Comprehensive feedback on bows/crossbows

[Basilllisk]

Crossbows absolutely suck and need to be considered for a buff or rebalance and here's why. There is a tl;dr at the end.

Unless noted otherwise the numbers I have listed were done only with the two +10% damage buffs that apply equally to bows and crossbows from skill and no other buffs.


Calculations

Here's a little number testing to show a bit of what's going on under the hood, after taking a few shots, the longbow with bone arrows seems to do about 85 or so damage bodyshot non-sneak, and the iron crossbow about 105 or so bodyshot non-sneak damage. Critical non-sneak is about 330 for the longbow and 420 for the iron crossbow here..

Based on pure calculation, the bone arrow does about 57 (base) x 1.2 (longbow) x 1.2(skills) = 85.5. The copper bolt should be something like 90(base) x 1.2 (skills) = 108. This pretty much adds up right to the test numbers. Given the iron crossbow has a massive 50% damage increase to "hardened points", I believe this confirms that the "hardened points" does not refer to body shots, but only hard points like antlers with the blue hitmarkers, otherwise the numbers would be skewed here. Since that's the case for body shots I will largely only be comparing the raw on-paper values for non-sneak crits.

A large part of why I'm trying to focus more on critical sneak shots, is they seem to always hit for the highest number, removing some of the RNG from testing, and it also showcases the extra one-shot potential bows have.


Tier 1

Let's start looking at the low end of things. Here we have access to the basic wood bow and stone/bone arrows. With a basic wood bow and a stone arrow, it's possible to one-shot from stealth a low level wolf with a headshot. With both +10% damage upgrades, I deal a little over 400 damage that way. With bone arrows, it goes up to around 730, enough to sneak crit kill antelope and zebras.

The crossbow does not have a tier 1 equivalent, which makes sense. So let's compare the Tier 1 bow to the Tier 2 iron crossbow at a glance. It takes four seconds to reload, not to mention the slight delay required after reloading to aim and fire. In this time period, you can fire off several arrows with the bow, spending less time walking slowly from reloading as well. Damage wise, since the wood bow and stone/bone arrows can already one shot beginning mobs from stealth, the damage increase from the iron crossbow won't be relevant.


Tier 2

We see the beginning of a pattern that causes a large part of the issue later down the line: the longbow sees a flat +25% projectile damage boost, and the arrows begin getting larger critical damage boosts, while bolts get zero. A longbow with bone arrows will do 890 damage with a sneak headshot (1046 with flint) and 212 with a sneak body shot, no critical. Comparatively, The Tier 2 iron crossbow, with a copper bolt (better than iron worse than steel for damage), does 1140 damage with a sneak critical killshot, 257 with a sneak non-critical shot. So, shot for shot, at Tier 2 the iron crossbow does win out by a small margin, but this higher per-shot damage is worthless because there is nothing the Tier 2 crossbow can one-shot that the bow cannot, which is why I didn't bother making steel bolts/arrows to compare. DPS wise, it obviously utterly pales to the bow when you take into account that 4 second reload.

This isn't to mention the fact we need iron to make the crossbow, and therefore an anvil, meaning while it is the same tier, it costs a little bit more upfront time and resources to get.


Tier 3

Here at the higher end is where the issues start becoming more apparent. While with the low end iron crossbow, it seems the intent was originally (since at one point it was the only crossbow) to have harder hitting single shot damage while sacrificing mobility, speed, and overall DPS. I could only speculate to the reasons that this philosophy was abandoned but it seems that it was, because instead of getting harder hitting crossbows we get repeating crossbows. The Tier 3 platinum with four shots and the Tier 4 with six shots (plus a damage bonus, we'll get to that).

The platinum crossbow shares the same lack of damage boost as the iron crossbow. It's chance to slow target on hit is actually lowered from the previous tier, down from 25% to 15%. The chance of this effect happening on a single magazine before needing to reload is about 52%, too unreliable to be of any significant use. It should be noted that even if it stayed 25%, the chance of getting at least one of four shots to proc is about 70%. Additionally, since the fire rate is 50 per minute, that will take almost five full seconds to do, roughly comparable to the bow for fire rate.

The recurve bow gets a further increase in damage from the longbow, up to 50%, with bow Tier 3 arrows getting a +25% crit damage modifier. With an aluminium arrow a sneak kill shot will do 1445. A non-sneak bodyshot with an aluminium should do about 76(base) x 1.5(recurve) x 1.2(skill) = 136.8.

It should be noted that the platinum crossbow has no damage increase, to make this a more accurate comparison I will test with the platinum bolts. A sneak crit kill will do 1320. The base body damage should avg 108(base) x 1.2(skill) = 129.6.

As we see here, at this point, the bow is now beating the crossbow in single shot headshot and singleshot body. As previously mentioned, since they fire at about the same rate, the recurve then wins out DPS wise as well, before including downtime to reload.

This is not to mention the fact that, arguably, platinum is more valuable a resource than aluminium, certainly scarcer.


