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Looking through the manual today, I found something a little off with Archery. I am a keen archer, I love it, it's in my opinion the best of all weapon skills, useful to everyone, but its neglected.

There are currently 17 swordsmanship weapons, 17 macefighting weapons and 8 fencing weapons...but only 4 archery weapons, which to a scouting archer, only one is useful.

Let me break it down a little bit....

All the strange codes "4d6+3" aside, there are two (maybe three) speeds of weapon in the game.

Fast and weak, the median so fast-ish and powerful-ish, and the slow and powerful.

In fencing I'd split it as so -

Daggers + Skinning knife / Kryss, Warfork, Rapier / Shortspear, spear, pitchfork.

In macefighting -

Smithy hammer / Club, war axe, mace, maul, sledgehammer, hammerpick, shepherds crook, black staff, gnarled staff, mage staff, druid staff, necro staff / war hammer, war mace, pickaxe, quarter staff.

And in swords -

Butchers knife, cleaver, hatchet / Longsword, scimitar, katana, broadsword, cutlass, battle axe / viking sword, axe, double axe, executioners axe, large battle axe, two handed axe, bardiche, halberd.

And finally, in Archery (This is a bit different as there are no REAL useless archery weapons)-

Bow / Crossbow, Heavy Crossbow/ Firebow.

There are 46 weapons on the game, Swords and Maces account for over half of them, fencing almost a 6th but archery less than a 12th of all the weapons on the game.

So why has this been kept the same ?

As far as I know, the firebow has been an addition to the archery armoury, however this is tediously slow for any real archer to use, infact, any real archer is pretty much forced to use the regular bow. It is great that there are frost/fire arrows and bolts, however any damage modifier on these is negligable.

Because of this, every day in WoD, theoretically, there are 4 bows to every 46 weapons, so almost 1 in every 12 magic weapons you find will be an archery weapon. (I stress weapons because armor/clothing is probably more likely because of the shear number of them).

In every 46 weapons you get, 1 will be useful to an everyday archer. Lets take that further in saying that one would get a magic every 50 crettins ? Lets say that the ratio between weapons/armor/clothing/wands is 1:1:1:1, so you have a 1/4 chance of getting a weapon if you kill 50 crettins. If my maths serves me correctly, that means that (1/4 * 1/50) = 1/200 chance of getting a weapon every time you kill one thing...so you would get 1 magic weapon for every 200 crettins killed.

Now, for swordsmanship, this would be (17/46 * 1/200, with my calculator miles away and no idea how to do it on the computer, lets call 17/46 a third. Therefore 1/3 * 1/200 = 1/600. So every 600 crettins you kill, you get 1 magic swords weapon.

It is the same for maces, 1 in every 600.

For fencing, lets say a 6th...so 1/6 * 1/200 = 1/1200. You would get 1 magic fencing weapon in every 1200 crettins you kill. This is a substantial leap, however fencing has been added to in the past in the form of the rapier, and strange so has macefighting, not that it needs another 1 handed fast weapon.

For archery however, the ratio is more 1/12, so 1/12 * 1/200 = 1/2200. So in every 2200 crettins you kill, you would get a magic archery weapon.

If there are 3 magic archery weapons you can get, that would mean that every 6600 crettins you kill you would get a bow.

This is rather simplistic (not the math), as I do not know the EXACT workings of the WoD machine. However, what is easy to see is that there is a HUGELY tilted slant towards the other types of weapons in regards to archery.

So more or less, my argument is, "can we get more archery weapons?"

Vaie.

not sure what other archery weapons we could have, but yeah we do need more archery
I had to use a couple dozen benson oils to get good bows for myself

I agree, I think that more archery weapons would benefit the shard very much. Archery is one of my favorite aspects of the game. I never really liked magery mainly because it was just widely used and I wanted to be the different one. Now i admit that in one on one a bow really isnt to useful, but if your fighting something that can kill you in one or two hits it's kinda hard to use a melee weapon. All that aside I really like using bows and I think with more weapons more people might like using them too.

the fact that a good bow costs about 10x as much as a good sword or mace doesnt exactly help the popularity of the skill

dont' be so quick to write off the heavy crossbow and firebow. they aren't exactly primo wpns for solo or small group hunting but lordy do they rock on a quest. some of the boss monsters are very very tough and you need the heavy punch to hurt them. the way the game mechanics work the extra damage is a very big deal. you can also look at it as the slow speed draws less critters down on you per point of damage done.

