Hasir wrote:
It's not really about being upset at a mistake. Thats part of it sure. But mainly I think people just think the idea of an archer not needing dexterity is kind of stupid.
dex·ter·i·ty/dekˈsteritē/
Noun:
Skill in performing tasks, esp. with the hands.
Synonyms:
skill - adroitness - deftness - knack - cleverness
It's the "rogue skill" for a reason. Don't get me wrong, I sort of like that strength affects archery. I would hate for this game to be streamlined like some sort of bioware trash, but dexterity should certainly have an effect with the offensive power of archery. Maybe it can decrease reload time? I already suggested adding the chance for projectiles to miss their targets, and being that ammo is so scarce accuracy would certainly be important. Perhaps strength could affect reload time and dexterity could effect damage? that would seem logical and both skills would be important and keep the game from being stream lined.
I'm anxious to hear if the devs are willing to look into skill balance. It's something that gets over looked in single player games too often.
I actually had a paragraph about how I thought that the term dexterity was a misnomer, however I deleted it because it didn't matter. It is misleading a bit, if anything maybe agility would be a better term.
I'm personally of the opinion that skill balance shouldn't be a priority. Some of the fun of a single player game is finding out which skills are good, and which skills are less good. If hand to hand for instance is moderately OK, but not as good as daggers for a rogue, that could mean that later I could play the game with a hand to hand rogue for a bit of an extra challenge.
I don't think "it's stupid" or "in other games dex affects bow damage" are good arguments for changing it though. The only good argument to change it would be that the game would be better if dex affected bow damage. I don't think it would, primarily because strength has a pretty limited affect on bow damage to begin with, (so you don't really lose out on much) because ranged weapons are pretty good without the change, and because dex is actually a pretty good stat despite not affecting bow damage.
If they were to change the word "Dexterity" to Agility instead, or change it to Nimbleness, I would think that's probably OK (but unnecessary). I mean, nimbleness wouldn't imply dealing additional damage with anything, but it might better describe being able to avoid blow and pass opponent defenses. But gamewise, it doesn't matter. You learn by reading the tooltips or the forums or whatever, that dexterity increases dodge and melee accuracy, then you deal accordingly.
I'm not even defending it as a good decision, I'm just saying that stating it's wrong because many other games do it differently is a poor reason. Arguing that it's poorly described is an already argument, but I do think the tooltips were pretty explicit on character creation. And ultimately making a mistake on character creation will barely affect your character, as the majority of your power will come from skills and items, not what stat you decided to put 6 points into instead of another.
