General Knight Changes

I dont think that's exactly what Josh ment.

 

I'm sick of the "Archer = Support" argument. People always throw it out like like "Support class" means it shouldn't be as good. The fact is that when in clan matches, 90% of teams are knight, archer isn't support, it's moot.

 

totally agree

 

It doesn't help either that archer is supposed to be the fast, unpredictable class, yet is the only one without a spontaneous attack. Between the time it takes to charge up an arrow, and the time it take to fire after releasing the mouse, an attentive player can see an attack from an archer coming a mile away. It baffles me that the "Fast class" has the slowest attack in the game. It doesn't help either that a skilled knight's bomb is a death sentence to archers, making knights as good of a ranged class too once they get decent..

 

builders in classic were ridiculously overpowered, i dont think anything ever should be that good

 

I've been sick of it for a long time, too.
Archers are considerably the other combat class, and don't really show for it unless you become, literally, a top tier archer. (Fencing, or rather Combat has backslided from b800, and unsurprisingly, their battlefield presence)

They really weren't a fast (or unpredictable) class to begin with, all they had to their name was the ability to stumble a knight at a slight above half charge, they were more ranged, and had higher prospective damage output.
The stumbling kept knights at bay, and with their range, they had more opportunity to aggressor other players. But now their stumbling has become stuns, and the stuns take too long to charge up when being aggressed by a knight, and then overcharge.

Yes they are supposed to be something, but they worked out completely differently.
What things are "supposed to be" generally never reflects what they can be, or are; it's very much like a limit, in the mathematical sense.


Anyways, the smartest guy here still seems to be @BlueLuigi since he's told us how we can solve this problem.

 

It's clear that the devs didn't know what to do with the archer class. The other 2 classes still resemble their classic counterparts. The archer has had pretty much every one of it's abilities replaced, save for shooting arrows.

 

That's generally where the controversy became even more sour, archers became less liked, and their investment cost (in time-effort) to become something increased.
To say that it was a convenient turn of events, however, invites incredulous stares, and mob lynchings.

(@BlueLuigi : Master Science)

 

Yeah I totally agree guys. Along with having the only burst movement in the game with the grapple, and by far the best maneuverability with grapple and tree climbing, we should also make it so that archers can attack instantly, because then they would be the fastest, have the best attack, AND be able to move all around the map with ease. In fact, while we're at it, why don't we make regular arrows break stone blocks as well?

Holy shit guys, archers aren't under powered. You have HOURS to see knights coming towards you, if you let them get close enough to slash you and then don't grapple or tree climb away then you deserve to get killed.

Archers are by far the most maneuverable class, learn to use your fucking assets. I've gotten destroyed in close ranged combat as a knight against archers of similar skill levels, because they use their maneuverability to their advantage, pouncing with a triple shot then grappling away before I can deal a single heart to them. Seriously, archers are literally un-kill-able if they use the grappling hook right.

As for everyone saying that an archer is dead the instant a knight lights a bomb, even if you were standing on top of him when he lit it, you could STILL move out of his throw range before it was low enough to lob, or just dodge it after he throws like a good player.

Honestly, I don't understand how you can be complaining about archers being under powered, all you have to do is make decent decisions and know when to back up and you will never die, and if there are trees around you then you basically have god mode enabled.

p.s.
@PandemicCommander builders are absolutely nothing like they were in beta, and knight combat is extremely different as well. Archers haven't had any of their abilities replaced, save for shooting arrows, because shooting arrows was their ONLY ability in classic. Now they can fire bombs, grapple, etc...

 

Alpaca is best at explaining this shit even if archer fans dont want to listen, trust me guys i play archer every now and then and i can tell you for sure that its perfectly fine where it is, no changes in arrows damage or the way they effect enemies needs to happen at all. just stop complaining and learn to play the game the way its supposed to be played, not Archer recking simulator 2014.

 

But that's exactly it, archers are only good when the terrain allows them to be. It's easy enough dodging one knight on flat-ish ground, but with even two it's massively harder. Manoeuvrability is only useful to an extent and when archers are charging an arrow they become much slower. You can survive, sure, but actually killing a knight quickly is extremely hard.
You can only take one hit, so you have to be constantly moving, but to avoid your attacks the knight just needs to put up his shield which blocks in three out of four directions. No decent knight is dumb enough to let you charge up a triple-shot, without slashing you. If you release earlier to hit him, and if he doesn't slash it, congratulations, you have taken off one heart out of four! When playing as a knight you have to just play it safe then hit them once or twice. Archers just have to dodge about for ages, even if they are slaughtering the knight.

