svendre wrote:Here's the thing.....
It's so much more effective to use stuff like the untrained short sword than the trained short bow for a lot of things (if only to save ammo) early game that it seems silly. I have heard a lot of talk about how great ranged combat is because you can hit from range... but the reality is that while it's good for the first enemy that you encounter, until it closes the gap.. they are worse than melee at close range, and if there are any other enemies behind the first, they close the gap as you're fighting the first. Solo targets are rarely as dangerous as large packs of enemies. You're going to wind up being trained for ranged (inferior to melee) weapons fighting a lot at melee range in most actual dangerous situations. The only saving grace is that the ammo may miss but wind up hitting something behind the first target. That isn't terrible, but it's not as good as killing stuff quickly as it walks into melee range and repeating the process such that you avoid many blows.
The reason hand crossbows are so much better is because they have great accuracy and damage, and the best usage of them is to use them (trained as a melee character) to hit enemies approached, sleeping, and still at range, as a lure and weakening agent. Often times an untrained hand-crossbow can be used to kill ogres which could otherwise put out too much damage for an early melee trained character. The slow time isn't a factor really, you just want to make sure the shot fired on them sleeping hits, and hits hard. When used in this fashion, there is also not much of an ammo issue. It's essentially a long-range weak stab + lure.
Over time, so much attention has been focused on screwing over players trying to kite and avoid getting damaged, that the end result is that melee (and heavy armour) is so stupidly better than any other tactic barring extended late game situations, level 8 and 9 spells and ziggurats. About the only combination I can find to the contrary is a vampire of Mak using lesser destruction from bat form to clear the early/mid game (and of course dumping xp into armour.)
A point i would make here is that ranged weapons are not really worse than melee ones at short range, i guess they are missing some of the top tier choices, but a longbow is equal to a greatsword (i would rate the "miss but maybe hit the thing in back" equal to riposte) or glaive, and personally i think training for a triple sword or bardiche in a 3 rune game is usually a waste of xp.
In my current game, i was in spider, killing things with my +2 longbow of venom, typically i would kill 3-7 things before the first of a swarm closed into melee range with me (1-3 shots each), sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes i would kill everything without it touching me, sometimes i would plink a single nasty 7 times and not kill it before it was on top of me, but that was pretty rare. Overall that seems pretty darn effective comparitively. Not as good as say, a well trained and placed fireballs would be (at least until you ran out of mana and pulled the whole floor to you), but better in terms of damage taken than waiting and whacking things with a greatsword.
Now spider is an extreme, it is fairly open (making choke points harder to find) the critters in there are fast (making it harder to reposition for optimal melee combat), fragile (meaning killing them at range is easier), mostly non ranged, and hard hitting (so if multiples do start chewing on you because you haven't had time to kill them yet, it hurts, even if on a one to one basis they would die quickly), which lends itself pretty well to ranged weapons, longbows would not be as similarly devastating in say, vaults.
I dont think ranged weapons are particularly overpowered, but nor are they especially weak. Crossbows, notably suffer from an early game ammo shortage (bows less so and slings not at all) but since you dont really need the ammo for the bulk of critters (or really any trained attack at all) in the early game, it doesn't matter much, it just means "train more fighting and dodging" which is good advice even if you are using a melee weapon. Starting with a melee weapon really just means less swapping and that your unthreatening early combats are shorter. Once you have sufficient ammo, ranged and melee weapons are exactly the same, except ammo is annoying to pick up, and critters (even tough ones) will sometimes die or take lots of damage before they can hit you. Oh and good ranged weapons are somewhat rarer than good melee weapons.
If you end up fighting in melee range in dangerous situations you aren't particularly at a disadvantage over a melee weapon user, you just have slightly less advantage than you would with better positioning.
Now if you want to evaluate how *annoying* it is, ranged combat is *way* more annoying than melee, melee being the lowest available effort one can put in to kill stuff. I waffle between whether conjurations are more or less annoying than ranged weapons, it is kind of a toss up imho.