Archer feedback [charged Puncture Marksman]

Feedback and Suggestions
1

The idea is to utilize passives like Ethereal Arrows and a couple more to make charged Puncture use as much mana as possible to gain a large multiplier to it’s damage.

THE PAINS:
Puncture is a Physical skill. It has no talents to convert it to elemental, it also has no uniques to convert it to elemental. It will always stay physical. Which is a problem, because Rogue, and even more so Marksman, utilizes a LARGE amount of flat elemental damage that doesn’t get scaled very well.

There are ways to make Puncture hit harder. Mainly just Physical Penetration with Puncture affixes on gear, idols and one talent in Puncture itself. But that’s about it. Charged Puncture is just too slow and burns through mana too fast to meaningfully make use of things like Armor Shred. Try as you might, you’re never gonna end up with something like 100+ stacks on a boss at the same time like your average Bladedancer.

The entire bottom left branch of the Puncture tree feels like it was made sometime in the depths of beta and forgotten about, which is why nobody is using it. It just has no synergy or means to achieve reasonable damage, especially as you start getting into corruption.

This is not my first rodeo. I’ve tried to make this work at launch, I’ve tried again in the skeleton event when EHG finally enabled mana regen (pitiful as it is) to continue while channeling (cause unfortunately, charging Puncture is channeling, therefore it doesn’t benefit from either of the right branches of the Shift tree). Now I’ve tried again in season 2 for the third time, but the fool that I am, I went into the patch without reading through the nodes, realizing too late the ONLY CHANGE in the entire season 2 again was the slight change to Dark Quiver, allowing you to hold 3 Dark Arrows at once (and a unique quiver Crystalquill which I’ve yet to try out as the only one I have has no LP, but it looks like it would lean into the spirit of the build, which is occasional high dmg snipes). Which is patently GARBAGE, since you could rework it into a mostly passive skills like you’ve done with Symbols of Hope, instead of everyone’s least favorite anti-QoL skill (besides, even if you picked 3 of them up, at least one would literally expire on you before you could use it).

So in the end, if you try to use tools given to you, like the Longshot bow, or the Elemental Arrows passive cluster, you end up with your charged Puncture being something like 40% physical, 10% cold, 25% fire and 25% lightning, which is ALL OVER PLACE (more like all over the world tbh).

If you don’t do that, well, there’s not a lot else you can do, as the only purely physical unique bows you can use are Drelkor’s Compass and Shadow String, and neither is particularly suited for charged Puncture even if you managed to get one with high LP

A pile of suggestions to browse as you please:

  • rework Longshot, remove the cold/fire/lightning flat damage and replace it with 20-40 flat physical damage… and maybe add 1-4 ranks of Puncture. The tree is pretty barren tho, not sure if that would even be too useful, but heck, if Talons can get up to 12 talent points, why the heck not!
  • rework Thrill of Anticipation node in Puncture (or add a node branching from it or parallel to it) that would multiply your chance to cause on-hit effects (Armor Shred, Bleed, Poison, Ignite, Frostbite/whatever) by AT LEAST the same amount as Thrill of Anticipation does for damage (ideally twice or thrice as much because typical meta builds can attack several times a second, meanwhile charged Puncture is at best once per second, realistically like once per 2-3 seconds… even less when you really squeeze the mana cost up and have to spam Flurry for regen).
  • rework Troaka’s Teeth quiver to actually replace Physical tag of Puncture with Cold tag, instead of just adding a freeze multiplier (that does nothing as far as I know, I’ve never seen any ability freeze past lvl ~40, cold or otherwise, no matter how much freeze multi it had or was on my gear), so you could potentially fully embrace the elemental thing and instead lean on full multi-elemental damage (not just over time with rapid-fire puncture merely as a frostbite stacker)
  • finally add some flat mana regen so classes that don’t have kit to instantly replenish their mana can play a mana stacker properly! Can’t do much other than spam Flurry (or Detonating Arrow if I want an elemental flavor) to regen mana, because that 8 mana per second or whatever just doesn’t scale enough no matter how many hundred percent your %mana regen would have to be to work (way too much to afford in any case)
  • actually making Mind Piercer give you 4 mana PER hit, instead of 4 mana IF you hit (per cast), would alleviate some of the mana pressure of the charged Puncture (especially since it can cost like upwards of 90 mana per cast in the endgame, and you at best get 4 mana back currently lmao)
  • and you know, rework Dark Quiver to something like new Symbols of Hope. Something like, passively generate 1 Dark Arrow every 4 seconds (up to 3 baseline) that will only be expended on a skill with non-zero mana cost, and activating the ability would give you one stack instantly and double the generation rate for a couple seconds. So you wouldn’t have to, I don’t know, RUN AROUND LIKE A CHICKEN TRYING TO PICK UP ARROWS YOU JUST SHOT IN THE AIR A SECOND AGO, ONLY TO SHOOT THEM AGAIN, ALL WHILE TRYING TO KEEP USING EVADE AND SHIFT TO KEEP YOUR MOVEMENT SPEED UP FOR THE DAMAGE BONUS OF IT THAT ONLY LASTS 1-1.5 SEC. If you can’t guess, I’m a bit miffed about it all.

