That’s because it has to be a ‘neck-shot’ to cut someone’s head off.

Hitting someone in the neck with a sword is harder to do than hitting someone in the head with a club.

@Dark:

They should instantly die in melee range. That’s my opinion. They simply provide too much support, take to much effort to approach inmost situations, have dramatic advantages when it comes to terrain exploitation (being pretty much the only class that can rely on any sort of terrain exploitation to any significant effect), they do not need to be anywhere near melee range to contribute to a battle, they can change the entire dynamic of a fight and create disadvantages from a long distance, often require navigating an entire enemy line as well as the target archer and other archer fire to approach… they are ultimate at ranged support.

I would like to see them nested further and further into that role. The other end of the spectrum would be that they go down in melee range like butter. Otherwise I’d have tobe asking for the other classes to get more ways to be even nearly as effective at ranges as the Archers are at melee and I think that would just be dumb.

I don’t buy into the “me too” design philosophy that a lot of people have, mainly due to games like World Of Warcraft where support/hybrid class players envied the abilities of primary class players which resulted in the delegating of primary abilities to support classes which made the primary classes jokes.

There’s zero point in debating with you because you won’t accept any other argument without repeating your same point to the end of time. We know, you want Archers to be meat-sacks that bleed health when your fierce Vanguard gaze arrives on them. What’s next, want to remove the Archers legs so they have to be picked up by team mates and put down in one spot, to make it even easier for you to kill them?

Again, you’re speaking of good archers. You don’t want good players killing you, so remove them? All I hear from you is a player who isn’t good/smart enough to counter Archers so you want them removed. I’ve explained how to counter Archers, but good Archers? One good player can turn the tide of battle, regardless of what class he plays.

I’ll leave you with this;

An Archer can be two hit by every primary in the game. If you can’t beat an Archer in melee, you aren’t nearly as good at this game as you think you are.

I assume because the only people who complain about the Archer as a class can’t counter it. Why would someone who doesn’t have a problem killing Archers in melee want a stamina drain for them? It’s common sense.

Exactly, my statement is that it’s not fair in melee as an Archer, and yes it’s that way for a reason, because it’s not a melee class. It has the tools to defend itself against much more powerful classes and that is it. We’re arguing the same point here. except you seem to think that being two-hit by every primary weapon, and having butter knives and MAA secondaries deems the class overpowered in melee and therefore needs a stamina drain. If you want to debate the ‘need’ for stamina drain, see my post earlier in the thread. I’m speaking of melee here.

You seem to forget that you’re speaking about a Knight with a shield. If you’re using a Tower shield, I’ll try one arrow at the 3 pixels that show of your head, with a Kite, I’ll try for your legs. Tower shield, there’s a 99% chance I’m not going to hit the top of your head and even if I do, you’re still swinging your sword. If I hit you in the feet while you’re using a Kite, I do 32 Damage with Warbow + Bodkin, wow, that drops the amount of hits I need to kill you with a Cudgel from 4 hits to 3, big deal. You still kill me in two.

If you’re a half decent Knight that knows that even when you’re not holding the shield up, it gives you passive protection, you’d hold the shield at your side and run towards me at an angle, then change it up and hold the shield up, then run to the side again, just generally being erratic and making it hard to hit you. A half decent Knight will reach me 90% of the time unless I have team mates to back into because he’s made himself incredibly hard to hit. This is why I speak of melee so much. If you were any good, in a 1v1, you would reach me 100% of the time and force me into melee, where I’m weak.

If we were speaking of shield-less classes, then no, you wouldn’t reach me because I can one or two shot you. As a Knight you should reach me every time unless I back into team mates.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, the Archer class is viable in melee, not effective. It’s not an offensive class when it comes to melee, you don’t find Archers actively pursuing melee fights. If the Archers melee were actually effective you’d see Archers putting away their bow on spawn and actively pursuing melee combat.

I’m sorry but if you can’t beat a squishier MAA with secondaries and no dodge, you aren’t as good as you think you are.

@Dr:

Excuse me, I certainly don’t want to see archers removed from the game: this is an absurd statement. i know there are those out there that do want archers removed but I’m not one of them and I doubt “everyone else on this thread” is either.

How about you answer my question - how is it fair that a knight can be one-hit by an archer and has to loose stamina to hold up a shield to even have a chance of attacking an archer without dying but still can’;t one-hit the archer and yet the archer is allowed to have full stamina? Why is a small stamina drain such a huge problem?

No, you don’t want Archers removed, you want them nerfed into obscurity. Potato, patato.

