I can see hamstring being quite useful in certain situations including bosses like bigfoot or black crow, or high HP mobs such as monks at the Shaolin Temple. I can sympathize with people not appreciating drastic changes, I think (or hope) the majority of Bowmaster players are open-minded enough to give the changes a try first. My first impression playing with the new soul arrow mechanics has been moderately positive overall. I agree we shouldn't be making comparisons to the gameplay of other classes
Alright then I'll give my opinion on these so-called buffs hope I don't get too rude about it but I'm gonna go direct to the point. Bowman Changed Final Attack from a passive skill to an active skill. Useless. Changed the description of Power Knock-Back to accurately reflect its effectiveness. (It previously said 40%, when in reality it had a 70% success rate.) Yeah not bad I guess but you guys forgot to address an incorrect description on Arrow Bomb saying it deals 130% at Level 30 but this 2nd job skill deals even more damage than 160% 3rd Job Arrow Rain on Level 30. I remember someone saying on shoutbox that the Arrow Bomb on this server actually deals 180% damage I wonder why this trend of 2nd-job moves outperform even 3rd and 4th job skills how is this even a thing Whoops. Changed Marksman’s Piercing arrow to be usable whilst jumping, moving, and taking damage. Nice and mandatory buff for MM. Changed Bowmaster’s Hamstring to work on bosses. Why do we even need this skill if most raid bosses in the game are either stationary or being pinned by a warrior/bucc combo. Only useful for a handful of solo bosses, particularly BF and he's not that hard to dodge once you learn his shitty hitboxes. Again maybe I'm too biased and I guess this actually works for unwashed players, but again, for the competitive top 30k washer, this skill is still last-choice SP filler the move. Changed Marksman’s Blind to work on bosses at a reduced rate of 10%. Again nice buff, higher avoid is always good, more consistent DPS for MM guys. Increased the HP of Ranger’s and Sniper’s Puppet from 6,000 to 20,000 at max level. God thank you Changed Soul Arrow: Bow and Soul Arrow: Crossbow to work like Night Lord’s Shadow Stars, whereby it consumes 200 arrows, allows the user to fire without consuming arrows for 2 minutes (at max level), and retains the attack bonus from your currently selected arrow. Excuse me what the fuck Fixed the long-standing bug that allowed Bowmaster’s Hurricane to continue firing after the user pressed ALT+TAB. Hurricane will now stop shooting when this is attempted. This bug was never a great deal to begin with, unless you are macro-botting, there is no way to exploit this to get "an unfair advantage over other players" because the way Hurricane works prevent pet MP auto-pot if the trigger isn't released, so if you alt-tab AFK 1st eye Krexel, unless you use a macro-bot your MP gonna reach zero eventually and the exploit will stop working without your interaction. IMO these buffs needs to be done so the archer class can be great again: 1. Make hurricane not lose DPS after being hit by allowing it to fire arrows whilst in midair, this is not the same as asking hurricane jump, I don't need to hurricane jump just want to keep my DPS intact during bosses when hurricaning that's all. 2. Make concentrate immune to dispel. Yes Matt you messed up (lol), as Saledor mentioned in the other thread the skill icon doesn't disappear but the effect of the skill such as the att buff (which is laughably low for a 5 minute cooldown move btw) and the mana reduction (why if we aren't even mages nor we use MG) are gone forever after that dispel happens. 3. Power Knock-Back, a Super-KB 2nd job skill is able of Super-KBing bosses when you deal enough damage to push them back, but Dragon's Breath, a 4th job skill which is supposed to be the definitive ultimate super ultra KB-move, can't, even when you deal enough damage to knock them away, when using DB's on bosses, they only suffer regular KB as if the skill weren't powerful enough to blast them off like Warrior's Rush. Also it's damage output for a 4th job skill leaves room to think if it's worth maxing this skill where it's only useful feature is super-KB and even at that it can't do it properly when more players come to hit the mobs you're hitting. A good example of this is in Duo Shao whenever my partner or Phoenix hits the mobs or the boss, Dragon's Breath works unreliably or almost never but PKB works almost 99% of the time even if multiple people hit the mobs. 4. For some reason, Inferno, a 3rd job skill no BM uses in 4th job after min-maxing DPS, get the special effect of burning foes to death with only 1-landed hit, don't know if this is an actual feature or an unintended bug but something tells me that Phoenix, a 4th job bird that literally is made of fire, breathes and burns on fire, should be able to retain this same effect of burning down foes to death, but this isn't the case. Both are elemental skills, just one happens to be an active attack and the other a temporal supportive Moltres. 5. Bowmaster is able to shoot 1 single fire arrow on 3rd job and summon a fire bird on 4th job but is unable of casting elemental charge on its arrow, same as Marksman does with Ice, they should be able to manipulate their assigned element at will with some sort of active skill as they are more than capable of doing this, that would grant them the ability to exploit elemental weakness on foes/bosses whenever it is convenient and manually cancel (right-click) them when no longer needed. Instead we get mobbing-based elemental skills that rapidly become obsolete on 4th job. A supportive elemental skill could make better use of their elemental capabilities of fire and ice, respectively. No one asked for but I wanted to say it anyways.
