unno, stealing/destroying items from a stunned enemy or something? I mean, if an Archer used something like a water arrow against someone carrying a ballista crate and then could just steal it for their own/destroy it, you honestly wouldn't be able to say that an Archer is useless regardless of skill level cause then if you are still complaining, you outright suck.

 

One thing I would love to see is the removal of arrows being batted out of the air on a slash. It removes one of the Archer's damaging abilities - even if it's difficult to time for the knight, it still occurs far too often for me.

 

I'm not going to argue about this if you want to discuss pub games. You simply can't rely on your team to use any of the advantages that archers provide like helping gain ground and stuff. As Saigon said, most knights won't care, they simply want to kill stuff and will only really push forward towards the next enemy they see. That combined with the fact that most pubs are stupid and won't gather and work together in groups, makes stalling out useless (unless you are stalling out the only good knights on the opposite team). It's also the reason skilled knights are more effective in pub matches, since basically enemies come to them one on one, so it's easier to destroy an entire team.

Thing is though, you can't really balance the game based on low leveled play, hence why I'm not really talking about pub matches. If you do, games will result in some class be clearly superior and overpowering when played by players who are actually good. Only thing you can do is make it easier for people to get the nuance of how the class works. I'll easily admit that archer is probably the hardest class to learn and use effectively because the skill curve for playing archer is much steeper than the other classes. However, that doesn't mean that the class is underpowered, it's just hard to get into.

Anyways, Harassment is very very very useful in Clan War/Competitive games (and it's something that really only an archer can do effectively too). I'll give you an example that's happened more than just once in a competitive game. Basically our team's knights lost against the other team's group but I managed to survive (mainly cause our team was out of bombs, while the other team still had a few). Now, in competitive play you can generally say that everyone is about equal skill and when everyone is about equal skill, 1 knight isn't going to win against 3 others. This is where harassing as an archer becomes effective. Since my most of my team was dead and all the way in the back, I knew that I probably wasn't going to kill anyone. However, I could stall the entire time and do small points of damage here and there to weaken them until they came back, which I did. The knights couldn't ignore me cause if they did, they'd get damaged, at the same time however, they were having a hard time killing me because my focus was distracting them, not trying to kill them. End result, they never got past that area (mean our defenses remained undamaged, giving builder time to improve and fix anything) and then our fresh new knights that were in tip top shape easily slaughtered them when they got back to that area.

Basically, an archer's effectiveness is limited to how much team work your team has. It's one of the reason I don't really play public matches and only play with a few people I know from time to time because I know what they are going to do, so I can easily support them with what they need. They'll tell me "Hey need a fire arrow up in here", "Can you take out that ballista?" or "Can you hold those guys until we get there?" or something along those lines. Games end faster.

tl:dr, Archer is basically a rouge. It's a hard class to solo with (although it can be done with the right skill) but it makes a good team even more effective. However most people only want to use the back stab ability rather than being useful and picking locks and disabling traps because back stab is so "cool", even though back stab is more situational then anything while use the other abilities is more useful to the party overall.

Contrary sucks btw