A ranged advantage taken away as a side effect

[SiliconShadow]

One of the advantages of ranged combat is that you can hold/disable mobs from a safe distance.

For this reason a 2 bows are common, Wounding of Puncturing and a Earth grab bow, this allowed ranged combat to make use of its 3x multiplier on bows, bow damage is relatively low, no power attack available etc, so it relies heavily on its critical multiplier.

Now only doing 50% more damage to a target ranged damage has taken a DPS impact in normal quest lines making it much harder to kill targets, now a very good archer has turned into mediocre and nothing in the patch makes up for that, the general change has hit a few builds hard but in general it has hit ranged very hard.

Waiting for a 20 to kill...

Camo isn't changing my texture I get a buff animation then it vanishes, someone confirm.. kinda looks freaky what in the xoriat!

[Trillea]

One of the advantages of ranged combat is that you can hold/disable mobs from a safe distance.

For this reason a 2 bows are common, Wounding of Puncturing and a Earth grab bow, this allowed ranged combat to make use of its 3x multiplier on bows, bow damage is relatively low, no power attack available etc, so it relies heavily on its critical multiplier.

Now only doing 50% more damage to a target ranged damage has taken a DPS impact in normal quest lines making it much harder to kill targets, now a very good archer has turned into mediocre and nothing in the patch makes up for that, the general change has hit a few builds hard but in general it has hit ranged very hard.

If this means less pewpew and more slashslash I am all for it.

[SiliconShadow]

If this means less pewpew and more slashslash I am all for it.

Very unuseful comment.

[Thuriaz]

I hate to say it but monks are hit even harder than archers. When you switch to your TWF options your going to have a decent STR to back it up. If a monk is landing, ANY, major wis strikes they are going dex based or used con as a dump stat. Imagine how much worse it is to try building up Ki without crits. This would be like removing your many shot until you had mele'ed at least 5 mobs to death and THEN putting you on a timer till many shot was removed.

In short this "no crit" situation is bad for everything, the less "Fighter" or "Barbarian" based your build is the worse it gets for you EXCEPT in the case of casters. Honestly I think they should have left the auto-crit for held mobs/players alone and changed the helpless extra damage profile to +50% as they did. Right now the difference between a helpless mob and a held/stunned mob is none-existent. That means your as well off to smack a mob with hypno, otto's sphere, enthrall, or something of the like as you are to spend points on a MORE EXPENSIVE spell (mass hold monster) to get the same effect.

In short, weaker spells just got boosted, stronger spells just got shelved for wizards/sorc's. No reason to cast a hold spell ever again, just dance them.

I'm not saying the changes are all bad, but I am saying that with so many changes and then bugs that need to be worked out with those changes my continual comment of "I need to shelve some of these characters" is slowly being resolved.

Characters being rendered ineffective:
2 monks
1 stalwart dwarf
1 wizard (possibly)