thrower?!?

[sly_1]

The general idea is simple: in the past a thrower build was never going to do much of anything. needing dex for ab and str for damage, you are either going to have to sacrifice ab or dmg or both. You might be able to get by with sneak attack rogue type of thrower, but anything else would be dps light.

But thanks to:

Brutal Throw
Prereqs: +1 Base Attack Bonus, 13 Strength
Benefit: You can use your Strength bonus instead of Dexterity bonus to determine bonus to attack with thrown weapons if it is higher.
Special:This feat can be selected by fighters as a fighter bonus feat.

now you can simply pump up your str and forget about dex altogether. Combine quick draw and rapid shot for some alacrity bonus and you are starting to get somewhere... maybe.

So any thoughts about a decent thrower build using this?

I worked up a kensai halfling thrower, but could only get the dps into the "just ok" range when getting sneak attacks and benefiting from halfling guile.

I won't bother y'all with the actual build but the dps looked something like:

dps:

1d8 base greensteel returning axe
4 - greater weapon specialization
3 - halfling thrown weapon damage
2 - fighter weapon mastery
2 - kensai mastery
10 - 30 base str, (requires +3 tome, otherwise this is +9)
2 - rage spell/potion

23 - 30 base dmg excluding elemental dmg etc.

situational:
4 - power surge
1 - madstone rage
12 - halfling guile

= 40 - 47 (+4 19-20 x3 on crit)

Now granted I could have very well missed something up there and there's also going to be other dmg types on a min II greensteel or radiance II weapon, but even with all of that the damage looks underwhelming to me. The main upside here is you get a *lot* of haste boosts in there, plus the 10% alacrity on the capstone, so you can have about 40% alacrity most of the time.

Now moving on to monk, I think there are some more interesting possibilities. Air stance will cap out at 25% alacrity, and 10,000 stars increases it to 50% (or does that stack with the 25% to get to 75%?). So you can get a machine gun thrower going with shurikens. the damage per blow will be low, but due to the massive volume of fire, you will maybe possibly average out respectable dps.

From there you can look at rogue throwers from the perspective of str based. the alacrity will suck on this build but the dps with all the str *and* sa dmg would be rock solid.

Finally we have rangers, who's ranged capstone reportedly works with thrown weapons...

Anyway, I'm too lazy atm to actually work up #'s for those 4 routes, but what say the lot of you? any chance of a viable thrower with that new feat?

[hydra_ex]

If archers with bows, with all their damage additions (ranger cap, AA), are still much inferior to melee, then a thrower, with the similar STR (maybe 5-10 higher), a lower RoF, and nothing else going for them, would suck.

[woundweaver]

being a thrower build is nice and all, except.....the fact that you cant repair the weps when they take damage. i would scrap the idea until turbine gets their head from where it doesnt belong, and fixes the thrown weapons so they can be repaired like every other weapon in the game. they dont show up on any repair lists. and its been this way for MONTHS

and for the record, its not just gs throwers that cant be repaired. its all thrown weps. my snowstars, and a couple more shuriken, named and unamed cannot be repaired because they dont show in repair lists. like i said, turbine somehow has left this problem unfixed for months, with promises that it was being fixed.*cough* 404error *cough*

[Memnir]

I threw the "changed enhancements" into this one because I figured that learning about Brutal Throw wouldn't excite too many people. That one, admittedly, was essentially a "target of opportunity" while we were making Zen Archery.

Busted up thrown weapons should be repairable in U5.

Emphasis mine.
...just in case y'all missed that in the jumble.


And on topic, I think the changes will make a throwing build better... but not quite viable.

[woundweaver]

Emphasis mine.
...just in case y'all missed that in the jumble.


