There's a big flaw in the diversity of bows.

What I am talking about is every attack bow build using decimator/harbinger bows. Only 2 skills will not want to use a decimator bow - Explosive Arrow and Posion Arrow. I ask you, is this truly balanced?
Don't mistake this for crit hate, I'm all for more weapon types being more crit accesible. What I am against is the Decimator Bow being the de facto best rare base. Nobody is using Thicket bows, nobody is using Maraketh bows, nobody uses Imperial bows. Is this truly balanced?
Having more diversity in weapon types is all fine and dandy but adding the benefit of crit should be taken lightly. I don't know what GG thinks about the overall balance of the game, but it is the general consensus that crit is the most powerful damage enhancing mechanic in the game.
There is a sort of balancing daggers and non dagger melee weapons in that you can dagger roll caster mods as well as attack mods. Where a dagger might roll a 2 attack (as in GOOD rolls) mods, a sword could rolls 4 or 5. A 300 dps foils vs 120 dps dagger. large investment of wealth was needed to ripe the benefits of a good dagger. Imagine if one of Axe types got a 7% base crit chance.
And that's what we have with bows now. A harbingers is a ranged dagger without the balancing factor of being hard to roll.

Tl;DR
Vaal Rapier vs Vaal Blade: With same mods you don't really care which one you take. You might prefer the sword if you have low accuracy but it wouldn't make a big change in DPS when choosing betwee nthe either.

Harbinger vs Thicket: With same mods you will take harbinger without a doubt.

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battled wrote:

What I am talking about is every attack bow build using decimator/harbinger bows. Only 2 skills will not want to use a decimator bow - Explosive Arrow and Posion Arrow. I ask you, is this truly balanced?
Don't mistake this for crit hate, I'm all for more weapon types being more crit accesible. What I am against is the Decimator Bow being the de facto best rare base. Nobody is using Thicket bows, nobody is using Maraketh bows, nobody uses Imperial bows. Is this truly balanced?
Having more diversity in weapon types is all fine and dandy but adding the benefit of crit should be taken lightly. I don't know what GG thinks about the overall balance of the game, but it is the general consensus that crit is the most powerful damage enhancing mechanic in the game.
There is a sort of balancing daggers and non dagger melee weapons in that you can dagger roll caster mods as well as attack mods. Where a dagger might roll a 2 attack (as in GOOD rolls) mods, a sword could rolls 4 or 5. A 300 dps foils vs 120 dps dagger. large investment of wealth was needed to ripe the benefits of a good dagger. Imagine if one of Axe types got a 7% base crit chance.
And that's what we have with bows now. A harbingers is a ranged dagger without the balancing factor of being hard to roll.

Currently, nothing trumps crit. That's the heart of it. Slow heavy damage without crit? Fagitaboutit.

The 1.4 patch coming up is supposed to have extensive rebalancing. There will likely be changes to crit mechanics. Maybe slow/heavy, or fast/light will become the dominant bow in a few months. Give it time. Everything changes.

Ranger tree got a rework.
Bows got a new skill gem.
Bows got a damage buff and an implicit mod rework.
A lot of the lack in diversity is because of this.

I would argue there is more diversity than the op has admitted. Most of it is in unique bows. However, I would find it interesting to have more diversity in base items. The root of the problem lies in the skill gems though. We need more gems that are better without crit (incinerate).

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Shagsbeard wrote:

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battled wrote:

What I am talking about is every attack bow build using decimator/harbinger bows. Only 2 skills will not want to use a decimator bow - Explosive Arrow and Posion Arrow. I ask you, is this truly balanced?
Don't mistake this for crit hate, I'm all for more weapon types being more crit accesible. What I am against is the Decimator Bow being the de facto best rare base. Nobody is using Thicket bows, nobody is using Maraketh bows, nobody uses Imperial bows. Is this truly balanced?
Having more diversity in weapon types is all fine and dandy but adding the benefit of crit should be taken lightly. I don't know what GG thinks about the overall balance of the game, but it is the general consensus that crit is the most powerful damage enhancing mechanic in the game.
There is a sort of balancing daggers and non dagger melee weapons in that you can dagger roll caster mods as well as attack mods. Where a dagger might roll a 2 attack (as in GOOD rolls) mods, a sword could rolls 4 or 5. A 300 dps foils vs 120 dps dagger. large investment of wealth was needed to ripe the benefits of a good dagger. Imagine if one of Axe types got a 7% base crit chance.
And that's what we have with bows now. A harbingers is a ranged dagger without the balancing factor of being hard to roll.

Currently, nothing trumps crit. That's the heart of it. Slow heavy damage without crit? Fagitaboutit.

The 1.4 patch coming up is supposed to have extensive rebalancing. There will likely be changes to crit mechanics. Maybe slow/heavy, or fast/light will become the dominant bow in a few months. Give it time. Everything changes.

This disparity is in the game since open beta. It was gated by daggers and wands being hard to roll and them not having access to the the best skills in the game (AKA Wand can't lightning Arrow and daggers can't cleave). But for some reason GG forgot about this ingenious balance and gave us Melee Splash. And if that wasn't enough, they gave daggers their own cleave, but with a bigger aoe even. And from that point melee skills stopped being weapon specific (Spectral Throw/Molten Strike). Sure it's nice in a way but weapon type balance was throw out immediately.
Now everything is too intertwined. If we nerf reave or spectral throw because it's too good with daggers we're also nerfing it for sowrds and all other weapons for which it was just right.

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Opinionated wrote:

Ranger tree got a rework.
Bows got a new skill gem.
Bows got a damage buff and an implicit mod rework.
A lot of the lack in diversity is because of this.

I would argue there is more diversity than the op has admitted. Most of it is in unique bows. However, I would find it interesting to have more diversity in base items. The root of the problem lies in the skill gems though. We need more gems that are better without crit (incinerate).

See that's the problem. There's something wrong when someone uses and imperial bow over harbinger only when it's and Unique that has even bigger crit chance than harbinger.

Other Bows need to be more inviting to use really.
For example, no one in their right mind will craft a Maraketh both (10% elemental damage) over Harbinger (50% Crit) --- Same goes for Imp and Thicket bows. Even if one specializes in an elemental build, Decimation is still better hands down.

GGG needs to draw some incentive to use the different base mods of weapons, as it would not only make crafting a whole lot more enjoyable but also to reiterate your point of opening build diversity for (most notable) Bows. I'm very interested to see a change in this regard, as it doesn't seem that it would take a lot of resources/testing but would greatly help the Bow department...and other weapons too hopefully. Spell Daggers suffer the same base roll pigeonholing (Golden Kris).

Make weapons have a stronger base appeal/implicit mods to open up their usefulness in crafting/builds.

It's "Decimation".

That said, yeah, it is kinda sad that crit trumps all - even though on my puncture shadow I don't use a crit bow. That is for lack of availability rather than real choice.
I don't depend on crit, but with puncture speed is rather irrelevant and elemental damage is, too. So I'd always choose the crit bow.

Dunno what I'd do playing a fire arrow build or LA; probabably would also go crit.

crit is overpowered and giving harbys 50% crit chance was an outrageously poor balance decision.

It's 50% increased, not flat 50%, mind.