Ranged RoF Increase

[grodon9999]

If they cannot increase the RoF, then a slight bump to the damage would be cool. I think that a high dex should account for some extra damage. Make it a feat if needs be. Dex bonus to damage.

Maybe a simple "overdraw" feat that's power attack for bows.

[Turial]

Didn't Codog say something along the lines, that rof could not be increased to much do to limitations on the server? I thought I remember reading that back when that whole thread was going.

Implementation of large numbers of orthons in quests that are commonly run kinda work against that idea. Either that or mob load is much less than player load on the server.

[Thorzian]

With the Ranger 20 capstone and manyshot while hasted I can fire 96 arrows in that 20 second period, can this do the same? Asking, not bragging as I'm a n00b and simply do not know.

I still don't see how it would be unbalancing if we could fire as fast as the mobs before the ranger 20 capstone. My AA can still swing her blades faster than she can shoot at level 20 (with the capstone).

the ranger capstone is 25% speed bonus. the fighter haste boost is 30, so yes. the fighter fires 5% more arrows. add the +8 strength power surge for the kensai 2, the +6(i think) damage per hit due to weapon specialization and mastery, the +3 strength for fighter ap, and the extra crit range of the fighter kensai 3 and not only is the fighter shooting more arrows, she is hitting much much harder per arrow. and for the favored enemy pushers.. it only requires 18 levels of fighter for kensai 3.. one of the other levels can be ranger and get the fe bonus if it's so important to you.

and i agree. rapid shot toons should fire as fast as enemy archers do. its just sick to see the difference.

[Fetchi]

Oh look, another "Ranged Combat Needs To Be Improved" thread. After 3 years these still never get old.

[BurnerD]

As much as I hate to even suggest this why not give a ranged combatant a toggle stance which increases damage output while applying a movement penalty and skill penalty (jump) while active.

I hate the movement penalty for the Paladin Defender Enhancement, but in this case it may work.

You can pack a wallop, but forget about kiting... time to pull out your rapiers......

[Fetchi]

Didn't Codog say something along the lines, that rof could not be increased to much do to limitations on the server? I thought I remember reading that back when that whole thread was going.

Something like this:

PARTYMAKER! (and everybody else that is interested in this issue)

I really don't like encouraging people to rant by responding to sarcastic and angry posts. However, today I think I encouraged this particular rant by not sharing some more information in the release notes about some work I've been doing to try to alleviate this. So fair enough, you called me out. I'm here and reading and responding to this thread. And no... I don't have time to respond to everybody who yells at me in their posts which I'm sure will erupt after this response.

This last cycle (mod 5) I put in a few fixes that should help with the missing die roll problem. Under load, we were able to reproduce the fact that when the server was hitching you'd miss one and three of your shots. Auto-attack made this problem worse because it exactly (more or less) predicts the moment you should be ready for another attack. So what I'm gathering from this thread is that one of the causes of this has been removed and there are yet other causes of the missed die rolls. It is extremely difficult to simulate in a development environment hundreds people hitting a server and playing an interactive game. Being that I reproduced _a_ problem with synchronization that was tricky and fixed it, I knew that this might not have totally eliminated the problem. Our QA team kicked the bug back to me with "hey it's not completely fixed... but it went from 1 in 3 shots to 1 in 50 shots" under normal dungeon circumstances. I made the call to not release note this because I figured this was likely a compound issue and might not totally go away.

Synchronization issues:

• The server thinks you can't perform this action yet because the cooldown timer got out of sync for this action. ( this is what I addressed )
• The server thinks the monster is somewhere else... I've noticed this playing with scorpions, wraiths, and spectres most. (still looking at this one) This is likely that the monster is actually "underground" or "in another plane" on the server when you attacked on the client, but hasn't been relayed to your client yet. Race states like this happen and there isn't a lot we can do about it.

Design issues:

• We use physics to determine whether you get a to hit roll or not. If your arrow doesn't hit the target, you don't get a chance at a to hit roll. We drew a really hard line in our game about this. Player skill, knowledge of D&D rules, and advancement all have to somehow play nice together. You can "physics miss" with melee weapons as well. (although the physics detection boxes are much larger than our arrows) I hope somebody out there has noticed that you can shoot an arrow and get some precise results when shooting untargetted. The choice to have precise aiming for untargetted attacks and using physics drives a lot of the rest of the issues. Virtually, you have a skill based to hit and THEN an advancement based to hit roll.
• Perching... monsters can't get everywhere in the game. Our pathing improvements have helped a lot... but every dungeon has some place where you can get safe from monsters immediate attacks.
• Due to our freedom of movement in our action combat, you can infini-kite monsters and never really risk being hit by melee style creatures or missile shooting creatures (arcus skeletons for example) if you play with enough twitch skill. I've seen videos of rangers soloing the Queen Lailat by this very tactic. In our damage curves for missile combat, we are somewhat compensating for this fact. This is what I believe feels really dissatisfactory to a lot of people. I shoot this guy 5 times and in 3 seconds Kargon kills everymahbody with his flamamatongue axe. The time you refer to as being when ranged combat was good was a time that when we went on the server and watched over people's shoulders to see how they were playing the game, we saw everybody ... and I mean EVERYBODY ... getting all the monsters mad and going and standing on a perch and killing everything. I thought to myself, "This certainly is fun for people." That rate of fire made bow combat far superior to melee in that you never had to risk anything really. Designers at the time used the cooldown time to limit the damage. (perhaps too much)

