Ranger: Arcane Archer Changes (Early Autumn Edition)

[Thar]

Here's some changes we'd like to make to Arcane Archer sooner rather than later. We expect we may come back to Arcane Archer in the not-distant future to address additional issues we'd like to get to. We consider this a strong basis for improvement in some of the primary Arcane Archer features. There are some specific abilities that we consider underperforming that we want to address but may not have time to get in very soon¹.

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Arcane Archer

• Action Boosts reduced to 1 AP per rank - good and common pass adjustment.
• DC Based Arrow Stances: Includes Terror, Paralyzing, Banishing, and Smiting Arrows:
  
  • Each becomes one rank, 2 AP. - good ap reduction.
  • Each has a saving throw of 20 + Wisdom Modifier + Enchantment Spell Bonuses - being that rangers are well rangers not casters, this is a common problem with the class and related spells. wisdom mod will be in the single digits and enhancement bonus will be limited on related gear, etc. i'd suggest 20 + Ranger level + wisdom mod + enchantment bonus if you don't want to use dex. yes moncher haters, this will boost monchers a bit but seriously dc's in epic are more than 50s that you obtain here anyway. if you want this to be useful, you need to add more to it somehow.
    
  • Each enhancement taken grants +1 DC with Enchantment Spells.
    why not evocation or a blanket to all spells which would help the useless ranger dc spells? that seems more in line with the class. i'm not charming monsters with my arrows or even hypnotizing? Is there any enchantment spell class on the tree? yes they are enchanting arrows but to do spell effects that hurt more or do other spell scoll effects.
    
  • Paralyze and Terror become short durations, but no additional save after the initial save. Short in this case is about 6 seconds. If you keep shooting one target, it can continue to be Paralyzed or Terrored. If you can keep a line going for Improved Precise Shot, you can keep this going on multiple enemies. To control maximum enemies, you'll need to frequently switch targets.
    
    boooo but whatever, it's still hardly going to work for a ranger in epics.
    
  • Paralyzing Arrows: On save, chance to apply 3 seconds of -10% Movement and Attack speed.
    
    good addition, a -1 to enchantment save would be nice if you insist on keeping the saving throw enchantment.
    
  • Smiting Arrows gains a chance to apply Deconstructed (slows attack speed, reduces fortification by 25%, and inflicts a 25% penalty to Repair healing)
    interesting
    
  • Banishing Arrows gains chance to inflict Pull of Reality¹ on each hit.
    
    • Pull of Reality¹: -1 PRR, -1 MRR. Stacks up to 25 times. 5 stacks fade away every 3 seconds (if no new stacks were added).
    
    
    interesting...
  
  
• Elemental Arrows (Corrosive, Flaming, Frost, Shock)
  
  • Increase base damage to 1d8.
  • Damage scales with Spell Power. Exact amount TBD.
  • Each additional Elemental Arrows increases damage by +1 die.
  • Each enhancement tier from 2-5 has a new multiple choice option, "Elemental Damage", that increases damage by +2 dice (for a maximum of 7 dice if you select only one damage type).
  • Tier 5 Elemental Arrow damage (Improved) also scales with Spell Power.
  • Force Arrows scales number of dice with Elemental Arrows, and also scales with spellpower
  
  
  good change here, these were always too costly for minimal useage since only one could be active at a time. will the force arrows tier up by +1 or 2 die too?
  
• Shadow Arrows (Core, 18 levels of Ranger):
  
  • Gains: "Passive: Equipped bows gain +1 Competence bonus to Critical Damage Multiplier"
  
  
  excellent. although since level 18, could be both threat and damage. keeps this out of moncher discussion which is good.
  
• Mystical Archer (Core, 20 levels of Ranger):
  
  • Dexterity bonus increased to +4
  
  
  appropriate but without manyshot changes the 20% doubleshot is less than it seems. 10k should have the penalty, manyshot shouldn't. put both on the same timer if you need to.
  
• Slaying Arrow:
  
  • Depending on DPS testing, this may be decreased or increased in power. Yes, if we've injected too much power into Arcane Archer, this is where we will probably pull back on some of it. We don't expect to fundamentally change the design of this ability, but it's not healthy or good design for so much of the power of one enhancement tree or build to be in a single ability like this. (And yes, we understand just how powerful and vital it is for certain builds, but that's part of the problem.)
  
  touching slayer arrow weakens ranger greatly with lesser arrows not working in epics. (changes above aren't sufficient to make dc's work in epics) and after 3 lives in primal, what then. if this is reduced then some other buffs to the tree are needed to keep ranged combat viable.
  

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This accomplishes a few goals:

1. DC based abilities² have long been a bane of Arcane Archers. They were often extremely strong when obtained, but had no way at all to scale up towards higher levels, which has only gotten worse over time and higher levels. Reworking these abilities was a key feature we wanted to get to sooner rather than later. This has meant we've wanted to adjust how some of those abilities work as well, and in particular wanted Smiting and Banishing Arrows to feel more impactful on attacks that were not criticals (while not simply adding damage).
   
   rework per ranger level or a stat the class uses. dex, int would be appropriate. maybe cha
   
2. Elemental Arrows were simply too weak, and also didn't scale into Epic levels. These changes should make them feel pretty powerful in heroic while also having some good options to scale into Epic. The addition of multiple choice options gives players some meaningful choices on how to progress.
   
