Buff Manyshot!

[Braegan]

Maybe a Enhancement that has a requirement of manyshot, all classes can get it?

Manyshot is a powerfull ability. That is why my suggestion to improve it would only apply to dedicated archer builds to improve their bread and butter form of DPS. Any improvement to MS should not, IMO, be allowed to splashes or dabblers.

[Braegan]

As an alternative, i would suggest a wider cone/cylinder through which Improved Precise shot acts.

IPS is, in many ways, a full time many-shot (toggleable, btw, something I didn't realize for far too many levels). Consider:

IPS is really nice for semi-AOE DPS. The very few places I've seen it really effective was in VoD with an Intim on Orthons. It is very situationally good. My sugestion was more for pro-longed single target DPS boost which is what MS improvement would yield.

[jingseng]

IPS is really nice for semi-AOE DPS. The very few places I've seen it really effective was in VoD with an Intim on Orthons. It is very situationally good. My sugestion was more for pro-longed single target DPS boost which is what MS improvement would yield.

I understand that; but I think simply buffing the ability, or substituting with a 50% chance double shot is simply too blatantly, all-the time powerful.

Devs aren't going to go for that.

I would be hard pressed to name, let alone believe, any incident in the history of MMOs where the devs were like "hey this player wants us to make something much more powerful than it currently is, with practically no downside. let's do it!"

On the other hand, they generally DO like when changes do, in fact, rebalance classes, and cause players to to take a more active role in the play... and to perhaps even rethink how to play the class.

And that's sort of the problem with DDO gameplay at the moment. The overwhelming focus on putative dps per second and papercrafting. This ignores any number of uncontrollable human and situational variables - number of attackers, positioning, rate of damage taken (a dead dps is divide by 0), distance to target (you can regularly and easily kill targets before they are even drawn on your screen with bow, including with IPS), detection by target, and so forth.

In short, tactical considerations get ignored. Gameplay gets reduced into mindless and endless clicking.

This is one of the reasons why I don't really mind manyshot in its current incarnation; I'm sure we'd all love for many shot to be constantly (or half constantly) available, but that's because deep down inside, most of us acknowledge that this would be overpowering - and we want that. But 20 seconds of manyshot (especially with haste) is enough time for me to duck in and clear a room, to overpower self-healing targets, or to make sure that one mob dies "now" before it can cause great harm to the party. that's the purpose of spike damage - but it's a tactical consideration that get's lost in "damage divided by time expressed in seconds".

If you think about it, I think many will agree that many shot as it is, we've got a good thing going. And considering the direction of the combat lag fixing, I don't think it will be a good idea for archers to get MORE attacks - because guess where that's going to lead?

Instead, we need to think sideways - how else can we improve that damage without substantially changing the good thing we have? That's why i suggest the alteration to IPS. This has the potential to change large aspects of gameplay.

Consider: Mob positioning now becomes (more) important. How do you achieve that, in order to increase party efficiency? True-tanking: Intimidating and damage reduction/avoidance.

So now you are altering how some classes of non archers play. But it doesn't stop there:

Now you have mobs all clustered - this will inevitably affect spell choice for casters, as well as make rogue/sneak attacking more desirable.

Now you are affecting many more classes, as well as overall party setup. If you take the time to think it through, in terms of consequences, results, and further consequences, you can see how one, simple change has the potential to affect large swathes of gameplay, and introduce multiple, viable forms of gameplay. That makes it attractive, for prolonging the enjoyment and viability of a game.

By contrast, if we simply reduce the cooldown of manyshot, for example, what does that change, other than archers using manyshot more often, and more players flocking to archer classes? If anything, that leads to an imbalance - there are fewer players representing other job classes at any given time. That in turn, makes it more difficult to get a group, makes it more difficult to complete quests, creates schisms in the community between "band wagoners" and "old schoolers", and so forth; it creates a lot of frustration.

This is, incidentally, why a lot of suggestions don't get implemented - they are great on paper, in a small view, but in a big view, they lead to detrimental effects. By contrast, it's easy to ignore threads that keep asking for the same thing - especially if you know that by "giving them what they want" you'll only be getting aggravation in return.

Take, for example, Imbue acid. Archers complained about wanting to do more damage. Ok, so dev's gave us imbue acid. Before it was even introduced into the game, flaming of the devs ensued.

It's probably the second, if not third most powerful imbue there is. You are automatically adding Acid Burst (base acid damage + tick of acid DoT is equivalent) to whatever bow you are using. That's huge for the traditional conception of DPS. If you throw in paralyzers and IPS, even the DoT portion has some measure of use.

More than that, it gave AA tactical considerations - which imbue do you want to use? Terror for Vorpal-Phantasmal Killer proc, and short term fear effect to protect mages and reduce damage taken? Slayer for the rough equivalent of +25 (on silver bow) per shot? Or is the target Incorporeal? Or does the target have some sort of regenerative trait (not necessarily troll) such that acid damage DoT may help when you roll that 1?

So I think we, those interested in boosting manyshot, need to take a step back, and consider what is our goal in making this request, and think of alternative ways to achieve that, even if it's by an indirect route such as influencing how other classes play their jobs.