Crossbows (in Changelog)

Here is a stab at fixing things without gimping the crossbows for players using them "properly."

The stat drain will be proportional to damage done. At about 2.5% of the target's current (not max) HP, the drain will be about what you were used to. At 5%, it will be 2x*, where it is capped. And on down: at 1% of HP, it will be 0.4 of the old drain. There is no floor; enchanters armed with a crossbow can expect to be very disappointed.

(*Actually the old code had a clause to double the damage when damage over 10% of HP was done, but that was so rarely triggered that I think most people have forgotten it was there. If you fall into this category then ignore this footnote since it will only confuse you. :)

The stat drain will be proportional to damage done.



O



M



G!!!!


:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

my dreams of a 20HP tank, destroyed

;P


Great change :)

I wonder how this is gonna pan out. Honestly I hope that this works out! Thanks for the Change!

THANKS NIGHTSTRIKE!

sounds good

NS brings up a good point, though; Ranger: the way the exbow is being abused by enchanters is not the same way that iconics3e employs it.

Ranger has often said that being used by a strong tank should have a strong effect, but that it just needed some counters. Damage reduction, EC, and high HP now all make excellent counters now.

Oops, the change and post was by me. (I was logged in as NS to test with his crossbow.)

caught with your multi....

Time to reset AdminJonathan and ban AdminNightStrike....

a sad day for CB

Multi.

Good change!

Even if it doesn't work out, at least *something* was done.

Nice change, let's see how it goes.

The sad part is, Jon's wonderful fix is being met with facepalms. Oh well, thanks for taking care of the problem.

I think I can safely speak for many silent players when I say that we appreciate you taking care of Ranger's bane the wild overpowerment.

Thanks Jon, and NS.

how does this work in terms of PL?

ELB/Hal + Exbow = Tank defeats!

Knock out some of that pesky HP, then SUPAH DRAINZ

I'm guessing people cheering don't understand, because this change is not good so far :|.

/me waits on pins and needles for the final version of this change.

Well done.

*footnotes are awesome... I learned something new about CB today, only three days from my 5 year anniversary here. That's why this game is awesome.

Just hold on.. I won't make changes regarding the overall idea.. but I will fix the glaring server errors due to the exbow giving huge amounts of ST.

I've over 9 million strength, and 7 million HP. The big exbows still do to me what they did before, putting me into negative strength. I'm not sure what result I'm supposed to be seeing. But this change looks like no change.

might be a revert... go go live testing!

Actually it does JW, this change stops me from putting the bow on my wall :|.

When the bow was on my wall, one hit would kill your str completely, now on the wall, the drain is so completely nominal that it's almost like not having it drain at all.

But with the bow on my tank, it still kills your str in one hit, don't know if this is 'working as intended or not', but other than the bugs I think this change fixes what most people saw as broken.

Ah ok.


Let me see if I understand the original posting. Is this actually a buff to the exbow if it's used by a tank?

Because I'm seeing this:

If somebody does about 175k damage against my 7 million HP they get a drain much like before. If they manage to do 350k against my 7 million the drain is doubled?

So if the xbow is on a minion like me where I'm capable of doing large damage I would get a better drain than before?

*when I say I'm seeing this, I mean I'm reading the changelog to mean:

Oh, and don't go reading that the wrong way: I think it's a great change. I'm not the fondest of the weapon itself, but I've always thought that if it's designed to work that way and somebody is using it as their main ranged weapon complete with investment then all is well and good.

But if I have read the changelog properly then some people are still not going to be satisfied....lol...

As long as a lower-score character can't beat me with an exbow on an enchanter, you won't hear a peep from me.

I'll have to see if that is the case tomorrow, er, later today...

Right now, one hit from NS's exbow drained just over 50% of my strength.

That is 3.4M.

This does give the ToE a nice little buff.

Horray the ToE!!!

Change itself : great.
Percentages of HP picked : not so great.
Ability to do double the previous drain : ouch ?

Interesting. Hope it works out well. At the very least, it's clearly a step in the right direction.

Dave shot Dog with A Bolt of Nether [146471]
Dog looks weaker!

Completely drains my entire strength.

I have almost 11M HP at the time.

This is less than 2.5% but a tad more than 1.0%. Should this be draining this much.

Mandos character with 2M str on his tank using a x4k exbow.

Master Yoda hit Dog with wooden cane [35383]

Dog hit The Force with The Lunatic [418]

both are from round 1 I only hit him once

My bow is a x2k and my minions str is 1.2m

I'm afraid that this change doesn't really change anything as it's still relatively possible to do max drain on an enchanter-like minion.

For example, how much life does an average minion have. On my fightlist, (which should be the most relevant anyways) you can say ~3m... 2.5% is only 75,000 damage. I feel it would be fully within reason that a x8000 Xbow (a 37m NW increase from my x4001 bow) thrown on an enchanter with a say 500k STR (not a lot, for example my Wall would even get a boost to str from a large TSA) and can still hit that 75k mark easy...

When My TSA gets back from forging, I can test this out. It might even be able to hit for that much without the boosted X.

Dunno.

I'll possibly do some testing if I can get my hands on a large tsa between now and then.

Although almost rather not, because if I'm right, it's likely this will just get changed again and I'll have wasted a lot of XP :|

Interesting, so a good way to combat the exbow is to increase the tank's HP.

You need a lot of HP. I've 7 million. Its not doing much to help me against exbows....

