Has anyone been experimenting with Bowmage since the 0.9.0 update? The Critical Vulnerability nerf was huge: to get it back to the same level of power would take a huge amount of Critical Chance investment. I’ve been trying to figure out what the best way to adjust to this is but haven’t found any great answers - whether to just completely pivot out of Crit scaling and try to scale other stuff, that there is no great solution except to play it the same way at reduced power, or to try to focus on Cold Damage scaling. My latest experiment is to try to get Prismatic Gaze to work…but that seems to require either using Decoy and missing out on some juicy nodes (the fear nodes, etc.) or using Rain of Arrows (not bad, but not idea)
Yes, that was rather the point, even for the Rogue.
Though I don’t know the answer to your question. @TriKster might.
Peak of the Mountain helmet helps alot to get additional crit chance to scale icicles low base crit. We also have to invest more into crit on gear…finally!
Crit vuln will still give us additional flat 20% crit ontop of our scaled base crit from icicles. Use passive like Critical Presicion (Rogue) or Barrage of Pain (Marksman) to scale base crit even more.
Ancient Coins is a good relic giving us up to 100% inc crit.
Same goes for Dragonsong btw.
Leveling turned out to be harder now for certain marksman builds, but you can still reach high effective crit rate with some gear investement.
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Hello there,
I was looking for those kinds of topic…
I share your feeling, Marksman feels like so hard now to build with low gear.
I feel like I need A/S tier stats on each item which is not at all the case with most of the other classes.
Stack DEX /add some AS / cold dmge & Crit sooo …
And a need to got some Legendary with Crit / AS
anyway marksman are not the one people are playing atm.
Have a good day all !
And @TriKster wanted to ask about ur detonating arrow melee. Another video on 0.9 coming ? 
Yeah, you only need about 1900% increased crit to cap it.
But only 1500% if you get 10 stacks of crit vulnerability though.
Because bow doesn’t have base crit anywhere. The obsidian bow, has 4% bow base crit, so doesn’t work with icicle (spell crit or generic works), still you would need 1100% increased crit to cap it.
Marksman was totally reliant of crit vulnerability to get crit. They murdered crit vulnerability. So marksman for crits is dead.
The thing is, you dont need 100% crit chance. We got used to perma crit with rogue for the last 2 years thats why it feels so terrible atm because we are used to the old numbers. An effective crit rate over 60% still feels very good with fast attacking skills or procs.
Crit builds in poe also used to have 50% base crit, and the diamond flask there feels like crit vuln in LE.
Dragonsong is different because you need to crit in order to get the proc out and you almost need the 7% base roll on the bow+ 34% proc chance.
Leveling felt horrible with dragonsong, you really need BiS gear now to have the 0.8.5 feeling again.
Not true. Dead means unplayable. The builds still work, people just compare Marksman with op classes like Lich and Necro where you can kill T4 in 5seconds. Thats not balanced.
And theres not alot of build variety due to a small amount of synergies and skills atm for rogue.
I’m not saying that Marksman is in a good spot, i’m more frustrated that other classes are broken for the last years.
When they fix the weapon range.
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When 0.9 MP Hit I built a VK Warpath/ES/Rive/VC/SR speficially for rushing to Heorot to get Reign of Winter. My current Bowmage has about a 60-70% crit chance, and I’m using the MourningFrost boots to scale Dex/Cold damage. I agree, the BowMage isn’t what it used to be, but is still quite viable. I did level it with a buddy of mine who ALSO built a BowMage and a two man flurry team burned quite nicely through early levelling. Two BowMages together absolutely SHRED bossing, esp with the knockback node in Multishot that interrupt some boss mechanics and bully them into corners.
The biggest problem I have right now with my BowMage is that she dropped me an Ingvar’s Head and now I’m levelling my Fire Disintegrator (which is so completely sillybroke it hurts).
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I was being a bit hyperbolic, but very little people is playing marksman, or bowmage for a reason.
Bowmage was exceptionally strong, so even with the nerf can do OK.
If you are happy with that, well, who I am to ruin that. Just don’t take a look at other classes.
The sad truth is they nerfed crit vulnerability too hard, because MP (still I can agree was kind of OP regardless), and didn’t make up for it for Marksman. Paladin still absurd support class. That’s about it.
I never played Last Epoch before 0.9 and kind of stumbled into the bowmage build after the bow dropped. I looked up some guides and have been playing it and honestly it feels perfectly fine to me. It really sounds like the community got used to the feeling of 100% crit and so it feels off to them now but from the perspective of a new player it feels incredibly strong still. My bowmage is level 97 and isn’t having issues clearing anything really.
Would you rather say that some Lich and Necro-Builds (and maybe a few other classes) are overpowered or that Marksmen (and maybe a few others) are undertuned?
Lich and Necro clearly overpowered.
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