Bow system overhaul - What do think?

RoyMallis

So the basic idea would be to have different types of bows, like how there are different types of Destruction staves.

Long Bow - highest damage, slow draw time, longer range
Short Bow - lowest damage, fastest draw time, med range
Cross Bow - Mid/high damage, "instant cast" but with lengthy reload time, short range

Adjustment to skills and passives as needed.

Please add some input with your vote.

Trentus

Seems intriguing, might work.

Sounds very intriguing to me, could work very well.

Lynx7386

Will these new bows use magicka? Because that's the only way they'll be effective.

madangrypally

I like it but have one of the bow types do a channeled heavy attack similar to Lightning staff and Restoration channeled attack.

I also think while they are at it they need to make a 2-hander and duel wield combo have a channeled attack.

IE:
A short bow heavy attack will be rapidly firing arrows at target.
2-Handed Axe heavy attack will be a channeled attack with a rampage like channeled animation.
A sword and dagger weapon combo for duel wielding will have a channeled heavy attack of weapon weaving.

rekina

Crossbow having shorter length and doing mediocre damage don't make any sense. It must do lethal damage and travel longer distance.

With that said, I don't know if I want Crossbow in this game because I don't want any weapon basic attacks do lethal damage. I like long bow/short bow thingy you suggested, but since there is no swing speed difference between sword/axe/mace and dagger as well I don't think it will happen.

FYI the best bow mechanics I've seen in my life was early DAoC's one. It felt really like bow-sniper... I miss it.

RoyMallis

That sounds awesome.

madangrypally wrote: »

I like it but have one of the bow types do a channeled heavy attack similar to Lightning staff and Restoration channeled attack.

I also think while they are at it they need to make a 2-hander and duel wield combo have a channeled attack.

IE:
A short bow heavy attack will be rapidly firing arrows at target.
2-Handed Axe heavy attack will be a channeled attack with a rampage like channeled animation.
A sword and dagger weapon combo for duel wielding will have a channeled heavy attack of weapon weaving.

I like the idea for the short bow having a multi shot/auto fire heavy attack. As for 2h and DW maybe an/a (Ult-)skill that animates for x amount of seconds while being able to aim and move at reduced speeds.

TheBull

Terrible idea, bow system is fine.

Make the rest of the physical weapons work as good as bow.

RoyMallis

That sounds awesome.

rekina wrote: »

Crossbow having shorter length and doing mediocre damage don't make any sense. It must do lethal damage and travel longer distance.

With that said, I don't know if I want Crossbow in this game because I don't want any weapon basic attacks do lethal damage. I like long bow/short bow thingy you suggested, but since there is no swing speed difference between sword/axe/mace and dagger as well I don't think it will happen.

FYI the best bow mechanics I've seen in my life was early DAoC's one. It felt really like bow-sniper... I miss it.

I get what you're saying but to keep cross boss relevant and balanced, this is how I would have them.
Damage for crossbow would be greater than longbow light attack but slightly less than it's heavy, with the possibility to add armor piercing passive or something specific to crossbow. but it wouldn't have a heave since it would be an instant attack (essentially silver-bolt from fighters guild but as a weapon).

seaef

No opinion.

Well, archery is one of my hobbies, so here goes...

Longbows have a longer pull, require more strength, arrows travel the slowest but have more energy behind them, and are the least accurate.

Short-bows have a shorter pull, require less strength, arrows travel faster but have less energy behind them, and are more accurate than a longbow.

Crossbows have a shorter pull but constant due to mechanics, arrows travel the fastest but have the least amount of energy behind them, have great accuracy, and require the least amount of strength to use.

Take it for what it's worth as part of the discussion.

RoyMallis

That sounds awesome.

TheBull wrote: »

Make the rest of the physical weapons work as good as bow.

I don't exactly understand, but I am interested to know what you mean. More often than not I have seen people complain about bows being clunky or what not, at the very least them being okay, but never better than others other than for stealth crit opener.

RoyMallis

That sounds awesome.

