Exile 2: Archery= No?

[Paragon]

It doesn't seem like archery is worth very much. Sometimes it doesn't even hit, and then when does hit, the enemy is either undamaged or does little damage. The same thing goes for thrown missiles, not worth putting skill points into.

[The Almighty Doer of Stuff]

Archery is more or less useless in all Exile games.

 

Arguments can be made for thrown missiles and slings, as they can be a free extra hit per round for a melee fighter, but they should always be only a secondary source of damage.

 

Specifically, if you have a melee fighter with 3 or 4 AP, if you do a melee attack, you lose all the AP. If you throw a missile, you do damage, and still have AP left over for the melee attack. It can also help when the melee fighters can't reach the opponent.

 

Archery is too expensive, however, both in terms of gold and skill points spent on bows, arrows, and skill training, and for the fact that it costs 3 AP per shot, as opposed to thrown missiles' and slings' 2 AP.

[Cryolemon]

Poisoned arrows could be useful, but the spell for it is better.

[Randomizer]

It's helpful for when you are backed up in the corridor so fighters can still attack with a range attack or you want to damage melee opponents before they can close with your party.

[Arc the Lad]

Useful at the start, then gradually gets worse and worse...

 

I still use bows though, I always find a chance to use them.

[Celtic Minstrel]

I use them in Avernum sometimes, and I think I also use them in Exile sometimes.

[The Mystic]

I only use archery in BoE, and then just the god arrows I made.

[Xelah]

There's an unofficial item editor floating around the internet somewhere that I've used to modify bows to be a little more useful. Not exactly proper use of the game, but the uselessness of archery is silly. A better fix would be if spidweb could adjust archery to use the assassination skill.

[Upon Mars.]

What's his name?

So can i know who (the editor's) he is?

[Lauren CW]

If I recall it was a bit more useful in Exile 3 when you could get the fury crossbow.

[deworde]

I always had an archer-centric character because I liked the "Robin Hood/Ranger" flavour of them, but they positively have to have poison use in order to pull their weight, and even then, they'll be the least useful by the end.

[Ishad Nha]

Item editor would presumably modify the save game files or the game item lists for the Exile games concerned. I am into hex editing so I could look into this at some point. I had a stab at decrypting the save game files for the various games, see:

http://www.ironycentral.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=101210#Post101210

In Exile 2, when the game itself is opened in the MS-Dos Edit command with a line width of 68, the list of items is found starting at line 1,198.

[Jean-Philippe]

Archery was useful in Exile 3, with crossbows. In Exile 2 it could do some damage at the very beginning and was useful in the Verdant Valley Dungeon, it saves some spell points when you are being annoyed by lava bats from the other side of a chasm. After this dungeon, it was quite useless. In exile 1, I don't remember...

[Figgy]

Archery was completely useless in all of the Exiles.

 

Why make an Archer when you could make another Mage/Priest?

 

Doesn't make any sense.

[Prince of Kitties]

Although it was pretty useful for monsters - the "good archer" trait in BoE for instance allows 40+ damager per shot.

 

(Realistically this makes some sense, but Exile is not supposed to be realistic. I mean, it has magic.)

[Mestalidd]

In all of Jeffs games, archery was useless in everything but A4. Simple and Clean.

[Tarson]

Archery was good in a1-6. You could do a fair amount of damage and take out mages from a distance in the early games before they threw out huge damage and get more attacks with haste in the later games.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Archery's not that bad, but thrown missiles is better because you get two hits per turn (provided you don't move).

[Prince of Kitties]

I will say the flaming, poisoned, etc. ammo + some item with the "Accuracy" trait can be useful, at least in BoE. Without Accuracy you're not going to get too far though.

 

(On that note, I once created a Bullseye-like BoE singleton, with gloves of +50 Accuracy and some magic, but bad at everything else. That was... interesting.)

[SlayerBlade]

I find archery very useful. With spells limited to a range the archery has a lot of spells beat. I normaly Have my archer keep a good distance as he has low HP but is a great ranged fighter. A well trained archer can duke out 40+ dam each round. The Envenom Spell on a archer is a good combo too if your enemy is out of poison spell range.

[ItwasTed]

Archery can be helpful for ranges and tight situations. Also, spells cost a lot of in terms of range. But it is typical of bows and arrows to be great at the beginning, and then stink later on.

