Bows now cost huge amounts of energy to use, even more useless than before.

Hmm.. Maybe it's because the main purpose of the bow is not for dealing a high damage output like weapons should in games.

 

I wonder if those crying about attacking the dragon or UFO with melee wepons ever heard of BLUE STIMS! Seriously, you can find plenty of them by exploring a couple of Apex labs/ high-tech temples.
I did destroy the flying saucer that way.

 

You shouldn't need to chug a stack of optional consumables to down the first freaking boss in the game.

Or really any boss. Yes, it should help, and it does help... Very briefly, before it wears off and you're forced to keep re-applying.

I'd totally be on board with you, if stims lasted as long as the various potions in Terraria. But they don't, if anything reds are about the only useful one, due to healing back chunks of health. *Maybe* the speed boost for crossing the map.

...Even if they did, contact damage. A problem that, once again, melee in Terraria also suffered from.

Fact is, there's problems here.

 

I fight birds by jumping into the air and hitting them with my sword like a real man.

 

I can understand the concern over the loss of energy when using a bow. I definitely don't think it should cost more energy than your average firearm. But for that matter, I also think a bow should be treated as a weapon. A single, well-placed arrow is all one would need in the wild and historically, it is a weapon. On the other hand, I'm slightly dubious about energy consumption being presented this way. It seems it would take far more energy to keep swinging a big, rusty sword than it would to fire off some arrows, let alone use a rifle.

My thought is that this game is first and foremost a game about exploration on a massive (unending) scale. It seems more than reasonable to place firearms on a cool down of sorts, but all else should be of infinite use.

 

I had no problems taking down the dragon with a steel bow in terms of energy and damage. I hit it once or twice with my sword for ~100 damage each, but that's it. Had no problems with energy consumption too as I was constantly using the energy dash tech to dodge and evade. Not saying that things couldn't be changed for the better. Plus, I normally just go sword/shield anyways.

As a personal opinion though, I think ranged weapons (aside from sniper rifle and projectile explosive guns if applicable) should generally be weaker than melee. Otherwise, why use a sword?

 

I disagree - It is the first (and only) means of a ranged weapon for a long time. And your hunting knife isn't in any way "useless" for fighting.

 

I killed the dragon with a steel bow today, because i couldn't find a gun without looking for someone else's coordinates, and it was a real pain. I had to fire like 100 shots and wait every few seconds for the energy-bar to refill...

Why use melee weapons? You should use the weapon you like the most, that's pretty much it.

 

As I said in another thread, a bow is a 'hunting tool' - But so is a rifle, a pistol, a shotgun, etc. A hunting tool is a fancy name for a thing that kills things. Comparing them to firearms, a modern compound bow with broadhead arrows is probably even more deadly than a pistol (hand-cannons like the Desert Eagle .50 and .44 Magnum excepted) because of the size of the injury they create and the fact they continue doing damage as they stay in there (which bullets usually don't).

Add this to the fact some people just aren't lucky finding gun vendors (I'm in Gamma Sector and have yet to find one) and it's entirely possible to be stuck with an implausibly weak, over-costed ranged weapon for a very long time. It sucks.

 

I killed all of the bosses so far with a melee weapon, the hardest being the skeletal dragon, not because it's hard to get at him with melee, more because it's hard to hit him because his hitbox is...odd to say the least, and his wings deal contact damage, despite being invincible. It's an odd bossfight that needs balancing.

On another note, you have to prepare to play the way you want to play. Can't find a ranged weapon? Explore more planets, find an Avian Airship, take the time to explore, sure you may be unlucky, but hey that happens to us all at times, instead of rushing ot the boss, take some time to enjoy the game, explore some planets, mine some stuff so on and so forth. Sorry but you can get T1 guns easy, you just have to explore enough planets to find the Avian airships. (They tend to spawn on Forest planets for me, just as an FYI) I personally don't use ranged weapons, why? Their damage is abyssmal compared to every melee weapon in the game, and other then the dragon I haven't had any issue with killing a boss with a melee weapon.

