Archery Perks Options

[Acadian]

I'm pretty happy with archery in Skyrim, but wonder if anyone else shares my feelings on a couple of the archery perks:

1. Steady Hand 1 & 2. These perks slow time when you are zoomed in with your bow. I find that it makes aiming vs a moving target troublesome. I can estimate lead time pretty well in normal time, but the slow down time seems to make that hard. Bottom line is that I deleted that perk from Buffy (via the command console) and it seems to work better for me without changing timezones.

2. Bullseye. This perk gives you a 15% chance of paralyzing a target for a few seconds. At closer ranges is works well and gives you breathing space to keep shooting the target while they're down. I have two concerns about this perk at long range though (where Buffy tries to stay) -

a. When the target goes down, they are much harder to hit; sometimes at longer ranges, we simply wait for them to get back to resume shooting.

b. The paralyze effect is actually a 'spell' that is not carried by the arrow it seems. As such, it travels faster than the arrow. The effect at long ranges is to drop the foe to the ground before the otherwise fatal arrow passes harmlessly through the air where the foe was standing. It is funny to watch when the game decides to do a kill cam animation - where you can close-up see the foe fall toward the ground (paralysis), then the arrow whiz through where he was just standing. Honestly, I'm thinking of using the command console to eliminate that perk from Buffy. I'll add that I really don't care for 'chance of' effects to begin with - preferring things I can really count on.

Anyway, I'm just wondering if any other archers view these to perks as more irritating than they are worth.

[ghastley]

Totally agree. I never added the Steady hand perks to Silwen, just on reading their descriptions.

She got the Bullseye, found out that it gave her targets a "save roll" they didn't have before, and insisted I remove it via console. I'd expected that the paralysis would only be "if not killed" by the arrow, rather than instead of delivering the damage. I found no way to mod things to achieve that, but I note that spookyfx is working on a Duke Patrick's Archery mod, so maybe it will be done soon?

It's all a result of having "kill cams". The game needs to determine the result before the arrow is released, so that it knows to start the camera rolling. So the paralysis is applied early, causing the miss. It also means that it's coded in the engine, and hard to override.

There's a similar perk problem in the Destruction tree, where one of the perks - Disintegrate - makes it impossible to loot the target. At least they die, rather than get back up and kill you.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Jul 17 2014, 04:52 PM