A Look In Depth To The Cernos, And Bows In General

[lautalocos]

wow, this ended up being WAY more long than i imagined it could be. TL,DR at the bottom

 

i realised why the bows are so bad, with the power of meth maths!

 

lets look at the cernos:

reload speed: 0.8 (time it takes to take an arrow from the quiver)

fire rate: 1 (time to fully charge the arrow)

 

thats basically the speed to fire arrows. you can too fire quick shots, in which case fire rate is not important, BUT, it seems that there is a short time between firing or charging an arrow, and the time when you put an arrow on the bow which is not affected by either fire rate and reload speed. after some time using bows, it´s easy to notice. this affects the time between each shot, and it really affects the DPS of non-charged shots.

 

now, on damage:

fast attack: 40 (30 impact, 2 piercing, 8 slash)

charged attack: 100 (no idea about specific damages here. for the sake of clarity, lets say it´s normal damage but multiplied by 1.5 = 40x1.5)

crit chance: 20%

crit damage: 150%

 

this makes the bow do 100 damage in 1.8 seconds, or 150 damage. that is very low. now, this bow is specialised against corpus because of the impact damage, which does 1.5x damage to shields.

 

lets see it´s damage against a corpus crewman:

shields: 150

health: 60

 

a fully charged shot (to the body, because crewmans heads have WAY too much resistance) would do 45 impact damage (against shields, the first line of defense of the corpus, that would be 67.5 damage), then 3 puncture damage (still 3 damage against shields), and 8 slash damage (8 damage against shields). this gives a total of 78.5 damage, a bit more than half of the crewman base shields.

 

i don´t wanna do any more maths (my nose is already bleeding) but it would take 3 charged shots and maybe 1 extra quick shot to kill even the weakest crewman. that is incredibly bad.

in top of that, the critical damage is average. it should be 200% or 300%. all current bows should be buffed too to have that crit damage.

 

the quick shots are really bad too, because the damage is bad compared to how much time you need to make each shot, and the arrows are quite slow when fired quickly.

 

compare the quick shots to a corpus specialised weapon like the magnus.the magnus shots 5.8 shots each second for 45 damage. that is way more than any bow.

 

 

 

also, the paris has many of these problems too against grineer. still, it´s at least usable because you can kill in 1 shot to the head, while the cernos is actually painfull to use (even when used against MOA, because their heads aren´t invulnerable to damage)

 

the dread is actually in quite a nice spot, but could be better. the punch trough it has makes a charged shot kill a line of infested easily, and if you add thunderbolt it´s even better.

 

the bows at least are silent, but stealth right now doesn´t feel very good.

 

 

so, how to fix all of this? this are raw stats. if you can refine these please post it below and i will post them here.

-quick shots in all of the bows should be faster. as an example, the cernos and dread (because of the infested) should have 0.6 fire rate, and the paris and paris prime 0.8 fire rate.

-quick shots with the cernos should be do 60 damage, and the paris and paris prime 72.

-charged shots with the cernos should do enough to kill a MOA and crewman in one body shot (maybe the MOA in a headshot?). i think that would be around 170 charge damage. the paris should have the same.

-as i said before, critical damage on all bows should be 200% or 300%.

- also, i think they should ALWAYS knockback enemies with each shot.

 

i think that would make bows great for stealth because they can actually kill in one shot (not a big thing, but something), be usable in every situation because of quick and charged shots, and because of the knockback.

 

 

TL;DR: bows in their current state are bad compared to every other weapon, especially the cernos. read the list just above this to see my recommendations on how to make them better.

 

also, if you are just going to say "you just don´t know how to use bows" then please compare it to another weapon and tell me how the bow is better.

Edited December 5, 2013 by lautalocos

[LordMidnightX]

yah cernos sucks right now although I like my paris prime quite a bit, although I agree they do need a buff

[Omegaboot]

I disagree about needing to knockback with every shot - that's the domain of the impact proc - but otherwise yes.

