Reworking Archery

[ripforareason]

If you got rid of flaming arrows, poison arrow drops, and made bows 2-handed weapons, you might actually make archery underpowered. I think it'd be best to compensate by dropping more arrows of piercing. Maybe you could have a system where you'd have to "swap" to your bow by pressing a key which would take a turn and negate any protection/ev bonuses from your shield and weapon(s), but leave any resists or light intact. (think sheathing your weapon or putting your shield on your back to be able to draw your bow).

[Infinitum]

That. I exclusively play melee characters, but even so my 0-skill bow means free hits vs assorted lightly armoured enemies, which feels wrong thematically.

Also there's the fact that both V and most other lategame uniques/strong enemies are slowish melee fighters that can't interact with quickened archers unless they get surrounded. Removing quickness and rebalancing fom there might be an option.

[Quirk]

If you got rid of flaming arrows, poison arrow drops, and made bows 2-handed weapons, you might actually make archery underpowered. I think it'd be best to compensate by dropping more arrows of piercing.

Well, if I get rid of Flaming Arrows, I will replace it with a new skill or skills. I am currently churning through ideas. Here are a few I've tried or am about to try.

"Easy Draw" - your Strength provides no bonus damage, but your Dexterity gives a double bonus to your Archery. This worked very well on a high-Dex Sindar in the early game. However, it doesn't accurately represent actual archery mechanics (you definitely want a full draw if you're strong enough for the bow) which are quite strength-dependent.
"Penetrate" - my current replacement for Flaming Arrows: if a hit is non-critical, it becomes critical and gains a damage die. This is still just about strong enough to kill Morgoth with an overpowered character but it's harder than before. It also crops up at the same place in the tree where Flaming Arrows would give a boost. However, it's kind of a boringly named everyone-will-want this skill and it feels wrong to replace a skill as fun as Flaming Arrows with it.
Considering implementing two new skills instead:
"Steady Hands" - if you're too strong for your bow, the extra Strength provides an Archery bonus. This does reflect realistic archery mechanics, gives shortbows a little something, and can be placed low on the tree as an easy free skill for elves. Late game with potions it will translate into extra crits. It's not great for Sindar Doriath and is a little dull.
"Running Shot" - using a new key a la Exchange Places and 'X', when you press the new key you continue moving in the direction you moved last while firing at your current target (you will be prompted if you have none). I like this because it gives the player additional positional options, and that feels very Sil-like. Probably needs some substantial penalty to hit to reflect you're on the move, and this may be some very dubious Legolas-like film archery.

Dedication and Deadly Hail are already able to fill some of the gap Flaming Arrows leaves, though they make archers more vulnerable and require more positional strategy.

Poison arrows will stay in the game I think but be a bit fewer and rarer.

Maybe you could have a system where you'd have to "swap" to your bow by pressing a key which would take a turn and negate any protection/ev bonuses from your shield and weapon(s), but leave any resists or light intact. (think sheathing your weapon or putting your shield on your back to be able to draw your bow).

I think it's actually currently very viable to take Point Blank and continue using your bow at close quarters, and I don't think this has changed. What I mean by this is that swapping to a weapon is mostly done in unusual circumstances where crits don't work e.g. hammering apart a Gargoyle.

So the actual main effect of this is to have the shield and weapon "half-wielded" where the protection and Evasion aren't there but other things are. I think I still prefer the approach of having a notable skill benefit you by their absence; I think most players will find this easier to adjust to.

That. I exclusively play melee characters, but even so my 0-skill bow means free hits vs assorted lightly armoured enemies, which feels wrong thematically.

This is a bit difficult to get right, I think.

With 0-skill in melee, you'll still get some hits into the mid-game, by the nature of the double d20 roll. Archery continues this much later because evasion is halved. From one perspective, this is justified because it's very hard to dodge arrows; from another it's also quite hard to fire arrows, so maybe an unskilled archer should be failing more from the start.

Realistic mechanics would make it very hard to dodge arrows, but you wouldn't have to dodge arrows unless the archer succeeded in getting it on target. Two opposed rolls aren't a great model for this. Then again similar issues exist if you're trying to accurately replicate melee - you need a much more sophisticated model.

From a game balance perspective though there would be much more tweaking to be done to move to a full-evasion system as more arrows fail to hit at all and skills like Crippling Shot that rely on criticals look bad. Half-evasion scales the additional power provided up the tree, and getting rid of it and keeping flaming arrows makes the chunkiness of that damage upgrade even more visible than before.

So, I have played with getting rid of it, but I think it's going to be easier to balance things by dropping Flaming Arrows instead.