It's possible to kill knights but it really says something when killing two of them makes people go, "Wow, he's good at archer!" Yet a knight would need to kill tons of people for anyone to mention it.

Even when there are floating islands in a map that favour archers, that only ever makes them have a level ground as there is always multiple routes in such maps. In any map with a sea or a slight pit in the middle, they are useful to begin with, but as the map gets destroyed viva la ballista, they only become useful in towers or when their team already has an advantage. That just means camping and knights kegging the towers and making giant stalemate pits.

I don't think knights are massively OP, but they can take way too much abuse from an archer. Maybe if fully charged, non-triple-shots did more damage. Maybe only at close-range, but I don't think that multiple archers spamming it would be that big a deal, because it's easily blocked.

 

I think maybe the right word is "Punishing" here. As an archer, you don't get to make a mistake and live. You can deal with a knight perfectly for 30 seconds, dodging every attack, exploiting his mistakes and miss a single grapple or lag for a split second and it's over. I would have less of a problem if things were a bit more reliable. To actually harass a knight and not just run, you need to be able to rely on stuns. There are far too many ways for a stun to fail, arrow slashing, lag, the slightest loss of momentum (sometimes a fully charged shot doesn't cut it for some reason). Grappling stills tends to be a little wonky at times with getting stuck. If these things were smoother, or if archers could take a hit, I'd be happy. Because as is, there seem to be far too many things that need to go right for an archer, where knights can afford to miss a slash or 2 or get hit with some lag and walk away.

 

@NinjaCell so you want to be able to 1v2 knights and win easily? So you think that it would be more balanced if 1 archer could kill 2 knights without any trouble. It would be perfectly fair for 1 archer to beat 2 knights, but 2 knights beating 1 archer is an unfair, broken mechanic. Ok. Gotcha. rest of my post also applies to your points.

@PandemicCommander that may be the most legitimate point any one has brought up yet, but I still have to disagree. Archers always have the option of sitting in the back and raining a storm of arrows upon their foes. Yes, it isn't likely that you'll do all that much damage if you're the only one there, but think about it: if an archer could easily cause large amounts of damage to knights that were 30 blocks away from them, that would be insanely over powered. Thus, knights can shield arrows fired from long distances.

Archers become useful again, however, when they have knights fighting with your opponents while they darken the sky with their arrow spam, which the knights cannot block because they are busy fighting other knights. This is when archers are strongest.

If an archer doesn't have knight friends to help him out, and he wants to get kills, then he has to go in closer. Yes, it's a lot riskier to go in closer, and it takes some more skill, but if it was easy to fight knights in close range and win then that would just be flat out unfair. That would make archers useful at close range, mid range, AND far range, whereas knights are only useful at close, and semi useful at mid if they spend money on bombs, which can usually be dodged or shielded easily.

As an archer, you have the choice to move in closer than your recommended range and still get kills. So what if it's more risky, knights don't have the option to lob their shields from half way across the map to deal damage, but lose the ability to block until they go pick them up again. As an archer, you get to make an impact at the range that you were intended to play at, at a farther range, and at a shorter range. Knights just get close range. If any new player who just bought the game can walk in, pick archer, and kill knights at close range with no skill and no risk, then knights would be completely worthless.

The only thing that I think it would be even reasonable to argue for is that you get shield break on arrows at a slightly farther range, so that you can be more effective at mid range, from where the archer is meant to be most effective, however, that would re-introduce the alpha issue of archer power scaling exponentially with each additional archer you have, allowing just 3 archers to stop an entire swarm of knights with their shield breaking arrow spam, from far outside of slash range.

tl;dr version: Knights are only useful up close, archers can be useful at close, medium, and far ranges. If archers could beat knights easily at close, then knights would have nothing. Yes it takes a lot of skill for an archer to kill a knight at close range, but it takes very little skill to escape from a knight at close range, which in itself isn't something that I necessarily agree with. Knights should have a blatant win against archers at close range, because if they don't win at close range, they have nowhere else to win, so they just lose. period. Archers have tons of areas and situations where they can be useful. Deal with it.

 

@Alpaca I wouldn't mind a slightly longer shield break range. I really don't think anything drastic is in order, but there's a bunch of minor things that hit archers harder than other classes. More than the shield break, I'd like a slightly more permissive stun. I find that's the thing I need to trust most that lets me down. If instead of 100% charged, arrows stunned at 90% or so, I'd be a much happier archer.

