Archer & Combat feat need rework

kangkeok · May 2015

Hi, 1st of, i am not going against trapper player here. In fact i m merely just standing up for archery and combat tree. Looking at the 3 path, we understand that Archery tree is focus its dmg on range stance and combat on melee. While trapper is specialize in balance between stances. Since Archery and combat sacrifice one of its stance to gain power on the other they need a dmg boost much more than trapper in order to hold the balance in those 3 tree. IMO the whole idea is to do something like, archery = range : melee = 2:1. Combat = range : melee = 1:2. While trapper, 1:1 with the ability to reduce cool down.

Currently from what i observe, archer and combat dps is sub-par compare to trapper with similar gear. Trapper almost double outperformed them in dps wise, mainly due to thorn root giving them extra 200% weapon dmg per sec for 8-9 sec (1600-1800% in total) and ability to spam encounter all day which further increase the dps gap from combat and archer tree. They are given 1.5 : 1.5 and the ability to spam encounter. But dun get me wrong, i m not here to say trapper is overpowered but in fact they are currently, if not balanced, remain competitive among other classes like gwf, tr etc.. So in order to keep trapper at where it is now, Developer should re-access and consider giving Archer and combat respectively some thing like, 3 : 1.5 (archery) and 1.5 : 3 (combat). Or 3.5 : 1 (archery) and 1 : 3.5 ( combat). U might find archery and combat has an extra 1.5 in total but thats is to compensate the lack of encounter spam-ability and thorn-root.

Next is that i am aware that each feat has its own distinctive specialty. Archery has extra mobility, combat has lifesteal & self healing and trapper has immobilize CC. The fact the usefulness of the 3 specialty has some gap with archery being the inferior one among the three. Bottomless quiver could compensate it here due to fact archer seldom able to bring melee dmg in a fight so all is well.

Also, looking at capstone, Archery may seem to have the highest dmg boost of the 3 tree with 40% bonus dmg for prey, extra dmg +30% dmg bonus for flurry and 20% for trapper. But in truth, archer has a much inferior capstone of them all due to fact prey only work on single target. Looking at AOE vs single target bonus, single target is alwaz 3 x the aoe. So IMO prey need to be at 60% bonus dmg at least.

Anyway, here are my opinion to balance out the 3 tree in HR. Although it might bias towards archer due to fact i only played an archer and have not played combat. As for combat part..i have to leave it to combat player in this forum.

lirithiel · May 2015

IMO the Combat tree needs a total overhaul again. Whereas the feats prior to Mod 3 were interesting in Combat they just plain suck now. And the two new ones added in Mod 6 (Lucky Blades and Skirmisher's Gambit) are the worst of them all - no synergy with the rest of the tree. Most of the feats lack any sort of imagination and there is too much free damage in Piercing Blades and Scything Blades. Hells, the only ones I would keep are Bloodletting, Fluid Hunter and Battle Crazed. Wilds Medicine was a bad idea at the start and caused so much problems that it has been nerfed into uselessness. Gimme back my old Combat HR pls!

xeezert · May 2015

There is something going on with damage at, least with combat wrt to arp. I was looking through ACT parses last night and my average effectiveness was like 70% - 73% vs lowly garden variety trash moblets and I know that can't be right because my RI is like 59%!! My other toons see an effectiveness value usually >100% with comparable RI so idk.

I'm going to do some more testing when I have the time, to confirm but I've also seen others allude to this however nothing definitive has been stated that I can reference.

I am not sure if the same applies to archers because I haven't looked at the numbers that closely yet because the damage feels somewhat right.

Unless I'm totally missing something obvious here, they need to fix this before we can truly tell where the trees are at.

And personally I'm ok with not having top DPS as combat HR as long as the survivability is on the high side.

As for archers *sigh*

Way too slow imo, and idk if it's just me but it feels like the closer enemies get to you the longer it takes to recover from firing and being able to take another action. Maybe it's latency on my end but most of my deaths as an archer come from getting stuck in the release after split shot, or hitting tab, waiting for the animation, then pressing an encounter and praying that these things actually happen. I can't count how many times I've hit tab and my stance didn't switch or I switch stances and tried to use an encounter and nothing happened and now the mobs are standing on top of me all swinging at once.

IT'S FRUSTRATING! Because I know that if I can evade enemies I can stay alive but when the only option is to run around my thorn ward because I'm not sure if my stance switch will take or if my attack action is going to stick for a couple extra milliseconds longer than it should then it really doesn't feel like any amount of skill on my end will make a difference.

I'm sure these thing applies to the other trees as well however I feel they disproportionately affect archers since we rely on being at range to be most effective more so than the other paragons.

tl;dr
Archers should be free to shoot and scoot at will imo otherwise what's the point?

jhpnw · May 2015

To start with the Arm pen is and issue across the class. needs to be fixed the feat that takes 10 crit gives 50% more severity should be reduced to 1 % per step for a total of 5% with new progression of gear scores you cant get crit up enough to work. wilds medicine should be total hps so has some use now you are hit so hard by even the lowest mobs that you cant recover even with a 10k hp.life steal should work but none of the BIS gear has much life steal and should be out of 10 encounters with 10% you should see it work I have yet to see LS work since leveling to 70 and over 3000 fights. The archers need a great dodge and a wilds medicine feat that works . Trappers damage is now a lot lower and needs to be looked at in mod 5 played melee was very good at it and with right encounters could keep my rotations going and do great damage but had to change to trapper to do same thing now and still my damge out is less that the melee HR in same dungeons in mod 6 vs my Trapper class.in tos standard did 2.2mill damage with melee 1/89 mil with trapper both level 70 the Trs I play with 2.9 mill in damage per run.

have player only HR since start 6months ago Archer was ist left due to solo player melee was second now play trapper but don't survive as much as melee did later hope they fix Melee I really would like to go back to that player

jhp

Archer & Combat feat need rework

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