Markman feels like sorc does in d4. lacking in sufficient damage and needing 3 defensive abilities to survive. only getting dodge is not enough to survive, and enemies have enough movement pr ranged options that unless you are running cold they are gonna get into melee very easy. extending the FOV would help
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Out of all the classes, I find marksman to be the weakest.
Damage wise it does okay, but there are so many other characters that not only do as much damage, theyâre much tankier in general.
They need to buff Dark Quiver or change it or something because I almost never see it used and its super awkward to use compared to other buffs like say Dread Shade.
Extending FOV would help, but clearing up some of the ranged blocked shots from steps and stuff would help a lot too.
My biggest issue is what feels like a distinct lack of diversity when it comes to the builds you can do with Marksman that are viable because they are just soooooo squishy. Dodge is okay but you get hit once and you die in a lot of situations. You gotta constantly be on the move to keep from getting overwhelmed.
Rogue has been underpowered since the game came out, I feel like. I know Iâve seen a spec here or there, or heard about it in passing where poison damage was racking up over a million DPS, but I always assumed those were bugs or things that would get patched later because they werenât intended damage output. Every spec Iâve played on Rogue has been the worst combination of extremely flimsy and anemic damage-wise.
I hope that might change at least a little bit in the future, but from what I have experienced playing this game, I have a feeling thatâs probably the way it is intended to work in terms of the gameâs philosophy. I suspect Rogue is meant to be life on hard mode. There probably isnât really an equivalency between it and other classes because it is supposed to be the challenging one to play. Ergo, Marksman probably also feels underwhelming for the same reason.
If that was EHGâs intention, they certainly succeeded. Both when I leveled five characters to 50 pre-0.8.5 and when I recently leveled five to 100, Rogue was the most challenging class to level both times.
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Rogue has had so many fun builds that were utterly destroyed by the nerf passes, that Iâve lost all interest in the class. I tried picking up the melee Detonating Strike build, but melee is so brokenly painful to play, that it sits on the shelf again.
Itâs sad, because thereâs so many potentially fun builds, that just donât stack up to some of the other (real) OP builds out there.
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I agree. This is part of why I donât really believe in âoverpoweredâ in a single player game. I mean itâs technically possible, but you have to be powerful enough to devalue the content to the point that it isnât fun to play anymore.
But if developers would just focus on whatâs fun and feels good to do rather than whatâs roughly equivalent between classes, then you wouldnât have this problem of removing content people enjoy and making the classes feel samey because they essentially perform the same overall. Variety is not a bad thing, - Itâs actually what people want in a game like this - And it doesnât really hurt anyone elseâs experience for one build to be a little better than another one, especially not at the upper end.
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Yeah, I agree. I mean, I am not saying builds should just completely destroy content without thought, or investment. But most of the seriously OP builds were done with edited gear, in the offline mode game. Iâm not sure itâs fair to judge a buildâs baseline powerlevel, based on how it performs with perfect/near-perfect gear. Because thatâs not the real playing experience⌠and even when it is reached, the player has already invested so much time, that itâs fairly inconsequential at that point.
Of course, people will put up ladders as a counter, but then every build should be 100% equal, across the boardâŚright? No build should have an advantage over another, if weâre using ladder âfairnessâ as a barometer for balance.
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Yep. Thatâs why I donât care about ladder. Ladder is another one of those things that was added to make people care about games for peer pressure reasons that ruins the fun for the rest of us when the content is balanced around it. If a game is supposed to be competitive, it should have a competitive mode that doesnât affect the casual noncompetitive content.
Since when did I start playing RPGâs so I could race my friends at how fast I could click things anyways? That seems like missing the point. The point is to have fun adventures in a pretend world fighting monsters. If we canât do that in 2023, then something has gone very wrong with the entertainment industry. Everybody who wants to have a clicking competition already has CoD, CS, Overwatch, Fortnite and Fruit Ninja. They also have PoE, incidentally. They donât need every other ARPG that comes out from now on for that also.
Ironically, ladder probably will help Rogue / Marksman eventually, even if that isnât really what EHG originally intended.
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Did you mean since the class came out? If memory serves, Rogue wasnât in Alpha. I remember when it dropped. It brought a lot of new mechanics to the game that were flashy at the time. Since then itâs (especially Marksman) definitely gotten surpassed by the changes and adjustments to other classes (except maybe Shaman, and in my opinion Sorcerer - that class has still never gelled for me.)
