[947] Bomb Arrows are Ridiculous

This is what we've been talking about, or at least many of us were. Taking a weak class and giving it a super cheap move to make up for that weakness is not game balance. The archer lacks in the area of sound fundamentals.

Lets take a little example to outline my point. For the sake of balance discussion take all the classes as they are with no items factored in. The builder can sap walls and attack really badly. The knight can hack people to ribbons, but is thwarted by decent walls. The archer can swing around like a chimp, but not even attack. Even if you go ahead and give the archer basic arrows for sake of this discussion, he excels at nothing useful, except maybe in some rare circumstances like handing off a flag.

TL;DR
Lets not worry about how the items affect balance until we actually have balance to worry about.

 

The thing is auburn, i dont think people want to have archer a support class

 

Lets make archer a tank. Give him a melee weapon. Give him 4 hearts. Let him have a shield. Take away his grapple because that would be OP. Take away the ranged weapon because now he has a melee weapon and a shield.

Oh hes a knight now.

The whole point of what my overly sarcastic comment is that whether the community likes the archer being support or not, the class will stay as support. Imagine all of the flags that wouldn't have been captured, buildings burned down, or knights killed without a archer firing at them and backing you up.

 

I'm afraid I have to completely disagree. All of the items in the game rely on certain conditions being met for you to get them. Until those conditions are met, you don't get them. If I like playing archer, am I to accept that my class simply has a distinct disadvantage until I can acquire such items, even when my opponent of a different class also has no items? It seems preposterous on its face that the classes are out of balance until one really gets going and rakes in some items, while the others suffer no such limitation.

So their gameplay is virtually nonexistent without said items, correct? These items cost coins, which archers are poor at collecting, generally speaking. It is important to consider normal play when considering these things, not @Auburn -tier play. The average player is lucky to get a 0.25 K:D as an archer, yet kills are how he can collect the coins he needs to buy the items that make him worth a crap. The only other valid tactic for the archer to take is to not be an archer until he's collected enough coins to buy the bomb and fire arrows, which is hardly a defensible position to take when defending the archer as a balanced class, so I doubt many would.

Believe me, I've played against some absolutely stellar archers before, and those badass archers were able to kill me about half the time as a mediocre knight. I just simply fail to see how they are balanced, even if the dubious "support class" argument is invoked, when they are flat broke from lack of kills and can't afford said "support" items.

 

You're completely missing my point, archer wasn't support in classic, he was ranged offence, that didn't make him a knight did he? NO.

Archers would be fine as support, except the fact they get credit for NOTHING, making playing them lame unless your skilled. Archer is at least twice as hard as knight to be good at, why? Archers can't fight on there own except when you get close ( triple shot stun ), how ironic being they are the ranged class.
Another problem with archer is that while they can do wonders for a team, most of the time they will be 1 hit ( not even on purpose some times ) before they can even see the other teams side of the map, losing all they're bomb and fire arrows. If burning a base or destroying shops actually credited archer this wouldn't be such a problem.

Archer can be support, fine i don't care. But at least let them actually do something

Mind you all of this rage is coming from someone who plays knight religiously and despises good archers, people need to take a look at the big picture of kag, things need to change.

/rant

 

Why do people play archer and expect a super k:d when the game is about taking the halls, or capturing the flag, and archer is absolutely fine to overpowered in most of the tdm maps regarding the one place that is about kills?

Archer is ranged offense, and he does the job, you people who think archers get tons of free kills xd in alpha are sorely mistaken considering he couldn't do any damage and could only just stun shielding knights alone, barring he stomped and shot, or stomped or whatever the fuck.

Stop playing archer if you expect super awesum k:d lulz in the short amount of time the matches in beta usually last, you will get a positive k:d but you can't get a 200:1 k:d simply because you don't attack fast enough to do so.

Lets not forget knights are racking up the numbers because they are always fighting other knights endlessly, if there were a shitload of archers i'm sure you'd get PLENTY OF KILLS.

Because the balance changes you are always requesting are literal cancer to this game, who the fuck wants archers to be able to kill faster when they are ranged in a game thats based on close range fortification puncturing.

 

Am I the only one whom doesn't really care how good the archer is at killing? Give him his own role, and I'll be happy. Right now, as Hierbo said, the archer can only really do something after X amount of time, while the other 2 classes can do something useful from the start. In the item department, I think removing Water Bombs from knight and only allow archers to have Water Arrows could help.. A tiny bit at least.

Edit: But changing how the archer works straight out the box is the thing though, it seems.

 

Fire arrows are an incredible utility in that you can burn entire buildings down with a single arrow. Buckets fortunately can counter that, but that requires vigilance from a player looking out for that kind of thing.

You conveniently failed to mention water arrows, which are also an amazing utility. Some players here suggest that the archer is a support class, which I agree. You can't kill someone with water arrows, but it allows you to knights in killing players with great ease.

Kegs are a great siege breaker. If you're besting the enemy on the field but can't get through the defenses, bring a keg and blow those defenses up. That first part is important though - your team needs to have control of the field to get keg close. For the most part, the same could be said of catapults, in that it requires you to take and hold an area for it to be effective.

Then we come to bomb arrows. Bomb arrows smash through defenses and there is no counter. You don't see them coming like a keg, you don't need complete control of the field, and they obliterate what they hit. Hard work is lost from something you cannot hope to defend against.

I think the coin issue with archers needs to be solved with a change in how gold is earned. Off the top of my head, I would personally suggest every player earning gold per minute. Coins still drop. Archers earn slightly more than knights. Inflate the prices.

Edit: Before anyone suggests that with that system, some people would play as archer to earn more gold per minute then change classes, I doubt it would be an issue. I do it already with the current gold system by earning gold as knight then switching to archer to buy bomb arrows.

 

I think a simple change to fix the gold issue is to give archers gold for every time a arrow hits a player, whether it does damage or not. I am pretty sure that currently you only get gold for doing damage.

Also there is a problem with making threads about game balancing. They always turn into a thread about all general changes. It really is not possible to stay on subject, which I guess is OK.

 

Yes. I primarily play CTF. Bomb arrows are really well balanced in CTF.

For TTH. I only have limited experience with the gamemode, but I know enough to agree that they are way to often spammed in TTH. I would suggest limiting the spawn time for bomb arrows and/or maybe requiring a longer time to research.

 

Maybe removing a bomb arrow and keg scroll wouldn't be out of the question?

Only allowing for top tier item research would allow for less spam and better games.

 

@hierbo

Think you could put that on one of your game balancing servers? See how it works out.

 

Idea. If were talking about Bomb arrow spam and its unnatural unfairness in TTH.. here's what should be done... deactivate the ability to buy more migrants. That there is the reason why so many shops are spammed.. cause of constant coin farming and migrant buying. That there is a simple and easy solution for all of TTH's balance issues with spam and so forth.