I am currently playing a Giant Slayer Flurry build and one of the main drawbacks is mana even when I have mana regen on every part of my gear. I don’t think that this needs to be changed however I would like to offer an alternative. Would you be open to creating a new passive node in the Marksman tree for Pierce?
Providing a flat pierce chance is not what I’m asking for since it already belongs on the Multishot tree and should stay there. It’s rewarding to have a flat %. However due to lack of + skills for Multishot you really can’t fit into this build as well as others. I don’t think many people are taking it.
Thus I would suggest creating a passive near the end of the Marksman tree that provides %chance to pierce but this % chance decreases the further you are away from the monster. This logically makes sense. If I was shooting point blank at someone with a bow, the arrow would probably go through, however if I was shooting far away, the arrow would hit with less force.
Therefore the passive tree would provide %Pierce but variable with distance and the Multishot skill would provide a flat % not based on distance. This benefits both the regular multishot build as well as a point blank build. In short, if you want pierce you have to go in and risk death and if you took both the passive and the skill on the tree you could reach a much higher % of pierce than what is currently available. This would ease mana as well since this would lead to more AoE DPS against groups of monsters but not decrease the difficulty of boss encounters.
even though i like your suggestions while you have also presented drawbacks as an alternative in order to not represent the pierce mechanic too strongly, the main reason why ehg did not include the pierce mechanic in the passive tree imo is because ehg wanted to make each skill unique. What i mean by that is that every skill should fulfill a certain task. Flurry for example is considered to be a strong single target skill. Should this skill get more access to aoe and clearspeed, it might become too strong because of its relatively good basedmg but very strong attack rate and 0 mana cost. Therefore it could simply outperform multishot and make the theme around multishot, being a map clearer/aoe skill, worthless.
I also see a big problem considering Detonating Arrows, especially the lightning version. Having a pierce mechanic and the lightning tendrils combinded with the great flat dmg scaling can make this skill very op.
What i would like to see is maybe an additional Passive point similar to Master Archer for HoA, Multishot and DA but more related to the 0 Mana skill like Cinder Strike, Puncture and Flurry. Something like additional Ignite chance per stack of oil coating for Cinder strike, additional bleed chance and duration for puncture and maybe something poison related for flurry…Just an idea.
When Rogue came out i was also thinking about: Where is the additional Arrow node? Where is the Pierce node? Because i’m coming from PoE and i’m used to those mechanics But the more i played Marksman the more i realized the theme and class identiy around Marksman. It’s just some mechanics and playstyles that makes certain builds outshine more than others.
Flurry doesn’t seem to be a strong single target skill to me considering I’ve seen some videos of other classes that completely out class a Marksman’s damage and defense simultaneously. I felt it only became strong with multishot combined with giant slayer.
You are absolutely right about detonating arrows, I looked at a video showcasing the build. It seems that the additional trigger of detonating arrow is what outputs the large damage so perhaps that could be mitigated in some way with the introduction to pierce. Perhaps a %trigger reduction based on pierce would mitigate this issue. So say you have 50% pierce then the trigger only occurs 60% of the time if the arrow pierces. However if the arrow doesn’t pierce it hits 100%. Considering my initial statement that the pierce node would vary its % on distance, I don’t think this would be over powering to detonating arrow. I haven’t played every version of Marksman and I’m sure that there would be other considerations to think about as well. Its tough designing an aRPG that has many skills. However the idea of an arrow piercing is very iconic to every archer build and as it stands, it is not utilized much at all from what I’ve seen.
If a piece of gear had +2 to multishot I think this would improve the variety. I’ve seen + to flurry but not multishot … This is a simpler solution.
