At 44 mana (around 70% of your mana pool) a piece you get a temporary minion that can maybe HOPEFULLY kill a single white enemy over its entire duration. Unless of course that enemy as much as sneeze on the balista in which case its 44 mana (did i mention that’s around 70% of your mana pool?) down the drain for you.
I’ve seen people make videos about this skill and its probably better as the game progresses, but right now its attack speed is horrendous. It relies heavily on Dex stacking, which in the early game is obviously non-existent. I think it’s base attack speed needs to be raised and the scaling lowered so the skill evens out to be usable both early and late game. Mana cost also needs looking into…
I am sure the theorycrafters and build masters will offer some advice/feedback, but Ballista is the ONLY rogue skill I never use… tried it a few times when Rogue launched and was so disappointed in it that I have not bothered since… imho hands down the crappest Rogue skill.
They are very useless in the early game. Only becomes a bit more useful after you have reached maybe level 30. And at higher levels, a lot of control is required to make them really effective. I think their impracticability is partly attributed to their terrible range attack hit boxes (like most of the range attacks in this game)
Nevertheless, ballista build is quite fun once you start to utilize its true strength by buffing them with Dark Arrow.
I would like to some buff on the ballista skills, but then I can also kind of see how easily they may end up making the skill too OP if they buffing it.
It is actually as simple as increasing the base attack speed and reducing the increased attack speed from Dex from 8 to something like 2 or 4 and also adding some life scaling based on Dex.
I tried to get them to work at high levels (70ish) but gave up in comparison to other skills available… I tend to weigh skils ease of use/effectiveness against one another and when there are skills that consistently underperform or end up being incredibly niche, I tend to not use them.
Personally I am not fond of the playstyle that Dark Quiver promotes (running back to fetch arrows just irritates me personally) but at least I can see its benefits while Ballista simply does nothing for the warm and fuzzy feelings… Honestly thought it sounded cool and then just went… nah… moving on…
I think its a much bigger core issue that a developer will spend time developing, balancing numbers, doing graphics, skill trees - basically lots of work just to provide a skill that is unplayable
This slows down development of everything else and almost feels it was only added to make it seem like there is more skills
I just cant understand a developer doing all this work and not thinking “hardly anyone is going to play this skill in this state…” but will release it anyway
My only thought on that is A) Perhaps it ties in better with the Falconer skills once they’re available? or 2) Some unreleased Unique or Legendary will make use of it.
But yeah, Ballista is bad no matter what you do with it.
Totally off topic but I just watched a video about Elon Musks Engineering Philosophy and your comment reminded me so much of it… Your comments about Ballista fit right in… (and to be honest, there are definitely other parts of LE that could also be used as examples)…
Links for those interested:
TLDWatch:
Musk’s Engineering Philosophy:
Musk overviewed his five step engineering process, which must be completed in order:
Make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are definitely dumb; it does not matter who gave them to you. He notes that it’s particularly dangerous if an intelligent person gives you the requirements, as you may not question the requirements enough. “Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone is wrong some of the time.” He further notes that “all designs are wrong, it’s just a matter of how wrong.”
Try very hard to delete the part or process. If parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough parts are being deleted. Musk noted that the bias tends to be very strongly toward “let’s add this part or process step in case we need it.” Additionally, each required part and process must come from a name, not a department, as a department cannot be asked why a requirement exists, but a person can.
Simplify and optimize the design. This is step three as the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.
Accelerate cycle time. Musk states “you’re moving too slowly, go faster! But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first.”
Automate. An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed; if a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate, there is no need for in-process testing.
Wintergatan (Marble Machine X) Dumb design - long but interesting if you know about the marble machine as its designer evaulates his own process vs Elon Musks philosophy… Also easier to understand for non-engineering types…
Releasing a new class will not directly help Balista in any way. It has atrocious atk speed and mana cost and relies heavily on stacking dex to function. Stats which you don’t have in the early game.
I think the problem with ballista stems from no good access to aoe, even if you can circumvent the attackspeed/mana issues it has, there is not much benefit to putting down some ballista that then fire single arrows imo. it needs to have extra projectiles that are not chance based.
Also does anyone know how the “shared enhancements” points work, it says you share a % of your damage increases with it, is that just % increased damage or does it include flat damage.
