NERF SKELETON ACCURACY!!!!!!!

Yes oh my god!! My friends and I have complained about this so many times! Skeletons are super OP.

I agree skeletons with pistols are way to accurate

They are definitely OP on the higher levels. They do need a accuracy nerf. They are huge time waster. They are able to be dealt with effectively both in solo/duo/crew scenario but all of them require some pretty well executed strategy that (in the case of a duo/crew) need to be communicated to get the job done. Especially in the case of Legendary Voyages.

This may have changed since I last played with a crew but... Legendary Random Skellies don't spawn with guns at all.

So the meat grinder technique (lots of players with swords) is probably best for Legendary voyages that are not solo. Also everyone should be travelling together to get chests on the x marks the spot. There are significantly more spawns due to the possible "dig spawn" on x marks the spot. But no guns means, agro control mixed with meat grinder to get them out of the way.

Another method is to get one person to agro all the skellies away to leave the treasure hunters in peace.

Solo Legendary usually only spawns 4 non gun skellies and can be cheesed pretty quickly before proceeding with the task at hand. Stand in the water and one shot blunder them. Charge attacks etc. Get to areas that the skellies can't mob you. In some rocks etc. Its cheesy but so is the programming... fight cheese with cheese.

Gold horders is technically harder than Legendary Voyages with the exception of the Legendary OoS component. This is because Gold Horder Random Skellies can spawn with pistols or blunders. They are 2 swipes weaker but that extra component does require a bit more strategy.

Out of interest I started a new pirate on a new account. The pistol skellies were less accurate, slower, less agressive. The Legendary skellies rarely make a mistake and there is almost no delay in their actions.

One final thing. If everyone in the crew dies - the random skellies on the island despawn. An effective if somewhat cheesy strategy that I often use when I've had it with the OP nature of the skellies.

One other way to deal with pistols on OoS Legendary is to firstly:

• Park the boat out of pistol range. You probably need to anyway to get the skellies on the beach. Due to cannon shot height.
• Rid yourself of the random skellie spawns first and away from the OoS spawn area.
• Approach the OoS spawn zone cautiously to "lure" (or agro) one pistol skelly at a time.
• They all have an individual agro zone and are often more than one step apart when a player is not around to agro them.

So you can lure them away further enough so that you don't lure anymore and kill them one at a time. Legendary OoS are never on small islands. Only medium to large islands.

The smaller islands for OoS with Pistols should be dealt with cannons. There is almost always a cannon shot on a small island.

@avecrux said in NERF SKELETON ACCURACY!!!!!!!:

Noone can take a challenge nowadays.

It might be that I don't take it as a challenge, but just a giant waste of time.
We had 4 legendary flower-skellies with blunderbusses yesterday.
Gunning them down isn't an option (because they'll follow into the water).
Cutlass isn't a real option either because they spread out and just two shot you.

You can slash 3 whities at the same time + your teammate is here. So it's 4-5 cuts for each of you to kill 3 skelletons.

We did extensive tests yesterday, maybe you can confirm some of it.
Skeleton HP seems to scale with current voyage level.
Doing a legendary voyage not only spawned more skeletons (which is no challenge, but just an annoying time-sink), there seems to be a significant difference in HP.
The "normal" skeletons take 9 swings in total to die (unless they eat an invisible banana we can't see). Those are white but with some grey-ish accents to their skin (bones).

Having a lvl 45 gold voyage on the table, the skeletons take 5 swings to die.

If you could elaborate on your concrete tactic, I'd be grateful.
What we do right now:
Break LoS with pistol skellies then chop them down in melee.
If that does not work (pathing issues) we run across half the map and try again.
This tactic works, but like I said earlier, is no challenge, but just a time sink.

@avecrux said in NERF SKELETON ACCURACY!!!!!!!:

@a-trusty-mango modern gaming in a nutshell. Noone can take a challenge nowadays. Everyone wants to have everything served on a plate. You can't deal with skeletons? It turns out that the title of the legendary pirate is not written for you.

I have fun, I know how to beat 6whities+10golden skelletons without dying 10times+
1 skelleton need as you make an example 9hits to kill.
You can slash 3 whities at the same time + your teammate is here. So it's 4-5 cuts for each of you to kill 3 skelletons. They're much easier to kill now, aren't they?