Very happy with the spirit of the BM changes, the att boost is great, the arrow level requirements add a new level of progression, and the number of inventory slots that have to be devoted for stacks of att-boosting arrows for bosses has been reduced with the new Soul Arrow. However, the lattermost change came at the cost of being able to use Soul Arrow to attack without having arrows in inventory, which was the entire original concept of the skill. Perhaps Soul Arrow could be reverted, the level requirements and attack bonuses from the new arrows retained, and the max number of Diamond/Red arrows per inventory slot could be increased from 2000 to 16000. 16000 arrows per slot would approximately match the rate of inventory space depletion under the shadow-star-soul-arrow buff regime assuming the BM is constantly using hurricane. shadow-star-soul-arrow (200 arrows) * (1 inventory slot / 2000 arrows) / 3.33 minute ~ 33 minutes per inventory slot constant-hurricane-with-16000-arrows-per-slot (500 arrows / 1 minute) * (1 inventory slot / 16000 arrows) ~ 32 minutes per inventory slot This approach blends the improvements from 73.3 with the desire to keep Soul Arrow in its nostalgic form and solves the inventory space problem that hurricane poses for BMs wanting to use att-boosting arrows in long boss runs. Perhaps the max arrow stack per inventory slot could also increase with the level requirement to retain the value of Soul Arrow at lower levels. 2000 for regular arrows 4000 for bronze arrows ..etc..12000 for red arrows (lv120)..16000 for diamond arrows (lv150)
I liked the changes, they're perfect dedicated 24 slots for diamond arrows and i dont think ill have to go refill them til next week
I see many ppl not seeing the relevance of harmstring on bosses, be open minded, ITS ACTUALLY QUITE GOOD, and it will be even better. You just lack of the proper experience, give it so time....
The arrow bomb skill itself is working as intended at 130% damage multiplier. The true issue here is how the critical multiplier applied for arrow bomb. If a player's archer has no SP invested in critical shot passive, one will observe there's no problem with arrow bomb damage at all. This is the legacy coding from the original MapleStory itself, so Nexon is the one to blame here. Whether if this critical multiplier can be changed or not has to be clarified by Royals staffs as they are the ones who have to deal with the shitty game coding from Nexon devs. To give an idea what's the actual multiplier value is with all skills at maxed level (with maxed SE):
Yes hamstring good. Btw S>hamstring 30sb. Also @leodexe i happen to use inferno in shao on my 200 bm to combo with my IL's ice demon so its not rly true to say no one uses it.
Not all of the skill changes is meant to benefit everyone. Those of us who have reached 4th job might not benefit from the Final Attack changes, but it doesn't mean its a useless change. I am actually happy with the change. This change is great for casual players who wish to grind their characters through 2nd job. As for Hamstring, perhaps give it a try first. Pre-skill change, BM have a lot of unused SPs anyway after we max our cores skills. I'm glad that we now have a skill to add and use.
