Crazy Idea (in General)

What if GS and Haste were somehow a counter to EX and Ax bows? Like, ST/DX added by them is ignored by Ex/Ax?

Gives a slightly larger chance for Ex/Ax resistance while buffing some very unloved spells... ^_^

interesting... still pwned by DM though

AND A BUFF TO THE LEAST USED SPELLS EVER


AND IT WILL BUFF FORGING?

NEED BUFFS TO FORGING PLZ


T^UP I like!

I like it

There might be merit for resistance, as opposed to immunity.

That would be good, given the current state of the Ax/Ex drain...

I have never understood this argument against ex/ax. ya whatever they can drain 5M str in one hit...if it's so OP then why doesn't everybody use it? that's right because it's hard to build a strat that uses it whitout opening yourself up with major weaknesses.

Don't change the ex/ax. They are hard enough to use. Honestly explain how using an ax/ex help AT all against mages. you do such little damage it's almost nothing meaning you have to last at least 7 rounds to hurt them.

with a big enough Ex, you're able to focus solely on anti-mage... ~_^

"Don't change the ex/ax. They are hard enough to use. Honestly explain how using an ax/ex help AT all against mages. you do such little damage it's almost nothing meaning you have to last at least 7 rounds to hurt them. "

So lets make the Mageseeker one shot mages, since it is not as effective against tanks.

30M on a weapon isn't huge, but it isn't a small amount either.

Oh and some drain more than just 5 mil.. I can fight one that will drain my 7mil str and put me negative ... so about 8 mil drain in 1 hit.. just a bit crazy there I think.

yeah Nightstrike character Iconics 3e ; exbow takes me to -450k strenght,(initially 10,8 mil str) in one shot.. :)

Oh and to reply before anyone can say.. Well that is what they are meant to do, well my old mageseeker was meant to kill mages so does that mean that the 120 mil nw one I had should have one shot every mage, or lowered their dd to a point that it wouldn't do any damage... If so, then make that change and I will gladly accept the Ex/Ax drain.

Again I will repost something I posted about a year ago.

What if there was a DD draining bow?

Something that in 1 hit for 1 damage took any mages DD level to the negatives.

Effectively making that minion worthless.

Well people, that is what we have with the exbow. 1 hit for 1 damage can drain 10+M strength. Rendering that minion useless other than a kill slot.

In all the games I have ever played, the exbow of CB2 is perhaps the most stupid item given its ability.

I would gladly spend 100M CB2 for that weapon.

Now as to why more people do not make huge exbows-The VB.

How is the VB relevant to this discussion you ask?

Well here goes:

The VB at one time was the best melee weapon by far. The MH, Bth and Bone were not even close.

There were a few of us that put 100M or more into our VBs. And in one fell swoop Jon nerfed the living hell out of it.

Now at the time all of us in CB knew the VB was way overpowered.

Well most of us in CB know the exbow is stupidly overpowered. And do not want to spend millions of CB into an item that we thought should have been nerf bait months ago.

I can promise you that if we all knew that the exbow would not be changed there would be plenty of high level exbows out there making this game easily mage blender.

The beauty of the exbow is that in 1 round you can destroy any tank team and concentrate all your other minions on AMF and antimage spells.

Now this idea of letting the str/dex from Haste/GS be extremely resistant to ex/axbows is a very good idea.

Since most exbow users use AMF and not DM.

But I do not want to see a exbow in this scenario be able to drain 10M str + 2M GS in 2 rounds and not 1. That would be stupid as well.

I guess making Exbow decay a percentage of STR and capped at like 60% STR would be fair (2 round reduces to 36%, 3 round 21.6%, so I guess there should be about 10% STR by the end of range - without double hits)

Ranger: "Now as to why more people do not make huge exbows-The VB. "

Not true. The real reason is that it is so DANG hard to use effectively:
1) It has no effect on mages and you have to give up a chance at decent damage to use it.
2) The only targets you want to use it against usually have a bucket load of dex. This means you have to put it on your tank, giving up valuable damage, or on a weenie which will not likely hit. It does work pretty well with a U/C minion, but they wipe up most normal tanks anyway

I had one of the top 5 AxBows in the game at one point. My fight list was barely affected by it and when the encumbrance change hit I had to abandon it altogether. Really, the only type of target it was really good against was a Bloodlust tank with no displacement boots.

Against Archers you are typically too late landing enough hits to stop him.
Against UC you can just forget about it altogether. Better chance hitting the moon.
Against BloodLust tanks with DBs your tank has to be better than his to hit and then you would probably have won anyway.

Of course my AxBow only did a 66% drain. Perhaps it is far more effective against some targets (like archers) if you pump it up above x4000.

But the bottom line is that for a 50M investment you MIGHT gain 1-2 on your fight list. For 100M you might gain a little more. At those encumbrance levels, you are only going to see these guys at the 2M MPR. The encumbrance rules slowed them down, but with minions with 300K encumbrance levels now, they will probably make a comeback. Also, they do have a use for those folks that like to pick out a higher level target and tailor a character to beat that one target. If that target happens to be vulnerable to a A/ExBow, then it comes in quite handy.

That being said, I fully agree that the drain should not max out at around x4000 and be figured using an increasing scale. There should be some kind of relative comparison between the A/Exbows X and the targets stat. I would recommend that an A/Exbow drain

250X of the stat

so if an A/ExBox was x1000 it would drain 250000 of the stat. The multiplier was pulled out of my nether regions so there is probably a better one out there of course. Balance is always the most difficult part of new ideas.

"2) The only targets you want to use it against usually have a bucket load of dex. This means you have to put it on your tank, giving up valuable damage, or on a weenie which will not likely hit. It does work pretty well with a U/C minion, but they wipe up most normal tanks anyway"

It's not too hard to get shots off with pth. DX is nice, but it's rarely a tide-turner when it comes to hitting or not. End result is just a better chance at multishots, if you didn't have DX advantage anyway :P


"I had one of the top 5 AxBows in the game at one point. My fight list was barely affected by it"

See?


Problem with the Exbow is that over the course of 6 ranged rounds, you need to manage just one single blow with a large enough Exbow... To avoid it, you need full DX advantage, and DBs or Evasion large enough to drop both the weapon's pth and the weapon's base cth... It's already been pointed out a million and one times that the point of evasion was not total evasion, but rather to just reduce the number of blows taken, so suggesting that as the counter to an item that turns a tank into a meat shield in the event that it scores more than 0 shots would just be silly... ^_^