[Trenton.]

hmm.i used to use archery. i only use it know with the crossbow and enchanted bows and arrows like fire or poison light death and other types of arrows

 

 

Loyal servile- who wonders why alorael changes his name all the time.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: loyal servile

Loyal servile- who wonders why alorael changes his name all the time.

It started out as a protest for not getting a custom title from Drakefyre and now he can't stop. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) isn't pretty.

[Trenton.]

wierd

[Alorael at Large]

Not really. Like my signature, it now has the force of tradition behind it.

 

—Alorael, who supposes he'll never get a title now. He can do it himself, which is no fun, and Drakey can't, which is even less fun.

[Slawbug]

Once upon a time, Alorael was not the only one who changed his name. I myself have at least two — possibly just two — changes to go, while I am still here.

[Trenton.]

*changed his name about four times already*

 

 

 

--Sauskes servile, who thinks its fun to look at peoples signatures

[Brocktree]

Originally Posted By: Paragon

It doesn't seem like archery is worth very much. Sometimes it doesn't even hit, and then when does hit, the enemy is either undamaged or does little damage. The same thing goes for thrown missiles, not worth putting skill points into.

Ranged weapons aren't very damaging vs melee because...

1. It's far easier to get your hands on a melee weapon with a hefty damage bonus, than a missile with a good damage bonus. For example, magic waveblades/broadswords are easy to find, and you can use them ad infinitum. Magic arrows (whose base damage and bonus is close to a magic wave blade) are rare, and are exhausted pretty quickly.

2. You don't get any strength bonus to damage for ranged attacks.

There are a number of other considerations (eg. lack of assassination, no dual wielding, inability to poison missiles, inability to augment, etc). But the above two explain why you rarely do good damage with ranged attacks.

Bows have two things going in their favour. Each shot only consumes 3 AP. And bows have a whopping 12 range. This is twice the range of a wound spell (Range = 6), and 1/3 more than a missile (range = 8) If you hoard magic arrows, give everyone a bow, and mass bless you might be able to wipe out a Rakshasha before it gets the chance to unleash any spells. In otherwords, bows should be an ancillary means of attack.

Alternatively, you could just buy everyone a lot of magic darts from formello. The +5 damage bonus is enough to pick off any regular mages.

[Tracer Bullet]

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES

Once upon a time, Alorael was not the only one who changed his name. I myself have at least two — possibly just two — changes to go, while I am still here.

I do it occasionally, remember?

[Slawbug]

Originally Posted By: Fflewddur Fflam, Lord of Song

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES

Once upon a time, Alorael was not the only one who changed his name. I myself have at least two — possibly just two — changes to go, while I am still here.

I do it occasionally, remember?

No, I don't, mainly because I have no idea who you are. People who changes their avatars all the time, but rarely change PDNs, are easy to recognize (say, Dintiradan). And people who change their PDNs all the time, but rarely change avatars, are also easy to recognize (say, Alorael).

People who change both all the time are difficult to recognize. In fact, it's been suggested in the past that something be done to make that harder to do.

[Tracer Bullet]

Well, I'm not going to change my avatar, now that I have one. I used to be Sage of Numenor.

[Karoka]

I use arrows to quickly eliminate those annoying, little weak pests that just get in the way and keep me from the big guy. That is until I get Firestorm and/or Divine Thud (I think you get Firestorm first) Then archery becomes pretty useless, unless you've collected some arrows that can't be sold.

[Trenton.]

unless you put an ridiculus amount of skill points in archery and get really good bows and enchanted arrows. its basically useless

[AndyLandy]

Archery has really grown on me. When I first played, I never messed with it. These days, I like to have one character who has some archery skill. If you train them up in it and have a decent bow (I'm using a magic bow in E2 at the moment) and you're liberal with the bless and haste spells (Who isn't?) you can do some pretty handy stuff with archery.

It's really good for:

 

• those dungeons where you're stuck in 1-wide corridors.
• for taking out the annoying spellcasters in an outdoor encounter (because they're always miles away at the back!)
• taking out null bugs when their antimagic clouds stop you getting your fireballs in.

 

Still, higher-level melee weapons are easier to get hold of (edged weapons even moreso) so I never have an exclusive archer. Usually I'll have a Nephilim who does archery and uses bashing weapons.