And on topic, I think the changes will make a throwing build better... but not quite viable.

its about time. i did miss that part. but why wait months and months, until they decided to add these new feats to fix something that was broken a long time ago. 1000 threads, and 5 or 6 updates later....

i just had to point out the ridiculousness of it

[BLAKROC]

If archers with bows, with all their damage additions (ranger cap, AA), are still much inferior to melee, then a thrower, with the similar STR (maybe 5-10 higher), a lower RoF, and nothing else going for them, would suck.

Not to mention greensteel throwers can't be repaired.

greensteel throwers can be repaired now. in fact there was a post on how to accomplish this in a quest in the inspired quarter

[sly_1]

If archers with bows, with all their damage additions (ranger cap, AA), are still much inferior to melee, then a thrower, with the similar STR (maybe 5-10 higher), a lower RoF, and nothing else going for them, would suck.

Not to mention greensteel throwers can't be repaired.

Lower rate of fire? quick draw and rapid shot both work on thrown rate of fire, so does the ranger capstone, the fighter capstone, haste enhancements, etc. If anything the rate of fire should be roughly comparable.

A monk with 25% standing thrown alacrity and situational buff to add 50% alacrity + quickdraw, rapid shot, haste boost etc would surely have a better rof, while a ranger thrower will be identical to a ranger archer. a fighter will fall behind by 15% in the alacrity dept but can use haste boost enhancements to at least partially compensate...

[hydra_ex]

Lower rate of fire? quick draw and rapid shot both work on thrown rate of fire, so does the ranger capstone, the fighter capstone, haste enhancements, etc. If anything the rate of fire should be roughly comparable.

A monk with 25% standing thrown alacrity and situational buff to add 50% alacrity + quickdraw, rapid shot, haste boost etc would surely have a better rof, while a ranger thrower will be identical to a ranger archer. a fighter will fall behind by 15% in the alacrity dept but can use haste boost enhancements to at least partially compensate...

Base RoF for thrown weapons is lower than bows, iirc.

Either way, my other points (save the part about being repaired) still hold; throwers don't have the goodies that arcane archers (and even the nature of bows) do, and AA's are still sub-par, which means throwers are even worse.

Emphasis mine.
...just in case y'all missed that in the jumble.

Thanks Mem, I did miss that. I doubt it will work though, somehow...

[MrCow]

Base RoF for thrown weapons is lower than bows, iirc.

From jjflanigan's numbers on attack speeds (which I think was also included in cforce's attack index) and some semi-recent measuring of attack speeds (to confirm these numbers haven't changed in a long long time) the bow and throwing attack animations are the same before adding any modifiers.

Throwing weapons can be theoretically faster though due to two factors. Thrown weapons can be given a flat attack speed bonus via Quick Draw and Rapid Shot (bows can only make use of Rapid Shot). Also, the reload animation segment of the throwing animation only makes up ~1/3rd the total animation (compared to a bow's reload animation being ~2/3 the animation time) and thus benefits more from things like Haste, Ranged Alacrity, Master of Archery, Fighter Haste Boost, Ten Thousand Star Strike, and so on due to a quirk in ranged reload animations only partially benefiting from attack speed modifiers.

[hydra_ex]

From jjflanigan's numbers on attack speeds (which I think was also included in cforce's attack index) and some semi-recent measuring of attack speeds (to confirm these numbers haven't changed in a long long time) the bow and throwing attack animations are the same before adding any modifiers.

Throwing weapons can be theoretically faster though due to two factors. Thrown weapons can be given a flat attack speed bonus via Quick Draw and Rapid Shot (bows can only make use of Rapid Shot). Also, the reload animation segment of the throwing animation only makes up ~1/3rd the total animation (compared to a bow's reload animation being ~2/3 the animation time) and thus benefits more from things like Haste, Ranged Alacrity, Master of Archery, Fighter Haste Boost, Ten Thousand Star Strike, and so on due to a quirk in ranged reload animations only partially benefiting from attack speed modifiers.

Hmmm. I didn't know that.

From a ranged standpoint, throwers might not be half bad, and might be equal, or similar, in DPS to an arcane archer.

However, that still doesn't make them a very useful build.