Shortbows, Longbows and Bow Damage Ratings

[FearDiadh]

<p>I've been thinking about some of the problems with bow damage as it is now and came up with a couple of ideas for the devs, player input or whatever.  The problems as I see them are these:</p><p>1) Shortbows - There is no incentive to use these ever.  The damage rating is no better (and it shouldn't be from a realism point of view) and the range is sub par compared to long bows.</p><p>2) Longbows - Do sub-par damage compared to melee weapons.  This increase in disparity has only grown this expansion.  Now there are actually two handed weapons with higher damage ratings than bows.</p><p>3) Damage Rating vs. Speed - Most longbows have a speed around 7-9 seconds.  This gives them an extremely high damage per hit.  This is actually happening with more and more weapons as we have moved from 4-5secs for bows to 7-9 and from 1-2 seconds for melee weapons to 3-4.  What happens now is an opening blow with a melee weapon does more faster damage in a lot of cases than acombat art.  With my brigand, assassin and ranger I often just turn auto attack on and watch a solo mob die before I need a combat art.  We could increase delay to 20 seconds and people could just one shot heroics.  20 seconds is rediculous, but in solo situations so are 4 second melee and 9 second bows.</p><p>My suggestion based on these problems are:</p><p>1) Shortbows need a draw.  They need something that will make them more wanted.  More useful.  Remove the minimum range.  This gives rangers a reason to want them because they could use them in melee situations.  They lose the really long ranges as a trade off but they get something that a lot of them keep asking for: no minumum range.</p><p>2) Longbows (and shortbows) need a damage increase.  They are not in line with equal quality melee weapons.  When someone has two fabled melee weapons that have a 130 damage rating (and they also get aoe attacks and flurrys) there is no way a bow with 175 dr can compete.  Bows need an overall damage increase.</p><p>3) Bring delays back to reasonable amounts. 2 seconds for 1 hand melee weaps and 4-5 seconds for bows.  This should not affect the damage ratings but it will prevent the total trivialization of solo mobs.</p>

[Gaige]

<p><cite>Jack@Lucan DLere wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>3) Bring delays back to reasonable amounts. 2 seconds for 1 hand melee weaps and 4-5 seconds for bows.  This should not affect the damage ratings but it will prevent the total trivialization of solo mobs.</p></blockquote><p>NO.</p><p>That said rangers need to realize the key to fixing them lies with their CAs, not with bows.  For one they're not the only class that can use bows and for two there is no way SOE is going to make bows that can hit for 100k because it would skew the ranger class towards auto attack so much that it would just be ridiculous.</p><p>Ranger CAs need to be looked at and adjusted, bows are fine.  Bows can currently hit a little harder than two 4.0s, my max bow hit as an assassin is 46k my max dw hit is 19k.</p><p>Taking flurry/aoe auto into consideration when making bows doesn't make sense either.  If a mechanic is broken, fix it, don't try to itemize around it.</p>

[Khurghan]

<p><cite>Jack@Lucan DLere wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>3) Bring delays back to reasonable amounts. <strong>2 seconds for 1 hand melee weaps</strong> and 4-5 seconds for bows.  This should not affect the damage ratings but it will prevent the total trivialization of solo mobs.</p></blockquote><p>Count me in for an eighth.</p>