LE Balance Committee - A serious suggestion for overall game quality

General
101

It wasn’t. Bowmage was never a high performing build. The mechanic of scaling its damage, combined that it’s a Marksman flattened its ability to have high enough EHP in order to do content, other classes breezed through. The problem with Morningfrost builds in general is that you are cutting down your ability to build up defencive layers and in Last Epoch DR is king. It didn’t even have that good of damage. It had damazing clear, but that was pretty much all it had going for it. I’ve always said that the Bowmage build is a bait for new players. It looks easy and fun to play, but it hits a massive wall very early on into the endgame.

It won’t. It will die all the time. Anyone that has any amount of time into the class knows this build with these items is just not effective. Its damage is unreliable, due to Throne of Ambition and it has no defencive layers without Arrowguard and life leech. Even if you get to 3+k hp, while using Morningfrost (good luck), you still have no glancing blow, no armor and no sustain.
Also it’s an absolute joke that in order for DA to be a good skill, you need +200 flat damage, 8% flat crit and -8 mana costs, which 2 blast knifes give.

102

Jeeez guys i told you its a simple gear setup while leveling to prove that you can still perma crit with mm even with a bit more investement into actual crit chance. You were talking like mm is unplayable anymore.
Give me a couple of days to gear this char up and ill make a showcase for it. Sorry that i actually need to invest some time into a build, i’m not an offline char sheet abuser you know :slight_smile:

2 Likes
103

Sapping Strikes, Draining Arrows, Perfect Aim. All Health on hit/crit passives that do not rely on leech. Lightning DA+Tendrils counts as 3 hits. Thats how you sustain life loss.

104

I mean he could be using health gain on hit/crit but that still seems incredibly flimsy (and only Flurry can get decent amounts AFAIK). Also I remember DA(pre 0.9) being fun but kinda clunky as you need to manage ele arrows while getting the suckerpunch+rapid detonate combo off. Sustaining through lgoh/crit while doing that seems rough as before your leech from explosion would be topping you back up as you charged ele arrows.

105

Description for Draining arrows state when YOU use a bow attack and hit atleast one enemy so it should not be working on multiple hits and be only 40 per DA.

Sapping strikes only works when YOU use 0 mana cost skills, shouldn’t work on DA or tendrils, only on your flurry and that also 16 per flurry.

Perfect aim and ancient coins works, but only if you maintaining stacks and still seems flimsy to me considering endgame you would ideally have 2-2.5k hp and as you mentioned 100% crit should not be relied on.

I’m assuming you are also grabbing all the health gain/on crit in flurry tree. But still seems clunky to me maintaining health that way. Previously my suckerpunch Detonating arrow leech would help keep life topped up while building ele arrows back. Being so heavily reliant on hit seems a bit rough.

Anyway GL and look forward to seeing the build.

106

115 on hit with Draining/Perfect Aim on full stacks. Lowered my health and witness 300+ health gain with DA explosion+tendril. I can only tell you what i see and test.
Sapping Strikes health and mana gain only possible with Puncture, i dont play Flurry it’s very clunky to play, Puncture allows me a faster transition into DA for better kiting. But you alternate both skills anyways for the Ele Arrows uptime.
Marksman dies to oneshots. I never had the case where multiple fast hits were killing me.
There is a certain point were you get oneshotted anyways. So you rely on silver shrouds, dodge chance and movement speed on high difficulty to survive.
No defensive game mechanic will help you at high levels, not even arrowguard. Thats something you have to accept and thats probably the concept or class identity of Marksman.
It’s the same when i play HoA in arena. I have my mono and arena gear. Arena or high corruption gear will focus on dodge.

107

Because it isn’t. Marksman, aside HoA bleed is unplayable in 300-350 corruption compared to other classes. I gave up on 3 LP Dragonsong decoy with 3.4k hp after the crit vuln nerf, because you are forced to sit still twice as long just to ramp up the damage, which even in 300c means death, as Marksman simply doesn’t have the same DR layers as BD for example. You don’t have access to shields, meaning you can’t afford Apostacy, meaning you can never have reliably 100% glancing blows (with a perfect Arrowguard, you get 73% GB) and your entire Defence can be snaped in half by 1-2 hits, which you didn’t dodge or glanced. How can you play a turret character like that? You can’t… HoA works, because it’s a run and gun play style, like most Blade Dancers. It’s not a Marksman turret.

