Devs... Simple Answer for Simple Question

[maddmatt70]

He was disagreeing with the assertion by negative that 1 ranged character in group does not contribute, not about certain fundamentals of ranged combat period, at least that is how I was reading it.

Correct ranged combatants do contribute. They do have to do some meleeing in a quest because of their dps deficiencies but they do contribute while ranging and they will provide an extra dimension if played well. I collect arrows and use arrows such as slaying arrows and +5 holy arrows. Archery in ddo is for the committed it is not for some happy go lucky guy that wants to sit there with a substandard bow and shoot arrows at all the mobs. You have to break out the special arrrows work at lining up your improved precise shot and be willing to do some meleeing. Exude versatility. I also have close to no fail heal scroll umd (someday will get no fail heal scrolls) and want to try to do what I can to help in the scroll usage end as well.

Should they improve ranged dps - the answer is yes, but they are very very afraid of making ranged combat the only way to go by over enhancing it. I think they feel if they ever did that they would kill ddo because so many people love to play melee.

[Angelus_dead]

Closer to the real problem: since ranged DPS currently does not stack with melee DPS, either ranged is underpowered or overpowered.

I wonder if I should look around for the thread where that concept is explained. That's an important conclusion that's not 100% intuitive (because in a crude and impractical sense, they do stack additively).

Anyway, you might be interested in what some other games do: separate hate numbers to pull aggro with ranged or melee. Basically, when designing the monster you enter a number indicating how confident it is at attacking things far away from it. Most mobs are melee-brutes, so they'd have a low number (like 0.2), but those with either powerful ranged attacks or fast movement would have higher (up to possibly 1.0).

Then when creatures are deciding who to attack, the effective aggro of anything outside it's melee reach is multiplied by the ranged-confidence factor, which might mean that an archer could stand back and inflict 500 damage before pulling aggro from a paladin who'd done 100 damage.

(This can lead to a cool/funny effect: an archer does heavy damage to a boss, but doesn't pull aggro because a melee tank's DPS is keeping up with the ranged-confidence factor. But then for some reason he steps into within swing range, and the boss immediately eats him)

[barecm]

I am reading a lot of theories of ranged combat and how hard or easy it is to fix. I have had a ranged ranger since the beginning of my account, which is basically the beginning of the game and in on beta as well (although I do not have a founders tag for whatever reason). I had played the beta ranger (the perceived over-powered ranger). That ranger from beta would have been the ideal until they broke it right before release. Then, they tried to fix it in mod 3, but wound up introducing a bigger issue, the terrain tracking bug which is the culprit for missed shots NOT lag. Now, nearly 3 years later, we are still asking for ranged combat to be fixed. No, it is not easy to fix. Yes, it should be fixed after 3 years.

You want proof that you can shoot faster and still record damage... look at your enemy's rate of fire. Have you seen how quickly drow archers shoot at you ???

So yes, this can be fixed. They choose not to. It is not a new issue. It has been brought up ad nasueum in the past. But still... NOTHING. No fix. In fact, it has been REMOVED from the known issues list. Yes Turbine we did notice you removed it! And no I am not going to stop bringing it up.

Now with mod 9 they had a chance to introduce better ammunition (which is a patch to a broken combat system) and still cannot get it done, or probably more accurate CHOSE not to do anything about it. So hurrah for +1 to our already +4 arrows. Big yippie. That should fix ranged combat.

Don't accept ranged combat being "fine as is" because it isn't. You cannot even fire as fast as your enemy.

[maddmatt70]

I am reading a lot of theories of ranged combat and how hard or easy it is to fix. I have had a ranged ranger since the beginning of my account, which is basically the beginning of the game and in on beta as well (although I do not have a founders tag for whatever reason). I had played the beta ranger (the perceived over-powered ranger). That ranger from beta would have been the ideal until they broke it right before release. Then, they tried to fix it in mod 3, but wound up introducing a bigger issue, the terrain tracking bug which is the culprit for missed shots NOT lag. Now, nearly 3 years later, we are still asking for ranged combat to be fixed. No, it is not easy to fix. Yes, it should be fixed after 3 years.

I had heard that it was alpha where ranged combat was overpowered and not beta.

I think a part of this has always been the resources DDO has. They don't have the resources to fix every issue and are slowing down production in general. I will be quite peeved personally if we don't at LEAST see a Gianthold sized update next mod for the 4 level cap increase along with a significant number of new spells and other additions.

Ranged combat in all probability is not a simple fix because if for instance they just upped the rate of fire 30% so much in terms of balance of enemy mobs and other party members are effected, there are aggro issues, etc. Turbine's decision likely long ago was to just forgo range combat fixes. Sadly, archery is becoming dead and buried and the decision to not release even one more tier of arcane archer speaks to this.

[Angelus_dead]

I had heard that it was alpha where ranged combat was overpowered and not beta.

In beta I was running Redwillow at level 3 with crossbows, which was a level 7 quest at the time.

[barecm]

I had heard that it was alpha where ranged combat was overpowered and not beta.

I think a part of this has always been the resources DDO has. They don't have the resources to fix every issue and are slowing down production in general. I will be quite peeved personally if we don't at LEAST see a Gianthold sized update next mod for the 4 level cap increase along with a significant number of new spells and other additions.

Ranged combat in all probability is not a simple fix because if for instance they just upped the rate of fire 30% so much in terms of balance of enemy mobs and other party members are effected, there are aggro issues, etc. Turbine's decision likely long ago was to just forgo range combat fixes. Sadly, archery is becoming dead and buried and the decision to not release even one more tier of arcane archer speaks to this.

Alpha testing? It was beta. There were a few different versions of the beta, but beta nonetheless.