So, I realize this is long and fixing the problem I present is neither easy nor quick, but I wanted to mention it so that maybe the devs will see it and keep it in mind. I mean this to be purely constructive, as I love this game, and I think this is something that probably needs to be addressed at some point for it to be the best it can be.
Marksman flexibility in a bad spot right now, especially in terms of rare bows. It feels very pidgeonholed into uniques because there are 3 ‘good’ bow builds (as in notably better than the rest, Rain of Arrows, Flurry+Multishot, Detonating Arrow) and here’s why:
Issue number 1: Bleed. Bleed, as a mechanic, is weaker than poison (at least for marksman especially) due to the nature of dots scaling best off attacking as fast as possible and poison reducing resistance with each hit. %increased phys is not enough to help with that. Add in the fact that Acidfletch exists, and all of a sudden Rain of Arrows poison blows any bleed build out of the water. Even if you say “Well its only for rain of arrows” take a look at the arena ladder and tell me what skills you see. ROA, Multishot-flurry, and maybe a detonating arrow or two. This is because even if you want to use bleed or poison on another skill, while flurry could probably keep up (or maybe even exceed, but I doubt it) with the single target dps of Rain of Arrow Acidfletch on a boss with poison, you have no clear skill because if you go all in on poison damage Multishot won’t proc enough and will do minimal on hit damage. Plus, you will want to be able to attack for as long as possible to get stacks up, which you can’t do. Ok, use puncture to clear. Good luck, you need them to line up perfectly, or take the ‘mirage’ perk which raises mana cost by so much it is quite literally never worth it. Add in the fact that even if you somehow managed the mana cost, your clear would be faster with rain of arrows Acidfletch by far. Anyone playing multishot using puncture for mana management knows what I am talking about for the clear issue. Detonating arrow and Cinder shot are awful for bleed/poison, and I have yet to see a good endgame build with cindershot ignite.
Thus, there is never any point in choosing bleed over poison, and if you are going poison, there is never any point to not going Acidfletch RoA, other than to say that you did.
Rare bows, hypothetically should have the advantage of flexibility. Sure, you lose out on flat damage, but you also lose out on your bleed/poison/slow/armor shred suffixes and the damage boosting prefixes for bleed/poison too. Armor shred is thrown at you by your passives, and slow can be sourced by specializations and almost any other slot, making that argument pointless. And the other two are rendered moot by the point about acid fletch above.
Issue Number 2: Flurry Multi-shot, which is probably the most popular build for generic monolith runs since it has (disputably) the best balance of clear and bossing capabilities for Marksman.
Unfortunately, it is indisputable for this build that rare bows are just a placeholder until you get the unique bow (Drelkor’s Compass), because the best way to scale it to be comparable to other classes’ endgame build options (and the reason this build is so popular) is by scaling ‘Damage per Arrow’, and it gives 4 additional arrows. If you push this build to have t5 damage per arrow on chest and helmet, that’s 25*4 = 100% increased damage. Add in the fact that you can quite achievably get 4 idols with 6% damage per arrow each and that’s another free 96% increased damage.
That 196% free increased damage is on top of the 50 flat damage which is by far the most you can get on any bow out there, period. Also, it is the ONLY SOURCE of flat Minus Mana Cost for bow builds. Spell builds and throwing builds have it as an affix shard. At 21 mana per second, you better believe that is a massive boost.
Alright, now let’s talk about the most damning thing for flexibility. If you want conversion, your only two options are Detonating arrow, and Cindershot. Cindershot is bad for a variety of reasons, but detonating arrow can be really good so lets focus on that. Currently, the reason flat phys on Drelkor’s Compass for Multishot is so important, is that there is no way to scale two flat damage crafts on a bow at the same time with one mod. 110 is the highest total possible flat damage on any bow out there, for reference, 19 is the cap for t5 crafts. Even if you put two t5 flat damage crafts on a bow, that’s 38, and they aren’t scaling both off one damage type, so you have to convert it, making detonating arrow your only option if you want high dps. This is the only build that a rare is actually useful rather than a second-rate option. Even then, if I were to make a detonating arrow build, I would take advantage conversion specialization node and Reign of Winter to get waaaaay more flat cold damage than a rare bow can ever give you (along with some pen and a cast on hit effect). Barring that, I would take advantage of the dual scaling dex stacking on skills and Mourningfrost to scale up the damage on detonating arrow. That’s just me though.
Now there are a lot of ways to scale damage, and this is very important, I do not think the unique bows are overpowered, they are the only thing that lets marksman get on the arena ladder at all right now outside of the one person I saw run to wave 400 with detonating arrow, and they are keeping their respective builds relevant compared to other class’s builds. Rather, because of a combination of lack of options for conversion skills, only having ‘bow’ affixes available, whereas melee has stuff like ‘sword, axe, one handed sword, one handed melee, generic melee, etc……’ gives them very little flexibility, and combined with the ways to best scale marksman’s skill makes that a very rough hurdle to overcome.
If you read all the way here, thank you, and thank you to the devs for making such a great game!
With all ailment versions for Marksman it is possible to complete endgame monolith. If we are talking about Arena, thats a different thing, yes! It depends a little bit what you want achieve at the end. But still the ailment playstyle on Marksman suffers the most imo.
We all know what we are talkin about, i was just confused in the beginning when i did a quick read through because of the actual passive that works similar to the skill HoA which is called Rain of Arrows.
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