Also there's the fact that both V and most other lategame uniques/strong enemies are slowish melee fighters that can't interact with quickened archers unless they get surrounded. Removing quickness and rebalancing fom there might be an option.

This also has consequences for melee, since melee fighters also turn to Quickness when things get tough; which is to say it could be done, but it would be potentially a larger rebalancing.

[Quirk]

I've put together an implementation with Steady Hands and Running Shot. The latter is powerful: getting to pepper enemies with arrows while remaining outside their reach is quite a game changer. I have accordingly given it a very steep accuracy penalty. It does have the drawback that you tend to end up quite far away from where you began so it's harder to collect your fallen arrows over the course of the fight.

I haven't embarked on a substantial rework of bows and ammunition yet, though Derakon's comments on the thematic weakness of slay bows remain with me and I probably will try to find a way to move them away from slays. Ammunition drop rates will in the longer run be tweaked to give more arrows near the surface, and more powerful arrows will be a bit rarer. I plan to release a testable version in the next few days, I may or may not do a little tweaking to bows and arrows first.

[wobbly]

Had the idle thought that flaming arrows could be a song. Not sure I like the idea, just putting it out there

[Quirk]

Had the idle thought that flaming arrows could be a song. Not sure I like the idea, just putting it out there

So this is not inconsistent with the only instance I'm aware of in Tolkien's work of flaming arrows in the hands of elves: the Battle of Five Armies:

The elves were the first to charge. Their hatred for the goblins is cold and bitter. Their spears and shields shone in the gloom with a gleam of chill flame, so deadly was the wrath of the hands that held them. As soon as the host of their enemies was dense in the valley, they sent against it a shower of arrows, and each flickered as it fled as if with stinging fire.

Now there are various ways to read this. I think the most obvious would be that the weapons were of the same nature as Sting, and glowed in the presence of their enemies - i.e. spears and arrows of Gondolin, in Sil parlance.

However we could also read the line "so deadly was the wrath of the hands that held them" to imply a more immediate cause than the smithing. There's plausibly room here for a Song of Wrath that would grant flame-brand, though probably not to arrows alone but to any held weapon. Flavour wise I think we have room to do this.

However, I'm a bit concerned this is a Throne Room Song. By this I mean that a song at say the 9 spot takes a 5K XP investment to pull off assuming no prerequisites; you can afford this straight out of character generation, but if you don't invest in Song at generation, it's quite late in the game by the time you can afford to build up a 5K buffer. A song that increases damage but not survivability is not a priority until you enter the throne room and need things to die fast. I want to avoid the original-Sil situation where Slaying and Sharpness were seen as close to must haves, and investing in other songs had the potential to weaken your throne room performance because it made them more expensive.

Currently I'm fairly happy with where we are with the lower-ranked songs. Elbereth, Silence, Freedom, Trees, Staying and Lorien are all justifiable choices to carry into the throneroom and have lots of utility outside it. Song of Challenge has some possible throne room merit with Anticipate, but is also just a very cheap way to manipulate archers and other annoying foes. Delvings is perhaps best on the ascent, but it helps smiths and speeds the dive for 50K characters.

Thresholds, Overwhelming and Mastery have more difficulty finding a place. Mastery requires a lot of Song to be effective late game, so it's either a bolt-on to Lorien or a 50K starting choice. Overwhelming is much stronger at ensuring survival in one on one unique combat than Staying when it's in effect - stunning opponents and halving their damage does a lot - but it's less useful against breathers and status effects, and I don't think anyone much is giving it a shot. Thresholds has a warding effect that probably would be useful early on for < 1K XP, along with a slightly tacked on melee/evasion boost that tries to justify its cost higher up the tree and mostly fails.

I'm not sure we have room for two combat songs in the place where nobody's taking songs, so it would probably have to replace Overwhelming. Maybe that's okay. I feel it would still be something people take at 950' instead of 700' though.

I would kind of like to have the Thresholds spot taken by something that provides such a huge early game boost to survival you can take it out of character generation, and fill in the pieces around it, without it being overpowered later; hence my earlier musings on a Song of Shaping.

An alternative approach is to fold the Song tree in half, and have multiple songs at the same point value; other trees largely don't do this, but I think with some kind of internally consistent structure it could be inoffensive (e.g. skills like Woven Themes get the slot to themselves but songs share). This resolves the issue of making expensive songs worth their keep, though there is an underlying issue in the assumption of the Song tree in general that you're going to keep buying more and more Song to scale your effects up, and I think in many cases this isn't really worth it. However, it's not clear how else to handle effects that enemies can resist with Will.