I think these would be reasonable changes even if you chose to implement all of them, because they basically only affect one niche build played by maybe less than 5 people currently due to the fact that you can BARELY scrape by in 100 corruption currently with how things are atm (and as fat as I know, not negatively impact any other build)

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Just a note, Hit/crit Charged Puncture on a Marksman is a bad idea IMO (charged puncture itself is bad). Falconer is a way better pick, the falcon can apply armor shred, slow, frailty for you, generates health and mana on hit and Falconer’s Mark is a massive 150% more damage multiplier. You can get stuff like Dark quiver and elemental arrows on a Falconer as well.

AFAIK, the only way to get mana COST on Bow Puncture is penumbral ambush and Mana warp for a total 26.5 mana cost(All the other things like coated blades or Archer’s Focus is mana consumed). With Ethereal arrows this is 26.5% more damage… Not really worth compared to Falconer IMO.

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When I equip that quiver, it turns Puncture into a blue arrow, which I thought meant it inherits the cold tag? I will need to check my tooltip later today when I log in, as I am trying to make a cold frostbite archer.

Are you saying the quiver doesn’t change Puncture the same way the poison passive on its tree does?
I also have a Reign of Winter I want to slam in the Eternity cache later, so my understanding with Puncture is that it has little to no flat dmg? Is this why people try to put flat cold dmg on the bow?

I suppose if I want to do a cold dot archer build then Heartseeker or Flurry would be better?
Or if I want to solely use Puncture then it’s better at a crit build, but that would require sources of flat cold dmg still, like the boots, in order to be decent?

Sorry, I am still trying to learn about Rogue skills and its different multipliers and which skills function better with added dmg effectiveness.

This write up is very good though, despite me not knowing much about Puncture; it adds good insight for my future considerations.

4

It does, Rahme’s suggesting that it would loose the phys tag.

Correct.

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5

Right, I see now and tested it in game; I have both tags.

But doesn’t that mean flat cold dmg would scale Puncture like he is suggesting to update it in future? And isn’t it better to have both tags in case you get a bow/quiver that rolled flat phys + cold mods?
Or am I missing something that having the passive properly convert it would be better overall?

I’m looking at my poison passive for Puncture and I actually don’t see it saying it changes its base dmg to poison. It looks similar to all other conversion passives but it’s only changing it to poison chance/shred/duration; does not mention base dmg.

Does that mean if I am doing poison puncture now I should be looking for flat phys dmg to make the poison dots scale?
I’ve been doing inc% poison mods on my bow/quiver.

6

Ailments like bleed, poison and frostbite do not depend on the skill proccing them to be the same element. Both damage and duration are independent, so you just need as much attack speed as possible to stack it up fast.
Troaka doesn’t, from my experience, change the element of the main damage at all (tried playing with it in the Skeleton event), merely turns any bleed and poison applied specifically by Puncture into Frostbite stacks. I’ve never managed to freeze anything with Puncture, so I assume that little bit of added freeze rate is not enough to actually freeze anything that doesn’t die instantly anyway.

In situations like these, I really miss those detailed skill breakdowns of PoE, where you can see exactly how much damage of each element you’re doing. But from my limited testing, Troaka doesn’t convert damage of Puncture into cold, just like getting Fire tag on a Forge Strike doesn’t make it scale with fire damage mods.

Rn the biggest BULLSH%# of the entire Marksman class is the fact that “mana cost” and “mana consumed” are for some reason two distinct things, seemingly just there to mess with the build I’m trying to do. Because they’re functionally the goddamn same, just the one talent that increases damage by 1% per 1 mana cost only works for tooltip mana cost (which is like 20% of the true mana cost thanks to rogue/marksman idiocy, so I only get 20% more dmg instead of ~100% more dmg… which is really bull since you’re already limited by your mana pool and the fact that your only way to regen said mana is spamming Flurry a couple times)

7

Flat damage is always added to the skill regardless of the tags. What the tags do is define what element the base & any adaptive (ie, untyped, such as most implicit damage from weapons) damage is. Having 1 tag means that any adaptive damage is of a single element which means it’s easier to scale with % increased modifiers.