Content Issues:

• The invisible hidden geometry to keep people from getting stuck ( I call them the "handrails" ) will sometimes get in the way of missiles hitting where they are supposed to and sometimes interfere with camera's view of the world.
• Not every dungeon gives the opportunity of perched monsters for ranged classes to be the hero that saves the day. Most of the time, we try to keep a very clear path for monsters to get to you so that we don't get them stuck on irrelevent geometry and ultimately make them unchallenging and not fun.
• Some of the perched situations put you at an angle such that autoattack shoots at the center of the monster which angle dictates it would hit the platform instead of the monster proper. Again, untargetted attacks will hit these monsters. We've tried adjusting the height of autoattack targetting... but it yielded worse results when you were above your target or in front of them.
• A room or two have had messed up exports that make monsters completely unhittable from a physics perspective.
• Our monsters move... A LOT and FAST!

So yes... we've made some progress on the technical issues. There are still some open design problems related to "should your autoattack aim predict and shoot at the position the target might be?" and DPS as level cap increases. Is this your primary issue or the DPS balance?

To be completely honest, the content issues are not likely to get fixed in the lifetime of an elf. Total redesign of dungeons or our dungeon sets to make the angles better for targetted ranged attacks is not going to happen. Moving forward with new set pieces, certainly this will be kept in mind. We're not going to change the movement or action model of combat in our game. We will discuss with design ranged combat damage going forward as level cap increases. I am personally VERY committed to fixing technical issues related to this problem. (my sister plays a ranger in our Thursday night games... my father has a barbarian with a repeating crossbow) I play pickup games with other players as I have time. When they are having problems, I recommend that they hit T and go untargetted. This is especially true with monsters on perches or when they are moving.

I'm sorry that my lack of a response on this issue has you so frustrated and upset. Let me know what areas are most frustrating. Being specific about what you think sucks is most helpful to us. Most the time we don't have time to respond to it. If you get a /location and pasting it along with the quest you are on into your post with a brief description of your character build and which targets are unhittable, it would be great. Try both targetted and untargetted to see if it matters. Sometimes particular rooms give us a lot of fantastic debugging hints as to what is going wrong. There was a great example of this where a room had a problem with its geometry in which NO arrows could hit any monster... ever. It was a player that discovered this and let us know about it. It may well be that there are more rooms that have errors in their cellmesh export.

Best regards to all of you,

Codog

This was from October 2007 from this thread:

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php...92#post1385292

[irivan]

except that you are losing dps by not being a Pure Ranger... +4 damage a hit is significantly less dps than 20+% more attacks per cycle... not to mention the loss of Favored Enemy bonuses.


Its the can of worms the Capstones opened that make MC less and less viable.

Now if instead they up'd the RoA of Ranged in general by 10% and downed the Ranger Capstone to 15% and instead added something else in the bonus form that would be nice. Give the general Ranged attacks a little boost.

also changing the AI to compensate for ranged kiting and and you reduce the tedium that that entails.

add in other DPS options for Single Target DPSing (like for most boss fights) say Over Draw (as a power Attack like Feat for Bow) and X-Bow Sniper (half Dex bonus to damage crittable mobs only for x-bow builds)

then toss in some Tactical Abilities that don't revolve around having an effect bow and you mayhave a viable style that isn't overpowered

Aesop

I love it when people talk out of the side of their mouth, fighter haste boost works with bows, at level 5 +20%, and yes you get and i would also argue that 25% bow haste is less valuable than +5 to dam every shot when fighter hasted, you also forgot that fighters get +2 to strength by level 6, you left that out of your equation.

So haste boost, and you get 8 per rest between shrines with veriks, and +5 more dam per shot, def worth it.

this all means that with the ranger cap you will have precisely one more shot in 20 than the 12/6/2 build, at +5 * 20 =100 POD, unless you critical with that one extra attack, you did less damage, and with the pally levels, and fighter levels, more hp and better saves..

ranger caps stone is for the birds!!!

[Angelus_dead]

the ranger capstone is 25% speed bonus.

Why do people keep saying that the ranger capstone is 25% speed?

[Aesop]

I love it when people talk out of the side of their mouth, fighter haste boost works with bows, at level 5 +20%, and yes you get and i would also argue that 25% bow haste is less valuable than +5 to dam every shot when fighter hasted, you also forgot that fighters get +2 to strength by level 6, you left that out of your equation.

So haste boost, and you get 8 per rest between shrines with veriks, and +5 more dam per shot, def worth it.

this all means that with the ranger cap you will have precisely one more shot in 20 than the 12/6/2 build, at +5 * 20 =100 POD, unless you critical with that one extra attack, you did less damage, and with the pally levels, and fighter levels, more hp and better saves..

ranger caps stone is for the birds!!!