Ehran wrote:dont' be so quick to write off the heavy crossbow

This is quite true, my tank generally uses his silver heavy crossbow of power against vamp lords (and ancients) during the mana dump phase of the battle, works great.

Hmm why not a magical bow that automatically poisons the arrows, not deadly poison that would be to much but a lower poison, whatever would be a neat idea and definatly add a bow to the list.

There's actually a bit more going on with the loot generator than just randomly picking a weapon out the entire available pool: different monster types often have different odds for different types of weapons. If you want to increase your odds of finding magic archery items, you'd want to hunt ... you didn't really think I'd make it that easy, did you?

Actually, you may be right that a few more bow types might not hurt: the problem, though, is artwork. There's technically only 3 right now (bow, crossbow, and heavy crossbow.) They represent the 3 speed/damage levels that the other weapon classes have. With any given level, other weapons just have varying graphics, with no real difference in how the weapon works, so any new bows added would just be the old weapons with different graphics. As I already said, though, there really isn't any other artwork, and it would be nearly impossible to add any for that sort of thing, so really, all we'd have is bows with crossbow graphics. That might actually be more confusing that anything...

Actually, there's a rather interesting addition coming to archery soon (and to all the other combat skills, too) which should make things somewhat more interesting... (Don't get your hopes up TOO much, though )

Drocket wrote:Actually, there's a rather interesting addition coming to archery soon (and to all the other combat skills, too) which should make things somewhat more interesting... (Don't get your hopes up TOO much, though )

Are they just going to get rid of it ? And add a few more swordsmanship weapons instead ?

Is this a lower your hopes and maybe get something good situation?

Drocket wrote:Actually, you may be right that a few more bow types might not hurt: the problem, though, is artwork. There's technically only 3 right now (bow, crossbow, and heavy crossbow.)

Would it be difficult to take the new bow graphics out of whichever expansion added them and stick them in the WoD custom files? Someplace along the line 2 were added, OSI called them composite bow and repeating crossbow.

Technically you don't have to use a firebow at all. My archer, Aellius, uses his regular bow with fire arrows and does just fine. So does Pau (90 archery). Pau's henchies use crossbows and they "just know" when to use fire bolts or freezing bolts.

What if you had different color bows which gave specific bonuses? Things like a green bow could be poisonous, a blue bow might throw an occasional lightning bolt at the target, a black bow might render the target blind occasionally--things like that?

Of course, the folks who use swords, maces and fencincg weapons would then want the same things.

Technically you don't have to use a firebow at all. My archer, Aellius, uses his regular bow with fire arrows and does just fine. So does Pau (90 archery). Pau's henchies use crossbows and they "just know" when to use fire bolts or freezing bolts.

What if you had different color bows which gave specific bonuses? Things like a green bow could be poisonous, a blue bow might throw an occasional lightning bolt at the target, a black bow might render the target blind occasionally--things like that?

Of course, the folks who use swords, maces and fencincg weapons would then want the same things.

I dont know if you follow me at all Atei... Its not the fact that archery isnt powerful enough, just the fact that the game is slanted against archers, in the fact that there are only 4 different types of bow...as opposed to 17 swords weps, 17 maces weps and 8 fencing weps. There really doesnt have to be any difference in damage, just the fact that good bows are extremely rare.

Sure this could be easily done...with the fact that bows cant be dyed, to differenciate, just change the colour.

For example - A composite bow for instance could just be copper colour, a daemon bow could be rubysteel, a water bow could be bluesteel, a druid bow could be green and a necro bow could be black. Any difference in them is would just be superficial, there is no difference between one handed swords, maces or fencing weapons... So why should there be with archery weapons?

Atei wrote:What if you had different color bows which gave specific bonuses? Things like a green bow could be poisonous, a blue bow might throw an occasional lightning bolt at the target, a black bow might render the target blind occasionally--things like that?

sorry to bash the idea, but it seems a little too diablo2

sorry to bash the idea, but it seems a little too diablo2

Well, UO is in the same genre as Diablo 2, so there should be some spillover.

Just as two seperate FPS'es would have the same things on them.