How would you nerf [Reach Of The Council] but still keep it Viable?

With how many people are complaining about RotC's +4 Arrows what about making the Additional Arrows a chance. Something like 40% Chance to add additional arrows with attacks. This seems like it would still work with the meta it's used with but also keep it from being too overpowered.

No nerf needed.

It's a league item with unknown future accessibility. It's not absolute best in slot for even the skills its strong for. There are numerous bow skills it doesnt work with at all.

Asking ggg to give it the cloak of defiance treatment is short sighted.

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Zaanus wrote:

There are numerous bow skills it doesnt work with at all.

Wat.

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

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Zaanus wrote:

There are numerous bow skills it doesnt work with at all.

Wat.

Raid of Arrows, Blast Rain, Caustic Arrow, basically all the bow skills that don't create projectiles but instead place aoes

Ok, technically it "works" but their mechanics are such that it's kinda pointless vs items at half the trouble.

So long as the meta is "shoot LA into a frost wall" or "stack dat poison with tshot" then sure, this will be a very strong bow.

But change the meta, and this doesn't look as good (but still good). It's what happened to CoD and countless other good uniques that didn't really need nerfed, or didn't need anywhere near the nerf they got.

Still the majority of most bow skills can take advantage of it.

Barrage,Ballista,Exploding Arrow,Burning Arrow and other skills.

I'd say if it really has to be nerfed give it reduced crit chance so you're better off going non crit with it. That will keep it useful but also leave a niche for rare harbingers to fill.

20% Reduced Proj Speed > 20% Less Proj Damage

7th link GMP (that is slightly better) on a decent bow base is still a great bow at that point, just not overpowered.

I think it should have some downside that actually makes it better in some situations, and worse in others. So it's something you need to build/play around, rather than just being the obvious BiS for most builds.

eg:
Far shot.
You deal 50% less weapon damage to nearby enemies.

(Fits with the 'reach of the council' name)

or, remove the '4 additional arrows' thing, and instead give it '100% more additional arrows'. So you could still get the 'free GMP' effect, but only if you had a few other sources of additional arrows anyway.

The proper nerf to Reach of the Council is to stop developing this game and start developing PoE2.

You simply cannot have an item which does anything close to what RotC is, and pretend to care about melee vs ranged balance at all. The moment I saw it the first time, my exact response was to say out loud, "oh, fuck this."

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

You simply cannot have an item which does anything close to what RotC is, and pretend to care about melee vs ranged balance at all. The moment I saw it the first time, my exact response was to say out loud, "oh, fuck this."

Voidheart is quite a bit stronger for melee than Reach of the Council is for ranged.

If you can't see why, imagine it the other way around - What if they had implemented a decent phys dps 2 hand mace which effectively gives a free AoE coverage support gem while removing the downside (for eg, a fated version of Marohi without the aspd nerf, and with level 30 inc AoE), and made Reach of the Council a ring which gives automatic poison and bleeding on bow attacks. Guess which one you would be complaining about then?

The reason why Reach is so powerful is because it makes bow attackers a bit stronger. Not because it further tips the ranged/melee balance towards ranged. Voidheart has actually overall tipped the balanced more towards the melee side IMO. Don't get me wrong, it's still way in ranged territory! But your claim that GGG doesn't care about melee vs ranged balance is not really supported by the evidence you provided. It seems like maybe they do care about ranged vs melee after all.

(Both uniques show they obviously don't care about overall game balance of course.)