I love it when people talk out of ... nevermind not worth the energy

as far as I can tell its 6 haste boosts not 8 at fighter 6 or 7 if you take Ranger Extra Boost at 11 ranger... unless you are talking with items? 5base +1Kensai I +1Ranger Extra Boost = 7... or I'm missing something... entirely possible

Oh and that +5 damage you get you loose when you subtract your ranger Favored Enemy bonuses from 15 and 20 and Enhancements.


Not saying your build is bad just that you aren't gaining nearly what you think you are.



Personally I perfer a Fighter 18/2Bard build...

I lose Evasion... which is big I must say but the double PrE benefits are quite interesting.

Improved Critical range with Kensai 3 and the extra adamage all around is nice. Still I'd want a change to the RoA of at least 10% to the general populace to make the builds more viable.

The Fighter Haste Boost is great... for short term engagements... but the Ranger Capstone has several advantages all around... not the least being it doesn't need to be activated thus it doesn't lose duration due to activation lag.


just saying try not to insult people and just state your case instead.

Aesop

[Aesop]

Why do people keep saying that the ranger capstone is 25% speed?

probably a misunderstanding of terminolgy?.. though I'm sure you could correct it.



Aesop

[Cyr]

Why do people keep saying that the ranger capstone is 25% speed?

indeed. The funky math with ranged speed bonuses is a major misunderstanding that people have when figuring out which builds are better at ranged.

[LargeMarge]

indeed. The funky math with ranged speed bonuses is a major misunderstanding that people have when figuring out which builds are better at ranged.

True...but the fact is that the RoF is too slow regardless of the build.

[gavagai]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that ranged bows and crossbows are ok as is. I don't hate the idea of an RoF increase. I just don't see the point for it. A 10% increase across the board wouldn't make ranged equivalent to melee, and 90% of characters could be doing something more useful when the tactical benefit of ranged attack is gone.

The problem isn't about RoF. The problem is whole idea that there is a conflict between ranged vs. melee that must be balanced is wrong. Ranged is situational, just as bludgeoning weapons are situational. Switching weapons is healthy. DDO's combat system allows you to be more tactical; we can choose to strongarm that ogre or just plink-plink-plink til he croaks. For the specialist a few feats you can get Manyshot and the Precise Shot line which is more than enough to drop tough mobs. The role of ranged is just different from melee combat, and no character is stuck in one role.

As for the "king of ranged fighter v. ranger": the ranger has all his class bonuses for all weapons, melee and ranged. The fighter, even if better at the bow, has to sacrifice competency in melee to get that good at archery. Who is the better archer? I don't know. But the best all around combatant would be the ranger imho.

EDIT: HOWEVER if anything needs an increase in RoF, Shuriken and Darts do. The Halfling Monks and Drow Shuriken Kensais of Eberron would <3 it. xD

[irivan]

I love it when people talk out of ... nevermind not worth the energy

as far as I can tell its 6 haste boosts not 8 at fighter 6 or 7 if you take Ranger Extra Boost at 11 ranger... unless you are talking with items? 5base +1Kensai I +1Ranger Extra Boost = 7... or I'm missing something... entirely possible

Oh and that +5 damage you get you loose when you subtract your ranger Favored Enemy bonuses from 15 and 20 and Enhancements.


Not saying your build is bad just that you aren't gaining nearly what you think you are.



Personally I perfer a Fighter 18/2Bard build...

I lose Evasion... which is big I must say but the double PrE benefits are quite interesting.

Improved Critical range with Kensai 3 and the extra adamage all around is nice. Still I'd want a change to the RoA of at least 10% to the general populace to make the builds more viable.

The Fighter Haste Boost is great... for short term engagements... but the Ranger Capstone has several advantages all around... not the least being it doesn't need to be activated thus it doesn't lose duration due to activation lag.


just saying try not to insult people and just state your case instead.

Aesop

Actaully if you take the extra boost you are talking about, but even still, with the item i named above, Veriks necklace, which is all together easy to get, that is +2, so it could be 9, which is more than enough to get you to a shrine, and do it again.

And i am not even thinking about ranger favored enemy, because fighter damage increases count for all enemies, Favored enemy unfortunately does not. In addition there is just one more level of enh, and two steps in favored progression so +3 that you loose, and only against your specific monsters...undead, outsiders, golems, elementals, etc.. what ever... vs +5 that you gain, so the mixed build wins by +2, and you mentioned that evasion was better, but so are all of the saves, esp will, which rangers are notoriously weak at.

So more damage, better saves, evasion, more HP, the list goes on and on...

mixed build beats ranger with capstone, every time! And does not really need an alacrity boost, why do you need this when you have very little damage threat? sure it takes slightly longer to kill a moving ranged target, than a stationary one getting whaled on by a bunch of melee's but then again, if parties consisted of all ranged types monsters would go down about just as fast, and at range with bouncing non real threat agro.

I think most of us ranged types expect to much, thinking that we are going to out kill the three melees when they can immobilize a target is just unrealistic.