Archery Opinions: packet or larp arrow?

He’s referring to hitting away arrows, not weapons. People do it all the time to those packet arrows.

You smack a weapon out of someone’s hand, sure that’s unsportsmanlike and against the rules, but an arrow is an arrow
 
He’s referring to hitting away arrows, not weapons. People do it all the time to those packet arrows.

You smack a weapon out of someone’s hand, sure that’s unsportsmanlike and against the rules, but an arrow is an arrow

We are referring to boffer arrows not packet arrows.
 
We're referring to blocking weapon attacks. I shouldn't be forced to dodge to protect the thing you're trying to hit me with.
 
See my response from the page before. The one about sportsmanship and stuff.

you seem to be starting some type of flame war. Every response directed to me from you seems very hostile and I am feeling attacked by you. So you win. I won't be responding to any post that you are involved in.
 
Wish I had seen these responses earlier. I disagree with David on the topic, but also legitimately see his point and where he is coming from. I don't think he was being disingenuous for a moment. He was teasing me a little and I am totally okay with that from someone I have known over half my life.

-MS
 
See my response from the page before. The one about sportsmanship and stuff.

you seem to be starting some type of flame war. Every response directed to me from you seems very hostile and I am feeling attacked by you. So you win. I won't be responding to any post that you are involved in.

I’m not sure I’m starting a flame war by disagreeing with you. I’m sorry if something I said came across as a personal attack, but it certainly was unintended.

I apologize for the remark I made, as I’m completely unaware of your relationship with Mike, and it’s easy to mistake tone and intent over a text-based method of communication.

I don’t apologize for disagreeing with you, however, and repeatedly doing so. You’ve made dismissive remarks regarding subjects that have been important to the fun of others, and I feel pretty strongly about that.
 
I'm new to the game so I'm not sure how much my opinion matters here but I'm good at understanding game mechanics and as a character that uses STRICTLY only a bow I think mechanically packets are better.

as it stand archers can dish out damage on par with melee focused and caster characters. and we can hit fast enough to make it past defenses like magic armor and poison shield with a hit or 2 before they can be reapplied. If the change was made to arrows, the rate of fire drastically drops to the point of becoming entirely useless if the enemy has a handful of those defensive spells, regardless of how much damage you add to the bows. a way past this would be to give the use of bows a kind of "piercing" effect where they ignore defensive spells and abilities aside from maybe dodge and Perry. Unfortunately this can cause bows to either be a bit under powered do to how slow you actually shoot. or EXTREMELY over powered for being guaranteed damage or effects on a hit. this also has the problem of changing the dynamic and party comps of the game. with this, archers beat casters, casters beat melee, and melee beat archers. setting up a complicated game of rock paper scissors with each engagement.

(if you want me to explain my reasoning on the rock paper scissors model further I will.)

also, from a practicality standpoint, carrying around boffer arrows is not at all easy. my character carries 2 quivers so I can carry 40 packets with me at any given time, and i have a pouch that can handle the capacity. but i would only be able to carry, maybe 10 boffer arrows, do to how big the heads are. and that's in quivers that can hold 30-40 real arrows each, comfortably. and in my opinion 10 arrows is not enough for a prolonged fight or an intense wave battle. they are also far more costly for both alliance and players. the cost of an actual bow and the arrows may make some one unwilling to try a build they might otherwise be interested in.

every one here has touched on the safety concerns of the arrows in one way or another, so I'll move past that for now. but the safety of the bow itself. having an unpadded weapon on the field is dangerous enough, bot to mention people are still going to be using to block adding to the wear and tear of the bow. also, at a maximum of a 30 pound draw weight, I personally can snap the bow back int a drawn position very quickly, and doing so is not good for the bows. all this wear and tear on top of those that might not properly maintain the bow or bow string makes for a very dangerous combination. I'm not if anyone here has had a long bow, or recurve bow snap on them, but it it terrifying and painful. not to mention, when it happens it will result in a lard piece of wood, or fiberglass, plastic flying back behind the archer, possibly into some one else.

in short:
it's less safe.
more costly.
far less practical.
and mechanically mor difficulty.

THAT BEING SAID. I think an actual bow and arrow is really really cool and I would love to apply my real life archery skills to my character. not to mention it sets up a neat bit of advancement in archery that just makes you feel completely bad ***, like firing multiple arrows (provided you prove you can do it safely) and even catching arrows (provided you catch them by the shaft and not the tip). really really cool. almost to the point were I would put up with all the negatives to using an actual bow and arrow.
 
I, for one, appreciate your perspective and insight. Thank you for participating. :)

Also, being a new player is an asset, not a detriment. We need more input on these forums from people who haven’t played long, I guarantee it.
 