GrimGryphon wrote: »

Well, archery is one of my hobbies, so here goes...

Longbows have a longer pull, require more strength, arrows travel the slowest but have more energy behind them, and are the least accurate.

Short-bows have a shorter pull, require less strength, arrows travel faster but have less energy behind them, and are more accurate than a longbow.

Crossbows have a shorter pull but constant due to mechanics, arrows travel the fastest but have the least amount of energy behind them, have great accuracy, and require the least amount of strength to use.

Take it for what it's worth as part of the discussion.

So would it be accurate then to rework the ranges I put up in reference to accuracy?

UrQuan

Seems intriguing, might work.

rekina wrote: »

Crossbow having shorter length and doing mediocre damage don't make any sense. It must do lethal damage and travel longer distance.

Ah, I see you've bought into the crossbow myth.

The fact is that crossbows never had longer effective ranges than longbows. The reason for this is that, unlike a regular bow, you can't fire a crossbow on an optimal parabola for achieving the greatest range. Or at least, you can't do it without the crossbow bolt tumbling and becoming ineffective. You need a longer arrow with better fletching to fly true over such a distance and arc.

Additionally, only the heaviest of crossbows had more penetrating power than a longbow. These are the crossbows you see with elaborate winches and other mechanisms for cocking them, and they were typically used primarily for sieges, where you could hide behind a wall or mantlet during the long reloading time. Crossbows used by armies in the field tended to be either cocked by hand (in which case they had less penetrating power than a bow), or by a stirrup and a hook on the belt (in which case they had similar penetrating power to a bow, and somewhat less than a longbow).

The only real advantage that crossbows had over bows is that a bow requires a great deal of training to be used effectively (the best longbowmen trained from when they were children). A crossbow requires virtually no training to be used effectively.

Obscure

No, bows will always be bad.

Why bother with any of them?
Restoration staff has the same range as the bow, has the fastest rate of fire, ignores miss chances, ignores dodge chances, cannot be reflected, restores magicka when you use it to block, can restore magicka when you attack with it, it improves the damage of everything you do by up to 10%, and it has skills tied to it that help keep you and all your friends alive... skills that use magicka mind you so you don't sacrifice your ability to block, bash, CC break, dodge, sprint, or sneak by using them.

Aggressively pointing this bit of wood at something is the most advanced tactic in ranged combat. It is the greatest achievement in Tamrielic ranged weaponry, rendering bows a relatively pointless invention. It is astonishing that bows survived into the 3rd and 4th eras, and more so that these clearly more technologically advanced homing laser weapons vanished.

Thralgaf

That sounds awesome.

UrQuan wrote: »

rekina wrote: »

Crossbow having shorter length and doing mediocre damage don't make any sense. It must do lethal damage and travel longer distance.

Ah, I see you've bought into the crossbow myth.

The fact is that crossbows never had longer effective ranges than longbows. The reason for this is that, unlike a regular bow, you can't fire a crossbow on an optimal parabola for achieving the greatest range. Or at least, you can't do it without the crossbow bolt tumbling and becoming ineffective. You need a longer arrow with better fletching to fly true over such a distance and arc.

Additionally, only the heaviest of crossbows had more penetrating power than a longbow. These are the crossbows you see with elaborate winches and other mechanisms for cocking them, and they were typically used primarily for sieges, where you could hide behind a wall or mantlet during the long reloading time. Crossbows used by armies in the field tended to be either cocked by hand (in which case they had less penetrating power than a bow), or by a stirrup and a hook on the belt (in which case they had similar penetrating power to a bow, and somewhat less than a longbow).

The only real advantage that crossbows had over bows is that a bow requires a great deal of training to be used effectively (the best longbowmen trained from when they were children). A crossbow requires virtually no training to be used effectively.

Actually, the arbalest had a longer range than the longbow. It just wasn't cost effective.

UrQuan

Seems intriguing, might work.

Thralgaf wrote: »

UrQuan wrote: »

rekina wrote: »

Crossbow having shorter length and doing mediocre damage don't make any sense. It must do lethal damage and travel longer distance.

