Bows are WAY too accurate.

[TomaSkTemplar]

you should not be one-shotting almost anything except unarmored at close range.

weapon skill increases damage, 300 proficiency gives 33% damage, so buy piercing arrows for warband-style and watch them fly away.

 

[kekkuli5]

You do still need to aim the reticle perfectly though and I've noticed (at least on my screen) that the arrows tend to fire a tiny bit to the left.

The aim reticle is terrible, i hope they change it. But you might want to use zoom to make aiming easier on distant targets. Bows are indeed very accurate, especially compared to warband. In warband you needed something like 400 archery skill to get this kind of accuracy.

 

[TomaSkTemplar]

starting archery accuracy is too high at best. In old game, warband too, 20-30 archery meant it took so long to take arrow, aim and hit a broadside of a barn.At 300 and higher with masterwork war bow you had a big long range gun headshotting over vast distances. That 178% (?) bonus to damage increase was just yea ...

 

[Pejot]

It's not just bows. Grab any throwing weapon while you have no skill in it and there's no aiming penalty. In bows at least at under 10nin skill you have some minor penalty but throwing weapons just fly where you want them even if you never before thrown anything.

 

[Shatti]

yeah, arrows in this game are annoying because they are too accurate and has a lot of damage

 

[fedeita]

This is my personal opinion but for me, while aiming with bows, there should be some sort of sway related to breathing and tension of the string. I don't like static aim crosshair with a randomizer for the precision of the arrow.

 

[Adrivan]

They are only accurate while standing still, which makes you also a target for other archers.
I believe the skill improves your aim while moving / riding a horse.

 

[evil_budgie]

I think we need to separate realism and good gameplay. In reality arrows do very little against full armour (see Tod's Workshop, ARROWS vs ARMOUR - Medieval Myth Busting on YouTube).

Of course just having arrows bounce off fully armoured soldiers until you get a lucky critical hit isn't a fun gameplay mechanic, so you'd make something like a headshot be a consistent critical hit. I think body shots do too much damage on armoured targets in general.

And the accuracy/speed seems way too good at low levels. I recognise that having arrows fly all over the shop with huge bloom would be rather annoying, so I think you should be able to be accurate but only by sacrificing a lot of speed - so much slower animations/reloading and where you're also having to take seconds for the reticle to reduce with a short window before it gets bigger again. So you're really working for that accurate shot. I've seen way too many 18 skill archers streaming where there's no discernable difference. In a game where so much emphasis is placed on earning everything, archery seems rather like something imported from an Elder Scrolls game only they took out most of the damage scaling.

 

[Grenn2384]

Has anyone here actually fired a real bow?
I was able to get a bullseye here and there with a longbow at maybe 15 or 20 yards, with a combined 5 or 6 hours of practice. Only missed the target at the beginning and after a couple hours had it pretty dialed in.

A character in the world of Bannerlord would have grown up around such weapons. I feel like skill gains are more about reaching perks anyway.

 

[Falrock]

They are only accurate while standing still, which makes you also a target for other archers.

I think this is a very good point.

 

[evil_budgie]

Has anyone here actually fired a real bow?
I was able to get a bullseye here and there with a longbow at maybe 15 or 20 yards, with a combined 5 or 6 hours of practice. Only missed the target at the beginning and after a couple hours had it pretty dialed in.

A character in the world of Bannerlord would have grown up around such weapons. I feel like skill gains are more about reaching perks anyway.

I've not fired one, but I've heard people who shoot every week talk about it. I figure the real life skill gains in archery are going to be largely around rate of fire and draw weight of the bow. Real-life accuracy differences are going to be fairly minor in terms of the bloom in a game. But it's in the heat of battle and having to hit a fast and lethal shot is something that's going to require training/battle experience. It's like how in home invasions where people unload a gun into a burglar or whatever, that person could be hitting every shot on a range, but they generally miss more than they hit in that incident even though the target is much closer.

 

[BUFFbeard]

This and maybe throwing weapons are bit too accurate given low skill level, or at least I can actually use them properly and reliably in contrast to Warband.

 

[Pancakelord333]

I think a bigger concern than accuracy for bows is the total lack of deviation (or "bloom"), they're far too consistent.

Provided I don't move my mouse I can drop an arrow in the exact same spot every single time even at extreme ranges.

That is only doable with modern bows and arrows that have been machined with identical weights (and a lot of experience) etc.

Medieval arrows, whilst good, would not all have had identical mass, and they'd have production flaws.

Arrows should have a more pronounced "deviation" statistic to represent this spread of shots, with higher tier arrows having better (more consistent) stats, as they're presumably better made, whilst lower tier ones should land outside the target more.