   good move
   
3. Those two changes, especially focusing on Spell DCs and Spell Power, help with the lore and flavor of Arcane Archer as well. While not strictly necessary for gameplay, we like to support this when we can. It also gives us a means of differentiating Arcane Archer from other potential bow users. We know this isn't a large and fully realized group of build choices, but we certainly want that open as a development path, and hopefully they won't look all that similar when we get there. Fighters focusing on bows should be viable, for instance, and wouldn't be likely to invest heavily in Spell Power or Enchantment DCs.
4. Some of the other changes are really quality of life, keeping up with the Joneses, and things we can quickly and easily do.

how are you helping the ranger spells? wisdom based does not help damage or to hit unless your monk. those spells snare, etc need a revamp to add ranger level into the dc and account for the bonus your providing here. that will make them useful, i would hope. saved in epic are into the 50-60s? how do you see a ranger building for this and maintaining a viable dex?

Again, we want to say that we don't think this is a perfect or even a complete pass for Arcane Archer. As an example, it pains us to leave Dispelling and Shattermantle shot as-is, and we've been discussing some other possibilities with the Player's Council. Those abilities really need a larger redesign - potentially touching on things like a redesign of Dispels across DDO, for instance, which we just don't have time for right now. But some of us having been pushing to get some of this came out sooner rather than later!

This is, of course, a design-in-progress, subject to change from testing, math, deep insights of wisdom, a million kobolds with typewriters, or designers unscrupulously trying to fit a bit more improvement in when they should probably get on with Level 30 work.



Thanks for your thoughts and feedback, and may you always be fighting in the shade!

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Footnotes, Vargouille? That's so outdated. Do you think you're in the module years?

1. (TM)

2. I'm going to recommend that when you fight in other planes, some enemy monsters should inflict Pull of Reality on player characters...

3. Developer Trivia: Some of the choices here in particular relate to technical hurdles that we've spent some time investigating working around but are probably not worth (even more) time. If you look carefully across DDO, you may note a relative lack of saving throws on most player abilities which are triggered passively. (Shiradi's Nerve Venom, for instance, was always intended to have a saving throw... it just didn't actually work, so got redesigned some at the last minute!) It's not that it's 100% impossible to do some of this kind of thing, but the amount of extra work is staggering (compared to even moderately simple abilities, can take 20-40 times as long to create). Even getting the saving throws we do have here is a bunch of extra work that doesn't really help anywhere else in the game, but at least applies to four abilities. This is also part of why they all use Enchantment Spell DC bonuses, rather than Terror Arrows using Necro... err, I mean, you are clearly enchanting your arrows in any case. So it's a lore reason! That sounds better, right? And therefore part of the flavor is that Arcane Archers specialize in Enchantment. It all comes together, somehow. (No, we're not going to base monster saves assuming you have 4 levels of Arcane Archer to get better Enchantment DCs... but if some Elf Wizard wants to go for it, well, we love somewhat crazy builds.)

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^{P.S. I probably ramble on too much even when I don't give a Trivia warning. Maybe I shouldn't use that. Maybe I shouldn't post hours after everyone else has gone home and no one can stop me. Bwahahahaha!}

see some notes in the original note above.

Too little for the poor archers. In heroic it's fine, if not a slow and agonizing combat style. Some alaracy would be nice higher in the tree to make it feel like action not pew....pew... pew... while rogue artificers are running around going pew.pew.pew...pew.pew.pew...pew.pew.pew in the same time. attack speed needs a boost. the crit range is still pityful compared to melee so a speed boost seems still ok here. much like crossbows got. bows can shoot faster in real life than a crossbow as was the original intent of pen and paper speeds of the weapons. somehow it morf'd in ddo to make crossbows king with uber crit ranges and speed.

the problem still related to not buffing monchers too much at the same time. put caps for the buff tied to ranger level. ie core adds 1 enchangement to the weapon (does not stack) what use is this with epic bows being +6 or more???. change to adds 3% alaracy ranged and 3 range power per core tier capped at ranger level or dex bonus

yes archery is safer but when you agro something and the tank can't pull it back, it's run straight at you and splat your dead as you can't cc or kill 10k mob in epic. if your the first to shoot before melee gets agro... good luck kiting. not saying this is not possible, but outside of the 7 furyshots you have how can you go any reasonable dps to kill something chasing you? some sla spells like -25% damage bubble like arty would be nice.

spells see above... need some +ranger level love

defense - cores are weak especially since you can't use all at once. add some passive mage like ability to each. core 2 - add 5 prr/mrr to leather armor or haste as sla, core 3 add globe of inv as sla core 4 add prr/mrr on his for 5 sec capped at ranger level. core 5 adds blur as sla core 6 adds 5 prr/mrr capstone adds 10% dodge or displacement as a sla or something defensive like displacement.

+1/2 die increases for the elementals - i like it as it fixes the limited usefulness of taking all 4.

main issue is the doublestrike penalty hurting rangers more than monchers which it seems it was intended for. it needs to move to 10k only or be removed. why would builds that favor doublestrike and never use manyshot be better than a normal class ability? you shouldn't want to negate a powerful abillity for rangers like that. make both to mutually exclusive toggle that gives ranger double shot and 10k gives monks some extra arrows at a longer interval but never turns off. so you get a bonus for using but can't use both at once. no? want that burst dps? then timers that impact both. no? want to keep that moncher build uber? then add in bonus to double shot at higher levels. ie 1% per ranger level at different cores so the doubleshot penalty can be overcome for rangers only.