I'm pretty sure somewhere was stated that hxbow .. (in General)

has more damage then exbow and axbow.

Or actually i (think) to remember it stated that exbow and axbow have reduced damage as they drain stats.

.. but I can't find the according changelog entry, and maybe it was even back in CB1 ..

Anyone else remembering and/or confirming this?
Too sad that i can not try, as i can't salvage my elb into an hxbow .. only axbow/exbow count as rare ..

Because the hxbow damage is pretty pathetic. There is a reason why no one uses them.

I'm fairly certain that all three bows have the same damage output. To wit, I cannot find a damage reducer in the stat-draining bows.

You might, then, be wondering why you would want to use a Heavy Crossbow.

I don't know.

Maybe that's something we can turn into a viable weapon :)

Give the Heavy xbow a base damage of 5 and make it work like MM. Hitting the last minion first.

Maybe with the base 5, make the heavy part armor piercing, like VB

Ok, I'll tell you what. If that passes the Natasha test, I'll do it.

Pit,

How many "heavy armor" minions are there out there? Really that make a difference?

Vs heavy armor minions the SoD is incredible. Most heavy armor minions have a PL backup and the SoD splash damage works great.

If you change it, then you need to make it available in the Blacksmith to change to and from.

Rarity will go up, which should do that (in theory)

This I do believe is a pretty great idea for the Hxbow.

So by that definition the Lucerne Hammer (143 in existance) should be a rare compared to the Morgul-Hammer (285 in play)?

Or heck, even the Katana with 1530 in play?

No, I mean rarity in the sense that CB assigns a static rarity value to every item. This rarity controls the spawn rate. The less rare, the more frequently they spawn, and vice versa. If the rarity level is above a certain threshold, they spawn in auctions. Otherwise, they spawn in the store. If they are above another threshold, they don't spawn at all. This is for supporter items, t-shirts, and things-not-yet-released.

CB is not smart enough to have an adaptive rarity. So in other words, it'd be really neat to combine the fixed rarity value with the number of items in play vs the total number of items in the respective item class, and have a final spawn rate based on that. But, we don't :)

It'd also be really hard to deal with the fact that dormant, unplayed characters with stockpiles would affect the spawn rates.

And how does CB assign this static rarity?

How does CB know to change a Heavy xbow from non-rare to rare and useable by the weapon artist?

The rarity is assigned when you create the item. So, Jon picks a number using some magic thought process, and out pops a value for rarity. In fact, you'll find plenty of change logs where he says something like "in/decreased the rarity of XYZ."

So you will manually have to change the rarity to make it work in the weapon shop, no?

The weapon artist has a rarity threshold. If you bump an item's rarity above or below that, it enters and leaves the list.

That's how I made lesser tattoos spawn in the store, incidentally. I lowered their rarity to right below the threshold at which the store/auction change happens. So that makes them the most rare of the non-rares.

For reference, the least rare items are the cutlass, sabre, mace, sling, cloak, and leather gloves. They all have a rarity of zero.

Nothing has a rarity of one, and it all goes up from there.

Yes, if we change the crossbow to do something cool, I'll also go in and manually bump its rarity value by some random amount, at least enough to kick it over into the "rare" region, probably using the SOD as a reference point.

Not that anyone cares anymore about frequency of items spawns, outside of drop threads.

NS, from what I've read, you make it seem like changing something already in the game is relatively simple on your end? Like, for instance, you could bump the Sabre into a 200x1 +50 weapon without much issue, right?

However,

If NS wanted to give the Heavy Xbox a nice property to make it actually useful, that may require a bit of coding. Possibly a lot of coding.

And time to code is not high on NSs to do list. (Just stating the obvious)

Yes to the two posts above.

WELL! Not to try and throw a bunch at you at once, but would it be possible to make changes to stuff already in the game?

For instance, we have all these utterly useless weapons and armor around. Would it be harshly difficult to rename, buff and add stuff to them that is already in the game files?

For instance, could you make a "Breastplate of Hellfire" that took the RoBF effect, reduced it (By say 75%) and ran with it? I'm honestly asking, because I don't know how much of it could be easily interchanged or augmented.

I mean, there are so many ideas, assuming it's that easy. It seems to me that you'd just take something that exists (In the Hbow case, the Vorpal effect) copy and paste it into the Hbow and... Voila? I'm probably making it sound easier than it is, but I for one would be a HUGE fan of you making changes like this.

You can always come back an nerf it. I highly doubt there is a single player in this game who can honestly say they'd prefer no changes at all than to changes with short periods of item inbalance.

There are some changes that are always easy to make. Generally, if it involves a number, it's easy. So for instance, an item's rarity, base damage, or percent-bonus-per-plus.

Things that convey an effect get a little trickier. Sometimes, effects are simply represented internally as a "spell" that gets "cast" by the item. Easy to see would be a DD familiar casting the respective DD, but a shield of capacity actually casts "capacity" behind the scenes. So We could put that attribute on any item (limit 1 per item).

Other times, an effect might be more unique. There's a check somewhere in the code that says "if weapon type = vorpal blade, then set vorpal to true". Then, hopefully, the rest of the code just checks for this global vorpal variable (instead of rechecking the weapon type, which is sometimes done.. it's an evolutionary program, after all).

Then, it gets more complicated. The RBF yields its own damage type named after the original version of the item: HC. That has to be special cased in a bazillion areas. if (a or b or c or.... or damage type = HC).... etc.

The RBF does NOT cast a spell called FieryHotness. I guess that would have been an easier implementation, but remember, it started as a cloak, and morphed into I forget how many things.

The NSC, as a side note, cast an interesting spell. It's called simply: AAMF :)



So like everything on CB, there's no simple answer. Some things are hard, some are easy, some are impossible. What I always feared was doing something too radical that just broke it all. I'd hate to have a pile of CL's that just change stuff for the heck of it, then revert the changes.

"So like everything on CB, there's no simple answer. Some things are hard, some are easy, some are impossible. What I always feared was doing something too radical that just broke it all. I'd hate to have a pile of CL's that just change stuff for the heck of it, then revert the changes."

I'm going to take this and throw a counter point, made with all due respect for you and how much more about this you know than I.

But I'd say, at this point, that what you just described is exactly what people want. People want a change like, "Increasing Morg to 90 and BoNE to 103 base damage. Changing Chain Mail Legging to grant Steel Skin at 25% of max Steel Skin. Granted AAMF to HoC at half the level of NSC (So it would take +2 on HoC to get the effect of +1 NSC), but increasing it's penalty to DD by 10%."

Okay. Yeah. Drastic changes. Broken? Maybe. Let the community decide. Imagine if alllll the angst put into the Exbow could start going into other items. Sure, you may have to change some things. But those would make your community feel empowered. And you don't have to listen to anyone, just like before.

I mean, after all, you increasing how powerful the Morgul Hammer is, then nerfing it a week later would STILL be the most exciting thing to happen to CB in awhile. And a little excitement will bring some players back, encourage the ones you still have and get us looking forward to the next change, REGARDLESS of balance.

I hope I made myself clear without sounding ungrateful for whatever you do decide to do.

change stuff :D

oh btw i heard admins have larger item storage is that true? :) how hard would it be to port that over to normal people?

No whips and daggers? :(

They are surprisingly higher on the list. I've no idea why.