EdgeCase Asks The Community: Burglar Bows; Yea Or Nay?

We wanted to address some of the feedback that we’ve been seeing regarding Burglar bows, and we wanted to make sure that our intentions for making this change were clear.

The basic reasoning went like this:

1. Beornings didn’t have a good way of pulling targets, especially for multipulling.
2. It’s pretty trivial to give a class the ability to use a particular weapon.
3. Let’s give Beornings bows!
4. Some Burglars are asking for bows now.
5. Burglars have pulls, but no way to pull multiple non-adjacent targets.
6. Burglars don’t have a good ranged slot item, since FMs aren’t very good right now.
7. Let’s give Burglars bows!

This wasn’t a long-term planned change, or an attempt to fix the larger issues with the Burglar, or even a “buff”, per se. This was a target of opportunity; we saw a problem and a low-cost way to solve the problem, so we went ahead with it. All of the other options to solve this problem that we’ve seen suggested (throwing knife autoattack, improving Signals, improving FMs, etc.) are ideas that we think are cool, but would take significantly more time. They’re full features, when giving bow proficiency is extremely simple. We just don’t have the time to implement any of these other solutions as well as all of the other stuff we’re doing in U18.

Given all of this, I want to present you with a choice: Would you rather Burglars have bows, or would you rather that Burglars not have bows? At this point, that’s the choice. If you would rather not have bows, we’re okay with removing them, but there won’t be something else added in its place in U18.

Go here to have your input.

EdgeCase

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Originally Posted by dwarfThar

The question is: are things like improving signals/FMs/etc. planned for the foreseeable future? Or is it bows or nothing at all for a long time?

It depends on what you mean by “long time”. There isn’t enough time to do more fixes in this vein until after the raid is out. However, improving the Burglar is definitely something I’m interested in doing, and something I’d like to do soon after. I’d like to stress that I’m not promising Burglar changes here, since I don’t want to make a promise unless I know for sure that we’re going to follow through, but Burglar improvements are near the top of the list of things we’d like to do, for sure.

Originally Posted by Confounded

I vote no… would the burglar class trainer selling consumable throwing knives be a viable alternative?

You can still make Serrated Knives and Throwing Hatchets as a Weaponsmith, and I’d rather not undercut crafting like that. If you’re asking if we could make a new kind of non-cooldown throwing knife for U18, the answer is no, unfortunately.

Originally Posted by Tirian-Hammerfist

I’d vote no, if there was a promise that a proper, well-thought out alternative (aka non-consumable throwing knife) was promised for a future update.

I don’t want to disappoint you here: We can’t make that promise right now. I love the idea of a non-consumable throwing knife as a ranged slot item for Burglars, but I’m not going to promise something that isn’t guaranteed. If we do broad Burglar changes, then making a non-consumable ranged slot knife is probably something that will happen, but we can’t promise anything definite for that right now.