Leveled correctly and placed correctly, archers can destroy everything. That’s part of the challenge though, figuring out how to make the shit work properly
Rangers: Over-powered or just right?
Ok, so archers were weakened pretty significantly with the most recent update. Some people have told me balance is better, while others feel that it went too far. Thoughts?
I think is ok now.
You can’t win stage just by placing rangers. However changing their range and increasing “dead zone” was a bit pain at the begining and required some changes in used tactics…
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Ok, so archers were weakened pretty significantly with the most recent update. Some people have told me balance is better, while others feel that it went too far. Thoughts?
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Poison was maybe unnecessary to touch. Is there anybody there who used it heavily, putting skillpoints into it?
Min-range was unnecessary to touch, too. Archers now became the underdogs in terms of usefulness. At least in early battles, the road to success now lies in respawning berzerkers with decent equipment. In my linear run last night I only upgraded Ketta to level 3 once when I tried to do the first armored level with help of her rapid shot, but in the end I managed without.
If anything I would undo the poison nerf and add an “unpoisoned” targetting logic. I have only 2 archers with 1 point in poison, all the rest are armor pierce/range/bleed.
Indeed. I’m cool about the poison part(not that I used it too much anyway) but minimazing the range reduced archers’ efficiency quity a lot. Now I have to take more units out and update them all steadily; making it harder was kind of disappointing at first but rising to a harder challenge made the game more fun.
Personally, i think you’re going in the wrong direction with the Archers. Before they were OP, now they’re UP.
The Problem with Archers: They can do far to much.
Armor Pierce, Bleed, Poisen, Damage, Range…
Personally i would prefer if they simply had a long range (and a not to short minimum range) and have only one of the 3 Aspects (Armor Pierce, Bleed or Poison) and an overall low damage.
Preferably the Poison Aspect would be the balanced one…
Then they could should shoot at a wide area but only doing little damage (this makes knights more important for the armor break and Zerks for damage), but poison them doing a little DoT. That would make them be good assets to any defense, but not make them the key piece of EVERY defense strategy.
Right now with the weird low range (and high minimum range) i feel a little sucker punched by it… Rangers are supposed to have a wide area of coverage, they should simply do less damage (and overall less status effects).
Just my 2 cents
That would make both ‘ranged’ units be DoT units. Rangers with poison and dragons with fire. Not that I’m complaining or anything. Just pointing it out.
I’m not sure I agree with the fact that Rangers are now UP. They’re certainly less powerful, but especially for normal difficulty, I find that Rangers can wipe out a significant portion of the baddies on most maps before they get to my main forces. It’s certainly forced me to be much more careful in placement though.
I agree with the above posters’ suggestions to make the range magnifier apply to minimum range as well…maybe with a cap around what they used to be? Makes investing points into that powerup a lot more useful, potentially.
Maybe Rangers are underpowered now, but when you factor in the other changes that were made, I think they’re in a pretty good place.
Is the new minimum range a bit much? I’d argue yes, because on some maps it’s nigh-impossible to put them anywhere that allows them to cover more lane than your average Berserker, or the only spots you can put them require you to “waste” a healer whose only duty is “heal the Rangers parked over there in Timbuktu”. I’d like to see it shrunk down very, very slightly and, as others have said, consider having the Range Passive Skill decrease it very, very slightly again.
Are the nerfs to Bleed and Poison a bit much? I dunno, I like it because it makes them the unit that’s good at softening mobs up before they reach your killzone while simultaneously catching the problem mob(s) that made it through said Killzone with next to no health left. The other unit types are typically good at one of those two things; Rangers are good at both.
They don’t need to be massive DPS powerhouses, keeping every mob on the screen permanently debuffed from the second they spawn with 4 different status ailments. The fact is, in prior builds you could easily place 6 Rangers and have them cover pretty much the entire map, dealing crazy damage, weakening mobs with Bleed, and sapping their health even further with Poison DoTs.
There were a lot of maps - particularly in the first half of the game - that could be won by placing Rangers in “good spots” (not hard with their range back then) and then Boosting the hell out of them and ignoring or only summoning token units of other classes (low level Healers for attack waves, un-Boosted Ice Mages for slow and freeze, etc).
That was not particularly good design. This new version however, while hard on Rangers as an individual class, has really brought them back in line - they actually have weaknesses now, and need to at least attempt to synergize with other unit types.
Rangers are ok. Not too over or under powered. And they are really useful for boss battles and empty spaces between the different classes. 
Rangers are also useful because they can inflict Bleed and Poison on revenant which actually help when there big gaps because it acts like leeches, slowly draining health.