Ranged Combat

**Xenostrata** · 02-19-2011, 06:01 PM

There seems to be a general agreement that in DDO, ranged combat is severely lacking. In other MMOs, ranged type fighting is usually reasonably even with melee in terms of cons and benefits, in that they will generally do slightly less damage but this is made up for by being harder to hit, or too far away to get to, or the use of ingame obstacles to maintain a distance. In DDO, archers and throwers lose all of these benefits and, at least in comparison to other games, the ranged damage is so severely lacking in comparison to melee that most don't bother- it seems to me that whenever a ranger is recruited into a group, it is assumed he is a tempest, and most of the time that assumption ia correct.

Now, I used to play PnP, and when I did, My favorite characters were almost always ranged, whether it was my longbow using elven druid or the human rogue that liked to kill things with his shortbow. When I first started playing DDO the beginning of last summer, one of the first toons I tried was a replication of my rogue - a high dex human that uses a shortbow for sneak attacks. I ended up scrapping him within a week, he was so frustrating to play (I was very close to giving up on DDO then, too- I thought it would always be that annoying). Not only was I not getting sneak attacks, but the monster would generally choose to ignore the tank in front of him to run straight at me, and being new to DDO and not knowing much about the importance of constitution, I would generally collapse into unconsciousness before my party could save me. What DDO needs is a few major changes to the ranged system, and having thought about it for a while, I've come up with the following suggestions:

1. Extend the sneak attack range. While this is less a modification to ranged combat than to rogues, there is no more of an icon of PnP than the halfling rogue with a crossbow, and all this would do is make rogues who choose to go ranged not be completely gimped. In addition, I would make the Assasinate ability from the PrE apply to any ranged attacks as well, so long as they are in the new and improved sneak attack range. Having it be just for melees is just another slap in the face to those of us who like to play the Deadly Arrow type rogues.

2. Rewrite the aggro system. This one might take a while to do, but I can't be the only one who finds it baffling when a mindless MOB at half health from a fighter's efforts turns around and attacks a mage for doing 30 damage with a failed FoD spell, or an orange named beholder chasing around the ranger who did 50 damage with a bow while completely ignoring the 3 fighters that had done well over 500 damage to it before the ranger shot it once. If a ranged attacker can grab less aggro than a melee (like how it is in pretty much every other game) it might attract more people to that play style. It also makes little sense for a zombie to switch targets and chase after the ranged, it shouldn't know anything about who's doing what damage anyway, is should just mindlessly attack the guy in front of it.

3. Give the deepwood sniper PrE something to be proud about. Please. If the ranger class was like a family, tempest would be the popular, athletic type that everyone likes, arcane archers would be the kind of nerdy but accepted little brother of the jock, and deepwood sniper would be the kid that everyone mostly ignores, but they all make fun of him behind his back because he's the kid that spends all his time thinking about death, listening to metal bands with names that are unpronouncable in the english language, and sitting quietly in his room playing with his pet tarantulas named Sadness and Despair. At the moment, all the deepwood sniper gets is the occasional boost in crit range and multiplier, which translates into something like a 5% dps boost for a couple seconds. It seems unfair and unrealistic that the only way to play a viable archer in this game is to be able to cast spells. Maybe you could give deepwood snipers automatic vorpals at long ranges (the point of a sniper is to kill things quickly from far away, not to do almost no damage and bring your target closer to your position). Also nice would be something to tie in the "deepwood" part, like maybe being able to shoot from sneaking and maintain the sneak, or giving bonuses to attack and/or damage when firing from somewhere secluded or raised (like from inside a bush or the top of a cliff). It would also make general sense to grant a little sneak attack damage like the ninja monk gets, since the PrE seems to be built on sneakiness and havinv a couple devastating attacks rather than a steady stream of dps. To be honest, even with these boosts, I still think that the deepwood sniper will lag far bahind the arcane archer and even further behind melees. They would still need something for maintained dps on bosses and in epics (maybe a permsnent boost to crits instead of temporary?), and their damage output still won't be anything near an AA with manyshot amd slaying arrows on.

4. Increased or modifiable attack speeds. One thing keeping ranged dps so far behind is that it is somkuch slower than everything else. If a guy with a pair of swords can hit something for more damage around 150 times a minute, there is no way someone with a bow hitting for less damage 60 times a minute will come close to that kind of damage. One way to change this and possibly make it mire realistic is to give stances to everyone for when they use a bow- maybe 4 or 5 total, each one with a different attack speed and bonus so that if you are easily hitting monsters you can switch to shooting faster but less acurately, or if you are having trouble hitting your target you can slow down your attack rate to aim better. Either way, having an attack mode be both slower and weaker than usual is going to gaurantee that it is less commonly used and considered gimp.

