Originally Posted by
blerkington
Hi OP,
You may have noticed that several posters here, including a developer, do not agree with the idea of removing manyshot. I am glad of that because I think your proposal would amount to throwing away a very useful tool. In relation to your post quoted above, don't fall into the trap of thinking that people are resisting your suggestion because they don't understand. They do, they just don't agree.
Manyshot is so useful because it is a burst effect. It is a very useful way to deliver sudden, massive damage to one or more targets. That is good for killing a thing, or things, very quickly, which in my view is more useful than evening out damage over time.
Do you and your party want to be damaged by an enemy for some unnecessarily extended period of time while you kill it more slowly, or do you want to wipe it out immediately? Apart from conserving party resources, such as SP for healing by finishing a fight quickly, there are sometimes in-quest reasons why you need to take down certain enemies fast.
Manyshot helps you do that, a slightly higher but evened-out rate of ranged damage does not. Unless of course you are proposing to raise the level of ranged damage to be anywhere near what a melee can do, which is unlikely to ever happen because of the other advantages ranged combatants enjoy.
Another thing about manyshot is although it's on a timer, quite often we are not fighting a constant stream of enemies. There are pauses between encounters, and that is when your timer can reset. The nice thing about it the way the feat currently works is that it suits a variety of playstyles too.
If you are in a party of people who take their time questing, it may well reset from encounter to encounter. If you zerg, you make decisions about when it is tactically best to use the ability (not cycle it mindlessly every two minutes, while bemoaning low dps when it is cooling down) based on what you know of the quest, and do other things (such as move, melee, cast, accomplish quest objectives, etc) in between.
Manyshot is also very useful, when employed correctly, for shifting aggro of stronger enemies. That's particularly useful if you need to take control of a rampaging boss and move it to a certain location so the party can resume its normal tactics for beating that boss. Abilities like that can prevent quests or raids from wiping, and that is a valuable thing.
Without such a tactically useful feat archery will become simpler, less interesting, and less useful, at least in my opinion. I don't want to see that happen. I also worry that your proposal leads towards to a game world where there are even more kiting, uncooperative would-be Legolases who build shallow, one-dimensional toons that just will never put down their bows. Yuck.
Thanks.