Originally Posted by
sylph
If I learned anything from the recent adompossible challenge, it's that people aren't going to try to figure out any clever approaches to the game's challenges (such as the steel golem) if they can just farm slaying arrows from barbarians. It's that simple, barbarian farming makes all other ranged attacks pointless, and the reduction of arrow/quarrel destruction (suggested here) makes rocks, spears, scurgari and daggers even more pointless to ever train.
I don't buy your chain of logic here. As someone who despises missiles and rarely uses ranged attacks, I've never farmed barbs outside of ADOMPossible. As someone who values turncount and really hates tedious things, I've never farmed barbs outside of ADOMPossible.
Yet, I was 100% on board with farming like 3 slaying arrows in something like 2000 turns (if I'm not misremembering) for ADOMPossible because it was by far the best way to defeat the golem - in fact, I dare say, the ***only*** way to defeat the golem for a vast majority of the characters in the ADOMPossible challenge (I point to Fire's 5-for-5 record against the golem, even if one of us stupidly died later in the COC). With basically only one way to complete the challenge, *of course* people took it! But I have no idea what you're talking about with respect to farming slaying arrows - I had my last slaying arrow snapped only 3 golems in, so unless you're spending 10s of thousands of turns farming arrows, you're not going to get any *good* arrows [a lot of 1d6 arrows? sure]. Trying to apply the logic that goes into making a decision for a turn-restricted, extreme challenge game into making a decision for a normal game makes little sense. And, if people are actually farming barbs for slaying arrows in a _normal_ game, they're just being dumb and you can't fix that.
The thing you're missing here is that other ranged attacks *suuuuuck* past the early game - absent slings, they have awful range and no slaying powers. With a short bow, any shmuck can get more range than daggers easily, so I won't even talk about the not-uncommon long bow. Of course, people are going to go with the skill that most efficiently kills enemies! Increasing arrow destruction won't mean they decide to challenge themselves and train up rocks or what-have-you as that would be very far from ideal gameplay when they get more gains from skills in bows/xbows!
You're trying to apply your gameplay experience and make it everyone else's, but most people aren't going to take the non-ideal route to do things and that's totally fine.