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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Harlock" data-source="post: 727969" data-attributes="member: 4545">First of all, Hi Zach!Secondly, Let's take the example out a bit.  First of all, in my experience the higher the level your character attains, the smerter the the opposition becomes.  More tactics, more healing potions, more natural healing abilities etc.  Let's also factor in the 50,000 gp for the 40 +5 arrows.  At five arrows a round you are looking at 8 rounds of a fight and you are needing to spend 50K again.  That's a whole lot of loot.  Figure in something like a group of Deathbringers (higher level example) and their negative energy burst, or a couple of clerics with healing circle on and spontaneous cures or heals and restorations and those non renewable resource arrows get chewed through pretty darn quick.  Factoring in Arcane Archer does away with this, but at the price of being an elf (not too bad a thing in many peoples' eyes) and at least one level of arcane casting.  Most likely you are a wizard1/fighter15.  You're toast in close quarters fighting and higher level enemies can close much faster.  For example combat begins with opponents 30 feet apart.  We'll hope that archer character had a feat left over for improved initiative because he's going to need it.  He gets first attack.  He fires off a full round of five arrows and hopes his friends engage and tie up the enemy before they get to the bow-boy.  Oh wait, high level opponents have wings of flying boots of sringing and striding etc.  Well, the bad guys recognize an archer getting off 5 shots a round as a bad thing and send in the barbarian with high speed and full of rage.  He can make the move and start swinging.  Sure the archer can move his full movement rate, and maybe he didn't spend all of his money on those non renewable resources called arrows and can actually move faster and farther than the Barbarian, but it is doubtable.  So we have a case of back up, shoot one arrow.  The barbarian will have more HP (likely especially if he is raging) and will hope the back the archer into a corner somewhere.  Worse he breaks the poor archers bow...  Best case scenario is your archer lives but is effectively a non issue in the fight because of the tactics used.  I'm not trying to say archers can never be effective.  I'm not the smartest DM out there and I am sure there are a whole lot more of and many more devious plots than this one.  Archers can be very effective, but a one trick pony in D&D will get you killed almost every time.  DMs adapt and can adapt on the fly.  A character that sinks hardcore into archery is likely to meet a devious end if he is too powerful.  Balanced attacks, in my experience, has always been preferable to the pure conentrated type of attacker.  Sure, look at how much damage you can do in a round... but don't expect a DM to let you get away with it everytime.EDIT:  BTW, a party of four characters, average party level of 20 fighting 3 Deathbringers took my group one and one-half hours of real time to fight because of that negative energy burst.  Many rounds of complicated combat later the party won, but even counting for Greater Magic Weapon that would be at least 3 casts for the archer in your example and at least one of those would have had to come in this actual combat meaning the cleric would be out for a few rounds while he had to make the moves to avoid being pasted while casting or he would have had to take a serious risk and taken the AoO or three.</blockquote>

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