Not understanding your methodology there Avecrux, you failed to mention the skellies that walk straight through you and start slicing you in the back or shoot you through rocks . Then you have them doing a lunge attack without the warm up . You get knocked back, whammo you are dead , because the ones with the guns have 99% accuracy.

Your analogy of the fight against skellies is very flawed and i call BS if there is only 2 of you .. Great your a legend so am I, whoop de doo. If you wish to big note ya self-mate go for it. I play with some very good players and we all agree that the skellies are to OP and I have not played with anyone that thinks it is fun to come across eight OOS skellies with guns whilst another 12 normals spawn around u.

@avecrux

You didn't reply to the comments I made why not ?

The accuracy is a mean mother but what really gets you is the quickness of some skellies, so that you are unable to simply outrun them.
They slide around a corner/rock and immediately start shooting and of course they hit you dead center.
More often than not, i go back to just using the cannons for fire support because fighting them bony brohs with the cutlass is too much of a hassle.

@breeza369 said in NERF SKELETON ACCURACY!!!!!!!:

and I have not played with anyone that thinks it is fun to come across eight OOS skellies with guns whilst another 12 normals spawn around u.

The important word here is fun.
Here's my definition of challenge:
If I do everything perfect, I win.
Pretty much like WoW does it.
Some fights are hard, but if everyone does everything perfect, it's a safe win.

@saglant777 said in NERF SKELETON ACCURACY!!!!!!!:

let the odd random skellie kill drop a reward. Ammo pouch for Pistol & Blunderbus skellies, Banana for Slash & Sword.

THIS is a brilliant idea.

Just wait until it takes 8 hits to kill the skeletons on Athena's. Here's the mechanics of how to handle the John wicks...er uh skeletons. Your 3rd Cutlass swing is a knock back, any form of damage prior to fire animation will reset the skeletons aim procedure. There's a roughly 2 second window when the skeleton goes to aim that you have to either damage him, or position yourself bettween another skeleton(or teamate haha). Skellys block other skellys shots. So knowing this, use your third swing to knock skellys into a direction of other pistol skellys. Keeping them all in one swing range mitigates all their damage. Once piled up, you have to commit and keep them all on the same animation reset to prevent any shots. If you find yourself in the middle of a mosh pit with the boney boys, repeatedly jumping and swinging seems to cause misses or positional blocks. Many times I have died with a nana half way down my throat, where if I would have kept the pressure and kept the chain going, I would have lived. Pre-banana rather than react banana. Commit to healing or swinging and running away without taking away the Skelly line of site is a waste of movement and time. You wont get out of range. Last mechanical tip, use a 90 to make the skeletons rotate. Walls and rocks are good, if you can kite the pistols to all come around one side of a vertex, they will all pile at the closest possible angle to shoot.

@kiirgus said in NERF SKELETON ACCURACY!!!!!!!:

and damn sure you can stop them from eating bananas.

so you say you're "pretty sure"?
Because our tests show the opposite.
Here's the testing scenario:

• find two equal looking skeletons (some have a grey-ish tint to their skin, these have more HP)
• divide them so you count hits correctly
• smack down the first skeleton with two people to get around it eating a banana
• have one player smack down the other sekeleton solo and in the very moment the banana animation starts, both players whack at it
• repeat test
• compare numbers

We did this for about 2 hrs yesterday and there's two things:

• a banana heals the legendary skeletons back up by at least half their HP (calculated by number of cutlass hits)
• the banana animation heals the skeleton instantly as opposed to the player that needs to finish the animation, wait 1.5 seconds to replenish the healthbar

Another important thing to factor in:
Skeleton shots do not get blocked by stones.
It's impossible for me to be sure whether that's the case for players as well (unless I'd use an aimbot, which I don't), but I believe it to be so.

@avecrux
I never said impossible I said it turns into an annoying time consuming grind that isn't worth the small reward. It takes the fun out of the game. Grind for 30 minutes to kill 10 skeletons just because they have aimbot and you can't close.

I just had another incident where there was 10 gold skeletons with pistols on top of a cliff in the middle of one of the bigger islands. Cannons couldn't hit the area either, they hit the cliff face or would go over the island entirely. Resulting in 30+ minutes of going up a small trail (choke point) to the skeletons giving them an advantage with all 10 being able to aim down this trail. Then dodging around shooting the skeletons and shooting all 5 shots in one skeleton (if you're lucky/skilled) before you get shot 4 times and die. And then lets not forget the skeletons have higher health so even if you get all 5 shots in on a skeleton it might not die and will just eat a banana as soon as you die.