It doesn’t, all it converts, per the tooltip is bleed chance to poison change & phys resist shred to poison resist shred.

No, flat damage doesn’t help ailments do damage.

But it does help since then any % element modifiers will be applied to the ailment. For example, if there were a % more physical damage on Puncture, but it was converted to poison, that wouldn’t help the poisons applied do damage. If Puncture was still doing bleeds then that % more phys damage would buff the applied bleeds.

It adds the cold tag, so it has to change the base damage of Puncture from pure phys to 50:50 phys/cold, it also adds a freeze rating to the base skill which only ever happens for cold skills. That’s how tags work.

8

Right, this makes sense, but reading the other replies here below I am confused about the percentage/ratio make up of a skill’s type of dmg depending on how many tags it has.

Disintegrate without any passives has fire + lightning tag, so does it equally do 50% fire and 50% light? If I have a staff with 100% inc fire dmg, does would that mean it’s only half as effective for Disintegrate (if the above point is true?).

This is news to me, wow.
It’s been a while since I last played; over a year ago so I forget some mechs.

I have a 1LP Reign of Winter bow I was almost going to put a T7 flat cold mod on for a future frostbite build.
I suppose the bow has some flat cold for the icicle proc, and hit/crit builds?

What are the 2 main prefixes people use to scale dots then? Poison, bleed and ignite chance are on suffixes which makes sense.
Does main stat scale all hit/ailments dmg?
Attack speed seems like a given and I guess a 2nd prefix would be inc% dmg of whatever dot you’re scaling?

I honestly forget if I’ve seen frostbite chance on a prefix or suffix or both between all gear slots.

I wish we had individual skill tooltips like PoE has. IIRC, they said a while ago this was coming? I could be mistaken, again, as it’s been a while since I’ve played and read updates.

Now this is where I’m confused again, specifically for the Puncture node that doesn’t specifically say it changes base dmg to poison, but I definitely have the poison tag in-game?
So now I’m not sure if my Acidfletch with inc% poison is doing much for Puncture.

Idk why all the other skills in the game which convert dmg types specifically mention base dmg and dmg types of the original wont scale anymore.
Then for Puncture it doesn’t mention this or function like the above?

Hail of Arrows and Detonating Arrow’s poison conversion nodes all specifically mention the base dmg is converted.
What’s so special and different about Puncture’s poison passive they chose not to do this?

Same, dude, same :sleepy:

Is this the Ethereal Arrows passive where you can put 10/10 points in?
My tooltip dmg does not go up at all when invest in that and I’m not sure why. I like the increased mana pool and regen but if it’s not giving me extra dmg I may respec.

9

Tooltip damage is famously off in every single aRPG. Because it cannot take into consideration all the conditional damage modifiers… and often even devs forget to put some of the less obvious ones in.

I also see a high variation of damage depending on mob’s armor and resist and potential flat dmg reduction mods they might have hidden. It’s ridiculous rn but hopefully will get more consistent the more I approach 75% physical penetration with Puncture (that, if I even understand the stat correctly, will completely ignore any monster’s Physical Resist), tho I’ll still have to worry about mob Armor (since charged Puncture shreds armor really badly and I need to use Smoke Bomb to apply it if I want more than like, 2-3 stacks at a time).
That will still only work for physical damage tho, so all that unconverted flat ele dmg from Elemental Arrows passive and boots and potentially bow/quiver will still crash hard against mob resistances.

10

Base & adaptive damage is split evenly between tags. For melee skills the base damage is usually tiny (~2) so can be ignored as the majoirty of your damage comes from youe weapon.

Correct. For that scenario, %elemental damage would affect both fire & lightning damage so be more effective.

If you wanted to affect the frostbite damage then % cold or % DoT would be best. The Icicle proc is a spell so flat bow cold damage won’t affect it, you’d need to get the Frostmourn boots (+1 attack and spell damage per dex) & stack dex.

Attack speed and the element that the DoT does. Phys for bleed, poison for poison, necrotic for damned, etc.

Yes, ailments will inherit the 4% per attribute from the skill that applied them, plus any relevant (ie, non-hit and non-melee/spell/bow/throwing) more modifiers that the skill has in it’s tree).

Yup, but it keeps on getting pushed back because of higher priority stuff.

If it’s gaining the poison tag then it should be doing poison hit damage, but the devs have said in the past that thty don’t really like that idea. And it would be very difficult to test.

With a few exceptions, mobs don’t have armour or resist & there is no flat damage reduction at all in the game. All non-DoT damage has a +/-20% damage variance.

