So let me get this right.. I need to ensure I'm not misunderstanding.. as a returning player I'm not entirely educated on things.. I HATE crossbows.. the first thing I did upon coming back was to planar break down all crossbows I was being given (dozens of them with overseer quests), as i like to play healers and mages.. and healers and mages don't need no stinking crossbows, they need a good wand! And a wizard hat or healers miter or whatever. But do I have it right, that not only do crossbow attacks just 'work' and don't interrupt spellcasting in any way, but the recommended thing to do, is to get a crossbow, reforge it for DPS, and turn all healers and men wearing dresses into Robbin Hood? This is the recommendation? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes.. so I'll move on to the next question.. what are mages/priests of only intermediate means buy for crossbow bolts? The level 100 ones look half affordable, but they have like +600 weapon stat bonus compared, to say +900 weapon stat bonus compared to the bolts that are about 1 plat per bolt! (dang things are expensive). None of my mages have much in the way of weapon/attack skills, so if I get the cheap arrows, will I even hit anything? I want to do heroics at some point. TY!
So I got out my 110 weaponsmith 1 decent arrow costs about 1000 plat to make! Either a wracked wood wedge or a golden whosiwhatzit. Now, I suppose I could gather for 4 hours a day, to feed my army of 11 cross-bow weilding alts.. dunno.. that seems painful. Advice would be good.
Just buy the bolts from the ammo vendor. For most the biggest benefit is from the opportunity to proc off the autoattack not the bonuses on the ammo.
I hadn't even thought about procing off the autoattack. I have read several posts where people are talking about reforging for DPS. Funny thing? I played launch of EQ1 and i've never bought anything from an ammo vendor.
The reason crossbows are better than wands is because of autoattack multiplier, and effects which boost it. They all specifically say "does not affect spell weapons", so wands are basically useless. If you're specced right and have the right group, a crossbow is hitting for upwards of 5bn per shot on average, and they fire quickly. As for ammo, look for items with "Conservative rate of fire" buff. The easy one is to chrono to 95 say, and go to Fabled Vault of El'Arad and kill the last boss. He drops a CRoF clicky pretty commonly and you can reset that zone every 90 minutes. Also, your overseer quests will be farting out more rares than you can use eventually, so if you're not using overseers, now would be a good time to start. Get a CRoF item and use the best quality crossbow bolts available (wracked blah blah), because with CRoF you will basically use no ammo. You do have to recast CRoF every time you zone though, so just remember to use it. You're welcome.
Thank you, Tanto. I didn't start this thread but I appreciate that breakdown of why go xbow. I just returned myself and was also curious what the deal was with them. Also, I love preemptive "your welcome"'s.
What server are you on? If you're on HoF I will log in for the 1st time in well over a month and make you plenty of bolts for free and mail them to you. That along with the CRoF clicky Tanto mentioned will keep you set up for quite awhile.
Wow, what a great response. Despite having played since launch, Iv'e come and gone many times,tried many other games.. so I don't have this true 'older timer' knowledge set.
Skyfire. I'm not certain that's a good server or not.. but I don't have the $300 to move all my characters to another server, and i don't know which one i'd pick if I did.
I took your advice and got the clicky. It dropped the first time. Now, I have 9 other characters to do it,but it only took 10 minutes including travel time. It's amazing that a 17-year old zone drops something that is more useful than nearly anything found in the current expansion. I wonder what other little gems are out there, that people are sitting on?
Gosh, I certainly love to see l33t gamers do the spreadsheet math and find a competitive advantage within the game mechanics but this....heck....it's unseemly and undignified LOL But hey...whatever works ROFL
I was under the impression that regular bows (short and long bow) do not benefit from the autoattack multipliers. Is this not the case?
The only ranged weapons that are sometimes excluded are wands. Auto-attack multipliers existed long before crossbows existed.. wording to exclude spell ranged auto-attack was added when wands were added. They never excluded real bows.
Thank you for your response, Mermut. I didn't make myself clear, I'm sorry. I have been told that the regular bows are broken in that they do not benefit from the autoattack multipliers. There are also threads in the scouts forums stating this very thing. Being a ranger, I had planned to switch to a crossbow because they have not been affected by this bug. I was just wondering if this was not the case anymore.