[VoidPunch]

Yea bows are very bad right now with the exception of paris prime. Snipers do better all around if you are going for ranged weapons. I think to compensate for the draw time the bows should have some distinguishing feature about that that would make people use them over just for fun. Maybe having really high status chances like base of 25% would be really cool if they don't plan on buffing the damages up 

[Krysis_V]

I am a bow user mainly before DMG2.0, and even then it really wasn't that great compared to some other weapons like Lanka. After the release of the Vectis and DMG2.0 which makes each bow specializes in specific area only, it was pretty much over for me.

 

I still use them time to time though. But only in those mid level alert missions, never for something serious like T3.

 

What a shame.

Edited December 5, 2013 by Krysis_V

[MECT_HET]

All bows need to have is x2 bonus damage against selected defence type (Cernos x2 against Shield, Paris x2 against armor, etc)

[lautalocos]

All bows need to have is x2 bonus damage against selected defence type (Cernos x2 against Shield, Paris x2 against armor, etc)

nah, that would make them only usable againsst a single faction. currently, the bows can we used against every faction, but each one with better results.

just buffing them in the correct way is enough.

[GhostUnitVII]

I have a paris prime, and I think it can use a buff on Crit chance :/... Everytime i do a Headshot lately, especially in Grineer, it doesnt crit, and its frustrating.

 

I agree with you completly, that Bows in general, need a buff, and ive pointed this out before in one of my post. That bows are just being overshadowed by the powercrawl of sniper rifles.

 

I guess now with 2.0, its with every rifle that its being overshadowed by, my Braton Prime is faster, has a higher DPS, and has a really good piercing on it. The bows in general are really slow, no direct line of fire, and the DPS is crap, just total crap.

Edited December 5, 2013 by GhostUnitVII

[Otakuwolf]

I have all of the bows myself, and i agree 50% about this.

 

With a Crit build I can oneshot almost everything with eighter Dread or Paris Prime (I mostly play on Kiste and Outer Terminus), of course one deals more damage to infesteds and crewmen/light Grineers while the other works better against armored targets like Heavies.

 

Paris feels like a "starter" version of those, which CAN be ok to a certain point, like a way to introduce the player to the bow weapons, but can INDEED be better to make it a be viable option on higher levels too with a proper build (side-comment: i hate the new sounds of it, feels like a plastic toy).

 

Cernos feels more like a "tool" bow as seems to be made as a "shield buster", but stats wise is INDEED bad even for a tool with such a purpouse and needs some buff, i would actually give it the same stats of Paris but "reversed" to make it an impact version of it.

[lautalocos]

I have all of the bows myself, and i agree 50% about this.

 

With a Crit build I can oneshot almost everything with eighter Dread or Paris Prime (I mostly play on Kiste and Outer Terminus), of course one deals more damage to infesteds and crewmen/light Grineers while the other works better against armored targets like Heavies.

 

Paris feels like a "starter" version of those, which CAN be ok to a certain point, like a way to introduce the player to the bow weapons, but can INDEED be better to make it a be viable option on higher levels too with a proper build (side-comment: i hate the new sounds of it, feels like a plastic toy).

 

Cernos feels more like a "tool" bow as seems to be made as a "shield buster", but stats wise is INDEED bad even for a tool with such a purpouse and needs some buff, i would actually give it the same stats of Paris but "reversed" to make it an impact version of it.

i don´t like for those weapons to be dependant on the chance on the crit mods for killing normal enemies.

 

also, the paris shouldnt exactly be a starter bow, because each bow is meant to be against a faction. by making a bow the starter bow (the wakest one) you can´t use bows against a faction effectively. that isn´t very fun.

[LunariaN-]

dread for infestation is pretty good but other bows are dean now :/  we need some love

[Grulos]

Dread is better than Paris Prime at killing Grineer.

 

I mean, WHAT??

[DB-Tenno]

I used to be frustrated with using the Cernos in a plain crit build, but then I decided to build it exclusively around Thunderbolt.

 

Thunderbolt + Split Chamber + Fast Hands + Ammo mutator

 

 

This gave me a surprising amount of fun as I leveled up the Cernos. Its innate speed advantage is what makes it work so well.