I totally agree, Marksman doesnt feel nice at what they should be good at right now… if you look at lastepochtools, most of good builds resolve around melee or trap indeed. Somehow shoot arrows playstyle feels weird when you can throw traps that jump all over the screen and shotgun bosses, I am not saying that there is no good build “bow and arrow” I am just saying that the quality of life that other playstyles offer are undeniable more attractive with the same or even more damage and if you dont agree, start a Marksman and try to play a normal “hit and run” Detonate Arrow, you will feel bad for it.
I am playing marksman right now, trying a Detonating Arrow non crit based on mana, using mainly Infused Discharge, Coated Blades and Ethereal Arrows as main mechanics for damage and I dont even know why these passives exist, they dont interact the way they supposably should and there is no way to build up mana regen to keep the build working. Now guess how I fixed this?! Yep, you are right I am throwing traps in the whole screen and before someone says that it was bad because of a crap ideia, its not about the numbers it is about how it feels to play and traps was for sure some quality of life in this aspect.
So at the end of the day, I am not saying they should nerf or change other skills, they just need to rethink/rework marksman in a way that shooting arrow feels nice, after all it is the main feature of the mastery.
I think marksman can be made to work as a scuffed warlock using flurry and multishot by stacking poison, bleed, and ignite.
playstyle
Movement: Poison comes from movement granting poison arrows + bleed + procs sharukens
Sharukens deal increased damage to bleeding + poison
Flurry: vigil: stacks poison and bleed with adrenaline, adrenaline increases bleed and poison indirectly. Flurry triggers multi shot
Multishot: up to preference.
Hail of arrows: aoe for clearing trash mobs. Or for movement on tight bosses
gear set up
Passives: maxed bleed stacks per 3rd shot, maxed speed from nodes, poison on hit
Idols: increased damage over time, ward gain on hit, poison / bleed damage
Bow: increased damage to poison and bleed, increased damage over time, [open slot]. Any unique works as long as has 3lp, [recommend Drelkor compass]
Quiver: Sanguinen Hoard [3Lp], [bleed damage, %bleed pierce, poison damage]
Quicksilver coil [×2]:
Aurora Time Glass
The rest you can build how ever you want, but these would be almost mandatory.
You essentialy rail fire on boss, boss gets hundrends of stacks of bleed and poison. Boss gets cooked. You use hail when ever you need to move
I think one of the issues that Flurry/MS suffers from. Is that the channel skill doesn’t actually proc your MM passive, so you can’t just hold it down. Every 4 seconds you gotta let up (at least) to refresh that. And if you screw it up, you gotta feather the skill again to build it back up which is frustrating.
I enjoy playing and the feeling of cinderstrike dragonsong, but the fact that the best marksman builds are jelkhor’s with traps or blast rain (again traps) with detonating arrows. And both of those are just, leagues ahead of any other MM build speaks to itself.
And then elemental arrow being time limited AND movement limited, just makes it rough to use. Which is a shame, cause when I saw it, I was like “those skills look/sound awesome. Almost arcane archer ish.”
Really interested to see what they have in store for Marksman and how/if they can “fix” explosive trap without completely gutting any viability of it.
This is an excellent post I agree with almost all of it, as someone who spent, as of today in 1.1, about 2-3 days trying to make a traditional bow build with detonating arrow, there are so many issues with synergies. I bought an insane nemesis bow from MG with tons of flat damage, 10% base crit stat, the phase point quiver with 2 LP and managed to slam some more flat on it. Took basically all the more multipliers on the detonating arrow skill, crit capped with about 350% crit multi, and still the damage was so freaking low. I think when I did the calculation on it, my detonating arrow total damage (mind you, with more multipliers for detonating arrow you go for longer arming time), for one cast was on average about 45k damage. The issue is it drains a shit ton of mana from you that you need another skill to generate the mana back (i used cinder strike with oil coating for some more inc. damage plus it deals a fair bit damage itself because it scales with the same stats). It was just so underwhelming, barely survived in 200 corruption. I think they need a major rework here, changing some numbers wont fix marksman.
Dark quiver aswell is just so clunky, like you said, it would be great if you could generate arrows passively, and thats what i hoped phase point would do, but they decided to attach it to dodge which just felt awful. I dont even know what defensive layers would work best with that, health + dodge is what i tried and it was bad, maybe ward + dodge would have worked better