Tier 4

The issues compound further. With the compound bow using composite arrows, I clocked damage at 2338 for a sneak critical kill. With the the titanium crossbow with titanium bolts it was 2040 for a sneak critical kill.

I had a friend help me with testing, since he has all the bow skills, including +crit damage to arrows and +crit damage to bow/crossbow usage. I thought the additional crit damage from skills might help the crossbow since it has higher base damage, but no. With that setup the compound bow achieved 2953, and the titanium crossbow 2517.

We also measured the time it takes to fire off 12 shots. 12 because, the titanium crossbow holds 6, we could start from full, reload once, and fire all of them again. I believed this to be a fair comparison to the bow. With the bow (with faster firing skills), it took about 15.5 seconds to fire 12 shots. It took the titanium crossbow about 24.5 seconds. I remember the titanium crossbow finished reloading after emptying at about the 14 second mark.

Base body damage for the crossbow would be about 117(titanium bolt) x 1.5(titanium crossbow) x 1.2(skills) = 211. Base body damage for the compound bow would be about 95(composite arrow) x 2.0 (compound bow) x 1.2(skills) = 228.


Workshop

Frankly I can't think of a way to look at the workshop bow/crossbows other than as a complete joke. The Larkwell bow is objectively better than the compound bow at 125% damage increase. The Inaris 'heavy' crossbow is a singleshot, giving a 25% projectile damage increase vs the titanium's 50%. The Inaris crossbow does also have a 10% crit bonus and a 15% crossbow damage, but all these added together might barely scrape past the titanium single-shot damage, but it only has one shot, and we already established that the bow is better shot-per-shot, so this heavy crossbow fails at being a heavy crossbow. I'm not going to even comment on the Inaris "rapid" singleshot.


Projectile Break Chances

This is a lesser issue, but notable, soI'm putting here in a separate section.

Tier 1:
Bows:

• Stone arrow - 50%
  
• Bone arrow 20%

Crossbows:
n/a

Tier 2:
Bows:

• Flint arrow - 30%
  
• Steel arrow - 20%

Crossbows:

• Iron bolt - 20%
  
• Copper bolt - 10%
  
• Steel bolt - 20%

Tier 3:
Bows:

• Aluminium arrow - 15%
  
• Carbon arrow 10%

Crossbows:

• Platinum bolt - 10%

Tier 4:
Bows:

• Titanium arrow - 10%
  
• Composite arrow - 5%

Crossbows:

• Titanium bolt - 10%

Workshop:

• Larkwell arrow - 5%
  
• Larkwell bolt - 15%

For the most part it seems roughly equivalent, with outliers. Tier 2 the crossbow does have an edge here. Copper bolts sit at an odd place balance wise, since they have a very low breakchance, and only cost one ingot, but if you are going for tier 4 you don't have the copper to spare here. While flint arrows have a rather high break chance. In my opinion, bone arrows are great enough that the jump up isn't worth it anyway, but the 30% break chance does seem unfair to the bow here.

At the high end is the bigger issue. The best in each slot for bows and crossbows is the composite arrow and the titanium bolt respectively. The titanium bolt has double the chance to break from the composite arrow, while arguably being a much more expensive item. It is far easier to farm materials to make composites than it is spare titanium. Same issue with the workshop projectiles. I don't understand why the bolt is three times more likely to break than the arrows, despite costing the same, and in practice doing less damage.


Possible Fixes

Frankly I don't know the best route to go, all I am certain of is that this is an unaddressed issue. One way to rebalance might be to give the repeating crossbows "+body damage", replacing the mostly useless hardpoint damage modifier, if you want the bow to remain ontop for big-game hunting.

The bolts need to have an even higher base damage, or at the very least be able to benefit from crafting skills that arrows do. It seems that bolts were given higher base damage to make them benefit more from damage increases and body shots, but in practice the bow has such extreme damage % increases that this higher base damage is worthless in every situation.

The repeating crossbow needs to fire faster. I'm not sure what the idea was behind making the titanium (40 per minute) fire slower than the platinum (50 per minute), but given the time test I did it was an unnecessary nerfing.

At the very least, the Inaris heavy crossbow needs major buffing. If it's intended to be an end-game single-shot weapon it shouldn't be losing out so hard the way it is, especially at the cost of 1400 exotics (while the Larkwell bow is only 500).


tl;dr

While the crossbow was given more attention by having higher tiers added, it was not balanced and it fails at being a viable option both for single shot big-game hunting and rapid-fire body shots during a fight. The bow beats it in single shot damage, sustained/rapid fire, and overall cost. The only real edge the crossbow objectively has is greater default distance, which is uncommonly a factor. The bow beats it across the board, including workshop items.

[Lev]

Nice job on the numbers! I completely agree, the crossbow need work to make it more worth using.

[Zeria]

In other games crossbows have a much longer range than bow...

[Basilllisk]

Bumping this hoping the devs see it. I do not think that the new overhaul of hardpoints as it is to proper rebalance the crossbow.