They make good use of it from my perspective. Running up to an archer expecting to just start slapping him in the face only for him to jump back and shoot you in the face is quite effective. And again, it only has any relevance to people using Glory of Combat. Vanilla bows only have a light shot for offhand.

Isnt that the best solution then
Its not like the AI ever makes proper use of dodges, just like with shields

Yeah, I could remove it easily. Then they won't use dodges anymore.

Is it not possible to just remove the offhand attack from the AI's combo package?

Purges can be quite resource intensive on your system, and the more NPCs in an area, the more the server has to work to get them to do anything. It could be a Funcom issue with Purge performance, but I still haven't been able to replicate the problem myself.

Yes, your mod is last on my mod list. As I said, outside of the purge, when they are following me in "normal" battles, they work actively. However, when defending the base, they have that behavior: they practically run to a corner and seem to be stuck without action, just with their weapon in hand. It is worth mentioning that I have an army of warriors, maybe 20 in the same area. Does this influence it? But in any case, your mod fulfills the objective, which is to make the stationed archers shoot more frequently, and when they are with me, they behave well, shooting without charging and retreating. I will do some more tests here. Thank you for your attention.

I can't say I've seen that behavior during Purges. My archer thralls work just fine while defending the Purge, though I have seen a vanilla issue with some NPCs having quirky movement after being rescued from any kind of prisoner cage.

Have you tried moving my mod to the bottom of your modlist to see if that helps? It could be an incompatibility somewhere.

As I said, they were "defending the base." Sorry, my game isn't in English, but as I said, even though I recruited one of them in the middle of the purge, he didn't attack and had the same reaction as the others who were defending, static and not attacking.

I went ahead and tested it in my own game on a Purge. My three T4 archers out here worked fine, following or not.

They were set to follow you?

Thanks for the clarification, the mistake was mine, I confess I read the description but only halfway......hehehe and yes I changed the archers to T1 and yes it worked, but I noticed something I called a purge the T4 that were outside the station still behave strangely, they run and stay still without attacking, I think they attack once and keep their weapon drawn, even when I call them to the group they don't even follow me, in normal battles they behave as they should, retreating to attack and using melee weapons when the enemy gets close

@werneckm2456 I'll go ahead and clarify something that isn't mentioned in the description, and that is the edits only apply to archers. Non archers will all still work fine in archer posts, and many fighters often have comically high ranged damage multipliers regardless.

Read the description. I already addressed that.

Hey man, one question, does your mod work on archers positioned in the "archer's post" item, those that make them shoot while standing still, because those that were in this item had a very chaotic behavior, leaving the post and dodging for no reason.

In that vein, I've had ideas to try to re-implement that stun immunity system from back in Age of Sorcery. But before anyone gets mad at me, hear me out: instead of stun immunity, I'd set it so the NPC would perform some variety of reaction, like a dodge or block. I'd also randomize the chance of countering, and probably add a system so the NPC has a base chance of countering and gains an increase to the chance every time he's hit without reacting. The chance resets back to normal after reacting, and the cycle starts over. Set the base counter chance on the thrall's tier and the counter increase based on one of their attributes, and how you've got enemies that appear to react with skill to your attacks instead of blindly attacking into you until one of you dies.

If it was in the scope of the mod, I'd just remove it completely. Not only do no other races get any variety of specialized racial bonuses, making Hyrkanians simply superior at archery for free (as you said), it's pretty much a guarantee that most other racial bonuses other than damage bonuses would be ignored. A developer for Remnant II mentioned that he would always steer away from any kind of flat damage bonus because players almost always go for the simplistic "make big number moar biggerer" instead of any interesting gimmicks or unique synergies, unless some YouTuber tells them that some gimmick is the new meta. I'm inclined to agree. I'd rather see thralls survive and succeed with unique mechanics and skills rather than just flat damage bonuses.

I've always noticed that Amurath has a comically high ranged damage multiplier (highest in the game for thrallable humans, in fact), but I've noticed nothing about Shemites. It's fair to point out that his extra ranged damage does display with console commands, while nothing shows up for Shemites of any profession outside the norm. That's why I was confused: Shemites all have normal damage multipliers. It's only on closer inspection that I've now noticed some Hyrkanians show higher than normal (including non archers), so I'm still not sure where the 2.8 multiplier on a T3 Shemite dancer came from.

Apologies for the delay, but I believe that the bonus from the race is present in-game. I tested two T4 Exile archers (the Hyrkanian Amurath and the Hyborian Hagar Hawkeye) who use identical stat and stat modifier templates, the only difference being their race.

With identical equipment, Amurath was consistently outperforming Hagar's damage by 48-49%, which given rounding errors is very similar to the 50% increase from the Hyrkanian modifier.

I then made a small mod which raised the ranged damage multiplier for Hyborians up to the same level as Hyrkanians, and upon testing the two were doing equal damage, so I am confident in saying that the modifier does apply. It's worth mentioning that this does not extend to players.

Personally I think it's cool for different races to have different strengths and weaknesses, but 50% extra power for free is probably too much.

I am one of those old players. I'VE SEEN THINGS.

Dress those archers up in Yamatai footsoldier armor with Zamorian thief hoods all colored black. I think you can see where this is going.

archers T-4 with katana i have found out do really good, i set them with a katana and bow then set there attack to far. when a target gets close they draw there two handed katana and are able to do all the attacks. everyone says archers suck, and compared to obsidian weapons with bleed, then yes i can see where fighters are just hand down better.
with that said archers for me seem to live longer and kill stuff faster.
anyone can spit out stats and buff's and numbers. but having fun playing the game is what counts, stressing over numbers is just "stupid"
So if the mod maker makes the thralls do more, and the game becomes more "cool" then i say, hell yea man! and thank you for putting the effort into it.
as a old player,
yes i remember when they had the broken cross bow (not a mod) but in the game. so yes there are players from the old days still playing.