Damage reduction is what I need...

This could get really weird actually, cause now Exbows are not a valid way to counter teams with Exbows. It kind of makes me glad, now it's not just a dex war ^^

"Damage reduction is what I need..."

Muwahaha! Now the rubber band's on the other claw! >:D

cause now Exbows are *now* a valid way to counter teams with Exbows

oops :(

PL > xbow though.

Seriously.. just wait a bit.. like... 20 minutes.

There... server errors should be gone. The server errors were situations where drain was larger than the size of an integer. In situations where it was just shy of that, the drain was still either +7857895789347584 or -57487589453. That means the bows would give a lot of st/dx, or take away a lot.

"*footnotes are awesome... I learned something new about CB today, only three days from my 5 year anniversary here. That's why this game is awesome."

Seconded! :D

I wonder what else is hidden away in the code no one else has any idea about yet. ;)

How much damage reduction you get from your own ST!

why not just base the reduction directly off the str say 20% of the damage dealt... woudltn it be much easier?

Nice change, even if it might not be the best (final) solution, it's a good step in the way :)

As it stands now, 8k x's and 1M ST can drain 8.67M ST in two rounds on a 6.7M HP minion. If you have a wall, might as well put on 500k ST and slap on a large exbow. You could drain all the ST in a few rounds.

still, that takes an Exbow twice the size of what was working before, Arty.

Ha! There's not an 8k X exbow around.

"Ha! There's not an 8k X exbow around."

There will be... There will be.

That's a bow bigger than any in existence at the moment, and a million str more than it used to be.

Very nice change, however it may need to be tweaked over a bit of time.

The HF without AS or DBs is very vulnerable, but is that a bad thing?

One can "defeat" the drain with large HP and/or AS. Which is not a bad thing.

the limit is abit too low... i mean like how hard is it to do more then 2.5% of the person's hp in damage

Yeah, 4 or 5% is probably needed.

2.5% isn't even as much as a TSA regen. I think if it took twice as much % as right now it would probably be good. But at least have it be as much as TSA regen.

This is a good idea for designing the drain though. It is interesting and takes new approach. Reminds me of when encumbrance came out.

'But at least have it be as much as TSA regen.'

err.. Why? It should be based of how much damage the Exbow can actually do. It may need tweaking, but there's no reason it needs to be as much as the TSA regen...

Well, if my point mattered enough to be in Jonathan's post about the exbow in the first place (that smaller characters can get massive challenge bonus longer by picking off top teams), this change hasn't done anything to address that. Jiraiya still beats me, and will always be able to. I don't really see any way I can prevent it.

Maybe I am the only Hal team vulnerable though, I don't know. Ranger seems much happier, so it must be mostly fixed. I'll just continue to serve the purpose of massive score funnel and massive rewards for bonus characters, I guess.

I do see Sut's point.

I would have preferred it be based upon strength instead of HP.

That way HF's get to live without needing either DB or AS.

However, I do like the way this has progressed.

From a flat drain only based upon the x of the weapon, to something at least based upon the targets stats.

Yes, I agree, the idea is fundamentally better, and this could very well just be related to my lack of tactical expertise (or caring)... Other teams with better damage reduction, for example, can save their Hal more easily. I'm just not set up that way, but perhaps I can eventually rejigger things. My massive DM is my choice, and it is useless against Jiraiya, so I can't forget that...

Jon brought AC back nanner nanner nanner! :D

And the more face palms i see on CB, the younger i feel

But at least now there are other options for you Sut.

I do believe we are on a path to getting things much better balanced!!!

"At 5%, it will be 2x*, where it is capped."

I don't understand this sentence.

I'm pretty sure as soon as I buy another 50m, the whining will start back up.

x8000 is only 37m more NW, which isn't much. Guess I'll just have to push the boundaries ... again... :O

"At 5%, it will be 2x*, where it is capped."


At 5% damage dealt with regards to its current HP, the ST drain will be 2x the damage dealt where it is capped.

So if your target has 1 mil HP, and if you deal 50k damage your drain will be 100k (which is the maximum)

so you're not supposed to drain anything more than 10% of their HP in str in a given hit? This isn't very consistent with previous post D:

No,
I believe this to mean that if you do 5% or more of the targets current hp the drain is 2x what it was before this changelog.

And 2x is the max drain possible now.

So the drain is still pretty dependent on the X, as long as you can deal at least 2.5% of their total HP in damage, the exbow behaves the same way.

As I can see it, we've pretty much only addressed the ability for enchanters to shut down tanks. Exbow still has a very binary effect on anyone with real str.

Not even PL seems to work any better than is used to. I think?

At least we got away from the enchanter using a 4x exbow doing 100% drain.

Now at least a real tank needs to use one.

Let us see how it works now, and move from there.

> Not even PL seems to work any better than is used to.

Nor should it.

PL is at most a 1 round stay of execution.

However, with the proper strategy, that 1 round may be all you need.

Even that depends... If the xbow is large enough, PL doesn't even save you.

For example, vs Nightstrike I 2x or even 3x hit the first round, so in the first round his PL loses all strength, AND his first minion... If that makes sense...

That is correct.

PL works per blow, not round.

But now one can stock up on AC, use PL or try evasion (if not an archer).

The current solution is not perfect. But it is one hell of a change and a great start if it does not work as needed.

Far better than the formula previously.

True.