How about you read my post? Regardless of how much stamina an Archer has at the start of a fight, it’s the weakest class in melee. Two successful parries by the Archer of a 2H will drop him to zero stamina anyway. That full stamina bar is all that maintains the Archer’s ability to weave in stabs and flinch you and thus make it viable in melee. An Archer’s melee game with the butter knives relies on flinching you. Without the butter knives i.e. using a Short Sword, its like playing a squishier, dodge-less MAA that’s forced to use secondaries.

Ok, lets talk about this.

A Knight cannot be one-hit by an archer with a bow if he hasn’t taken prior damage. A Bodkin to the skull from the Warbow does 79 damage. The Crossbow and Heavy Crossbow are a different story but they aren’t nearly as widely used by good archers as the Warbow.

Besides, you speak as if hitting the 4 pixels of the Knights head that show above the shield with the Knight moving rapidly left to right is a shot that every archer you’ve ever fought against will hit 100% of the time, and I’m absurd.

It’s an incredibly hard shot to hit, a lot harder than swinging your 2H around in 180 degree arcs, let me tell you.

By the way, what’s the next best thing to a one hit and is more fair? A two hit which is exactly what it is now. Every primary weapon in the game will two hit an Archer unless you hit them in the legs.

Before speaking out next time I suggest you put a good 25 or so hours into each class and learn their strengths and weaknesses.

@Dark:

“You must not be goodz if you has the problem!”

Poor response.

1: The best way to design a ranged class is to focus on making them effective at range. Not to compensate for downsides my giving them options to be effective in close.

2:There are way more issues I have with dealing with archers than “they kills me.” Some are really god and do, I admit. But it more comes down to the time investment and work one ha to do to tra k down an archer that isn’t braindead and how powerful blocking and playing defensively is since you likely need to expose yourself significantly to the other side in order to confront a good archer.

3: The archer does not eliminate their ability to do damage when they run. This is a huge upside that people don’t consider.

I thin the archer should be deadly at range and garbage up close based on those observations. Can you give me any well thought out reasons that don’t rely on “if an archer kills you you can’t comment!” as to why you think they shouldn’t get wasted if someone manages to confront them? I’m sure my extreme stance can use tweaking. I just need to be communicating with someone capable of presenting some design philosophy.

As it stands, I think leaving them with 0 stamina if they decide to take that last shot in close is a great idea. Because they can always, you know, stop shooting when they see someone approaching and pull out their melee weapon.

As far as I see it your problem is just like the other 90% of people in this thread, you hate good archers, so you want them nerfed into obscurity. I hate good MAA in 1v1 fights because they’re immense, do I campaign to have their dodge removed?

If you as a player can’t come to grips with using a shield, even just placing a Tower on your back as passive projectile protection and turning 180 degrees when the archers wind-up finishes, then you deserve to be killed. If you’re a Vanguard player complaining about Archers, then good, Archers are doing their job, they’re the hard counter to Vanguard’s.

Just like a new MAA player that constantly tries to trade hits with a Knight rather than dodge out during their windup and run back in during the recovery, you deserve to die to an Archer if you can’t adapt to their tactics.

Here’s my response to you.

1. They aren’t effective in melee in the slightest, effective means I’d actively put away my bow to hunt people down with the Cudgel. Pre-patch the butter knives were beyond useless with the broken flinch mechanics. They’re still butter knives but now with flinch they’re viable. The Short Sword’s much better and the Cudgel’s good against Knights but it still takes 4+ hits to kill any class regardless of side-arm as an Archer. An Archer in melee is the easiest class to come up against, lets have a look at it compared to the other classes.

• Knight has better damage resistances, more reach, more damage.
• Vanguard has better damage resistances, more reach, more damage.
• MAA has better damage resistances, slightly more reach, more damage and the dodge.

Fighting an Archer in melee you’re effectively fighting a squishier MAA that’s forced to use a side-arm and has no dodge. Yeah, lets nerf them in melee combat even more.

The only time you’ll get minced up against an Archer is when you’ve made the mistake of pushing into face-hugging range or letting him get into said range and he gets into a flinch-rhythm with a dagger.

Every other time if he kills you with a Short Sword after a standard swing-parry-swing fight, you’ve been beaten by the worst melee class in the game and need to have a good hard look at how you approached the fight.

If you can’t alter (slow down/speed up) and vary your attacks enough to keep the Archer at a distance and get around his parries (It now takes about half the stamina bar to block a 2H sword, btw) then you probably deserved to be killed. In the same vein, if an Archer kills you in melee consistently, then I have full faith that he’d kill you consistently if he were using any other class in the game.

2. Again, your problem here is good archers. You get killed by them so you want them nerfed.

A good archer using tactics like defensive parrying to wait for reinforcements and forcing you to over-extend yourself to come after him so you get singled out by his team mates is exactly the same as a good MAA picking his fights by running in to big fights, drawing out one or two stragglers and then taking them 1v1 or 1v2 where the odds are in his favour and his and the classes finesse will net him kills. He’s playing to the strength of his class, just like the Archer is. The Archer’s a support class, he relies on the support of better-equipped melee classes to aid him in melee.