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Yes, I didnât realize the game didnât launch EA with Rogue in it. If thatâs the case, I probably started playing shortly after its release.
This caused me to be curious enough to go check out my steam purchase history: Turns out I bought the game in July of 2021.
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Ha, made me look it up also. Couldnt find the exact date, but found my first post:
Also, this was interesting, in my profile:
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Oh gosh, that is just too interesting, this is going to completely derail the threadâŚ
I agree with that 200%. Too bad the forum will only let me like your comment once, I would happily put 5-6 hearts. 
To me the problem started with WoW (pretty much when WoW came out), then expanded when most games became online and multiplayer. Basically everything from that point had to be âbalancedâ, and balance became the nemesis of fun. All skills, all classes, have to be perfectly equal, and permanently get tweaked to achieve that. Matters became even far worse when streamers started taking the upper hand.
I have seen so, so many builds I enjoyed, in so many games, sacrified on the altar of the evil god balance. I play builds that I like, I donât care if they never reach deep endgame or if they are weaker than other builds. But nowadays this is not acceptable anymore. Because of balance, everything is permanently changed. It is simply impossible to come back to a character you loved after 6 months or one year, because it will be completely different by then.
Sad times for old fashioned RPG fansâŚ
As for âthe point is to have fun adventures in a pretend worldâ, it is to me (and apparently to you).
Mechanics are a mean to an end (having adventures), they should never be put first. Quests and above all atmosphere always come first, the build is just a way to get through.
But sadly I fear we are a small minority in the ARPG world, which has become almost entirely focused on technicalities and has forgotten the adventure part.
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you know you love me mate. 
Pity itâs not an sp game anymore. Also some do find that kind of thing fun.
Ideally, most builds would be broadly comparable in terms of what they can achieve on the ladder so that fow far you get on that is more of a measure of personal skill/etc. Then youâd be able to do more with more builds.
That said, a certain segment of the community always hyper-focusses in on the tinyest improvement/deficiency in builds classes and proclaims that the bestest/worsetest which, IMO, isnât the most helpful/healthy viewpoint/mindset to have (even if it is a very human one).
Any online game will want to have stuff balanced, youâll find buffs and nerfs to things well before WoW. But yes, streamers and the like do exacerbate it for views/clickbait.
Sounds like youâre describing proper RPGs rather than action RPGs.
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Kinda. I am a general RPG player more than an ARPG specialist.
Yet I am not sure where this clear-cut distinction comes from. Titan Quest, Diablo 2, Sacred, Diablo 3, Grim Dawn, Van Helsing, Undecember, all have long, interesting and atmospheric campaigns. And now Diablo 4 takes it to a brand new level (yes, sue me, I love that game, to me it really feels like a revolution, leaving every other arpg in the dust).
Basically, the full focus on mechanics instead of story is only valid for PoE (and now LE?) and a few niche solo-developped games like Chronicon.
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I have the same feeling of most here . I guess part of the Marksman problem lies in itâs base class.
Rogue has always being a more challengingly class to level. Itâs squishy and take a long time until itâs defensive systems âbecome onlineâ.
You need much more investment in survability and because of that generally the damage feels like lacking.
Many skills most times donât have a proper base damage.
I guess the devs , as much as I have experienced around here, err on the side of caution, in almost every aspect of the game, afraid of losing control of balance. And it reflects when it comes to give rogue damage. Maybe they are afraid of it loosing control and the class gain too much damage. Maybe itâs very difficult to boost some skills, since the class have lot of mechanics that boost the damage of skills, and could easily become uncontrollable.
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This, I think, is true⌠unfortunately. I was recalling back to the first âonlineâ games I played⌠more LAN or CO-OP games via modem connections. Balance was never really a concern, because you were playing WITH someone. But once things went true online, it became more playing AGAINST everyone else. PvP, Ladders, Races, etc⌠MMOâs just exacerbated this with their World 1st races to beat content.
Games, now days, are more about spreadsheets, min/maxing and how fast you can devour content presented. The worst part about this, is I think itâs a rather small portion of the player base that has made it this way. But, the majority are meant to suffer because of itâŚ
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My understanding is this is still primarily a proper single player ARPG. I donât see anything on their website or remember any of the devs posting anything that states otherwise. If Ladder replaces everything else as the primary content, I will lose interest and stop playing. I suspect a lot of us will. Iâm glad I played the game plenty before any mistakes like that were made.
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I think the genre has a problem when it comes to this.
Like take pokemon for example, in any given game you have as you travel through your game 100-200 options for pokemon to use on your team.
