BL or Archery Question (in General)

I was asked by someone if they should go change from Archery to BL given the BL buff. This was my response and I'm sticking to it.

"Depends, going BL over Archery is only good if you can hope to live to melee. BL won't help your ranged attacks and makes you weaker to teams with more throw away minions. Archery is still good for minions who can't live for very long and is best against larger teams with small guys blocking the real threats. Your FB however helps with the throw away minions, the real question is how long does your minion tend to hold out. I suggest looking through you battle log and just skimming down the number of rounds each battle takes. If the average isn't around 5 or 6 rounds or over, then don't bother. If it is then battle with the play-by-play on and see if your tank in question lives around 5 or 6 rounds on average. If he does then that answers your question, go BL."

This is just a little PSA from me to you. Good luck everyone.

I changed from Archery to BL.

It's official BL rox

It should also be noted, that a team such as MT or EMT with a fireball mage and BL tank works quite well, for the reason shown above (FB wasting the "throw away" minions) and BL mopping up the leftovers in melee.)

Right now there is no negative from going BL aside from not getting a set of arrows firing off in the 2nd round of missile.

Just because you use BL does not mean you cannot use a large elb, just look at Krang and Almuric.

With the nerfs of the melee weapons that were used up to now, the Both and MH, BL is needed more than ever.

But, unless archery gets its boost back, that is both firing in round 2 of missile AND more damage, I suspect its soon to be another UC. An unloved skill.

I always hated Archery anyways, 'twas always the unloved skill to me ;-)

Truly, I have to agree with Ranger. All it gets you is an extra couple of arrows in the ranged rounds. Admittedly, against some opponents, that can be 300K of damage.

Still, I was already 4-minion, so it wasn't a hard choice. Jon's changes made it almost impossible for me not to switch. I was losing to all sorts of people without AMF. Before, Archery did enough damage in ranged to kill all the mages. After the 9/1 changes, Bartlett beat me; Susan Death; BCS. I had to re-learn AMF. Once I had that back, I didn't need Archery anymore as the only people who might possibly kill me in just the ranged rounds would be FB mages. Tanks, I'm willing to go toe-to-toe with in melee.

So, a big enough AMF to take care of mages, a semi-big DM to ameliorate damage from GA, and 3 extra minions to ensure my tank survives to melee. With no more extra damage from BL and doubling the damage in rounds 4 and on, I would have been a fool not to.

If you're a lone tank, you're probably better off with Archery. Somewhere between that and 4-minion, BL becomes the better skill.

I have to side with Ranger, until we get to a much higher stage in CB where you can kill 1 minion per round, archery will be ignored. But I believe after weapons top 100 million NW a piece, archery will soon seem a bit more interesting.

or you can keep archery and get back the extra damage the hard way...

get some belegs, they've been going for cheap recently

I switched my Archery wall/tank to BL, also. I had already been using BL on one Tank already, with a TOE to try to counteract the "taking damage factor".
Now I'm tempted to change my UC tank to BL too, but like every change month since March, I'm holding out in the hopes that this is the month that UC finally "gets some love" :)

BarzooMonkey is back! Did you find your family?

Almuric, I made it perfectly clear when to use BL. I did not say BL was better because it isn't. I did not directly suggest they go BL but rather that they first go through an entire check list first.

Let us also not forget that "BL is better" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. BL only performs better when you manage to get through ranged rounds. If everyone switches to BL then ranged combat gets weaker and everyone manages to make it to melee more easily. Then you will all just turn around and talk about how you were right.

The same goes with Archery. If you all became confident that it was the superior skill then when everyone changes they will notice that it becomes very hard to make it to melee rounds. Then you would all turn around and talk about what a waste BL is since it never gets to kick in.

You should also note that the same comparison could be drawn between CoC and FB. There is a serious lack of understanding here of what the cause and effect is by screaming out "this thing is the best" or "this thing is overpowered".

Just one more PSA for you people.

" Right now there is no negative from going BL aside from not getting a set of arrows firing off in the 2nd round of missile."

Sorry I meant to direct my reply at Ranger instead, not Almuric.

Ranger, wasn't Evasion the original unloved skill? ;)

wait so if we wanted a third round in ranged would we still have to train archery to 1.00 even though that won't increase ranged dmg?

Correct Tormentor.