Please make Deadeye ascendacy viable for casters

"

666lol666 wrote:

"

Starlight85 wrote:

Please make Deadeye ascendacy viable for casters

Hell no! It's perfect as it is now - no need to make it completely op.

Yes, it´s mighty mighty powerful, needless to say you can build insane projectile CoC with your spells chaining for free, on top of massive projectile damage/speed and crit boost. The high attack speed does the rest.

Adding cast speed on top of all this would make the actual INT classes look prety bad in comparison for self-cast. If you really want to make Deadeye a self-caster, you got enough raw power and can easily afford to get some cast speed from other sources (gear and upper skilltree).

I am leveling a non crit-EK Deadeye ATM

16k damage at level 67 with a mere 4 link level 17 EK and loads of eva% nodes. With only Herald of ash as damaging Aura

With controlled destruction as fifth link i should reach 22k DPS easily and after i get all those yummy phys damage nodes in shadow area i should reach over 30k DPS with a level 18-19 EK with a free chain

The problem is single targets...

My actual stats at level 67 are:

14k evasion
4,6k life
30% chance to dodge
16k DPS EK in a 4L
Enfeeble + Clarity + Herald of Ash Auras

Evasion, enfeeble and dodge let most enemies miss 3/4 attacks, with a jade flask i wasn't hit by Merc Piety fire form for 7 times in a row.

Very shame the 30% more damage ascendancy node is applied to physical attacks only... instead of that i'm forced to take 2 minor nodes just for the 10% projectile damage.

It's not as OP as i tought, but it's viable and can still keep good defences, i can also see a good Ice spear crit build using deadeye

Well there are some things that should be Attack based. The attack speed should stay pure attack speed and the accuracy should be kept. However there are two things that bother me a bit.

1. Far Shots, it would be rather nice to make this work with Spells
2. Sharp and Venomous

The rest... I don't really care. The wording in powerful precision is kinda iffy, I assume it is similar to drillneck so any piercing spell does work. However I never understood why it is not worded away from Projectile's Pierce Chance which means the inherit chance to pierce the projectile has, which also excludes boni like Projectile Weakness (or an Armor like Lyoneyes, that allows to get pierced). But it would clarify that it does actually apply to spells and non-arrow based projectiles.

Spectral Throw does get a free 100% crit chance from this and spells like Rain of Arrows or Blast Rain benefit without even actually piercing (which makes getting Pierce Chance odd, however not sure what happens with Powerful Precision if you use Rain of Arrows point blank?).

"

Yeah, make far shot work with spells, then combine it with shavrone's and pain attunment to have 60% more damage and a billion auras resulting in 8 trillion DPS, it'd be fun -> NOT! It has happened too many times(and it keeps happening).

I do not really understand far shot anyway. 30% MORE fucking damage for playing the safest and most mindless way there is(offscreening targets), while the Berseker gets 40% more damage(only 10% more) for playing the absolutely most dangerous way there is (melee + 10% increased damage taken).

Well Far Shots isn't all that powerful. The Assassins base crit increase gives even higher damage increases and Far Shot has a rather high range and is often not even possible to be used. From pure damage to only noteworthy note is Sharp and Venomous, since it is easy to stack projectile damage which is applied twice to bleed and poison (as is Far Shot). Adding the Poison nodes from the tree you can get a rather high poison chance without the support, which supplements your damage very well. Not only does Poisoning gives an increase in damage (considering about 150% increased projectile damage, permanent poisoning is a 50% more damage, while the 10% still gives 5% more damage on top of 30% crit multi and 40% crit chance. I would prefer this due to its reliability. Far Shots is hard to use exspecially with a lot of the more dangerous bosses (those that are dangerous because they close in on you). Also if it is still the old enemy far shots the distance to benefit from it is the end of point blank range, which is something you hardly ever fight tough enemies. I'm also not entirely sure how Far Shot interacts with Tornado Shot, you can't offscreen with it, similar to Blast Rain because you have to target a location, which already limits Far Shots. I assume TS secondary projectiles do keep the distance the initial arrow traveled otherwise Point Blank would be ridicolous, but they usually hit directly after being released, so don't travel much farther.

"

As others have pointed out, currently there's no viable 6-point path for casters in Deadeye. However, if Sharp and Venomous were viable for spell builds, then casters could either go Fast&Deadly + Sharp&Venomous + Powerful Precision, or Fast&Deadly + Sharp&Venomoous + Ricochet. That's 2 possible paths. GGG please change Sharp and Venomous!

Well that is not quite right, however the uses are a bit different. And the builds are not really that powerful or even really great. And the most important thing is despite EK looking nice on paper with the free chain, it isn't all that good.

