Cockroach infestation (in General)

ToA Archers are the new cockroaches of CB in my opinion. Its as if they breed and multiply all on their own. Doesn't really bother me much though. Just figured I'd throw that out there is all.

Nah, they're more like nukes.

The only thing they can't take out is a heavily armored fortress in the middle of outer space.

AKA 14348923 AC. Give or take 14348400 or so.

And your discovering this now????

I'm not just discovering this, I'm just putting it in print.

Lol, I'm not a cockroach. Most of my teams have used the ToA, most have used the ELB. Right the way back to when the Single FB mage and FF was doing the same thing as archers are now.

I do find the 'cockroach' phenomenon funny; it does usually follow a series of posts describing something as 'overpowered'. That's almost guaranteed to create an outbreak of 'roachism'. See aforementioned FF; the same happened with the SF, the Vorpal, the SoD for five minutes.

The SoD will likely never get its day in the "overpowered" sun as nobody will be stupid enough to upgrade one far enough to see it destroy the top teams in 1-3 rounds.

After what happened to the VB, do you really think anyone will upgrade a SOD enough to show actually how powerful it really is???

I learned my lesson after my 90M VB, which was stable for over 18 months, became nothing more than a large moneysink/paperweight.

Actually this "problem" came only after the introduction of the HoC. I had a MM mage until I chanced upon a decent +85 ELB which made up my mind to change into an archer when I hit the weapon allowance.

I'm no cockroach, either. I've had my ToA archer since last June, when Archery was still the "why are you using that lame skill?" skill...

See, the lesson I learned with slugging it out with UC for as long as I did before its usefulness was revealed, was that all the skills will get their "overpowered day in the sun" eventually, if you stick with them long enough - just look at what evasion has become, as well. Isn't there a song - "You say 'overpowered', I say 'useful'"...

:)

There has only been a few times in this game that I did not use my Elb, and that was back when I was a NUB. I have run a mage team before in the past, but I didn't enjoy it no where near as much once I played a tank. The Elb has always been a pretty decent weapon, but fell in popularity with CB2, and of course, it was a buyers market then and I stocked up on them and they have always been excellent rentals. So who are you referring to as "cockroaches", I'm curious as to what criteria must be met to fall into this category?

Whoever said the SF was overpowered? For even five minutes? I don't recall that at all, Johnny...

Well, maybe not the SF being overpowered as such Sut, but there were a horde of SF teams at one point.

CB goes like that though; it's more like watching a large flock of birds flying; the way they will all change direction at once, as if they were one.

Course, if you're watching, watch from a distance; never underneath...... ;)

That is a salient point, JW, but I would like to point out that since Archery got fixed (I don't exactly remember what was broken or what the fix was, but it became very viable), archers have been steadily on the rise, up to and surpassing the point of saturation. And it doesn't appear to be letting up, apparently (hence the cockroach comment).

On CB, it is not snapshots of strategies that are useful. As with many phenomenon, it is the differential with respect to time that matters. Archer/tanks are still growing, and there has been a groundswell of issues:

-- seekers
-- damage
-- weapon allowance

that have been recurring. Again, differential with respect to time: when an issue keeps coming up, odds are that there is, in fact, an issue. You yourself have wanted to see the weapon allowance tweaked/reduced, so I am fairly certain you know what I am referring to.

It is different than my standard-fare tank bashing where I just note the disparities between tank and mage equipment/stats. Some of the issues recently have been very specific, come from a multitude of people at various levels, and keep coming up. I can't say I am fanatically on board with any of them, but that's just because I have always had issues with tanks, meaning my signal/noise ratio doesn't really "aid the cause" when I speak on these more specific things.

Sut,

You are forgetting 2 key points of why people are flocking to elb/archery

1) HoC - Allows an extra round of high damage.
2) Upgradeable ammo - For a few cb2 more you get a nice pseudo-invulnerability from being attacked/farmed.

The other points are well known:

3) Seekers - Bypasses all the NW mages have on their walls for instakill.
4) Damage - A bit too high, but again my opinion, others disagree.
5) Weapon Allowance (I disagree a bit with the group thinking about it though).

When Jon changed archery from needing it to fire in round 2 to having a 100% chance to hit, it was broken for a while until Novice, among others, pointed it out to Jon.

When Jon fixed it, the retraining boom started.

Yes, there have been tried and true players loyal to the elb from the beginnings of CB2. But please, have people not noticed the plethora of low MPR archers with massive score climbing up the rank now? The cockroach.

Archery (and the thing that makes it so powerful, the change to Beleg's) actually changed back in September. But there were not a massive amount of people taking up archer strats at the time. The current groundswell has a lot more to do with a: the rise of Mikel's character, and b: the multitude of posts about how overpowered the Elb is.

(Seekers...mmm. They've always been seen as a problem by mage teams; There really is only one way to fix them and that's get rid of them. But then you run the risk of it being possible to make a mage team near invincible if you set the right damage reduction measures in place. Large ToE, AC can make that happen. By getting rid of seekers you run the risk of making AMF compulsory. But that's by the by.)

The things that are really causing the current problem are the changes that happened last summer: the change to damage upgrades on weapons and the increase to physical damage. Before then, unless you had a lot of cash the cost of upgrades at least gave some sort of cap - I couldn't afford to boost weapons over a certain point, which is why I played UC so much. Being able to boost weapon damage so much might not have been a major concern, if the damage levels hadn't risen so much.

The WA is part of it, in so much as it lets you fit a lot of power under it's level, but without the ability to boost damage so much at source for tanks the WA would be OK.

I think the real problem isn't the archer anyway; it really does boil down to tanks having it so much better than mages. As Jon put it last summer, welcome to Tank Blender. Perhaps it's time to revisit how good that is for the game as a whole?

Sorry, PM, you posted before I hit confirm; I agree about the HoC point too. The HoC made it very attractive to run ranged based teams; how can you really argue with being able to hit an opponent before they even start attacking?

It's a silly item really, but if you've got one, it's an advantage that you can't really resist. It's tailor made to go hand in hand with a big ranged attack.

Still, at least there won't be any more of them entering the game.... ;)