Constant back and forth grind in the same spot isn't fun and makes for bad gameplay.
And unbalanced combat in a game that boasts about being fair and balanced means the developers are failing at their goal. This game could be so amazing if the designers would actually fix these obvious flaws.
Simply getting rid of the ridiculous aimbot skeletons have would make the game a lot more fun and feel less like a boring repetitive grind. Actually modeling the skeletons stats on player stats would make the game what it should be. Compare the game to something like DnD or any balanced game. When you have a limited player amount going up against a swarm of enemies the enemies always have lower stats.
The captain is the boss and the skeletons are henchmen the players are maxed to just 4 of them and sometimes fight up to 25+ skeletons at once. In any balanced game through out history of gaming the henchmen would die in 2 or 3 hits while the boss would take 20 to 30. That's just basic combat design and Rare is failing at it right now and if you don't undersnt that, then please never make a game.

@kiirgus
Ummm I don't think your playing the same game because both the player community and the actual game coding disagree with you lol...

@lefaux2
Thank you sir, it's nice to see another intelligent individual who actually takes the time to experiment with a game's physics. As well some of the other intelligent experimentative people in this thread. It's great to see other people really examining and analyzing the game to point out flaws.

Yes I've noticed everything you mentioned as well they heal as soon as the animation starts regardless of whether they finish it vs the players who we know must finish the banana to heal. Also yes skeletons can shoot through edges of stone and wood something players can not do no matter how many times I've tried. Their hp is also far higher than a player. It's over all a very unbalanced combat system that takes most the fun out of combat with skeletons and probably a contributing factor in the constant rise of pvp instead of cooperation. Sadly Rare says they want more player cooperation in game but their actions and designs make people more likely to pursue pvp.

@stevie-the-dj theres been multiple times where the island is too small to hit the skellies with cannons unless you park the ship so far from the island that you have to swim through sharks. And having to use cannons is boring combat... and a good open world adventure should offer players multiple ways to approach combat encounters. In my eyes and I think most players eyes Rare is failing at this as most people agree the only real working strategy is to use canons... me and I think most players like combat to be more lively. You should go to an island and be able to think how do we want to approach the skellies this time and be able to have fun flowing combat that's never the exact same against balanced waves of enemies. That is a good open world combat system.

Currently it's this ok guys where do they spawn. Okay I'll move the ship to fire cannons at them. Okay I'll lure them to the cannons. Okay we'll spend the next 5 minutes shooting constant cannons till they're dead then go pick up the skulls.... that may be fun once or twice but not every single time. And some islands I just get bad luck and there is absolutely no way to lure the skellies to the canons unless you want to spend 15 minutes slowly leading them down a mountain to a beach. Again not fun for most people.

Ya there are strategies that work yo make it easier but they turn the game into the same repetitive grind and after an hour of playing like that it's just boring.

As the game is if you try to actually have real combat it's too difficult when skellies have guns. If you just use cannons it's boring. The only options for combat shouldn't be unbalanced and difficult or repetitive and boring.

If they just lose the aimbot entirely and limit their ammo the real combat would become a lot more balanced fair and fun. And if players have fun just using cannons good for them but againgood open world games give multiple options not one way that works.

@diplexstatue44
I'm never lucky enough or have a well working crew to get every skelly bundled up like that. Most the time I'll be focusing on two or three preventing them from shooting when I get shot 4 times in the back by different skellies and die. Then by the time I run back they're spread out even more. Or what seems to happen a lot for me lately is they form a firing line so they don't hit each other and instead just swiss cheese the player approaching them. Most strategies require a solid crew and that's pretty uncommon for me to find. And it's a flaw in the game design as the again the game designers boast that the game is fair and balanced for all crew sizes and doing oos solo is near impossible.

@power-hansen
Exactly and the game shouldn't force players to result to the same style of combat everytime. That's not a good open world game. Sure most the time the cannons will work to wipe them out but for me it kills the fun treating every oos voyage the exact same way.

@elchupacabraj86
Exactly the point of a game is to be fun combat shouldn't become a chore that you have to systematically follow step by step to complete. And describing them as having esp and being robotic is perfect. It feels like on fighting terminators the way they all lock on and fire perfectly at the same time a player shouldn't be able to get insta killed by walking up on a group of skellies with guns.