Aside from the discussion, what do you plan to do with metal arrows? There’s only 1 craftable and several aluminium ones AFAIK.
Yeah it’s gonna stay that way until we have sufficient crafting capabilities to make an aluminum extrusion jig. That said, I’m planning on making them spawn in a lot more places, so they’ll be more common despite being uncraftable.
Maybe nanofabricator schematic for them for now? Or for the carbon fiber arrows, if they still exist after archery rebalance
Corrosives and shockers can be mitigated with the right gear, the feral predator with rollerskates can be flat out outpaced and kited. If it does benefit from the 18/4/8/4 split, that shows, as people have been pointing out, that the problem is with the stat system not the bows themselves.
My suggestion as far as stats go at least would be the inclusion of a Endurance stat, with HP tied to that along with stamina and resistance to disease/infections etc. That would at least shift away some of the bonuses from going high strength while opening up more options for character building, marathon runner anyone?
Maybe there could be a push to tie more things in directly with other stats, moving over rough terrain tied to Dex and spotting range for items tied to Per for example.
Corrosives and shockers can be mitigated with the right gear,
If you you were lucky enough to find it, sure. But that’s very much pure RNG.
the feral predator with rollerskates can be flat out outpaced and kited.
Nope. Once you get into the spear range, it can jump and strike in a single turn, and it’s special attack ignores armor.
If it does benefit from the 18/4/8/4 split, that shows, as people have been pointing out, that the problem is with the stat system not the bows themselves.
I don’t think there is a problem with “the bows” at large. darktoes did a great job with them in general. There is only a problem with ONE particular bow: compound greatbow. And the problem is that it scales it’s damage from strength (from the level of compound bow) at a ratio much higher than melee weapons do.
My suggestion as far as stats go at least would be the inclusion of a Endurance stat, with HP tied to that along with stamina and resistance to disease/infections etc. That would at least shift away some of the bonuses from going high strength while opening up more options for character building, marathon runner anyone?
Maybe there could be a push to tie more things in directly with other stats, moving over rough terrain tied to Dex and spotting range for items tied to Per for example.
There are many good suggestions here and in many other places:
You move until it jumps then you attack, it has a cool down on leap and leap doesn’t always put it next to you. It’s like fighting hulks with this build and a spear, once you have the timing it’s easy. Flame resistant gear is pretty common, mitigating shockers is harder I’ll admit though.
I can see that working, I guess (not sure if cool-down on the jump is variable or not), but if you have rollerblades (those are down to RNG) and flat road, than killing a feral pred with a bow/crossbow is an actual no-brainer. The spear, on the other hand, requires pretty exquisite timing shenanigans.
It has it’s pro’s and con’s, I tend to treat spears (and the awl pike) as a short range, unlimited ammo, ranged weapon. I only tend to use them with a build that has traits that favour them though as a normal build simply does better with a normal melee weapon then with a spear.
I just really like playing with low item/vehicle spawn rates, high enemy spawn rates and with a start about a week after the “day 0”.
That makes melee builds really, REALLY dicey: Z’s are numerous and advanced from the start, and disinfectant is quite VERY rare (unless RNG favors you). But it really just exemplifies the fact that melee builds are essentially “much higher risk, much faster zombie killing”. While ranged are much, much more reliable, but less powerful in early game.
Well tbf I dunno how much tampering with the spawn rate affects foraging but unless I’m getting the recipes from mods you have quite a few options for cooking up your own disinfectant. Thyme oil and cattail jelly are both directly from forgaging, thyme oil takes a fair amount of cooking skill though I guess but I don’t really get that many bites even in the nastier fights, especially after I’ve got some semi decent gear to wear. You need to get grabbed and stay grabbed before they start nibbling and even semi decent gear will protect you against that with low level zombies.
I do winter starts. So thyme oil and the like is about 91 days away, and it only takes ONE deep bite to die with bad RNG if you lack disinfectant.
You need to get grabbed and stay grabbed before they start nibbling and even semi decent gear will protect you against that with low level zombies.
My experience tells otherwise. A single slavering biter can get you deep bite pretty much instantly.
A slavering biter isn’t a low level zombie tbf but I didn’t realise you ment the winter after day 0 
This for me:
I’m not a big fan of turning down item spawns, It doesn’t make sense to me in an area that has been very rapidly depopulated (in a letal sense) that it would have no stuff, that’s just my preference though. I’ll probably turn up enemy spawn soon/ for the next play through though.
This is rapidly moving away from the topic of the thread, so if you want to keep talking about it I’d suggest making a new one.
As it stands, i don’t see an issue with the compound greatbow as it is in my current PR, so unless Kevin tells me to change it, I’m not going to.
Sorry, I take full responsibility. I have a terrible habit of going on tangents.
So what’s the base damage on compound bow (high) and compound greatbow in this new PR, and what are the strength requirements for them?
You can check the PR or the change spreadsheet I’ve linked at least once in this thread. Or reread the message where i listed those stats already.
If you are talking about this:
I don’t see strength requirements explicitly listed, unless it’s just (poundage/10).
Assuming that’s the case, we have 24 damage for str 8 and 31 damage for str 14.
So 7 damage for 6 points of str.
Compound bow settings scale at 2 damage per 1 str ratio.
That’s still higher that the melee scaling ratio. I still don’t think bows should outpace melee in how quickly they scale with strength.
Then go make a pr to fix melee scaling. It’s based on real world values, so melee must be broken.