I'm new to the game so I'm not sure how much my opinion matters here but I'm good at understanding game mechanics and as a character that uses STRICTLY only a bow I think mechanically packets are better.

as it stand archers can dish out damage on par with melee focused and caster characters. and we can hit fast enough to make it past defenses like magic armor and poison shield with a hit or 2 before they can be reapplied. If the change was made to arrows, the rate of fire drastically drops to the point of becoming entirely useless if the enemy has a handful of those defensive spells, regardless of how much damage you add to the bows. a way past this would be to give the use of bows a kind of "piercing" effect where they ignore defensive spells and abilities aside from maybe dodge and Perry. Unfortunately this can cause bows to either be a bit under powered do to how slow you actually shoot. or EXTREMELY over powered for being guaranteed damage or effects on a hit. this also has the problem of changing the dynamic and party comps of the game. with this, archers beat casters, casters beat melee, and melee beat archers. setting up a complicated game of rock paper scissors with each engagement.

(if you want me to explain my reasoning on the rock paper scissors model further I will.)

Just as a caution, the MMO R/P/S model really, really does not apply to Alliance's character design mechanics. We aren't balanced remotely for PVP.
 
I'm not looking at the game globally and comparing it to an MMO or RPG, rather just looking at the "action economy" of archery its self. I can work on getting some hard numbers, on melee speeds vs packet throws vs archery shots. but I can promise actual archery is ungodly slow. also I'll include accuracy in as a metric as well. I know it's just a sample size of 1 person but it's a start. also keep in mind that my packet times will be slow, as I am new, and my archery times will be faster then average because I legitimately shoot bow alot and have even dabbled in speed and trick shooting. hopefully this weekend I might be able to get those numbers for you.
 
I agree fully that it's relatively slow. I just disagree that even at present archery can get even remotely close to magic's damage output. It's relatively close to wands, but in no way comparable to a caster's output even before considering that a spell packet can't be blocked.
 
Archery has sustained damage as opposed to magic's burst damage. I've heard archers talk about going through several hundred arrows in a weekend. A magic caster will never have that number of packets. And for an archer, each incremental weapon proficiency is on all the shots -- and it works out at roughly 10 build per point of damage for a fighter (over the base of 3+magic_weapon). (As opposed to a caster, who has to buy low level spells as prereqs for buying high level spells.)
 
Archery as it stands doesn't even really have sustained damage unless you're willing to coin-feed it, because arrows have a cost. A melee weapon doesn't cost anything to attack with nor require additional reps.

20 arrows cost a silver to make, to use an example that's a nice round number that fits in a single 64 cubic inch quiver. Double that at minimum if you're buying from other players because you didn't have room to take 20 levels of Blacksmith to feed your own shooting.

Fighty McFighter with 5 Weapon Proficiencies deals the same amount of damage (10) with either a two handed sword or a longbow. Against your average 100 body monster, that means 10 good hits per kill.

Long bows cost 15cp to make. Two handed swords 45cp. Assuming zero misses, it takes 10 arrows to kill that enemy, costing 5 copper per kill in resources. The 30 CP cost difference is easily made up in a single fight.

That's before we get into the -really- annoying issues, like needing 64 cubic inches of quiver space per 20 arrows you want to carry, and most monsters not dropping loot that will make up for the cost of shooting them.
 
Archery as it stands doesn't even really have sustained damage unless you're willing to coin-feed it, because arrows have a cost. A melee weapon doesn't cost anything to attack with nor require additional reps.

20 arrows cost a silver to make, to use an example that's a nice round number that fits in a single 64 cubic inch quiver. Double that at minimum if you're buying from other players because you didn't have room to take 20 levels of Blacksmith to feed your own shooting.

Fighty McFighter with 5 Weapon Proficiencies deals the same amount of damage (10) with either a two handed sword or a longbow. Against your average 100 body monster, that means 10 good hits per kill.

Long bows cost 15cp to make. Two handed swords 45cp. Assuming zero misses, it takes 10 arrows to kill that enemy, costing 5 copper per kill in resources. The 30 CP cost difference is easily made up in a single fight.

That's before we get into the -really- annoying issues, like needing 64 cubic inches of quiver space per 20 arrows you want to carry, and most monsters not dropping loot that will make up for the cost of shooting them.

I feel this summary leaves out some important consideration, Fighty McFighter now needs to deal with the additional damage he generally receives being in closer range, so he's gotta be a templar and buy some healing (or have another player dedicate build to the process) Failing that he'll need healing potions, which are about 2 arrows per point of damage taken in cost if you are using the most efficient potion healing available a 100 hp crunchy may or may not do body damage depending on your armor/style etc but to make the math work you need to be good enough to take less than 5 on average per 100 body of said critter so it's very local chapter dependent. Fighty McFighter is also significantly more vulnerable to ptds/spells and getting swarmed.

So like everything else, being an archer depends on your local PC population, whether you fight with a team, if there are blacksmiths (for example SoMN had 3, possibly 4 master blacksmiths last event so arrows where plentiful, although not so cheap.) If your local chapter has higher attack/skilled cards archery will likely be more valuable, I've noticed in my travels that in general some chapters run higher body cards, including the midwest so archery is a bit harder here.
 
I didn't worry about damage healing costs because armor exists they generally even out with arrows wasted via misses, blocks, and NPCs not noticing the hit in a melee.
 
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