All I hear from you with this point is “I’m being out-smarted by an Archer, nerf him.”

3. Any self respecting (i.e. good) archer uses the Warbow. You cannot run with the Warbow drawn, you walk at a snails pace. The Shortbow allows you to run and the only people who use the Shortbow are people who want to unlock the Warbow. The shortbow also takes 3 hits to kill someone so it’s a harassment weapon, not a killing weapon.

Don’t convolute the bows to strengthen your argument.

Now to your final point. If you haven’t grasped it by now, I’ll put it plainly. The word to describe an Archer in melee is viable, not effective. They’re the weakest melee class in the game bar none and nerfing them even more in melee would render the Archer class un-usable and the class would disappear from pub and most likely competitive play.

If your agenda is to remove the archer class from the game because you get killed by it (Which is yours as well as everyone else in this thread’s agenda, lets be honest here) you’re going down the right road, so gg.

The maps decided entirely on the first objective.

If Agatha can break the wall, they win. There’s little to no guidance for the Masons when it comes to the rest of the map and it’s just too big, there’s too many options and too much space to cover even on a 32 player server.

Defending Malric is somewhat of a joke as well, I’ve seen that end as quickly as 25 seconds, the longest was when I was put as Malric and just put my back to the wall in the far corner of where Agatha spawn and that still only lasted 2-3 minutes before getting slaughtered.

Two good archers and a few Knights and Vanguards to watch their back and pick off stragglers can bring the first objective to a standstill on D but when it comes down to it, the last 10 times I’ve played it it’s always been a Agatha victory.

Great players stack to Agatha for the first objective, take it in a fair amount of time by pushing us back into our spawn and bottle-necking us there and then steam-roll right through to victory.

Any map that forces stacked teams is not a good map.

Fair point, but I’d rather Torn Banner concern themselves with fixing the numerous other bugs and glitches before adding features or fixing any more of the weapons, especially such a little change to a small area of the game like what you’re suggesting

The game’s horribly optimised, the server browser’s bad (but getting better), flinch is still flakey at best, feints need a serious re-work (i.e. removing the ability to feint into an attack and keeping the ability to feint into parry, taking the guesswork out of melee and adding another layer of defensive play for two handed weapons), the list goes on.

@Slaughtervomit:

I like the idea of giving the bowmen added time for draw, but at a cost… After a few seconds make it start costing stamina… I wouldn’t call this a nerf… This would be more like a sidegrade for archery with bows…

This idea is not original, has been mentioned a few times throughout the thread.

That’s just changing it for the sake of changing it at that point though. The current system of forcing an un-nock when held for too long does just as good, if not a better job of forcing people to take the shot.

It’s not going to change anything, I’m still only going to hold the draw for 1-2 seconds before firing, especially since I press Q to cancel just as often as I actually fire the arrow. Nubs are still going to pew-pew across the map.

At the end of the day, changing it the way you suggest will not change the way I or anyone else plays archer at all. My stamina bar will remain un-touched until I get forced into melee combat as will the nub’s who pew-pews.

You see, the entire thread is 90% people who hate being killed by Archers so therefore want them nerfed into obscurity and the other 10% is people who play Archer.

Don’t want to be killed by a good Archer? Adapt, use shields, just like you would against any other opponent.

Or like I said before, if the Archer has to use stamina to hold the draw of a bow, we archers can just campaign to reduce the Knight’s health, the Vanguard’s reach and remove the MAA’s dodge. All three of those are just as debilitating a nerf as requiring stamina to hold the draw on a bow.

All you’re doing is nerfing the Warbow, not solving the problem of the 7 shitty longbow archers or crossbowmen on each team.

@Retsnom:

You can throw out all the accusations of a lack of skill within the player but for those of us with 400+ hours in the game, we notice these things. For example I am missing far more attacks than I was prior to the patch, dramatically so. I am also missing more blocks/parries than before, so much so that I am not even getting consistent positive KDR. For a skilled ranked 42 player like myself the patch is not all it is cracked up to be.

I wouldn’t say it’s a lack of skill. I’d say it’s more of a having to re-learn the muscle memory and the parry and attack timings and distances after playing those 400+ hours.

Your muscle memory is a lot more cemented after 400+ hours than mine after 70+. Even with my paltry (in comparison) hours played I had a bit of trouble re-learning the game after the patch. I jumped on the day after it was released and got destroyed. I wasn’t happy in the slightest going from a regular 2+ K/D to a .5 K/D. One or two sessions later, I’m back to consistent 2+ K/D’s.

You just need to give it time.