Why Bowspam is a terrible strategy for an Archer.

Spoiler: Introduction

A while ago @GalaThundR asked me to post a thread about why bowspam is fundamentally a stupid thing to do as an archer, and now thankfully I've finally got a chance to get round to actually doing it. In all honesty though, this thread has been a long time coming for me, because I see bowspam being debated in game quite a lot, with different archers falling on different sides of the line. Hopefully this thread will put to rest a lot of the arguments about this so called "tactic", and provide evidence for why it's simply a bad tactic for an archer to employ in the vast majority of situations it has to handle.

So I'm sure you're all aware that there are 2 sides to the debate. Some archers believe that bowspam is a legitimate tactic useful in battle, whereas other archers and classes see the tactic as cheap and a waste of time. I happen to fall on the latter side of the debate, that the tactic is not useful for an archer to employ. This does however mean that this thread might be imbalanced and so please feel free to post counterarguments as a response to this thread. Hopefully some of the imbalance will be checked with the physical evidence I'll present alongside my argument. Whilst I'm here, I'm also going to establish some ground rules:
1. Whilst bowspam can be seen as a pointless and unhelpful tactic, it is still not against any rules aside from team matches. That means whilst employers of the strategy could be considered worse archers, they're aren't doing anything against any rules (unless you're in a team match, in which case you will be warned and punished appropriately)
2. this thread is talking about the efficacy of the "tactic" of bowspamming, not as something for fun. If you're just bowspamming for fun rather than as a useful strategy then yes of course there's nothing wrong with that. I'm talking about how useful the tactic is, I'm not trying to ruin that fun
3. I'm going with the pretty lax terminology used by the staff about bowspam. This means that as long as its excessive firing lower power arrows in a certain amount of time, then it's going to count as bowspam here (yes more than 3 or 4 at once). That also applies regardless of aim, so whether 100% of the excessive arrows hit or 0% it's still going to be bowspam here

4. This is all subject to change. At the current time, the stats and maths involved are correct, but there's nothing to stop Mojang from updating and changing the maths. If things do change, I will probably write another thread on the matter, with the new stats.

5. Bowspam has the potential to be used in conjunction with the sword as part of a combined strategy to take down an opponent. This creates new interaction whereby you can weaken an opponent into a potential range whereby you can kill them with a sword (provided you're accurate enough). I'm not considering this interaction, only bowspam itself. In any case, from a damage perspective, this is an inferior damage output and efficiency to using a sword anyway, so even then it's debatable. In use to whittle down an enemy, it's potentially viable, although highly resource inefficient and requires aim to hit repeated shots before they get close enough to do damage with a sword.

6. I don't think I should have to say this, but 1 block = 1 metre, Notch said it himself!

With all of that said, it's time to prove bowspam as a standalone tactic is pointless!

Spoiler: Damage

The archer class has 2 stacks of arrows, making 128 total arrows for use. To fire them, it has a bow enchanted with punch 1, and has an ability whereby if the arrow exceeds a certain infamous range, it'll count as a snipe, instantly killing the victim. For the purposes of my argument, instead of each arrow doing 1000 damage (I've been lead to believe this is how it's coded) and instead doing exactly 20 health points worth of damage (10 hearts). Given the archer has 128 arrows, and every arrow has the potential to headshot, the maximum amount of damage an archer can do with 2 stacks of arrows is 2560 health points (or 1280 hearts).

When you bowspam, you fire arrows faster, but at a lower power than if you were to fully draw back the bow. This means you can get more arrows into the air per second, but these arrows both move slower in the air, have a reduced range and critically deal reduced damage. The range means unless you're almost fully charging the bow and aiming decently upright (as arcs do change at lower powers) you're not going to be sniping anything at all. This automatically means you're going to be dealing reduced damage on the method of using your arrows to headshot rather than bowspam, meaning you're losing damage potential. How much damage is lost depends on how much you do charge the bow:

A bow takes up to 1 second to fully charge (plus any additional thought and reaction time the player uses/has), but obviously can be fired when it has less charge than that. The minimum amount of charge time for a bow is 0.15 seconds, but at this level, the arrow won't even travel a single block. Additionally, that arrow will do 1 health point (before being affected by armor and so it's unlikely for most classes to do anything at all). From this point it scales upwards, in a linear fashion until it reaches full charge. At full charge, the shot becomes "critical" and deals 150% damage (making the damage at full an average of 9.2 health points). This means if you don't fully charge your arrow, you're at the very least losing 33% of your damage right off the bat. Assuming you're fighting a ninja, at the lowest power arrow you can fire you'd need to hit at least 9 arrows to even equal the damage output of one full charge arrow (which doesn't headshot, for that you'd need the full 20). Assuming somehow you hit all of these arrows in a row, the charge time still means you're going to need at least 1.35 seconds to match the output of damage on a ninja as to a 1 second charge time for the full power. That's not counting armor, the ability to hit those arrows, or reaction time, which would very likely slow that time down further. Towards a regular shot that doesn't headshot, you're losing at least a 3rd of a second bowspamming in the best case scenario, and at worst it'd be a lot more inefficient. However this bowspam is a bit impractical given the lack of range, so let's scale it up to a half power shot. At half power you're dealing half damage of the non-critical full power shot in about half the drawback time. This means about 3 or 4 damage with a drawback time over a half second charge time. Assuming this is the case, you're still losing 33% damage outright due to the non-critical factor, but you're also increasing the chance you miss, as half the usual aiming time, an increase in angle variability (human error in judging time in this instance changes your arc) and doubles the amount of shots you can potentially miss.

Overall, this means that you're losing 33% damage by bowspamming instantaneously, and that loss increases with the number of arrows fired in a second because you're denying yourself the time to aim, increasing the number of shots you can potentially miss, and giving more of a chance for human error to kick in. Factoring in the fact that instead of 9.2 health points, a snipe does 20 and you're losing a good 67% of your damage output and efficiency before you even hit something. If you miss more shots, that damage loss increases.

All of this would suggest bowspam is bad compared to snipes, but of course there might not be a better short range option for damage either, and so it might be the only logical solution! This seems to be the argument for the majority of the opposition. To that I say that there is obviously a better option, the sword. There's a very simple reason why the sword is better than the bow short range to begin with, which is the sword is unbreakable, whereas you only have 128 arrows to hit a target in the first place, so you might as well make them snipes. However, the sword is also better in damage efficiency short range too (surprise surprise!):

A sword hits for +5 attack damage, meaning in total you're hitting for 6 damage a swing. We're not in new minecraft, and the games been coded so you have a half second invincibility period where you can't be damaged again (where you turn red). However, you can still take 2 potential hits of a sword in a second window, meaning that you can potential deal 12 health points worth of damage with a sword in 1 second. I've already proven that the damage a bow can inflict with full power at short range is more efficient than bowspamming, and so given this method does at least 20% more damage per second than the full power arrow, it's fairly obviously for damage efficiency, at short ranges the sword wins hands down.

To sum up, for damage, for a short range fight, not only is there a better option in a sword open to archers, but there are more efficient tactics open to an archer short range using a bow which deal more damage than bowspam. Aside from fun, there's literally no reason at all to bowspam in a short range situation, because literally every other viable tactic is more efficient! Of course, the real reason archers use bowspam isn't for damage, it's mainly for the benefits of knockback. However, as you'll see in the next section, you'll see that it's not efficient in that respect either!

Spoiler: Knockback

This is where the real debate lies, because various people draw up the point that if you spam hard enough the players are never going to get near you in the first place. This is however a myth! To explain why, you need to understand what punch actually does:

Punch increases the knockback applied on arrows, and increases by +4 a level. Minecraft already applies a small amount of knockback on a bow, but this is increased by the punch, to be precise by an extra 4 blocks per punch level applied on the bow. In this case, given the CTF archer bow is only punch 1, it's only going to have an extra 4 blocks placed on it. We're going to be safe here and assume that the base knockback from the bow is another 1 block (since it's small) leading the final knockback from a full charge shot to be about 5 blocks.

Why does this matter? well, there are 2 fundamental ways you can get round this, either strafing the arrows, or straightlining it and hope they miss! Strafing attempts to dodge the arrows, but you're going a lot further and slower in a forward momentum to hit your target meaning one hit can set you back a little way. Straightlining is pretty shunned because you take unnecessary damage and it can take quite a while to get to the archer. What matters here though, is that even a straightlining enemy could in theory reach the archer!

Some people won't believe me when I say that even a straightlining player could reach an enemy, and before the archer nerf you'd have been right. Back when archer had punch 2, a straightlining enemy would have never reached an archer, but this isn't the case anymore. With the reduction of the punch to 1, it's wholly possible, and accomplished through player sprint speed. Player sprint speed is 5.612 metres per second, which is further increased by jumping whilst running. This increase that speed to 6.993 metres a second. This jump sprint speed outpaces the bowspam knockback by 2 blocks a second (most decent players will be jump sprinting towards the archer anyway). Of course this does have the downside you'll be knocked back more easily if hit in the air, but combining with strafing, you should cover the distance relatively easy. Even factoring in player reaction time in theory you should be able to outpace the knockback.

