Out of curiosity, which of the big 4 roguelikes has the best archer class?

[Estie]

This is interesting suggestion which I'm not at all disagreeing with. Now that shooters can have slays you could remove them from ammo (as well as ammo branding spell). You could add whole new world of ego-shooters. Multi-slay would have to be achieved from shooter instead of carrying multiple different stacks of ego-ammo. Branded shooter should be rare.

Its not quite that simple. How much damage should an archer do ?

A typical melee encounter might go like this: @.....D

@ moves up 5 squares. @ spends about 5 turns meleeing D.
The number 5 is a bit arbitrarily picked, and @ might wait around corner rather than walk up to D, but the point is that he spends some time setting up the fight (since he can only fight in melee range). The whole fight lasts about 10 turns.

Enter our archer. He has plenty of ammo and no qualms about wasting it on D.
Lets assume he does similar damage to the melee @; then he just presses the button at 5 square distance, and D croaks as he reaches melee range. The fight lasts only 5 rounds, half as long as the melee fight, and furthermore the archer is only exposed to Ds ranged attacks, while melee @ has both melee and ranged attacks to contend with.
Clearly the ranger has an easier time.

While this in itself is not necessarily a problem - similar to highelf race, there could be an easy class in angband - one might want to balance it, if only to not have archery being the best method for everyone.
The options that come to mind are

a) reduce archer defense so he is at similar risk as melee guy. This is not really viable the way vanilla is set up.

b) reduce archer damage so he gets exposed for longer. There are (unfortunately) many games that have adopted this way, for example diablo I.
It leads to what is sometimes called a "tank archer", where the fights last long and most of it takes place in melee range (because its easier for the archer to get some defenses up than to constantly maneuvre out of melee range). I dislike it because it feels wrong that a normal (non-unique) monster should take dozens of arrows to kill, and using launchers like a melee weapon goes against everything I associate with archery. Historically, once the infantry or cavalry caught up, the archer unit was toast.

Hence my suggestion to disable archery in melee range. This way he can have high damage, but is forced to do tactical maneuvres similar to the melee guy.

[Derakon]

Honestly I like that idea. It seems interesting. My main qualm would be that it can be very hard to avoid melee range in Angband, simply because there's so bloody many enemies. In the (very common) event that you're fighting a group, if you can't kill one enemy per turn then eventually you'll be in melee range and can't shoot things any more. Which basically means that any archer class will still need some form of backup offense that they can use when in melee range, so you still can't kill everything with archery.

The idea of ditching ammo entirely in favor of carrying multiple bows around is perfectly fine by me. Among other things, this would mean that we could have bows have exactly the same stats as melee weapons. E.g. a longbow could be a 3d4 weapon, a heavy crossbow a 4d5.

[debo]

Sil has a thing where if you shoot at point-blank range, every adjacent monster gets a free "attack of opportunity"...

There's an ability that can help you reduce it to 50% probability but it's still a nasty repercussion.

[half]

E.g. a longbow could be a 3d4 weapon, a heavy crossbow a 4d5.

Sil also has bows work like this. In fact, rather amazingly, we managed to make short swords and short bows have the same dice, and for long swords and long bows too.

[Timo Pietilä]

Its not quite that simple. How much damage should an archer do ?

I'd say about what it does now. Ranger is not broken, just powerful.

Point for removing ammo slays is that you would no longer be able to just select ammo that suits your requirement best. It's now very easy to get brand that matches the resistance hole of the opponent by casting a spell and just by picking up right combo of ammo.

This would not be so easy with bows. Would you carry swap-bows like you carry swap melee-weapons and other swap stuff? Maybe, but inventory space is still very valuable, so probably not.

Archery as main killing method would still apply as best solution against big ones. It's best solution even for most non-archery classes like priests if you just happen to have very good shooter and have proper ammo.

[Derakon]

Um, what spell are you talking about? And carrying ammo would presumably take up just as much space as carrying a bow.

It does occur to me that if we switched to branded bows, then bows with Slay Evil would have to be horrifically rare or nonexistent. Ditto for elemental bows. The general-purpose damage multiplier would be too powerful to be readily-available.

[Timo Pietilä]

Um, what spell are you talking about? And carrying ammo would presumably take up just as much space as carrying a bow.

N:54:Elemental Brand
I:90:7:5
D:Brands one stack of ammunition with fire, cold, or poison
D: (selected at random) and at the same time attempts to improve
D: the to-hit bonus and the to-dam bonus of the same ammunition.
D: The spell has no effect if the ammunition is already branded, has a
D: slay, is broken, or is cursed.


That is available for rangers still in 3.5 dev. Makes getting x3 ammo really easy. Almost nothing resists both fire and cold. All you need is brand non-ego ammo to get both stacks. And poison to boost the probability of getting resistance hole.

One extra bow takes one inventory slot. Two stacks takes also one slot, but difference here is that those ammo can be shot from extra might/shots bow. Branded bow would not be as powerful as branded ammo because you would not get benefit of the both egos (naturally you could add slays to Belthronding and Bard to compensate).

Consider non-rangers: Shooter +1 shots doubles your shots making all your ammo doing double-damage. Shooter "fire brand" doubles damage only to monsters not resistant to fire. Less if the comparison is against HXbow.

Cubragol has fire brand. How often do you use that as your main weapon? Without extra might or shots it's mediocre weapon even with that brand.

[kaypy]

Being able to kill a GHW earlier than others is certainly nice, but imho doesnt make up for the hours wasted with picking up arrows (or with "suboptimal" melee, which I prefer). Others milage may vary.

I tend to play mages because all the uninteresting fights resolve to 'press the "magic missile the boring critter till the problem goes away" button'

Once upon a time I hacked in a pair of commands
"run towards target"
and
"get input character and target nearest location of that character"

which combined with existing functionality gave single buttons for
"target the nearest critter and put a default arrow through it"
"target the nearest critter and melee it"
"go and pick up arrows"

[taptap]

Counting Sil as a major roguelike (anyway the only one I play): It certainly has strong and viable archers. You can even build towards different types of archers (with or without stealth, with or without melee, light or heavy bows) and you can decide what makes a "class" and come up with a working combination yourself.