Archery needs significant changes
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As a new player (I went bow shadow), I was at first confused as how to play my archer character given that no efficient kiting tools were given to me by the game's quest rewarding NPCs, and because I refused to believe that GGG intended for archers to facetank mobs; if I wanted to stand toe to toe with a mob, I'd build a melee class. Then, half way through normal difficulty, I realized that mobs, ALL mobs, will briefly stop chasing you if you don't stop running, which gives you ample time to shoot a heavy hitting arrow before the mob has a chance to catch up. I then proceeded to clear all of cruel using nothing but fire arrow, with the occasional multi puncture when I got really bored, just to see if I could. It was trivial, but boring. I'm now in act2 ruthless, still only using fire arrow (and phase run to backtrack through cleared areas faster). It's still trivial...
Does this seem wrong to anyone else? Is this disengaging mob behavior intended? Shouldn't it be removed, in favor of awarding effective kiting skills such as temporal chains very early on in normal difficulty? Shouldn't the game make us work for our kills, and encourage the use of many different skills to survive? Honestly, I'm uncertain if the designers gave much thought to the archer gameplay. I haven't played my character in over a week now because I grew so bored of him. I even considered, for a split second of insanity, to return to my physical ranged class character in that other game. edit: I have yet to play a ranged caster but I suspect you could do the same thing with a single heavy hitting spell. [quote="Path of Exile forums"]Draft out of sync.[/quote] Last edited by artemis42#6160 on Sep 26, 2012, 4:07:11 PM
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I would suggest you keep playing, you're using quite a squishy toon. Things don't ramp up until merciless and maps.
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Well then that is a problem in and of itself. Why should the game only start on merciless?
[quote="Path of Exile forums"]Draft out of sync.[/quote]
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There is a similar discussion in another recent thread. I think it's more to do with increasing the aggressiveness of mobs than kiting.
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" As OP pointed out, game does not start within Merciless. Game should be challenging from start to finish. This is how it supposed to be, no way around. "This is too good for you, very powerful ! You want - You take"
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" Yes to this. Monster aggressiveness is lower than for example Torchlight 2 that i play atm. Mobs should be slighty faster in PoE (imho), especially zombies and some humanoids, etc... spawning animations should be A LOT faster (i kill all zombies when they are half in the ground etc..). Also AI foxing is a must - mobs OFTEN stops attacking, walking away from player, patching is not so good, and doing all this stupid stuff that makes them feels almost friendly :) Its not problem with overall game difficulty, its not problem with mobs dmg atc... its problem with mobs aggressiveness and AI glitching. Kiting is fine imho but GGG can increase mobs pursue distance i think to aovid exxtensively use of 'agrro reseting'. Last edited by Kabraxis#1526 on Sep 27, 2012, 7:51:25 PM
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I believe the devs already know that the general monster AI in this game is pretty bad (the boss AI's are fairly decent though). The main reason is that all the melee mobs do the exact same thing... Walk towards you and somehow manage to forget you exist 25% of the time. GGG has stated that they plan to revamp the AI, while also adding new monsters that behave differently (as in anti ranged mobs). This obviously hasn't been done yet, so I guess kiting is the way to go.
Also, all of the previous hard monsters such as the Rhoa's and Cold Snap casters have been nerfed to oblivion cause people died to much to them (which led to complaining that they were OP). They weren't really OP, you just had to be careful when you are in areas with them. But for some reason breaking the 1-2 tactics that people had with every other monster warranted a nerf stick cause they were "too hard". I am saying this as a person who died an awful lot to Rhoas and the Cold Snap spammers. But I didn't QQ due to it, I had to change tactics in order to kill them. It was normally the reality check as to how strong I was at that current point in the game. Last edited by Repeats#0576 on Sep 28, 2012, 12:04:19 AM
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" This is so true. I think that devs are aware of it and will increase the difficulty of cruel and ruthless. Right now normal and merciless are hardest. | |
" For the love of God don't return to TOG. It can't possibly be more intersting than POE. I have one ranged character and I didn't really noticed what your talking about. If you find your clas boring then map out a different one. This game never gets old because there is always something new and exciting to try. AI will more than likely get better for a lnog time. Standard Forever
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" OK. Say you spot a pack of mobs considerably faster than you, and you're in act 1 normal, on your first character, so you only have the quest reward gems. What do you do? If you say 'stand in place and kill them one by one, quaffing pots as needed' then that is precisely why I think archery needs significant changes. No one plays ranged characters to 'melee with bows'. If you say 'run away until they disengage, then shoot, rinse and repeat', then that presents the problem I detailed in the OP: the game becomes a boring one skill deal. If they fix the AI so the mobs stop disengaging, then that only leaves the facetanking option. They need to add kiting gems very early on as quest rewards. [quote="Path of Exile forums"]Draft out of sync.[/quote]
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