The biggest issue for the Deadeye is that Poison and Bleed are not the other way around. If Poison would be Crit mult and Bleed crit chance it would be far easier to make use of this. Every free piercing spell like Freezing Pulse gets free 100% crit from powerful precision, which is half decent. All of those spells that tie range to projectile speed benefit from fast and deadly. And even though Incinerate, Ethereal Knives and Freezing Pulse all have reliable ways of Poisoning getting just 40% critchance from this is not that good for two of them and worthless for the first one. It also doesn't help that getting the benefit from Powerful Precision and Riccochet is mutual exclusive, you cannot get both.

"

For non-poison builds, 10% poison chance equates to .1*.1=.01 or +1% average damage per second, which isn't worth considering. All that's left is the bonuses to crit chance and multi on bleeding/poisoned enemies, so, the node boils down to an inconsistent version of the Assassination notable.

Uhm... that is totally ehm not right. Poison deals 20% of the initial hit as damage over 2 seconds. This means that always poisoning is 20% more damage. Because if you hit once every 2 seconds there is always one dot active that deals 20% damage until the next hit arrive, and if you deal one hit every second, there are two dots active that deal 10% each in that one second. So the damage dealt until your next hit arrives is always 20% of your average damage on hit, without any multipliers.

For attack based builds this node is really great. 20% more damage, means with 10% chance 2% more damage. However all projectile modifiers are applied again. You likely get about 150% increased projectile damage, if not more (Drillneck easily adds another 100% here). So with decent gear you should reach 200%, some gems also give damage or projectile damage as quality bonus. The Shadows Physical/Chaos Damage nodes also come to play here. So already with just this it means 6% more damage. Which isn't all that bad. But wait... there is a pierce gem and a slower projectiles gem, both likely used by Attack builds, not so much by spells (due to how they work with EK or Freezing Pulse). Both add 30% more damage too, which boosts our Poison damage to 10% of our initial hit (technically it is 100% every 10th hit, but that is easier calculation). But for most builds centered around bows this node gives 10% more damage and also 40% crit chance and 30% crit multiplier. Not to mention that Bleeding deals some damage too, due to the 10% chance you might actually not lose as much bleeding damage, which would be 250% of the initial hit for moving targets and 50% for standing targets over 5 seconds.

So depending on your build (exspecially slow attacks with Harbinger Bows) would make this node great. Not only are Harbingers usually meant for Crit builds that benefits from the on-poison stats, they are also slower with high impact hits, since the bow only provides a base AS of 1,2. This makes it unlikely that Poison is always applied (it only lasts 2 seconds so you need to hit 10 times, not sure how it is calculated if per attack or per hit, so skills like Tornado Shot might actually apply it very reliable). If the use of an attack either entirely poisons or entirely fails to poison, the attack doesn't really matter, however if it is seperate most multi-hitting skills like Barrage and Tornado Shot will keep the poison applied permanently.

For the Bleed though to get at least half the duration on average you might want about 4 aps. This means during the 5 seconds bleed lasts 20 attacks will happen, of which two cause a bleeding. So during this time if we assume the same modifiers apply to bleeding as they do to poison, which is very likely, they might actually be higher since it is more likely that a TS-ranger has increases to physical damage than to chaos damage. Our 2% more damage from poison increased to 10%, which is 5 times more, due to increases from the tree and multipliers from support gems. So if our Bleed usually deals 250% of initial hit damage or 50% for immobile targets it now deals 1250% to moving and 250% to immobile targets. However we do hit 20 times during one bleeding, which means we usually on average only get half our bleed and unless we have very bad luck that none of our bleeds ever runs out, this math stays correct even if we would score 3 bleeds in 20 seconds, the only important thing is that the bleeding never stops. And the conclusion is that we get half of this damage. That is a wooping 625% for moving targets and 125% when standing still. However we will hit 10 times for that bleed to occur, so for every hit we only get an average of 62,5% more damage on moving targets and 12,5% more damage on immobile targets.

So now to sum it all up. In an average scenario, that assumes we always deal average damage and has 4 Attacks per Second Sharp and Venomous provides us 10% more damage from Poison and 12,5% more damage from Bleeding. This favors in about 200% increased projectile and chaos/physical damage (generic damage increases apply as well), the supports slower projectiles and pierce. The higher the Attacks per Second go the less effective Sharp and Venomous gets, however to reach 4 a total 233% increased attack speed on a basic Harbinger or 167% increased attack speed on a MaxAS Harbinger are required, not counting the 10% less attack speed from Ranged Projectile Attack Speed. The 10% more damage from Poison will keep the same as long as 200% increased damage and Slower Projectiles and Pierce are used, the more damage gained from Bleed might increase a bit with less attacks per second but at some point the bleed will not be kept on the enemy. However any scenario that requires shooting and moving the bleed damage will be a lot higher, exspecially when it also includes an enemy running at you. Also having Knockback from King of the Hill will make Sharp and Venomous incredible more potent, since it will ensure that the enemy is moving.

So I would honestly, for a pure physical attacker, prefer Sharp and Venomous, it is reliable on any distance provides great damage exspecially if you use it on a crit ranger with King of the Hill and it also provides Crit Mult and Crit Chance.

