[.51][Balance] Lightning Bow and Rain of Arrows

from Stardock Forums

In my current game (playing as a custom faction based on Kingdom of Tarth), I got extremely lucky at the beginning of the game, although I didn't realize just how lucky at the time.

Around level 3/4, I picked up a Lightning Longbow, a weapon with Lvl 4 req, 9 damage, -4 initiative, and +2 lightning damage per level (so total damage at minimum level is 17).

My Sovereign is currently level 17, with an attack of 56: 34 from lightning, 9 base physical, 7 additional physical, and 6 fire.

With such high elemental damage, my DPS against anything not immune to lightning damage is insane. And that's when I'm shooting individual targets.

I think my best recent example was an Epic Troll Shaman spawn. A single, 5/56/32/110 champion against a 9-stack, ~336 HP enemy group. First attack, Rain of Arrows, dropping 5 enemy stacks in one go. 5 combat turns later, I'm victorious. I never moved. One stack of Troll Warriors attacked me, which missed (I also have 57 dodge).

I have gotten to the point where I consider moving to be as much a symbol of failure as actually dying (extremely rare! The last spawn type I found that could actually kill me was an Epic Corpse Spider group). I dealt with two Morian spawns by pruning his minions with cheap archers, then bursting Morian himself down with my sovereign and another archer champion who ALSO has a Lightning Longbow in two successive battles (Morian won the first = P).

Oh yeah, and I have a third Lightning Longbow waiting to be assigned. I converted Magar to a melee champion early-game, so he doesn't have Rain of Arrows and as such can't benefit from this insane synergy.

8,047 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Rain of Arrows is further broken in the fact that each of the 9 potential attacks can crit individually (they can also miss, but that's damn rare with my accuracy stat of 139). For sufficiently large enemy forces, I just take my Sovereign and my secondary Lightning Longbow archer in together and REALLY curb stomp things.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I think Rain of Arrows is very good balanced, because non-mage heroes are useful against groups of units, but every item that scales with the level is unbalanced, because the damage is too low at low levels and too high at high levels.

Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

At level 17, your hero should be that strong, especially against creeps.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

i think the balance issue here is not so much that the shocking longbow is overpowered. the problem is that an archer hero without that item sucks.  the second best bow is probably some flaming bow with 20 or something attack - which is less than half of what the shocking longbow does @ mid/late levels. so either you get lucky and get the shocking bow, or you wasted your time training your hero for archery.

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

The "best" bow you can get through the shop is the Ignys Longbow, which is 9 phys, 6 fire, -4 init. So, yes, absolutely sodding horrible (30 total attack points difference, at level 17!) compared to the Lightning Longbow. So either the LL is horrifically OP, or the other bows are horrifically UP.

That's why I'm saying the LL and RoA synergy is unbalanced, not RoA in and of itself.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Wasn't there the possibility to have a faction of "Archers" ? They had the Ram Hornbow. It was pretty good if I remember correctly (allthough it didn't scale).

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

I think they should cap the "damage per level" aspect, so after a certain level it stops adding damage to it. That way it's not horribly overpowered at low levels (if it was just a fixed sum) but also not horribly overpowered at high levels (if it just keeps adding more attack every level indefinitely).

Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting N1ghthavvk, reply 6

Wasn't there the possibility to have a faction of "Archers" ? They had the Ram Hornbow. It was pretty good if I remember correctly (allthough it didn't scale).

You're mostly correct - the nice thing about the Ramhorn is that I can throw it on a unit of archers and it won't cost any crystal, whereas the Ignys does. Thus, you can pump them out at relatively low cost. Three or four units of Ramhorn archers with the Impulsive quality can work miracles.

 

Though, they may have changed this in LH - I stopped playing archers because it felt like cheating.

Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting Tavra, reply 8
Though, they may have changed this in LH - I stopped playing archers because it felt like cheating.

Refusing to use a legal gameplay advantage over some silly notion of "it feels like cheating" is nothing short of foolish.

9x6 stacks of horse-mounted archers with Rams' Horn Longbows, ho!