Buff unique bows. (pretty please)

After last rotc nerf, all unique bows are mostly trash tier compared to Cheap rare bows, except for niche builds.

Two handed weapons have starforge, hegemony era and others, daggers have bino's and amazing passives, claws have scourge, howa and others (and amazing nodes as well now) wands have the most op barrage build and void batteries, swords have varunastra, but bows? To hell with them.

Lioneyes glare for example, buff the crit a bit (5>6%) and its perfect. edit: Ok ive heard about a few builds with this one, great, still much worst than a relic rotc and a decent rolled harbinger (i've tested it on path of building now). Plus, someone pointed out, which i've discovered recently through the worst way, that LG is awful when used with attacks on reflect damage mobs because if you had any evasion, it could mitigate reflect damage, but not agains't it... since reflect damage uses your own accuracy against you (i.e. 100% chance to hit, all reflected damage is instantly taken).

Voltaxic, same thing, needs more crit, maybe an implicit, maybe more chaos conversion for attacks (not spells)..... I've used it (near max roll, +1 power charges/+1 arrow) before i got a relic rotc, and boy, the difference is HUGE, like 3x more dps with rotc...

The infractem, needs a bit of aps + not being able to leech IS PAINFUL.
Chin sol/darkscorn, more aps.
Slivertongue is a joke, so is nuro's harp i guess and many others.
Xophs nurture aps is another joke, usable for some niche build's ive heard.
Death opus has so much potential, but it could use another fated transformation (lol 2x times fated) to boost it's APS or something.

Just remembered about roth's reach, which has 2 prophecies that cause it to drop, maybe one of them was intended to actually be a fated version of it? If it was, i know it would be great (increase the aps + physical damage on the fated version plz)

Also, crafting rare bows (and weapons in general) is NOT. WORTH IT, too much RNG (unless you are wealthy or too dedicated). Therefore, the need for unique endgame viable is even more dire, specially for bows atm.>> Just a reminder that i know uniques are not supposed to be better or even near top rolled rare items, i like this design, and trust me, or check it yourself with path of building program... unique bows are nowhere near being better than top notch rares.

one question: are you for real?

He's right though, RotC was nerfed to utter mediocrity and most of older bows were never that useful to begin with. Silvertongue will probably remain the 1 alch reskin bow. Nuro's Harp is crippled by GGG's nonsensical approach to mechanics like Consecrated Ground being cast on the enemy and not yourself and the fact that converting damage to element remains superior. Stuff like Infractem and Darkscorn remain useless. Chin Sol and Doomfletch Prism are niche but have their uses. Lioneye's Glare is still great but its usefulness is greatly crippled by the retarded reflect mechanics this game has so it's written off by default once you're past leveling phase. Death's Opus is pretty great though, and sadly it beats stuff that's much harder to obtain by a pretty long shot. Xoph's Nurture looks great on paper but seeing how it's another 1 alch item, I guess it isn't that great right now.

It feels like GGG is trying really hard to keep unique bows unappealing for some reason, while continuously tossing in absolutely insane "melee" two handers, after abandoning the concept of melee ages ago with all the ranged widescreen skills.

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Raudram wrote:

He's right though, RotC was nerfed to utter mediocrity and most of older bows were never that useful to begin with.

LG used to be BiS, and is still very strong.
Reflect can be a problem, there are ways to somewhat deal with it though.

Doomprism also still pretty freaking strong afaik.

RotC was just overshadowing everything else ... and now it seems that people don't want to go back to using 'normal' high end bows instead, idk.

As much as I would like to see a better unique bow (or the RotC nerf reversed), I don't think I can complain to much since I get to use pretty awesome quivers with my bow too.

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Raudram wrote:

He's right though, RotC was nerfed to utter mediocrity and most of older bows were never that useful to begin with. Silvertongue will probably remain the 1 alch reskin bow. Nuro's Harp is crippled by GGG's nonsensical approach to mechanics like Consecrated Ground being cast on the enemy and not yourself and the fact that converting damage to element remains superior. Stuff like Infractem and Darkscorn remain useless. Chin Sol and Doomfletch Prism are niche but have their uses. Lioneye's Glare is still great but its usefulness is greatly crippled by the retarded reflect mechanics this game has so it's written off by default once you're past leveling phase. Death's Opus is pretty great though, and sadly it beats stuff that's much harder to obtain by a pretty long shot. Xoph's Nurture looks great on paper but seeing how it's another 1 alch item, I guess it isn't that great right now.