Now obviously even with this clear advantage, there are still going to be players that can't outpace the knockback (their reaction time is fairly slow, and only walk, which is about 4.317 metres a second) so let's assume factoring both in, the travel distance is 4 blocks a second. Firstly, to get total knockback per shot (at max efficiency, so full drawn back) you need to get the knockback minus the reaction time and walk speed, which works out in this simplified version to be about 1 block a second. That means to get into headshot range, assuming the player is right in front of you to begin with, it's a total straightline and you don't miss, you need the minimum of 25 arrows to knock the player into headshot range. However, he then walks back out of headshot range for another 4 shots, meaning in total you need 29 shots to knockback a player far enough to headshot them from right in front of you. That's almost a 1/4 of your total arrows, and means in terms of damage output you're losing at the very least 33% of a potential 580 health points (so at least 193 points lost, assuming you're as efficient as possible). This doesn't factor in the archers reaction time and human error, which could also affect the number of arrows fired a second, meaning the opposition has a chance to recover more ground, making it take more shots to kill.

For those who are bowspamming with the intention of knocking an enemy back into headshot range, the argument also doesn't stand up even if you can somehow knock them back further than the ground they can recover. Assuming that this is just under full charge shot range (so just under 1 second charge time, the maximum bowspam efficiency really, if you can even call that bowspam) with a damage output of about 6 health points, the full damage output of those 29 arrows stands at 174 health points. With diamond armor reduction (from a heavy, the maximum amount of damage these 29 arrows do stands at 55.68 health points, just below the 64 health points the heavy truly has when including the three steaks. This means that you're taking away all 10 hearts plus 2 steaks worth of damage before the arrow could get headshot range, at which points it's probably easy enough to kill the heavy with a sword anyway and save the extra arrow. For the other classes, you're going to kill them with bowspam before you even hit headshot range. This is also time consuming, taking at the very least about 30 seconds of your life assuming maximum efficiency (with drawback time), and wasting resources that could be much better put to use elsewhere. Bear in mind that this math was trying to keep the bowspam as efficient as possible, meaning it's very likely going to be MORE inefficient in the real world scenario!

Spoiler: Response to other reasons why Bowspam is a good tactic

Those are the main 2 reasons why bowspamming is seen as a good thing, but there are a few other more minor reasons why people attempt to bowspam which I'd also like to address:

1. It's part of archer to bowspam, you have enough arrows and you can fire as many as you want as much as you want! - Yes, this is true, but it doesn't make it a good tactic. Ninjas can potentially use all of their eggs on 1 person straight away but this doesn't make it a good tactic. For one it doesn't compound the nausea and blindness effect the more you use, and 2, you've just wasted all of them on 1 person where you could have used them on 10 seperate occasions. The same goes for bowspam, you only need 1 arrow to kill a player, so why are you using 30!

2. It improves my KDR! - Stats don't matter, but in any case there are other tactics which don't force you to waste several minutes of your life bowspamming a guy back. Reselecting your class preserves your kdr but takes a couple seconds to do. This isn't an encouragement, but even that tactic is better for preserving KDR than bowspam (yes, bowspam can't even do stuff the community doesn't approve of the best!). Oh, and don't combat log etc. for KDR, nobody thinks you're better because of it, and in fact a lot of the time the opposite is true. (Given my current kdr that sounds stupid, but to that I say it used to be double what it is now, so if I really care why would I let myself die so much).

3. It's about the psychology behind it! - Incredibly I have actually heard this argument in game, and although I think it's ridiculous, given there's even a game theory on the psychological impact of the colour of your multiplayer team these days, I'm going to respond to it anyway. By bowspamming you're going to enrage someone, which means they'll probably want to kill you. It might mean they don't play smart, making it easier for you to kill them (or possible, whichever way). CTF is still a team game, you're still immobile whilst bowspamming and someone could still kill you really easily. It's still going to take time for you to kill the guy with bowspam, and there are more efficient ways of you doing it anyway. You'll waste one guys time, but unless they're central to the enemy team, you're not going to be impacting the game that much even with that psychology. Some teams even have people dedicated to killing archers so you might not even get a chance to do that!

4. I can survive better if I bowspam - Very similar to 2. I guess. Well, as you'll see later there is a situation where bowspam does make logical sense to survive, but for the most part you're more damage efficient and impacting on the game if you just let yourself die and respawn. It doesn't take long to return to where you were on any map, and with fresh supplies you'll be able to survive more anyway. If you're problem is you can't aim and bowspam corrects that, I suggest learning to aim anyway because it'll much help you in the long run, even if it causes you to die more in the present.

