Only respond to this if you have the latest version of experimental. If you do then you may know that ranged in general has been heavily nerfed, but I feel its a bit too much I start playing build my short bow and ammo (field point arrows) and go along my marry way I decide to test this new nerf by taking on a moose which im normally able to kill easily with my usual build. So I get in range shoot and miss he gets about 4 tiles closer, so I shoot and miss again, this time he is now at point blank, I shoot about 6 arrows at point blank miss every shot and get an antler shoved up my arse and die. I mean come on at point blank and 6 shots at level 3 should hit the thing at least once, and if you want to say well level up more, at unarmed level 3 you can easily crit and do a ton of damage with your FISTS.
As I recall from a developer post, the idea going forward is to remove some of the hard range/weapon accuracy limits and replace it with skill-based accuracy modifiers for weapons where it makes sense.
It’s possible the process is incomplete and that the particular bow you were using is not balanced for the new system yet. Though if it is a crude bow, it may well be intentionally rather poor.
Also using a bow and arrow in melee would seem quite difficult, perhaps that is working as intended?
Oh its not the bow I was using a shortbow and decent arrows also theres nothing that lowers accuracy in the code at close range if anything accuracy gets better at close range. One of my friends tested it and at level 10 archery he was still VERY ineffective only making shots at about 1 or 2 tile ranges. Keep in mind at level 10 unarmed you can seriously just look at zombies and they will explode. Also I believe the process is pretty complete I also doesnt help that default stats inherently now have a penalty for ranged and you can only bring it to zero using points that could be used for something else.
We agree with you that the ranged nerf was too strong, and right now we are looking for rebalancing some other aspects of accuracy to counter that fact.
As I see it there are a few options as to what can be changed in order to nerf the value.
First: The distance to the target. I think that this one is a bit too low as beginning archers cant hit something far, but will almost always hit closeby (read 5 ft).
Second: The quality of the bow. This means that depending on the the quality of the bow accuracy and distance are affected. Nickboom was angered by how high this value was, and I agree. Even though I an just using a bow made out of thread and a curtain rod I should be able to hit something that is 3 ft from me.
Third there was arrow type. Depending on the type of arrow accuracy/distance are affected. This is already in place and IMO is working fine. No need to change this too much (IMO).
TL:DR. there has to be a balance between distance, bow type and arrow type.
nightly’s are a great way to drop major changes so people can test them out.
to the developers: if you guys are going to drop a major change or addition in a nightly, how about posting it on the front page? Then sticky a thread for comments. Getting the player base to test out these things for you could save you alot of time.
As someone guessed, this is incomplete. Step one was adjusting the penalty from skills and stats, step two is reducing the accuracy penalty for weapons and ammo. Due to a communication error step one got landed before step two is done, so yes, it’s definitely over-nerfed. It’s quite possible this will be reverted, since I’m not sure there’s enough time to get it done before [REDACTED].
Also, the accuracy numbers in the weapons and ammo are in the JSON, as the “dispersion” stat, and the ranged weapons and ammo are spread across ranged.json, ammo.json, and archery.json.
I’ll keep in mind to do a call for testing on balance changes in the future, that would be very helpful.
the low accuracy at least counters the ease of making arrows xD
i2amroy came through and burned through all the accuracy values for all the range weapons in time for 0.7, so:
At low skill/stat levels things should be similar to where they used to be.
Highly accurate weapons should still be headshotting regularly if you have good stats and skills.
High skills and stats should no longer make up for inaccurate weapons.
Please let us know if the above isn’t the case.