It feels like GGG is trying really hard to keep unique bows unappealing for some reason, while continuously tossing in absolutely insane "melee" two handers, after abandoning the concept of melee ages ago with all the ranged widescreen skills.

unique bows can be used up to and including end end end game. scaling bows have is monstrous and 300pdps bow is perfectly fine

the only two bows i just do not understand are: Nuros Harp and Darkscorn

first one is GGG pretending that phys conversions do not exist and pretending that minor utility matters

second one is most likely intended as a caster bow (no matter how i hate this 'design')

every other bow is a clear leveling weapon or can be made usable in endgame

i would much better liked them nerfing some bows (Opus..) than reintroducing auto-wins like original RotC. double dip changes might help a bit but i doubt they will make it in time..


oh.. and that hydra's bow. slivertongue it is? it is just weird. dezigned for POE2 maybe? it simply makes little sense in its current form.

Bows lack mostly in end-game scaling. You have crit, that is cool. But if you want to go crit-bow, you most likely want to go Ranger. Now, good luck dealing with reflect with your scaled up crit. Or forget about actually doing decent damage. Chaos/Double Dip aside, because they most likely will be gutted.

The main problem I see now is clearly visible on Shaper. I'm, of course, talking about character that have to deal with reflect and don't do Chaos/Double Dip shenanigans.
In order to complete that fight relatively comfortably, you need to have DPS so high, that T15 bosses do absolutely nothing to you. That in itself is pretty damn silly. But ok, so now you have retarded high DPS... but reflect exists.
So, you either tune down your DPS (and therefore forget about doing Shaper) or one-shot yourself the very first time you hit something with reflect.

The amount of HP Shaper has is probably because of how retarded double dip is, but nonetheless, the scale here is waaaay of. :@

But I digress... a lot. D:

Would I like to see unique bows buffed? Nope, not really. Too many uniques already overshadow good rolled rares. Evasion unique armor? Haha, you must be kidding!



I can't sell this thing for even 2ex.

If you want to have unique so good that you'd never want to swap it out, you'll have to make it VERY rare. Shavronnes level rare. And I don't really want to see 3/4 of bows to be that rare.
That said, the T1 rarity bows (Windripper) are lackluster. That I can totally agree on.

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Perq wrote:

Bows lack mostly in end-game scaling. You have crit, that is cool. But if you want to go crit-bow, you most likely want to go Ranger. Now, good luck dealing with reflect with your scaled up crit. Or forget about actually doing decent damage. Chaos/Double Dip aside, because they most likely will be gutted.

The main problem I see now is clearly visible on Shaper. I'm, of course, talking about character that have to deal with reflect and don't do Chaos/Double Dip shenanigans.
In order to complete that fight relatively comfortably, you need to have DPS so high, that T15 bosses do absolutely nothing to you. That in itself is pretty damn silly. But ok, so now you have retarded high DPS... but reflect exists.
So, you either tune down your DPS (and therefore forget about doing Shaper) or one-shot yourself the very first time you hit something with reflect.

The amount of HP Shaper has is probably because of how retarded double dip is, but nonetheless, the scale here is waaaay of. :@

But I digress... a lot. D:

Would I like to see unique bows buffed? Nope, not really. Too many uniques already overshadow good rolled rares. Evasion unique armor? Haha, you must be kidding!

I can't sell this thing for even 2ex.

If you want to have unique so good that you'd never want to swap it out, you'll have to make it VERY rare. Shavronnes level rare. And I don't really want to see 3/4 of bows to be that rare.
That said, the T1 rarity bows (Windripper) are lackluster. That I can totally agree on.

Because it is overpriced af for a decent 5-link.

I'm all for a Nuro's Harp buff or even Voltaxic

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MasterTBC wrote:

I'm all for a Nuro's Harp buff or even Voltaxic

QFT
Voltaxic is fucking bad since they nerfed the conversion (because of that braindead skill vaal spark - which needs to be deleted from the game). Any successful build using voltaxic would be more successful using a bow that has decent crit/ele damage. Reflect is scarcely an issue these days unless you run reflect maps, and 40% lightning damage is still enough to OS you in reflect maps unless you're doing sub 10k dps.

IMHO it needs to get '100% of lightning damage with attacks converted to chaos damage' or '60% of lightning damage converted to chaos damage' and '40% of lightning damage with attacks converted to chaos damage'.

Could also do with some actual crit, since crit seems to be the only way to scale bows inherently lower damage than other 2Hers.

Nuro's Harp is just a bad design. Chilled ground is cool and all but when the entire endgame is immune to chill it makes the biggest strength of this item irrelevant. They could double Nuro's ele dps and it still wouldn't be broken, only viable.