My Thoughts On Bows.

[Yastin]

Bows, as they are, are rather... Difficult. If you are using a bow, you have to contend with quite a lot of things... Charge time that seems to last forever and a half, unmodded. Arrow speed and drop... Though the speed's the killer here. And then you can't manuever much, because if by some happy accident you trigger the roll animation everyone hates so much already, you lose your arrow and charge... All this while being deafened by a Soma rattling away at everything that moves (and a lot that doesn't) right beside you. They're a very disconcerting type of weapon, really. And then you take a look at the stats, and you weep a little... So here's some of my suggestions;

 

1. Either speed up the charge, or make it uninterruptable. I prefer the speed, If it takes less time to shoot, maybe I wouldn't wish I could hold a charge without fear of the roll of doom.

 

2. Make arrows 'skip' or richochet slightly under some conditions. This is more of a pet peeve than a widely acknowladged problem, but when I manage to hit the little strat in the center of a hand-rail, or catch a micron of the corner of a piece of cover, it'd be cool if, instead of a semi-floating reminder of a wasted shot, it'd deflect slightly, though this is hard to code...

 

3. Differ your bows. Okay, so this one is more complex than that lets on, but here's the idea. Make the bows meaningfully different, like Dread is the fastest shooter, being a shortbow with energy string, Cernos is the status bow, and Paris is the crit bow with the fastest arrows but slowest charge, being the long-bow of the three. Then, let the player choose their quiver/arrows sepperately from the bow to choose damage types.Even if you have to make the bow first, to unlock it's arrow-type, I'd like to feel like I'm selecting more than which arrows to take along with my "generic similarly-statted arrow-chucker", so each should feel different regardless of damage percentages. It's not the bow that's hitting the things, after all.

 

4. Finally, add some arrow mods! I've heard talk of a fire- mode system as well, so maybe you could have different arrow-modes without mods, but until that's confirmed, why not make unique mods like thunderbolt (though less crappy)? Tripwire arrows, arrows that deal an AOE cloud around impact, a Penta style remote detonate arrow, an arrow that harpoons an enemy so you can pull them (take that, Scorpion!), Hell, you could even do magnetic arrows that auto-aim a bit, though at either the cost of damage due to diverted force, or simply a huge mod cost. Add some utility and variety, things to make the others in your group say, "Neat!" rather than pity the archer for their obsolete arrow-chucker.

 

Anyways, those're my thoughts on improvement. What feedback do -you- have?

Edited January 4, 2014 by Yastin

[Jithvan]

Explosive AOE Elemental Arrows! Always wanted them :3

[RCOAS]

YES. YES. YES.

[Yastin]

Heh, I can imagine that... Maybe an arrow that bursts into a mini vortex of fire, or one that leaves a trail of gas or something as it flies...But the main point is making the bow a utility weapon. Like the blunt tip impact arrows should probably have higher knockdown/stagger, and hey, why not make arrows slow enemies you've hit by a given percentage? At least for non-infested, it makes sense they'd want to jostle around less with an arrow going through their viscera...

[Jithvan]

i think bows should have a 100% status chance. It really makes no sense putting in an elemental mods hoping each arrow will cause a status effect to take place.

[Yastin]

Again, one could be a staus bow. But right now, the bow does a lot of things. None of them well. It can get up to just above 50% crits with a specific corrupt mod AND the normal crit mod, taking two slots to make it even a tiny bit reliable critting. It has 20% status, which can get up to what, 40% when modded out? The bow is just a fickle weapon. It doesn't even have the crit-rate of a super high ROF machine-gun, but it's a "finesse" weapon.

[Noble_Cactus]

I brought up the idea of elemental/utility arrow mods in the other thread, and I'm sure others had thought of them long before I did. I'm all for them.

 

One idea that I really like that I've seen thrown around lately is guaranteed punch-through on a fully charged arrow. Doing loads of damage to a single target is great, but as the Penta/Soma/Synapse/etc. can attest, doing loads of damage to multiple targets in that same timespan is even better. An arrow that has a small amount of penetration - enough to go through 2-3 targets - could help dps and teamwork immensely. As for how this would work with Thunderbolt and potential utility bow mods, maybe it could just proc on the first hit. Speaking of which, Thunderbolt needs damage scaling. A chance for a Blast proc or a stagger would be icing on the cake. Because let's face it, for all the gimmicks and utility DE could give snipers and bows, they're still probably not going to outdamage the current favorites.