Hitscan archers are plain unfair

Think of how much it would suck to play an archer if you had to lead your targets to get hits, and how badly it would be effected by latency and sync. Think of how much it would suck to have to use Multiple Projectiles on every single skill just to get a decent chance to hit.

Skills like Lightning Arrow are going to do more damage to you than a skeleton mage's lightning skill because it has 2 forms of damage. It does both physical and lightning. You need armor and resistance, compared to just resistance for the mage attacks.

I really don't see an issue with the current setup. If you have decent defenses and don't Leroy Jenkins packs of skilled archers, you can deal with them rather easily. Most of the archers with player skills are indoors, so you have a lot of options for tactical movement.

Archers in Normal seem to have the same fast arrow speed as in Ruthless or Merciless and that feels wrong to me.
I'd balance NPC projectile speed around the average run speed bonus that players can obtain per difficulty.
If we keep running full tilt in a 90deg angle, their arrows should miss unless they're buffed by champion buffs or totems.
I guess it is code-related though, to save some CPU cycles for other stuff instead of doing collision detection for every arrow.

Agreed, and same for wand blasts and flicker strike. Unavoidable damage makes for poor gameplay.

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WhiteBoy88 wrote:

Think of how much it would suck to play an archer if you had to lead your targets to get hits, and how badly it would be effected by latency and sync. Think of how much it would suck to have to use Multiple Projectiles on every single skill just to get a decent chance to hit.

I think you are exaggerating heavily.
I managed to play an ice spear witch just fine (she had no multiple projectiles for about the first 30 levels) and that thing flies way slower than any arrow. Nothing about it sucked.

i criticized the same issue in my feedback thread, so i completely agree with the OP, you should be able to dodge arrows! undodgeable attacks (flicker strike included) are really bad game design, please change.

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WhiteBoy88 wrote:

Think of how much it would suck to play an archer if you had to lead your targets to get hits, and how badly it would be effected by latency and sync. Think of how much it would suck to have to use Multiple Projectiles on every single skill just to get a decent chance to hit.

I play an archer and I already lead all my targets, cause I use right click for attack so I don't have to move my mouse all the way to clicking on the target, and so that I won't accidentally move.

It's really not that hard, mobs tend to move towards you anyway, and much better than the alternative imo.

Vankeris quoted this in a thread I made about Iron reflexes and evasion in general. Speaking about Arrow Dodging and its effects:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

It doubles the actual chance, not the rating. Not that in general archer monsters have higher than average accuracy, so will hit more often than the estimated chance to evade in you character panel against an average monster.

The 'not' in the second second sentence is apparently a typo for 'note', and by examining the rest of the sentence, this appears to be the case.

Point being, here's fairly solid proof that archers have increased chance to hit. Spells, of course, will hit no matter what *but* you can actively avoid them with Whirling Blades and the like. Arrows, MUCH harder to avoid, and yet granted increased accuracy without any sort of damage penalty. I'm not sure if it's unfair, but it can be pretty off-putting. I think, however, this is stretching into the broader argument of melee vs. ranged, and we have plenty of threads about that. :)

NPC and player mechanics don't have to be the same.

Archer NPCs in their current state are miles beyond the other NPC types because their attacks cannot miss.

This goes especially for lightning damage skeletons, where a pack of them can quickly apply stacks of Shock on you.

With my 2h Duelist with an Armor/Evasion combo and 75% resists, I just cleared Chamber of Sins on Cruel and found it to be very imbalanced.
Quite frankly, the spiders with Viper Sting and skeletons with lightning damage (both melee and ranged) represent the difficulty I expected when coming to Cruel difficulty.

However, in the case of the archers, going toe to toe with them relies solely on being able to kill them before they kill you, which isn't the case with other mobs simply because mobility and correct planning means you can evade enough attacks to survive when shit hits the fan.

I don't like using Flicker Strike, many times it's a "spam and win" ability, but seeing as I can't use Leap Slam to close in on archers it has become the only reliable way to close the distance.
For those who aren't familiar with Leap Slam, it's what the goatmen use, and if you play a ranged character you might know they can be killed mid-air.
It's the same for players, leaping towards archers means you'll get a volley (and almost two) in you before you've even landed.

Even though you can't manually dodge these attacks (sans utilizing terrain to block), there are still plenty of ways to mitigate the hazards. Every single defense mechanism in the game works: evasion, dodge, block, armor, energy shield, health, resistances. It's not like they're extremely overpowered and the player can do nothing about them.

If you could just run a wide arc around archers to avoid all their shots, there wouldn't be much challenge left in them.

Keep your defenses on par, utilize terrain, try some blocking skills like Frost Wall or minions, utilize movement skills to close the distance if you're melee, and don't try to take on too many of them at once. There are plenty of options in the game to deal with this.

Plenty of options that you don't have access to unless they drop.