Spoiler: Negatives of Bowspam

All of the things I've talked about already has been proving that the supposed benefits of bowspam are lies, but I haven't talked much about the drawbacks of bowspamming, other than inefficiency which I'll skip over due to it being covered already. Here are some other problems with bowspam:

1. Lack of mobility - You slow to a sneak speed when you bowspam, and if you're constantly firing arrows this means that your mobility is going to be severely impaired. This can limit your ability to move from other threats, as CTF is a team game and so it's quite possible you can be attacked in a 2v1 or possibly more. Additionally, it makes you a sitting duck for other archers not involved in the 1v1 who can snipe you down pretty easily. Additionally, if they outpace the bowspam knockback and reach you, you can't really get away!

2. limits the number of foes you can fight - due to the number of arrows you're using per foe, there's only so many you can really fight before you run out, which means you're stuck using the sword or having to respawn, both of which take additional time, or limit your ability to impact the game further

3. Lowers your impact on the game - feeding from 1. and 2., if you're more immobile and have no arrows, you're not realistically going to be able to kill the mobile soldier with your flag. If you had, you might have been able to kill him and save your team from defeat. If you spend more time on one enemy, you let others through, meaning the rest of your team has a harder time fighting the enemy, and once again could mean your defeat. Archer has the potential to control a game, and you're squandering it, along with your arrows

4. It's against MMR - less of a justified reason, but nevertheless, it's against MMR so doing it in matches gets you punished, it's just another reason to not.

5. It leads to further reliance - if you're constantly throwing out arrows you have less of a reason to aim, because ultimately one of them is likely to hit. This means that you don't have to bother aiming, and so you get rusty. This means when you do have to bother aiming, you find you can't, so you further rely on bowspam to get the job done. In this way the cycle repeats itself.

Spoiler: When bowspam is a useful tactic

After all of this, you're probably wondering if I do actually think bowspam is or will ever be useful, and in fact there are potential situations in which it can be beneficial. This doesn't apply to team matches where it is ALWAYS WRONG as it is against MMR. If you want to argue about that, then get it removed off MMR, in the meantime, it's wrong.

Firstly, when you're low on health as an archer, you don't want to get involved in melee combat so soon as you'll very likely die, especially with a disadvantage in short range combat already. For this to make sense, you have to be in a location where you're needed, and being sent back to spawn would mean you couldn't properly impact the game. In this sense, it's logical to fire some arrows at the enemy to whittle down some of their health as well as prevent them from getting too close too soon, then moving in with the sword for the final couple blows. It might just save your life, even if it does take time (this is situational, if the flag bearer is near your spawn, you may as well die and attempt to recover)

Secondly, in a mid range archer 1v1 having some bowspam experience can actually help you. If you do learn to control and aim that spam so it hits targets more, then it can be useful in the mid range 1v1s where your reactions have to be quick to avoid dying. Using a tactic where you tend to dodge only slightly and give yourself more of an opportunity to fire does benefit in this range, but do bear in mind that on the long range, this isn't viable to pull off, given all of your shots need to be fully powered. Also, this tactic isn't going to work as well against newer archers, who tend to fire near to where you were to begin with, only to archers that attempt to predict your movements, as they're the ones that will fire too far left, right etc. Could save your life, and could even mean you're considered good at archer 1v1s, though personally a good archer isn't just good at those, but against all classes(though that's probably a topic for another day).

Thirdly, to deliberately stall time, bowspam is great. Sometimes it becomes important to stall a particular player out for more time. Bowspam can be really good at this for 2 reasons. Firstly, that it's really annoying, so players will want to kill you, and 2, the knockback means even if they do eventually reach and kill you, it's going to take a few shots, which stalls them out for both time and weakens them somewhat for the next player to kill.

In other situations, I've found bowspam to be pretty inferior to other tactics. Furthermore, there are other ways of achieving these goals without bowspam, so I'd personally stick to them (you know, because they're not against MMR and they don't make you look like an ass)

Spoiler: Conclusion

I certainly didn't expect it to take this long to fully write up all of the evidence and responses on this topic. With such a large and controversial theme, there's bound to be at least something I missed, and so feel free to let me know about it in the responses, and I'll try my best to answer that as well. I hope the explanations and evidence I've put together here either affirms your view that bowspam is a bad tactic to employ, or even better changes your mind from the opposite. Of course, there still might be other reasons why bowspamming is a good idea, so feel free to disagree with me in response as well. As much as I've tried to tie up all loose ends, this is still a controversial topic after all!

Spoiler: TL;DR

Yeah there isn't one, I'm afraid you'll have to read it all

 

Actually this only took a couple hours, I started yesterday

 

Chemist is something I haven't mentioned but I'll add to it tomorrow. Basically you shouldn't need to bowspam a chemist due to the damage!