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Originally Posted by KamikazeDreamer
I realized a while ago that while I love bows and ranged chars, the reason I always end up disliking them when I make them in D2 is that it takes like 10+ arrows to kill anything. I want 1-2 hit kills against normal monsters from a ranged character.
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Wouldn't that be boring pretty quickly? take a high level bowazon and go run around normal difficulty for a while; it's kind of fun to hunt chipped gems when you can mow down entire Fallen camps with a single strafe or MS, but if the whole game were like that it wouldn't be much of a game.
Also, how would you balance a game with non-ranged characters if the Legolas class can clear screens in 10 shots? Does the Aragorn class kill 5 monsters with every swing? (I don't even want to imagine what the Gandalf class does.)
To go with your example, the reason Legolas can do that is because he's incredibly fast and has magnificent aim. That can be expressed in a game like an FPS with headshots, or with grenade launchers, but the weapon has to be in short supply, and the headshot has to be really hard to aim. That's hard to apply to Diablo since weapons aren't disposable and only good for a few shots, and since there's no real aiming mechanism. You'll note that the 2 most powerful bow skills in D2, MS and strafe, basically were non-aiming, other than by general direction and character positioning. This is partially due to the lag inherent in online play, and partially because that's how the game is designed. Loot-based, item based damage, skills that you put points into rather than mouse aiming, etc. Besides, you can't really have headshots and precise skill-based aim in an isometric view RPG.
D3 ranged style could allow much higher ranged damage and remain balanced if it integrated player skill accuracy. They could require you to hold a locked on aim on a given monster for several seconds, or make bow shots have drawbacks like Impale or Sacrifice, or make some kind of power up shot that got stronger the longer you waited to deliver it. But those would have to work within the game engine, and with lag in online play, and there's no telling if they could. I think it would be interesting if some skills had that kind of aspect to them, though. Where the game did something to make every shot count and to emphasize accuracy, rather than simply rewarding chars for emitting the greatest number of arrows in the shortest possible time.
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