Ah, I see you've bought into the crossbow myth.

The fact is that crossbows never had longer effective ranges than longbows. The reason for this is that, unlike a regular bow, you can't fire a crossbow on an optimal parabola for achieving the greatest range. Or at least, you can't do it without the crossbow bolt tumbling and becoming ineffective. You need a longer arrow with better fletching to fly true over such a distance and arc.

Additionally, only the heaviest of crossbows had more penetrating power than a longbow. These are the crossbows you see with elaborate winches and other mechanisms for cocking them, and they were typically used primarily for sieges, where you could hide behind a wall or mantlet during the long reloading time. Crossbows used by armies in the field tended to be either cocked by hand (in which case they had less penetrating power than a bow), or by a stirrup and a hook on the belt (in which case they had similar penetrating power to a bow, and somewhat less than a longbow).

The only real advantage that crossbows had over bows is that a bow requires a great deal of training to be used effectively (the best longbowmen trained from when they were children). A crossbow requires virtually no training to be used effectively.

Actually, the arbalest had a longer range than the longbow. It just wasn't cost effective.

No, it actually didn't. An arbalest had an effective range of about 300m, while an English longbow had an effective range of about 315m (at least that's the longest range we know for sure they practiced hitting a target at - supposedly it could fire significantly further than that, but it's doubtful it would have been effective). I once wrote a paper on the evolution of bows when I was in university.

rekina

UrQuan wrote: »

rekina wrote: »

Crossbow having shorter length and doing mediocre damage don't make any sense. It must do lethal damage and travel longer distance.

Ah, I see you've bought into the crossbow myth.

The fact is that crossbows never had longer effective ranges than longbows. The reason for this is that, unlike a regular bow, you can't fire a crossbow on an optimal parabola for achieving the greatest range.

Your logic only makes sense when your bow basic attack makes parabola. Ability Sniper does, so it has great range. Under the current bow basic attack motion, crossbow would make longer range in any case.

Cyberdown

id rather see a separate archery class added.

don't really like how they lumped together NB and archer, despite the whole stealth thing works well with it, eventhough NB was never a stealth class...more like a mage with a sword.

anyway...

id rather them flesh out the current melee system before they started making range weapons even more popular.

Dubah

Seems intriguing, might work.

Lynx7386 wrote: »

Will these new bows use magicka? Because that's the only way they'll be effective.

Are you kidding me? My melee dps are now outperforming or doing the same dps as my magicka based dps... The change is already here, you just gotta go embrace it. We now have 4 stamina dps builds in our raid and are just mauling everything down. Love the new changes keep em coming! I also love this idea, 3 seperate skill lines for each type (and hopefully the haste will affect them lol) Good thinking

Holycannoli

The large cranked crossbows can penetrate armor at a longer range than a longbow. That translates into more "damage" and range in a videogame. It also translates into longer loading times, but the difference is in videogames the training and expense of longbowmen are often not accounted for, at least in MMOs (games like RTS sometimes account for it) so a longbow has no disadvantages when in reality it had enough disadvantages to be eventually replaced by crossbows.

Mind you I'm talking about the large cranked crossbows like arbalests, not the smaller ones that were loaded by pulling up while stepping in a stirrup although they were also lethal. Some of the smaller crossbows still had a greater effective range than most bows but their largest advantage was the training necessary to use them, or should I say lack of training compared to longbows.

Holycannoli

UrQuan wrote: »

No, it actually didn't. An arbalest had an effective range of about 300m, while an English longbow had an effective range of about 315m (at least that's the longest range we know for sure they practiced hitting a target at - supposedly it could fire significantly further than that, but it's doubtful it would have been effective). I once wrote a paper on the evolution of bows when I was in university.

The longbow didn't have a longer range than the arbalest, and the longbow's real advantage was vs chainmail with bodkin arrowheads.