I checked the age of heroes chapter 1 tab, as that was the most recent one. Either way, it doesn't seem to make a difference in game. None of my testing is showing any kind of damage buff, either in the dev kit or in the live game.

I'll go ahead and keep the non archers the way they were, then. It does make more sense that way.

Yes, I do have the extended thralls mod and it shows 2.8. And no the google sheets does not show them as 1.7, it shows them as 2.7. Maybe you checked an old tab or something. Though I will admit I never tested the damage myself so I do not know if these numbers are valid.

Regarding the combos. I think just archers having them makes sense. Currently archers are pointless because fighters are just better archers most of the time. Just T3 and T4 archers getting the new combos makes sense and is a necessary buff to archers.

If I just say screw it and give all archers the same combos, then that means anyone using GoC will be unable to effectively use archer posts, since any thrall attached to one will just dodge-hop his way away from where he's supposed to be standing. I'd prefer that not be the case.

So, the question is how to arrange this. Should non archers get the same combos? How do low-tier archers fit in a way that makes sense?

@Aphyxia I found the reason why it wasn't applying to non-archers. There are two combo tables used for NPCs: one of them (the one I had been working with) had individual combo rows for each tier of archer, allowing me to set T3s and T4s to use the more advanced combos I was working with. The other one is called the default combo table and has only one row for bows. It appears the first combo table only applies to archers and the second applies to everyone else.

It may seem like this is an easy fix, but while I could just slap all the fancy combos into the second table and give you the crackshot dancers and artisans of your dreams, that leaves us a problem: that table applies to literally every non-archer NPC. I don't know how to force it to separate out low-tier artisans, fighters, bearers, and dancers from high tiers, meaning low tier non-archers will wind up somehow being more skilled than low tier actual archers. Make that make sense.

Gonna be honest, I'm not sure that it's actually implemented in game. I just did a test pitting some T3 Black Hand archers against the game's dev practice dummy. One was Shemite, one was Hyrkanian, and one was Kushite. They all did the same damage. It's possible that the damage bonus you saw was a relic of a past attempt to add specialized racial bonuses to thralls and players, but practically, I'm not detecting any evidence of a supersized 150% damage bonus for all the Shemites and Hyrkanians.

And if there is a phantom damage bonus like that, it's hidden so well that the wiki doesn't have any info on it and no vanilla or mod functions are capable of detecting it in game, and it's not because they can't account for edits to base multipliers. Stick a thrall on an archer post, and Extended Thrall Stats will correctly show its doubled ranged damage multiplier on its stats page.

Which would be a bit ridiculous.

If it isn't accounted for, then his base multiplier of 2.88 is in addition to that racial bonus.

It is accounted for. Amurath the Swift has the single highest ranged damage multiplier in the game.

I'm not sure if it's already been accounted for, but in working on Heritage I found that NPCs (and possibly players) internally-marked as Shemites or Hyrkanians receive an extra 1.5x damage multiplier for ranged weapons (1.8 x 1.5 = 2.7). It would help explain the strong performance from characters like Du'neman the Dragoon or Amurath the Swift.

You can check a follower's base damage multipliers by having them follow you while you input the console command GetFollowerStat and then use either damagemodifiermelee or damagemodifierranged. In all cases you showed, they list as 1.8 for both multipliers.

This is fairly consistent with the Wiki's descriptions of T4 thrall stats, with T4 dancers also having a max of 1.8 for both stats.

In addition, there is a fantastic mod called Extended Follower Stats which displays this information on the thrall's stats page so you don't have to use console commands. Again, it shows 1.8 for all three of your presented cases.

And your Google doc agrees. I just looked. They all have multipliers of 1.8.

Shemite blacksmith, performer and tanner III from the volcano have a 2.7 ranged multiplier and it seems to increase by 0.1 when fully leveled. All thralls are listed here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZFwOkOq_cFQ7_-tzvcXlDxiZ8XWL5RD9zMSyPZN6Or0/

And if you want an ungodly high ranged damage multiplier, go check out Amurath the Swift.

What mod added that multiplier? Last I checked, dancers top out at 1.8 for ranged and melee damage.

Damn, I'm using the Volcano Shemite dancer III with its 2.8 ranged multiplier. Hope you'll find a way.

I've noticed that the mod doesn't appear to affect non-archers. I've given bows to other NPCs and the only ones that use the light shots are archer thralls. I'll need to do some investigating to figure out why.

I'd recommend putting the mod after GoC on principle. Larger edits should go before smaller ones; if not, the smaller edits can get overwritten. While I am not aware of GoC editing the combo tables for bows, it's possible they were, and therefore this mod needs to go lower in the list to give it higher priority.

Lastly, the mod in its current state works fine with GoC. I've been using both mods together without issue. What doesn't work with GoC are my future intentions, specifically double and triple light shots (firing two to three light shots in succession instead of just one). That feature isn't implemented yet purely because I'm working on making it compatible with GoC.

Set this up in the mod load order before Glory of Combat but I'm not seeing it work. T3 performer with a bow kept doing charged shots. What is the ratio between light and heavy bow attacks? Does the mod currently not work with GoC at all?

@Old Coot Gamer I figured it was oddly appropriate.

@Dread Swoop Thanks!

I'm subscribing to this just for the meme image. The utility is just icing on the cake.

Good work!

It's the little things.

huh, nice