So I would prefer that on EK over Far Shots, the downside of course is that it doesn't work with other Multipliers (similar to Added Fire and Hatred, both only modify the base damage). Increasing this chance any higher would make the Deadeye actually too strong, right now it is fine, exspecially since it lacks defenses. Making it more accessible to Casters would only help one very specific types of casters: Physical Projectile Casters... or better EK. Spells like Freezing Pulse or Incinerate or basically any other spell benefit much more from Assassin if you go for Crit or from Occultist or Elementalist if you go non-crit. Triple cursing with Assassin will very likely provide you with more dps than what the Deadeye offers.

So at the end if the nodes will be more caster friendly (and this doesn't mean all nodes need cast speed), it might turn into the best choice for Ethereal Knives... but then again EK is a dex-based projectile spell, with a small Int part (honestly it should be switched with Bladefall and Bladevortex to pure Dex, while they should be Dex/Int) so why shouldn't it be most powerful with the Deadeye... and even more funny why shouldn't knives be able to cause a bleeding or poison, right now a play a char that poisons with fire.

So my suggestion:

Sharp and Venomous get "with attacks" removed.
Powerful Precision gets a better wording to make it clear it works with any projectiles
Far Shots gets "Projectile Attacks and Spells" to make it different from "more projectile damage to not allow double dipping Poison and Bleed"*
Fast and Deadly gets 10% attack and cast speed

* - Right now Far Shot provides Projectile Attack Damage, which does not benefit poison or bleed, since it is attack damage. If it would provide generic Projectile Damage the most benefit would be for builds using Poison, since initial hit and poison would get 30% more damage at max range. So they would have to add Projectile Spell damage and I'm not sure if that modifier already exists, should be doable though.

The minor nodes should keep attack speed only. Small note too, making Far Shots more accessible would also benefit builds utilizing 20% increased Area of Effect. There aren't to many, mostly Fireball and Arctic Breath, even though it might be harder to get the jewels a Far Shots, Rolling Flames Fireball Deadeye might be a possibility, which doesn't mean that it is necessarily OP, fun though it would likely be.

"

Emphasy wrote:

Uhm... that is totally ehm not right. ... For attack based builds this node is really great.

Yeah... ya caught me. It's 2% more damage base, multiplied by your Chaos and Projectile damage modifiers. With 200% proj dmg, GMP, and Pierce gem (or Proj Weakness curse), the node gives (.02*(1+2)*.75*1.3=) ~6% more average damage, with a conditional crit bonus tacked on. It's worth maybe a bit more damage than a Frenzy charge, on average. Not the worst.

"

For the Bleed though to get at least half the duration on average you might want about 4 aps.

The problem is that mobs have a finite amount of health. If it takes 20 hits to kill a boss, there's a (.9^20=) ~12% chance that the bleed never procs at all. After 10 hits, there's still a ~35% chance of not proccing the bleed. These numbers only get worse if you're hoping to proc bleed with a crit, factoring accuracy, etc. For builds whose single target only hits once (like Frenzy), those builds can only count on it proccing about once or twice per fight. For builds that hit multiple times with their single-target (TS, Blast Rain) the bleed is less useful because of the smaller bleed-proccing hit. On top of that, any ele conversion (PtL, Hatred, Lightning Arrow) is very bad synergy with this node.

In fact, the node has slight anti-synergy with itself. One of the benefits of bleed damage (and degen in general) is that it allows the character to move while still dealing damage. But if there's a damage bonus that only applies during bleed, then the character is incentivized to keep attacking even though the target is already taking degen. That's not a deal-breaker, but it feels bad/wasteful.
Also, this feels like a node that benefits non-crit bow builds by giving them "mini crits" in the poison and bleed damage, but then both of those statuses only provide benefits for crit builds.

I guess I'm convinced that the node has potential, but currently it's so far out of the meta that I just can't see anyone taking the node. It ideally would be a build that a) does not otherwise poison, b) uses mostly or all phys damage, c) attacks quickly but also has high damage-per-hit for bleed, or builds high aps to get the crit multi bonus from bleed while ignoring the bleed damage itself.

I mean, Far Shot is conditional damage too, but to a far lesser degree. With Blast Rain + King of the Hill, Far Shot can be guaranteed added damage, for any damage type. Sharp&Venomous is luck-based and doesn't even require that bad of luck to do nothing.

"

So my suggestion:

Sharp and Venomous get "with attacks" removed.
Powerful Precision gets a better wording to make it clear it works with any projectiles
Far Shots gets "Projectile Attacks and Spells" to make it different from "more projectile damage" to not allow double dipping Poison and Bleed*
Fast and Deadly gets 10% attack and cast speed

I agree with the Sharp&Venomous and Powerful Precision changes :) but I disagree with the last two because I don't think Deadeye should be a go-to class for spellcasters. I think it should be viable, so there should be at least 1 path that is actually desirable for spellcasters, but I still think it should be attack-focused. I think the first change is enough of a buff to add some interest without being a severe change to what the class stands for.