Crossbows came to dominate medieval warfare, along with pikes. It's not that the longbow wasn't good, it's that it was so expensive and the training so time consuming, and lost longbowmen were not easy to replace. Crossbows were easy to manufacture, easy to train and just as effective.

That does not translate well into an MMORPG. It certainly can't translate into ESO where we have laughably short bow ranges.

UrQuan

Seems intriguing, might work.

Holycannoli wrote: »

The longbow didn't have a longer range than the arbalest,

So 315m is not greater than 300m? That's odd... Especially since I was using the conservative estimate for the effective range for an English longbow. Some sources say that the professional longbowmen during the late 100 years war had an effective range of as much as 350m. I've never seen any source that gives an arbalest more than about 300m of effective range, but if you've got a source I'd love to see it.

Wolfshead

why should we have 2 different bow in game?

i get that people want xbow i would love to have handheld xbow even if don't make so much dmg but still would like to have it.

but bow i don't see the point and also as Holycannoli different type bow is very hard to translate into MMORPG

cuz_mike200

Seems intriguing, might work.

I don't care about the short bow, but a crossbow sounds awesome

Rodario

Terrible idea, bow system is fine.

Missing option: Meh Idea, bow system needs something else.

To your suggestion:

- What would be the reason to use anything but a long bow? Unless you mean they'd all have the same dps and the individual skill lines would be tailored towards long/short rage encounters.

- Crossbows had a better range than bows. They were a bit more difficult to produce, but a lot easier to use than bows. You could train any peasant to use a crossbow in a couple weeks' time, while an archer needed years of training to become proficient.

The advantage bows had over crossbows, despite the long training and shorter range, was that they could be fired accurately over obsticles like walls or your own troops. So crossbows were fired once or twice by frontline peasants, before the enemy got too close, while the archers could continue firing over the main battlefront.

Holycannoli

UrQuan wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

The longbow didn't have a longer range than the arbalest,

So 315m is not greater than 300m? That's odd... Especially since I was using the conservative estimate for the effective range for an English longbow. Some sources say that the professional longbowmen during the late 100 years war had an effective range of as much as 350m. I've never seen any source that gives an arbalest more than about 300m of effective range, but if you've got a source I'd love to see it.

There's a few sources, and if need be I can dig through my medieval warfare textbooks but not right now.

http://www.lordsandladies.org/crossbow.htm

That link is sketchy in spots, like saying the crossbow was supplanted by the longbow. It's actually the opposite.

http://fads.blogspot.com/2008/07/long-bow-vs-crossbow.html

http://web.mit.edu/21h.416/www/militarytechnology/crossbow.html

These are the most important exerpts from that link:

- Range: By the 15th century, with a steel crossbow, the range was about 380 yards, sometimes up to 500(2). Earlier crossbows were thought to have a point blank range of 70 yards but were more often angled up 45 degrees to give them a range of 350 yards. Highest effective was 150 yards, but still able to kill at 300(5).

- By 15th century most were made of steel so crossbows could have a better range than a longbow, as well as require less training to use(2).

- The most powerful were Genoese crossbows (this and their training may have accounted for their being the major mercenary crossbowmen hired in the Hundred Years War by France). This bow was 38 inches wide, 18 lbs, with a pull of 1,200 lbs and a range of 450 yards. It would shoot a bolt of 14 inches and 1/4 lbs but had to use a windlass and was very slow and heavy(5).

Italy was known for it's crossbowmen at the time, as the swiss were known for their pikemen. Turns out combining the two made an extremely effective fighting force in high demand.

The next source is not about not medieval crossbows and longbows but modern flight bows. It's interesting even if it doesn't add much to the discussion of medieval bows so I'll link it:

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/flight.html

Distances shot

The furthest distance shot with any bow is 2,047 yards (1,871.84m) . This was shot by the late Harry Drake in 1988 using a crossbow. The furthest with a hand-held — and pulled — bow is 1,336 yds 1' 3" (1,222.01m) , shot by Don Brown with an unlimited conventional Flight bow in 1987. My 40kg Compound World Record of 1,162 yards was made shooting a 30 kg bow — I can't pull 40 kg!

