Asurea Skie

I love the whole, "Just don't let them build up! Also, don't engage them!" The problem is the bulk spawning and complete lack of despawning, especially related to temporal storms but also outside of them. Meanwhile, there are acknowledgments of both the different AI and the fact that they pursue you from ridiculous ranges. Yes, I know how to adapt, make an escape tunnel, etc. It doesn't change that they're an actively un-fun mechanic that completely violates the rules all other drifters establish. They've made it especially hard to get my friends to play with me when they're just ganked by an enemy they can't see half the time, or swarmed with an execution squad. Sure, you can chase one or two around and dodge their shots, but when there are 20?

I think part of what's going on is how the game normally handles spawns. It creates a wave of drifters that try to get at the player for a period of time, but then give up, retreat, and a fresh wave comes in. It's that retreat mechanism that's missing/broken with bowtorn. Combined with their heavy hits, incredible accuracy, and high damage, it allows them to build up these "execution squads" shockingly early. My first encounter with a mass like this was less than a week into the game, and wasn't even tied to a temporal storm. I was setting a pretty good pace, already having copper tools and just casting my bronze anvil and first bronze pick. Yes, nights are and should be scary at that stage, but some RNG spawning 18-20 bowtorns leading to an unavoidable death makes that rage quit button feel like you're just being baited. VS is supposed to be hard, not complete BS. The new enemy types are, overall, a good thing. Drifters alone were too exploitable. It's just that bowtorn are an exception to all of the rules.

I'm going to add my own experiences here. Bowtorn don't flee with sunlight/vanish with the end of a storm like other mobs do (even when you're in the middle of fighting them). They just stand around, keeping you under siege. When it's your first high rift activity night (not even a temporal storm) and you open the door...oh, hey, it's two bowtorn, if I charge them down I can take them! Weird that they're still here at 0800 in the first month in broad daylight...CHARGE! OH S*** IT'S NOT TWO IT'S 20 DODGE DODGE D-dead. In just a storm of arrow fire. If you don't have proper armor (and heck; unless you have superior armor) they chunk you for 4HP per shot and are super-accurate. You can dodge at long range but if you run in a straight line from their specific viewpoint, they'll nail you. Now I've had two bowtorn-only temporal storms in a row, which I didn't even know was a thing until reading this forum post. Even in steel chain armor, they were nightmares, needing dozens of bandages just to keep the population under control so my entire base wouldn't be surrounded when the storm ended. Speaking of the storm ending, the bowtorn themselves don't despawn on their own. They just stick around, ready to murder you...but their corpses sure disappear promptly for any you kill after the storm ends. All in all, they just don't feel fun and challenging. They feel like they're designed to break all the normal drifter rules and wreck players. Here's some suggestions I would make: Reduce the damage of lower-tier bowtorn. Surface bowtorn with Rank 0 damage shouldn't be hitting you for over a quarter of your default HP. Deep or tainted, sure, and corrupt/nightmare should hit an unarmored player even harder, but surface ones shouldn't be hitting for more than 2-2.5HP per shot. Make them follow the same rules as drifters and shivers. They need to flee with the end of the storm/rising of the sun. Being sieged in your base and literally having to dig a 40+block long tunnel with your hands is not fun or engaging. Cap their spawns at 10%-30% of all spawns from a portal or a storm. Could be different for each. A storm that spawns nothing but bowtorn is one where even someone in full steel feels it's better to just hide in the base and bunker down instead of "fighting the storm," something I'd routinely challenge myself to do prior to this patch in the endgame. Reduce their accuracy. Whether through making them worse at leading targets or just increasing their dispersion (the size of the "aiming circle" that determines where their arrow will go), make them less likely to just consistently hit the player. This is especially suggested at long range. Not all of these would necessarily need to be done. Any one of them, I feel, would go a long way towards correcting this enemy that currently feels like it exists to obliterate new characters and especially new players. The screenshot, by the way, is one of two storm drifters (the other was a corrupt!) that first ambushed me over two full in-game hours after the last temporal storm ended. They don't despawn or run off...just stick around waiting to ambush the player. And you can't tell me that a tainted (T2) or corrupt (T3) bowtorn just wandered out of a cave next to my base, especially when both of them had the blinking/shimmering effect of enemies spawned because of a storm.