How to stop worrying and love the bomb?

Playing archer these days can be tough. Something I've noticed is how prevalent bombs are becoming, or how more people are becoming proficient at using them. In my opinion bombs are OP right now.

They are cheap and lethal and in the hands of a good knight are a viable medium to long range weapon. When you kill with a bomb( which is often and frequently a multi-kill) you get coins back as well; so it's not hard for a knight to have a steady supply of them.

As an archer there are two things you can do; run away or water stun them. You don't always see the bomb being thrown considering that a knight can hurl a bomb from far away, and that if a knight is near you when he primes a bomb, you are hard pressed to survive. water arrows are only half effective as you have to hit a knight carrying a bomb towards the end of it's priming time for it to go off in his hands, otherwise he will toss it for no damage, consequential bombs are held on to longer the closer a target is, which as said above is no good for an archer.

Somethings I've thought could be done:

1. Increase the cost of bombs at shops
2. decrease the amount of gold given for a bomb kill
3. increase the amount of gold archers get for successful arrow hits to make water arrows( bombs counter) more easily available
4. knights slowed down when holding lit bomb

And the Idea I'd really like to see implemented...

Make bombs easier to hit with arrows.
this would give archers another thing to do when a knight primes a bomb, and is favored by skill, allowing for a higher level of play.

 

If an archer is good, I can't kill him with even 4 bombs. :s

 

Bombs are only totally lethal if a good knight catches you unawares, which doesn't really happen. Bombs are much easier to hit in water and grapples increase your horizontal speed a lot, which helps.

 

Players get better at game.

Better nerf knights.

I rarely ever use bombs against enemies.

What's killing a archer compared to bomb jumping into their base and killing them with slashes?

 

an*

//EDIT by FBB: Do not try my patience, bout! You've been around enough to know that I do not tolerate grammatical nazism of this ilk on my forums. Keep it up and you'll earn yourself a special title for being a baddie.

 

You missed pickaxe kill.

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 5, 2014, Original Post Date: Apr 5, 2014 ---

+ Cata kill counts as fall, so does boulder kill.

 

Different kill types should receive different gold generation. that's one of the problems of the balista, that you can spam the bolts and get gold for it. Eight or ten different types doesn't seem unreasonable.

Increasing the hit box of the bombs would be the way to go.

Bomb play with knight vs knight is balanced, but bomb play with knights vs archers is not. all a knight has to do to block a bomb is hold his shield up and be a little ways away from the bomb thrower( if not he can bounce it past your shield behind you). as I've stated above archers have it a lot harder. This would make it to where a skilled archer is rewarded for being skilled. What does it take away from the game other than easy bomb kills for knights?

 

It seems to me that most people find hitting bombs midair with arrows, to be too unreliable. I like your idea of doing some changes to the hitboxes to makes this a viable option to go for.

I don't think it is for the best to alter the current hitboxes though, since placing bombs in 1x1 slot holes in walls can already be quite a task, don't know about the arrow hitbox to be honest.

Anyway, instead I suggest adding an extra, larger collider to either bombs or arrows, which only triggers when in contact with its counterpart (arrow/bomb).

I also think it seems reasonable to have a .cfg file etc. for balancing out the amount coins you get for each type of kill.

 

there is only one issue i can see with bombs, that would be the cost. Maybe making bombs cost 25 coins instead would be good. anything else brought up here i really look at as a non issue and no its not just because i main knight and only knight. infact i play archer too and know how both classes work very well. i always examine the field and see if its safe to go in, when my knights are there i usually go forward to be about 5 footsteps behind my knights as i peg away at the other knights. if i see a bomb getting cooked i definetly bolt away as fast as i can and usually im able to get far enough away to the point that the knight with the bomb made a new target. When i do indeed die to a bomb as archer its either 1. some kind of item induced bs (whether thats water ammo or not) or 2. i was plain dumb and deserved to die to that bomb. archers as it is has the tools he needs to get away from imminent danger. No bomb changes are really needed accept for a cost change.

 

*Shrugs*
If there are any nerfs I'll just inventory a bomb and run up to an archer before taking it out.

 

an*

//EDIT by FBB: I am a massive badmin, Arcrave makes me his bitch everynight, all night.

 

I'm a huge bomb-user. I do bomb-jumping, bomb throwing, bomb eati - wait not that! But seriously, bombs shouldn't be nerfed. A good archer can easily escape them. I find that I'm good enough to blow an archer up with my bombs about half the times I try. I think this is reasonable... Also, who gives a crap about archers?!

 

So far, I've seen two good ideas in this thread;

• Slightly increased cost for bombs (25 or 30 coins)
• A more focused blast radius (the total AoE would remain the same, but the 3 heart damage area would be smaller)

Let's face it. 5 or 10 coins is absolutely nothing to a knight, it's quite easy to rack up hundreds of coins per life, even if you're not that great. I don't see this even making much of a difference. It's kind of a "why not" sort of thing.

I really like the idea of tweaking the blast radius of bombs, either by shrinking it, or making the max damage area smaller. No matter how much grappling around I do, it's still really hard to get away from a bomb, even when I feel like I'm on the edge of an explosion, I take damage as if I'm in the bloody center. Bombs just feel way too easy to use right now.

 

When @Trumbles and @kodysch have a problem dealing with bombs, there's a problem. (Especially since half of archer complaint threads end with Trumbles explaining why he has no problem with whatever it is)

I think there are 2 main frustrations with bombs here, at least to archers.

1) A knight who can cook a bomb well can wreck most archers. It's true that you can take off running once they pull the bomb out, but it means abandoning whatever your currently doing. So even if an archer can get away from the bomb, it's usually enough to scare him away a ways or mess up what hes doing.

2) Randomly thrown bombs wreck archers. Once a game heats up, especially in 10 v 10 or more matches, there are bombs all over. It's easy to be in a fight with an enemy archer, only to have a stray bomb fly out of melee and waste you. Nobody was really aiming, so you don't really see it coming at all. I find this is more of a problem for archers playing a support roll to knights (the "Correct" roll for archers) and is just plain punishing. I cant think of anything more frustrating in all of KAG than dropping 150 gold on bomb arrows only to have a bomb fly in out of nowhere and take me out.

Out of the suggested fixes, I like the fixed blast radius idea the most. The bigger hitbox for arrow collisions seems really interesting to me and could be a lot of fun, but doesn't do much for the second issue.
However, If that WERE implemented, I very much like this https://forum.kag2d.com/threads/bomb-tweaks.19363/ idea here. Having an arrow hitting a bomb make it "your" bomb, so you can kill any enemy with it and get the credit and gold.

Upping bomb cost is simple enough, may be a bit instutive to overall gameplay, but I don't think it's too bad. Making knights think a bit before tossing bombs around would definitely fix this.