I'm also not sure if the AI even adheres to all the mechanics the player does I've seen them fire with aimbot-levels of precision clean across a battlefield and get headshots

 

[Jhaerik]

Has anyone here actually fired a real bow?
I was able to get a bullseye here and there with a longbow at maybe 15 or 20 yards, with a combined 5 or 6 hours of practice. Only missed the target at the beginning and after a couple hours had it pretty dialed in.

A character in the world of Bannerlord would have grown up around such weapons. I feel like skill gains are more about reaching perks anyway.

I think people do generally overrate the difficulty. About anyone with the strength to pull back a given bow is going to be able to hit a man sized target at 30 yards in their first few attempts ever. It's really not any more difficult than throwing a baseball. That said from an RPG perspective all of the skills do feel pretty pointless.

This is why you need attributes to do SOMETHING. Strength needs to be a factor for example. Currently all characters are the same damn thing plus or minus a few percent from grinding. People have different levels of physical and mental capacity that are completely separate from learned skills. Of course that leads to the whole "Men are stronger than women" argument and we just can't have that in our PC nonsense culture. Just try suggesting that female humanoids get -2 STR/DEX/CON on a D&D/Pathfinder reddit and observe the **** show to come lol.

 

[Gunter von Krieg]

I think a bigger concern than accuracy for bows is the total lack of deviation (or "bloom"), they're far too consistent.

Provided I don't move my mouse I can drop an arrow in the exact same spot every single time even at extreme ranges.

That is only doable with modern bows and arrows that have been machined with identical weights (and a lot of experience) etc.

Medieval arrows, whilst good, would not all have had identical mass, and they'd have production flaws.

Arrows should have a more pronounced "deviation" statistic to represent this spread of shots, with higher tier arrows having better (more consistent) stats, as they're presumably better made, whilst lower tier ones should land outside the target more.

I'm also not sure if the AI even adheres to all the mechanics the player does I've seen them fire with aimbot-levels of precision clean across a battlefield and get headshots

^ this guy gets it. On a related note I wish this forum had a 'Like Post' button

 

[enemy_man]

Honestly I think weapon skill has little to no effect on combat. You can easily compete with top-level troops even on level 1 and I don't notice any big difference after I level up my skills.

 

[Tajl]

If it didn't cost me more than all the armor myself and my entire retinue of companions is worth combined I might agree with you.

But that is an insanely expensive bow. Over thirty times more expensive than the next most expensive bow. If I am dropping that kind of cash it better be a massive improvement and do something spectacular.

Aside from that it is also just kind of unsatisfying to build a dedicated archer and still not be able to kill most troops in one shot with a top quality war bow.

Money is basically free after some time. Fact is that in real life bows just can't penetrate plate. That is just physically impossible. Guy in plate could take hundreds of arrows and they would do absolutely nothing.

Being archers is easy mode in this game. Horse archery doesn't take any skill at all. Starting character can without any effort kill anything without bows or crossbows.

I think good balance would be that with best bow in game you could one shot peasants without armor, but against plate it should take 10+ shots. Against plate heaviest very slow to reload crossbows would be good as well as armor piercing melee weapons.

 

[Ariakan]

I totally agree with this thread. Great observation.

 

[eddiemccandless]

I don't know which bows are you guys using, but to me bows are like something of average accuracy. I have my bow skill is about 70-80, and when I stand still - yes, ut is accurate, just the way it should be with that skill level. When I move - It is hard to hit a single standing target. When I ride the horse at full speed - I hit the target in about 40% cases.

So, I honestly don't know what OP accuracy are you taking about here.

That's because you are riding from a horse at full speed, and there is no horse archery skill in Bannerlord.

The problem with the high accuracy of bows isn't even the player, it's the troops. Everyone from peasant levy archers to elite archers is a machine gun once you give them a bow. That is fine for the elite units, not so much for the low level units. It makes the game unbalanced.

Archery at low levels should be only semi accurate and have low damage against armored opponents. Only at high levels and with good gear you should be able to have better accuracy and hurt armored units. You should also be able to one shot a looter if you headshot them with a low level bow/low skills (i.e., looters have way too many hitpoints right now).

These are the problems I see with bows in their current state, I hope that makes sense.

 

[duchuy613]

High accuracy with a bow isn't really a problem to me, but more of the bows doing too much damage.

In real life, most arrows would just bounce off heavy armor. But bows in this game does massive piercing damage, even the arrows do piercing damage. They literally shred through heavy armor like paper. I'm at almost 50 armor but even those militia archers are destroying me without a shield.

Can we fix the bow so the damage type of bows is cut instead of piercing? Leave the arrows to do piercing damage.