Yet another thread about ranged (in General)

... but this one is different,

NS's Xbow [4x1999] (+148) worth $57,204,661 drains me (if and when it hits me past my chanter's PL) from over 900k Str to a paltry 900 in one hit.

Although the damage seems to be around 100~200k (as compared to Elbs around the same NW doing damage in millions), I think nuking a million str is, or rather could eventually be worth it when it starts hitting consistently? :)

I wonder what a 160 million Xbow could do - complete immunity from physical damage?

Oh I forgot to say, it seems to be a pretty cool balance atm, A/Exbow being quite powerful in their own way, SoD and splash undeniably effective especially against multi-minion teams, and Elb being the king of damage...

"SoD and splash undeniably effective especially against multi-minion teams"

has anyone done ny testing on this? ;)

Back when I had my SoD (in forge right now) i killed NWO in one round ;) (for a draw)

I read somewhere that before the boost to ax/exbow, every x drains 0.33% of str plus an unknown constant. So x2000 easily drains 66 to 70%. Maybe after the boost, it has increased to over 90% of str drain ;)

yea the n drain per x model is not easy to balance when funds are so unevenly spread

When the 'x' upgrade model changed, the stat drain was reduced by 1/11. So it went from 1/3% to 1/33% per x. Recently, bot the % drain and the fixed drain received a 20% bonus. So now I have no idea what the drain is, but I think I figured out how to solve the puzzle.

It must have a constant drain too, coz my chanter with 20 str goes to -100,000

-843 str for my guy with 943,561 str,
-100,000 str for my guy with 20 str, hope this helps :)

There is a % drain per x and a fixed drain per x. The drains are constant (as in, a 20ST minion against the Exbow on my monk will always have -100,079 after one hit). There is no randomness involved.

Draco has been showing interesting results suggesting that the ST of the attacker affects the stat drain. We'll have to evaluate this further.

Currently, I'm showing about 0.034% +50 per x. This may change based on the above statement about attacker's ST. Also, this is only against 20ST minions.

i always thought, and i could be wrong, that it was a constant per hit and a % drain based on the X and on the opponents ST

I have a nice large AxBow and it hasn't really changed my fight list. Why? Because if I equip my tank with it, he trades his massive damage for a bunch of smaller damages and becomes highly vulnerable to GA, plus a large chance at missing those prolific evasion guys ANYWAY. So now I equip a micro tank with it and hope for the best. Occasionally it can be a lot of fun, but usually it makes no difference. I know I would have done better to put the money into my MH, but I just couldn't resist! In fact I want to get it up to +150 and see if that helps out any.

I believe exbow/axbow are best used with ToA. Gotta guarantee those hits to land...

lets just forget that they only really work against tanks then. :P

And only really against melee tanks, since the archers have already delivered their payload by the time you start hacking away at their stats. Oh, and only against tanks that aren't training a large evasion. Dang, that only really leaves bloodlust tanks, given that archery and evasion are the only other two skills a tank is likely to learn, huh? No wonder it rarely makes a difference. And the really annoying thing is that even if I land a bunch of blows and reduce the dex to negatives, many of them still hit because of pth. Makes me wonder if I should have gone with the ExBow instead.