108

Do you have footage of your dragonsong char? Would really like to see an echo/boss gameplay where you struggle because i also switched my dragonsong to hybrid decoy bomber.

109

Hmm… off topic but Spirit thorns Shaman/Druid should work like the turret playstyle you want, scales both armor and dodge well, DR from close by enemies, Aspect of boar is available(but unreliable), spirit thorns pierce and have great tracking/freeze.

Idk the state of the low life frostbite shaman version as of now, but my spell dmg Shaman feels decent (IDK high corrupt tho).

110

Speaking of all these MM problems, there is a mechanical issue with Dodge that makes it completely unviable in late endgame as the second you fail a dodge you are done. Smoke Bomb and Decoy can mitigate this for a couple of seconds at a time, but cannot protect you from any AOE that is undodgeable.

That being said, I have found there is a slight trick with Bow characters that works for the most part, which is that you fight mobs before they even hit the screen… Move a couple steps, shoot, rinse, repeat; however this is exceptionally slow compared to classes with maxed end/health. My Bowmage does this at moderate corruption and can minimize mobbing OS – of course with bosses you have to perfect mechanic or you’re getting OS.

TLDR: Dodge is worthless; MM is weaker than other classes; Endgame scaling means DR is Meta.

111

Well, bowmage had pretty amazing clear, is rogue = is fast, and marksman has a nice playstile, the problem with marksman in general is, compared to other classes, lacks both defenses and damage. It had easy crits: still, you had to get those vulnerability stacks going, is not 100% crit right from the first hit, like other crit builds.

Bowmage at least had the damage, those icicles hit really hard, and if you’re a good player, you could clear all the content with it. Good luck getting the damage with any other build (or any build now, with crit not being a thing with marksman).

The true bait for me is mourningfrost, is one of those uniques that seems great at first, wow, scaling your flat damage but too taxing in your defenses, is like Souloron’s step, sad uniques that really are not worth over a good base and the desired affixes, if you really need the damage… well, play another skill/class, don’t rely on those. They can break even with a 3-4LP version, but again, good luck with that…

The thing with bowmague was, as it has a few uniques required, the scaling was exceptionally hard, but could be done with legendaries in place of the base uniques. Again, good luck getting your hands in a 2LP+ version of the bow or the boots, but it was there.

Anyways, I don’t see the class going anywhere as it is now. My question is… is there anyone here that has a marksman capable of clearing T4 content and navigate through 300 corruption monos?

112

Yep, HoA

113

HOA? HOA??? Man, I will never live in a community with an HOA… XDXDXD
P.S. What is HoA in this context?

114

I have no idea. Hit on arrival?

115

Hail of Arrows with shadow setup

116

Shaman isnt weak

1 Like
117

Most Markman builds can clear the content as you described. Bowmage, HoA, Dragonsong, Multishot etc. can all clear that content.

Edit: Some of the comments I’m reading on Marksman are just weird to me. Yes, the crit vuln nerf hurt but it by no means killed the mastery. This feels like a major overreaction or not adapting a build in the right way to overcome the nerf.

4 Likes
118

Probably? but actually anyone has a Marksman? xD

119

Yes, we have a build guide that’s 0.9 tested for each of those on Maxroll. We probably wouldn’t even post a guide that can’t reach that minimum threshold.

1 Like
120

Yeah, listen. I saw at least 3 different nerfs to BowMage. Some were straight up code errors but here they are:
– Change to Crit Vulnerability
– Change where Multishot Node “Readied Arrows” would trigger during the entire channel of Flurry (it no longer does)
– Change where Icicles fired from Reign of Winter would explode with Icicle Shards in a small AOE (it no longer does)

These 3 changes have lowered the effectiveness of the BowMage dramatically. That being said, the ability of arrows to strike enemies off-screen and still trigger Icicles that will also strike enemies off-screen means that you can use a Marksman to very slowly clear areas at much higher corruption than they normally would – take a couple steps, fire a zillion arrows off-screen, kill whatever moves to on-screen, move forward again. It’s not a super fun gameplay style.