As for supporting from a range, I usually feel like I could be doing something more. Water arrows seem to be the answer here but the fact that they stun both sides makes them way less useful for helping knights in melee. (I could see an archer getting pro at selectively stunning, but once again, there's that steep skill curve for archers)
So I guess another easy, not too drastic fix would be to make water arrows not friendly fire. Or if that's too much, maybe just have a small stun radius on teammates.

I've said before, archer and knight are balanced nicely on paper, but there are too many little situations that hurt archers unfairly. While I'd be thrilled if archers got some new mechanic or something. Some little things here and there to smooth over the things that sting them more are really what's needed. There's a suggestion thread here https://forum.kag2d.com/threads/make-archers-swim-faster.19493/ about bumping up the swim speed on archers, since knights still get the move bonus from slashing, but the grapple both fires slower and pulls slower, (not to mention arrows become useless) It's stuff like that that I think is in order.

Also, I think the score system focusing on K/D only makes archers look bad. If they're a support class that's fine, but the game really needs to give credit for support, not just the front-line guys getting kills. Maybe that's why most archers want to play up front, it's the only thing the game seems to reward points wise.

 

You're saying knights should have an easy win at close range in 1v1, but then you say archers should not be able to do anymore damage at long ranges when they are a ranged class. Knights don't need to kill archers at far range because they can shield their arrows easily from a distance. You say 3 archers defeating a swarm of knights at long range is OP, yet a 3 knights could easily take a swarm of archers at close range. You underestimate the likelihood of getting far range kills, you have to hit a knight four times without him noticing. When two knights are fighting far away, aiming is hard and most arrows will get blocked or slashed. Archers can flee easily, but this achieves nothing unless they can quickly swoop back in to attack. An archer running from a knight means the knight wins; he can advance. The archer has done nothing to stop him. Archers have the "advantage" at long range, but they generally do very little.
Archers don't really have lots of useful areas, you generally have to be very lucky and quite skilled. Archer provide valuable help sometimes with bomb or fire arrows, but these are gimmicks compared to what the knights can do.

Two things control the flow of KAG:
Builder's skill at creating good defence and providing offensive opportunities.
The knights timing when they charge in.

Archers can change a game but only in very specific circumstances. There a wide variety of them but they are generally very hard, have an extremely small time-window or rely completely on the other two classes. Bombing/burning a rubbish tower is one, but that relies on the tower being rubbish. Sneaking into the enemies base to steal their flag, that relies on extremely good timing and special arrows or terrible defence.

Archers are "useful" at many times, I could potentially snipe the entire enemy team as they approach our base, but chances are, I'll miss the majority of the time. In a match, a bad-to-average archer slows the team down, but a bad-to-average knight with even the slightest sense of timing can charge in a group and affect the outcome of the game. It's not terribly unfair as such, it's just that the majority of the time, archers are unnecessary, unless they are on top of their game.

--- Double Post Merged, Mar 30, 2014, Original Post Date: Mar 30, 2014 ---

Yeah, I really just wish there was something else to being an archer that just weakening knights until you can afford bomb arrows. It's just that everything is so high risk. A knight can take some hits, find a bomb, bomb-jump then wreak some havoc. With an archer, you just have to avoid everything, then use your special arrows, hoping that they find their target. I find flat maps much more satisfying, as archers can use trees, then take out the weaker towers. Until the map gets wreaked with siege weapons.

On maps with dips or sea, archers just lose their edge. I wish there were more maps in which people built little towers, as that really helps archers, and stops them from camping as knights charge between two massive towers, with perma-backwall and bedrock in them. Those stalemate games are the worst. I think dirt should take more hits from explosions, because maps just erode so fast.

I think with faster swimming, more arrow-damage to siege weapons and adjusting the knights shield so it only blocks in the direction it's facing, it would work a lot better.

 

You completely missed the point, ninja. Yes, archers cannot do much at very long ranges when they're alone, but knights can't do ANYTHING at long ranges. Archers are extremely useful at ANY range when they have just a single knight on their side. I don't feel you've brought up any real counters to the points I've made, and if you have you've hidden them within that disorganized wall of text.

Please try to separate each idea into its own paragraph, and keep paragraphs short and separated by whole line breaks, it makes it so much easier to discuss things.


E: glad to have gotten lui's post b4 del

 

So @BlueLuigi if someone put up a modded server with a few archer tweaks. (Like slightly more liberal arrow stun, faster archer swimming, momentum on crouching.) And things seemed to test out ok with people playing on it, that would be the best step to getting actual changes implemented?

 

That's what Rayne/Sharcrave did on Action!, and a good deal of the beta mechanics are taken from that server.

 

Time to bug all my coder friends...

If I did end up getting a server up to test out some balance mods (mainly for archer) would people here be up for trying it?