Of course it can be modified to fit the correct numbers, in other server I'm playing, Level 30 Arrow Rain does 200% damage, and their Arrow Bomb seems like it deals regular 130%, as the damage difference from 200% to 130% is huge, in comparison, 130% to 160% in this server make it seems as if every other skill is weak and for whatever reason they left it unmodified, when in the practice, I just find odd than a 2nd job mobbing skill outdamages every other multi-mobbing skill in the game.
I immediately maxed out Hamstring after the update. It is so helpful in bosses. Slowing down Shao, Dunas V1/V2, and Rog in APQ has been extremely useful.
Yeah but I meant to use it effectively, its only useful as the only multi-mobbing skill that doesn't stun nor Super-KB which is a must for certain grinding maps like Typhons. Once you get to 4th Job and get Your Hurricane Lv1 it becomes almost completely pointless unless for whatever reason you decide to clear RoR before reaching 120 it can be useful because the bonus damage will be nice if you don't have Hurricane yet, but then again after getting hurricane it will nuke every other mob faster than the bonus damage itself against weak-against-fire mobs.
There are some maths on the bowmaster guide, you can check them out https://royals.ms/forum/threads/new-source-nanys-bowmaster-guide-road-to-lord-sniper.121936/page-4 Inferno > arrow bomb > arrow rain when taking dots into consideration (LHC mons seems to be weak to fire aswell, so) also seems like inferno outperforms hurricane when there are more than 3 mobs.
Weird, I always had this placebo feeling Hurricane would kill faster even with elemental advantage with Inferno. Mainly did most of RoR1-5 Inferno-less
It's very situational. The key condition for Arrow Bomb and Inferno to outperform Hurricane is for the mobs to be close together. Archer's range AoE skills suffers from "wasted area" problem, where their effective kill zone being cut in half (exception for piercing type skill such as Iron Arrow). This is due to how targeting works in MapleStory where first monster contact triggers the effect of these arrow skills. We can't manually target monster further down in the pack to maximize the AoE range. So, it's pretty normal to feel these skills being underwhelming when the targets are normally spread out. This is where dragon breath (at the level to push 6 targets) compliments with our 2nd and 3rd job AoE skills to force multiple targets being herd together. Spoiler Edit: Edited explanation for more clarity
Polling is now open: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/soul-arrow-polling-thread-to-be-released-on-13-aug-2021.194696/
189bm here and I can say that arrow buff is great, but maybe we can increase the duration of the new SA to 300 seconds instead? Most MM doesnt use as much arrows in 200 seconds. Also I would rather see some buff to concentrate skill, rather than buffing final attack which no one uses. Make concentrate WA undispellable (dp doesnt remove icon but it takes away the extra wa given), and instead of giving 50% mana usage reduction, give 70% stance like effect for archers. Since developer can't get around hurricane not stopping attack while KB, having stance like buff would be better.
Longer duration on the skill would be ideal as BM already has to recast SE and more buffs just makes them waste more DPS uptime recasting them. However after thinking around for a while it would be simply better if the new change on Soul Arrow was moved to a New 2nd or 4th Job Skill instead, and revert Soul Arrow to it's original state. That way people who want whatever buff just need to allocate SP on the proper skill instead of begrudgingly having to deal with the new changes. Also yes, it's hard to appreciate the buff on Final Attack as it is common knowledge that it's only useful during 2nd job, wasting 30SP on FA means you have to forfeit PKB or SA which have very specific niche uses and are overall more useful tools on the long run even after surpassing 4th job. I'll quote myself about why this won't work
Fair enough, well such OP buff could be combine with concentrate instead won't you agree? +Wa and consume selected arrows for further wa boost. This'll make concentrate more tactical and relevant with the CD it has. Regardless, a stance like buff would give a significant boost for Archers and their dps uptime from getting KB from platform like in HT, Zak arms and Cwk pirate. Repositioning can be a bitch, we don't have movement skill, high avoid, stance or iframes to deal with KB.