Distances achieved in Britain include:

Conventional Flight Bow (unlimited): Alan Webster — 916 yards
Compound Flight Bow (60 lbs): Barry Groves - 914 yards. That distance has since been beaten

seaef

No opinion.

RoyMallis wrote: »

GrimGryphon wrote: »

Well, archery is one of my hobbies, so here goes...

Longbows have a longer pull, require more strength, arrows travel the slowest but have more energy behind them, and are the least accurate.

Short-bows have a shorter pull, require less strength, arrows travel faster but have less energy behind them, and are more accurate than a longbow.

Crossbows have a shorter pull but constant due to mechanics, arrows travel the fastest but have the least amount of energy behind them, have great accuracy, and require the least amount of strength to use.

Take it for what it's worth as part of the discussion.

So would it be accurate then to rework the ranges I put up in reference to accuracy?

Absolutely. Some bows are harder to control than others. As for the crossbow, that's for the weaklings. ;-)

Audigy

There was a mod for Skyrim that offered this. So long bows did a lot of damage based on the distance, while short bows were almost melee combat and did less per shot.

Personally I don't mind this, they could also add poison arrows, flame ... The question however is, how urgent is it and how many would really use it?

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO

Seems intriguing, might work.

The "wooden angry stick of homing healing laser magic" post above made a very good point, but there is one thing that a reworked bow system could add: range. If a bow allowed for significantlly longer range shots than a staff, I could see people using it. But then again, the developers made a decision to make all weapons have a short range in this game, and there are probably technical reasons for that, like view distance issues.

suelothvar

Terrible idea, bow system is fine.

just give bows a decent range, sticks shoot just as far, even my thrown daggers go pretty much same range as normal shots, it just feels like were all running around with 30lb bows not longbows. snipe is ok, but even that feels short.


ps: if they do add anything to bows, please dont break bows again while doing it.

Moonscythe

Seems intriguing, might work.

It sounds like a good idea in a single player game but I think it would fall apart under the constraints of inventory and ability bars. I mean, that in any TES game I might train and use all three bows, I like bow; but I would be able to keep them with me if I balanced my carry capacity correctly or store them at home against need for a specific planned attack on a specific target. Otherwise, speed usually wins for me and would in ESO.

Holycannoli

Audigy wrote: »

There was a mod for Skyrim that offered this. So long bows did a lot of damage based on the distance, while short bows were almost melee combat and did less per shot.

Personally I don't mind this, they could also add poison arrows, flame ... The question however is, how urgent is it and how many would really use it?

It's urgent in the sense that weapons and stamina skills need an overhaul. And I would use it because my preferred weapon is the bow, even though I respecced out of one hand + shield to train destruction staff "to keep up with the Joneses."

The problem is it's nearly impossible to model the real life pros and cons of the various bows in a MMORPG. I briefly mentioned some of those pros and cons last night.

One idea I wouldn't mind seeing is that longbows would require a lot of skill points to use effectively, and you gain the advantage of a fast reload speed, which would make it a fantastic weapon vs unarmored or lightly armored opponents. Crossbows would require very little skill points, but you'd reload much slower (at least half as fast as a longbow). You'd also have a better effective range than longbows vs armored targets if you are using a later era heavy crossbow.

What would be the point in spending so many skill points in longbow then you ask? Exactly. That's realistic. You can accurately fire at least twice as many arrows, at shorter max range. Vs lightly armored opponents it's devastating, and how many people wear light armor in this game? Answer: almost everyone.

Unfortunately this sort of thing works much better in a game like Mount & Blade. MMORPGs are too simple and cannot model cost effectiveness, training requirements, effectiveness in large-scale battles where rains of arrows are modeled etc. When I asked above what the point in spending skill points in longbow would be, in a game like Mount & Blade an army supported by well-trained longbowmen can mow down lightly armored opponents at a much faster rate than an equal number of crossbowmen. Again though, doesn't translate that well in a MMORPG.