Armour only affects hit damage, not DoTs, so armour shred would only affect the hit damage that puncture does, not the ailments it applies.

Armour is 25% less effective against non-phys damage, but it does still affect it.

Have you tried reading the in-game guide? You seem to be operating under a few misconceptions as to how LE works compared to PoE.

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11

Keep your DoT discussion OUT OF THE TOPIC MADE FOR SPECIFICALLY CHARGED PUNCTURE (aka huge direct damage snipes, NOT DOT).

You two hijacked the thread spiraling further and further off topic and now you’re telling me to get in line with your off topic rants instead?

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There wasn’t a discussion, there was me corrrecting you on how the game works (that the vast majority of mobs don’t have armour/resists) & then extending that to explain how armour works (since your comment about Elemental Arrows made it clear that you don’t understand how armour works in LE, despite it being quite clear in the tooltips).

If people are asking questions because they don’t understand how the game works, answering them is a good thing, rather than letting them stew in their own ignorance. I’m sorry if me trying to bring the light of knowledge to someone spoiled the purity of “your” thread. If you don’t want other people to comment, perhaps PM/email the devs direct rather than posting in public.

Hardly, I was explaining to Gattaca how stuff works in LE so that he could understand better what you were talking about.

I never said that, me asking if you’d read the in-game guide (or the tooltip for armour TBH) is not telling you to “get in line”, I’m merely trying to help you understand how the game works so that you can make better informed decisions.

Also, going all caps for part of a sentence is not necessary.

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Don’t you think I KNOW it’s bad? The purpose of feedback forum section is to give FEEDBACK on things that need a touch-up. I’ve done this every season, just so EHG has some fresh data if/when they finally get around to reworking Marksman.

I’ve checked it and I can agree Falcon’s Mark might be good… once in a while, mostly just on tougher enemies since the bird can only Mark so fast… But no, thank you. Falconer passives are, forgive my french, dogshit for anything that ain’t minion or ailment minion (or Throwing at best). There’s literally a grand total of TWO passives that would help a charged Puncture build at all - “Ranger’s Mark” and “Needle like Precision” - in the entire tree.
For the low, low cost of giving up Sniper’s Gambit, Barbed Arrows, Ethereal Arrows, Mana Warp, Barrage of Pain, Sharpshooter and Thief’s Quiver, not to mention losing the Marskman mastery bonuses too.

Following changes need to be made by EHG when they stop fanboying over void knights and paladins:

  • Dark Quiver needs to be reworked into mostly passive skill, like Symbols of Hope did in this seasonal patch
  • Ethereal Arrows needs to count mana spent, not tooltip mana cost (or be buffed significantly so it works for skills other than purely for Hail of Arrows)
  • Elemental Arrows needs a choice node in there to optionally convert the charges to physical, or at least have it use physical penetration as a stand-in for their respective elemental pens
  • and if you want anyone to actually use Rain of Arrows (the passive, not Hail of Arrows the skill), it needs its damage increased by A LOT. It says it scales with a lot of things yet still does barely any damage for something you can only proc once per 10 seconds.
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Actually, Charged puncture’s damage multipliers are generic so they apply to ailments as well and can very well be used in a DoT ailment build.

My initial plan for it way back when I tested it was poison using shift casted shurikens to apply poison resist shred and weaker stacks of poison to achieve poison’s resistance reduction per stack of poison and hence buff poisons applied by charged puncture(which inherit the more damage multipliers of charged puncture). This is a concept that worked for me on Hungering Souls Lich but didn’t really pan out for Charged puncture although with bleeding fury now getting converted it could have potential.

15

Falconer’s mark can have pretty much 100% uptime on a slow attacking build like charged puncture which should be firing at most twice a second if not longer considering positioning, buff management, etc. Don’t underestimate a 150% more damage multiplier especially when you have other massive damage multipliers.

You are also heavily disregarding the defensive bonuses from Falconer. When I played charged puncture, this was one of its biggest deficits. Capping glancing blow is actually possible on the Falconer thanks to Deflect and Weave and Poise. Strike their flank adds another 6% more damage multiplier to slowed enemies which you want anyway for the Puncture node Inescapable. The Falcon itself gets you a solid amount of health on hit sustaining you when you are charging, a little mana on hit to help with mana management, armor if you get stymphalian feathers and crimson shrouds for DoT mitigation with crimson skies. It also applies Slow and Armor shred to improve your damage.

Marksman bonuses are better for fast hitting builds and its got pretty much nothing defensively and stuff like Sniper’s gambit actually results in more damage taken.