I really like the concept of the Dark Quiver skill for marksman. Sadly it just feels terrible to use in echoes.
In major bossfights it’s fine even with zero skill points invested in the QoL nodes since you can just fill the arena with arrows and pick them up when you need/get the chance to.
While clearing echoes however, I can spend all 20 points on QoL and it doesn’t really help.
Because of it’s long animation it’s not worth using in combat when I could just be shooting the enemies instead.
Trying to use it between packs I run into the problem of the arrows spawning randomly around me which leads to having to backtrack for them 80% of the time. Picking the arrows from the ground stops being an interesting and interactive mechanic and becomes just a hassle.
If someone has had better experience feel free to prove me wrong.
So far I’ve come up with two ideas for improvement that I like.
For one, the ‘Until Dawn’ passive (Using a bow attack grants you a chance to summon a black arrow at a random nearby location. 3 seconds cooldown, 5% chance per point, 5 points max) could use a buff.
Including the prerequisite nodes it takes 10 skill points to max out and for such an investment it really doesn’t do much. Even on a fast attacking build that triggers it basically on cd it’s very rare for the dropped arrows to come in usefull. Either make it cost less skill points or significantly up the rate it spawns arrows (even something like +1 arrows dropped per point could work).
The second idea and in my opinion the simplest and most intuitive change the skill could get is to make it a ground target instead of an aura around the character. Either through a passive node or even as the default.
This way it’d be possible to shoot the skill ahead of me into an area I think I’ll be fighting in and have the buff arrows already there to be picked up when I start getting teleported on by gankbears and charged by baby mammoths.
On the other hand, a thing I would absolutely hate is something along the lines of a passive node that gave you a black arrow automatically without having to pick it up in exchange for longer cooldown. That just gets rid of the most unique and interesting thing about Dark Quiver.