The term "You shouldn't have to chug a consumable" is a silly one, it's there to make a certain playstyle more viable. If you don't want to use bluestimpacks, then don't use armor, or weapons. Kill the boss with your matter manipulators! [/sarcasm] But really just because you don't WANT to use something, doesn't mean you can't. You can't complain something is hard, when you're limiting how you play for your personal sake, if you aren't using all the tools available, then you're gimping yourself, much like I did with the skeletal dragon. Would I say the boss needs a re-work? Meh, I'd say fix his hitbox, so that if he can hit you with something, you can do damage to it, but if the devs odn't wanna do that and he's working as intended, then next time I fight him I need to be prepared and get a ranged weapon, this way I don't complain about the game being hard, when I'm making it hard on myself.

 

Actually, I destroyed the flying saucer in just 2-3 blue stims because I had a powerful warhammer causing burns. So I guess with a legendary 2h weapon against the dragon, it should require half a dozen blue stims or so (pretty easy to find, really... I had like 14 when I had to fight it).
And of course I'm forgetting to mention any tech that may help to reach the dragon (I've been very unlucky with techs so far, so I didn't have the butterflies or bubbles at that time).

 

It should still be viable for combat given your other choice of ranged weapons needs you to be luck in finding a pirate ship.

 

It's not the easiest weapon to use in combat. Having to navigate terrain, while moving slower, jumping much less farther, predicting the enemies' movements and random jumps, while dodging attacks.

I see no point to make it less useful in combat, for balance purposes. It's one of the few elements of this game which actually require a very specific and refined type of skill in order to use consistently. Why take that away?

 

If you havnt found a gun by the end of level 3, you need explore more. I found about 3-4 from killing epic monsters on various level 3 planets, and also 2 avian airships (that sell a nice variety of guns). Stick the planet surfaces unless you need raw minerals, it's where 80% of the content is right now.

 

It isn't just the UFO or the Dragon.

There are birds, there are other times where you'd like to attack at range, as you'd expect to do with a bow & arrow set (because in any other game where you swing swords, bow&arrows make for useful weapons).

Birds have this annoying tendency to keep throwing fireballs/waves/whatever at you while remaining out of reach of your melee weapons... are we supposed to chug blue stims for every bird, too?

It'd be nice if the bows were just....plain more reasonable to use.

 

Ok I'll be rather frank. The initial concept behind the bow seems to be, low tier, low functionality and low practicality behind it unless you are in desperate need of either leather (Which is very possible due to needing it to survive on snow planets early on) or out of desperation for food. It was never a "Weapon of first choice" for anything I've done because it was ungodly slow, does pitiful damage and just is plainly not very useful.

With the alteration recently done to the bow it has changed just from unwieldy and unpractical to essentially being useless. It takes five seconds now to pull back the iron bow to fire a single shot and now it burns through a rather massive chunk of energy that, at low levels, tends to be better served almost anywhere else. The bow is first and foremost a low end item - Its progression tree is a joke and outside of those early, early, early zones it has utterly zero utility.

There are plenty of posts about "but guns" - Guns have massive advantages over the bow... Once you can find one that is. Not everyone has anything remotely comparable to luck. Again I know they are a low end tool and a stop-gap between other things but they are also absolutely necessary to get leather and face it, the way they now function is abysmal. It wasn't great before either but now they have replaced difficult but rewarding to punishing without reward. Yes they don't use ammo, frankly I wouldn't care if they did, yes they are low end, that is a no brainier but dear god the time it takes to pull back the string and fire is usually enough for any small mob to outright kill a player before they've even gotten it all the way back. They are not functional, in the bad sort of way.

 

Bows are far too weak to make this change balanced. Please remove the energy cost of bows/ brain extractor.

 

It could just be temporary, but I agree that the current state of energy use on bows make them lackluster and not worth using when it comes to combat or hunting for meat.

Often there is more than one enemy on the screen and being out of energy, or even missing a single shot puts you at risk versus just whipping out your badass melee weapon and watching them melt. Since all monsters now have a tiny chance to drop meat on death regardless of weapon, I gave up on the bow a long time ago as a useful tool for gathering due to the nature of its use.

I'm sure it will not stay that way, but it currently does not seem suitable as a "hunting tool."

 

Can't fathom why a bow salvages meat while a spear is incapable of it. Convoluted mechanic.

 

Because the 'hardcore' guys tend to squeak the loudest (Although I will agree the penguin boss feels a bit like a pushover now, but I think it was because i got use to the insanely overpowered one) Also they tend to put suggestions in the proper suggestion forum, when we casuals tend to place them on the General forum where they get bumped off the front page in a matter of hours.