Reasons to have an archer?
Obviously it's very handy to have one character who mostly keeps back and avoids taking damage, with a tank up front soaking up the blows. But I'd also assumed that archers were pretty versatile at attacking enemies with different weaknesses simply by changing arrows.
Most enemies have strong resistances to certain attacks, but are weak against others. For instance the Fire Elemental has 100 resistance to Fire and something like -90 (-87??) to Water.
I thought that this could make a fairly major difference, just by swapping arrows to suit the enemy.
However, although this makes for a nice Role Play element it doesn't seem to make all that much difference in practise (I'm hastily editing my post here after actually testing what I wrote before and finding it didn't really add up!! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" /> )
I guess that the resistance only applies to the extra fire/poison/water damage (or whatever) that the arrow inflicts over and above the basic attack damage of the (cross)bow. In most cases, in standard form that's a pretty small figure compared to the base damage.
I just did ten or so test runs with just one character fighting a Fire Elemental with either fire or water arrows, and over a few tries it made almost no difference to how many hits it took to kill it. Disappointing really, and it makes me wonder why they choose such precise numbers (like -87) if it makes so little difference. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/question.gif" alt="" />