5. Implement composite bonuses to damage, as well as other dps boosts. The bow strength feat, while helpful, isn't nearly enough to bring the damage of ranged up to par. Composite bows are pretty much indistinguishable from their normal counterparts, however, in PnP they could come with bonuses that allowed you to use your strength bonus with damage (a +4 comp longbow would let you use 4 of your strength for damage, for instance). One way to bost ranged damage would be to use that idea and have it stack with bow strength, so that while bows do inferior damage you would be able to apply your strength bonus to damage twice in some cases (anyone who has used a composite bow in real life knows that this is actually how they work - they are designed to magnify a persons strength as the string is pulled). Also implementable would be to give a fraction of a toons dexterity bonus to damage, possibly based on how close the target is (this is based on the idea that aiming well makes a difference in damage, that someone who can choose to aim for the head will dommore damage than someone who just aims randomly and hits an arm). Of course, other ways to boost dps (like higher bow damage) would be simpler, but I think the best way would be to involve the stats of the toon.

6. Change how looted arrows work. One bonus to ranged combat is that you can use two bonuses in your attacks - maybe some holy arrows with a shocking burst bow for a lot of damage. The problem is, getting these arrows is reasonably rare, you only get 20 of them at a time, and you run out really fast. If, for some lucky reason, you manage to pull 100 greater evil outsider bane arrows over the course of a week, then you might be thinking "Wow! I can use these on Harry and actually make a difference next shroud run!" So, you load up your silver or metaline of pure good longbow, join the next shroud run, and find yourself at phase four shooting like there's no tomorrow. Unfortunately, those 100 arrows are gone in less than two minutes, leaving you feeling cold and depressed as you realize you don't have anymore for the next phase. Luckily, this situation only rarely happens, but only because you won't find 100 greater bane arrows of the same type in a week. Since I've started playing, I have found maybe 80 evil outsider ones, 120 aberration, and assorted others - over the course of about 8 months. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but if it takes me 8 months to not even find a full stack of arrows, and that stack would only last about a minute and a half, then something is probably wrong with the system. For this bonus to ranged combat to be helpful at all, magic arrows should have some return rate to prolong effectiveness and a higher drop rate. Also helpful would being able to find them in stores, but the pricing would either be too high or too low, since a middle price would be too easy for incredibly rich upper level archers and too expensive for the poor lower levels who are still grinding.

7. Use of terrain as a bonus of ranged combat. One of the reasons I always liked ranged combat in games was how you could think strategically, with thought to attack angles and slopes and obstacles. In DDO, the only way this factors in is through shooting from somewhere unreachable by your target. Due to movement speed and monster movement, shooting at something from the top of a hill that os covered in boulders does no more to impede movement than shooting at him from even ground- the monster is still going to reach you by the second or third shot, nommatter how you plan out your strategy. If you manage to arrange it so that he needsmto run around to get to stairs to reach you, all that does is make is impossible to hit him wbile he is runnig sideways since toon AI does not know how to lead a moving target when aiming with a bow. Ranged combat has become just as straightforward as melee, which is kind of disappointing since the whole point is to be able to do damage from afar and in DDO you don't actualky get to keep that benefit. What's the point of attacking from a distance if it can run up to you really fast, and if it is going to stay where it is that generally it means it is attacking someone else and wouldn't be bothering you if you were right next to it.

Anyway, this is all just my opinion. If you have any ideas to improve ranged combat, please post them, if you have any reasons why my ideas won't work, please post that too, and if you agree with me feel free to sign it to get some decent ranged combat back to DnD.

**Xenostrata** · 02-19-2011, 06:02 PM

Wow, that came out longer than I thought it would. I apologize for typos, I wrote this from a mobile device and virtual keyboards tend to come out badly.

**Gorbadoc** · 02-19-2011, 08:13 PM

This suggestion comes up from time to time. I guess I'm glad for that, since I do want to see ranged combat improved, and I figure the devs are more likely to make it a priority if they see recurring interest in the topic.

The trouble, though, is that just toying with the numbers won't fix things. It needs to be tricky to kill monsters with ranged combat, not because the DPS numbers stink (I want to see the DPS numbers improve, too!), but because the monsters put up a good fight against ranged combat. Ranged combat needs to be interesting, with its own risks as well as benefits.

**Brennie** · 02-20-2011, 05:36 AM

I would like to start out by saying that one of my 20's in an Arcane Archer, but i have no other ranged characters. My comments will mostly be through the filter of a Level 20 AA Ranger.