Bows needs to be tweaked

It's great that there's some variety to weapons, but I feel it's a bit messed up for at least bows. Basically you first go for a short bow, into a groove bow, into a thicket bow. Point being that attack speed difference is to large between bows. When so much damage comes irregardless of the bows fixed damage the small tweaks to compensate for the attack speed on higher tiers of bows doesn't really matter.

A "perfect" phys Harbinger has 478 DPS, a "perfect" phys Thicket has 498 DPS ( if bows can roll Celebration which I think they can't, I believe the wiki is wrong here, the relative difference is the same regardless ). Sure the Harbinger has higher potential local crit chance going for it, but the thickets significantly higher attack speed is arguably still going mean it will outperform the Harbinger for all realistic end game cases. Flat dmg mods which are common on other equipment slots will grossly favor the Thicket, the Thicket will apply on hit effects faster, tend to overkill less etc. The oh so common flat elemental damage mods on weapons also means that thickets continues to dominate.

Suggestion:

Thicket switches with Spine, which is a shit bow base that no one uses. Set thicket attack speed to 1.3, and let it have an implicit attack speed mod that caps out at 25%. This would make a top rolled thicket slightly faster than today but at least it would require most thickets to be divined to reach its highest potential. Also lower the flat damage on the bow from 19 - 56 to lets say 15 - 45. This way thicket would still be the go to bow for flat damage based & on hit based builds.

Harbingers base attack speed of 1.2 needs to be higher, AT LEAST 1.35 to even be considered usable. I understand that the local crit chance is the whole point of the bow, and because of that we can't have an attack speed in thickets area, but I feel 1.35 would be a good trade off, that's still a slow ass bow.

At the high end bow spectrum Maraketh Bow suffers the same fate, an implicit mod which is way to low to make up for the fact that the bow itself is slow as hell. Either tweak the attack speed, or better yet for some variety make the implicit mod WAY higher. 6% - 12% weapon elemental is really pitiful, especially considering elemental damage% isn't a local mod ( correct me if I'm wrong ). So in return for letting all the local mods be shit I get at most 1/3 of lets say a belts elemental damage mod. If we're going to buy that the local mods be crap, and that weapon elemental stays global, then the implicit mod needs to be ballpark 6% - 80%, and even then I find it hard for a high end bow elemental bow user to prefer it in an end game scenario.

Imperial Bow, I guess there's nothing really wrong with imperials as base save for the fact that they're pretty uninteresting :)

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Sairony wrote:

Sure the Harbinger has higher potential local crit chance going for it, but the thickets significantly higher attack speed is arguably still going mean it will outperform the Harbinger for all realistic end game cases.

Justify this with a calculation.

Local crit chance is awesome. Harbinger bow is obviously the best choice for puncture or burning arrow/ignite builds, no calculation needed.

More damage per hit is also good for evading armour.

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Note that the actual calculations as to which is better for general use are hard to do. They are also irrelevant, since Lioneye's is better for almost every situation.

I just wanted to point out that you don't use divines for implicit mods you use blessed. To that end, it'd probably have to have a stupidly wide range like 4% to 24% in order to justify expected cost of blessing.

You're correct that Maraketh bows are bad. They're actually extremely bad, the mod needs to be more than 30%. I'm not sure about Harbinger bows needing 1.35 though there is definitely a little change to be had.

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adghar wrote:

I just wanted to point out that you don't use divines for implicit mods you use blessed. To that end, it'd probably have to have a stupidly wide range like 4% to 24% in order to justify expected cost of blessing.

30% -> 50% on the harbinger is worth it though, I think.

Hard to do a straight comparison because of the many aspects, what we can say however is that Thicket is 30% faster than Harbinger while Harbinger considering perfect crit chance rolls has 36.5% higher crit chance. I'd still go for the thicket in almost all cases because of it, there's just so many things in this game which benefits attacking fast above criting more often. This is also comparing a lvl 56 bow to what's designed to be the top of the line bow.

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Sairony wrote:

Hard to do a straight comparison because of the many aspects, what we can say however is that Thicket is 30% faster than Harbinger while Harbinger considering perfect crit chance rolls has 36.5% higher crit chance. I'd still go for the thicket in almost all cases because of it, there's just so many things in this game which benefits attacking fast above criting more often. This is also comparing a lvl 56 bow to what's designed to be the top of the line bow.

There are many things that benefit crit over attack speed as well, including elemental procs. There are other things still unstated: crit has downsides against reflected damage, while attack speed consumes more mana per second. For now, it might be simpler to ignore these things and just look at dps.

The contribution of crit is a quadratic one -- the two stats, multiplier and chance, are multiplied together to yield the increase in dps over the base dps that is added. With a harbinger bow you can easily hit 40% chance to crit and over 500 multiplier -- that's adding 160% of your base dps through crit mechanics (!!!).

Attack speed, on the other hand, contributes a linear factor -- twice as much attack speed means (modulo armor) twice the dps.

Lastly, the great thicket bows are usually of very high ilvl. I doubt you'll find an ilvl < 60 thicket bow that compares to a decent harbinger bow. It's possible, but it would have to be quite a special thing indeed.

For my build, I'd take a good harbinger bow over a good thicket anytime.

Thicket bows are good for LA/LMP builds and thats about it

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deteego wrote:

Thicket bows are good for LA/LMP builds and thats about it

I get that impression.