There is very obvious âGoodâ choices, and very obvious âBadâ choices. But in pokemon I never felt like I have to choose the good option, if you want to keep the route 1 bird and rat on your team, you will still easily win. so if you like those guys, feel free.
Arpgs sometimes play that way too, where you can just use whatever and it works. LE for the most part is true to that.
Marksmen will do 100c and even 200c just fine. The problem is despite this genre being 95% singleplayer focused, and even then only say 25% or less of the players even care about ladder, they still dont want to play whatever is âweakâ in the âmetaâ they want to play whats strong even if what they like works.
its all a mental thing that bogs down the genre as a whole. So if you have something that is actually op by a decent margin, everyone is just gonna flock to it even if they are then gonna complain about how boring it is. Even though all the other options are perfectly viable too.
So the devs try and solve this problem by not having outlier op builds. But arpg players are pretty much never happy.
As for the OP topic, i agree that marksmen feels⌠limp. its certainly not unplayable, and atleast for right now, marksmen has lots of unique builds that only it can access, since its locked skills like det arrow and hail of arrows are pretty good. it feels in a better position then shaman despite probably being weaker then shaman.
It just has a really bad passive tree with lots of stuff that is thematically cool, but comes with downsides no normal player would ever take. Concentration, sniper gambit etc. Are cool thematic nodes but they dont offer enough vs the insane downsides or mechanics they have.
Also the extremely big nerf to crit vuln made builds which use unique bows now need 1 lp to get flat crit and %crit etc. Icicle bowmage has gotten nerfed relentlesslyâŚ
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Well so, to use your analogy with Pokemon, what Ladder / competitive multiplayer would be like is if every Pokemon in the entire game were roughly equivalent except for one or two differences, or maybe type differences only. If every class / spec has to be about the same at killing bosses, about the same at overall damage output against mobs, and about the same at movement or clear rate of dungeons, then the differences between them are what weâd consider to be mostly cosmetic or surface level. Their actual performance would be the same.
This is actually a bigger problem in an ARPG than a game like Pokemon, because at least you can battle the Pokemon against each other and create a meta based on their differences. The same idea exists in League of Legends: All the champions are supposed to be roughly equivalent in their ability to do things, but the roles they serve on a team and the combos they create when played together change where they sit in the meta. You donât have those advantages in an ARPG because everyone is playing against the same content all of the time, which means if all of them perform it roughly the same, the only significant differences are what buttons you press and when to accomplish the same goals.
And to get to my major objection to balancing a game like this for Ladder, the problem is youâre forbidding the players from experiencing the rewards of creativity, going in and finding the specs that are allowed to do a little better than if you were to just pick skills randomly. To sand them all down to a nub is to remove a wide variety of experiences that the player can have, which is ultimately what you want in a game like this. That and, inherently there will be a meta build in any game like this, even if the advantages are marginal. Itâs impossible to make every spec perfectly equal.
So why bother? Just to have another competitive peer pressure driven eSport? Personally, I donât need or want that from ARPGâs. And I donât believe thatâs the only model that can succeed either. At this point, the market is probably over-saturated with those. Plus competing directly with PoE is probably not a good idea, I think they have the market capped out at this point. I think a lot more people would play an ARPG if it were the coolest and most interesting one to play, and you could prove it to people. Thatâs the kind of game I would want to make, if I were the one making it.
Thatâs why Iâd make Marksman do whatever I wanted it to do also, instead of trying to balance it for Ladder. (Though I donât think Iâd make it quite as wimpy as it is now.)
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THIS! I understand bug fixes. But yes, it feels like creativity, ingenuity and exploration are punished. Take the latest 60k ward build. Iâm sure that will be battered, relentlessly into the ground. Even though (as far as I could tell), itâs not abusing any bugs or mechanics. Itâs just creative buildingâŚalbeit with a very annoying playstyle that will cause many playersâŚmyself includedâŚto not even consider trying it.
This kind of sledgehammer-approach to âbalanceâ has rendered too many builds either unplayable, or unfun, as well as some legendary items losing their real purpose â What good is Serpentâs Milk now, with the poison cap?
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This is precisely why I really enjoy leveling characters in arpgs. I leveled a character of every class in Grim Dawn to 100 TWICE in standard and once in HC because I really like the feel of my character progressing and in campaign (usually with arpgs) the diffculty is easy enough you can make almost ANYTHING work so you get to play some funky, weird, quirky stuff that often can be a hell of a lot of fun.
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