My Thoughts on Scourge Arrow

I have been playing a Doomfletch's Prism Scourge Arrow Deadeye for about 20 hours now, and I love the skill, but I have some feedback suggestions for it.


First of all, the good:
1. The damage of the skill is great, a fully charged shot plus the store pods can drop a boss's health significantly.
2. It doesn't feel very slow if you have decent investment. The skill itself has an 85% more attack speed modifier, which makes it pretty quick to hit a 5 stack shot in about a second or less. This makes it so that you aren't really staying still for too long.
3. The high damage arrow being fired where you aim feels very rewarding. I have found that it is fun to choose a main target, usually the rare in a pack and use the brief charge up time to aim at that monster, that way you can do a lot of damage to them, and the spore pods will finish off the rest of the pack around them.
4. The look, sound, and general feel of the skill is great. From a straight up aesthetics point of view, the skill is awesome with the green charge up and shot. The sound of the spores popping is really satisfying as well. Playing with the skill feels a lot more responsive than other skills as well, since you actually get to think about where you want to fire the shot to make the most out of it, unlike the fairly mindless play style of Tornado Shot where you just click and the whole screen dies.

And then the Bad:
1. Doors and Pebbles. The actual projectile is fairly wide, which is great in open areas, but it makes it so that shooting through a door is nigh impossible, as if even a pixel of the projectile collides with the doorway, the entire shot is stopped without leaving any spore pods. It seems that there are only a few degrees at which an arrow will actually make it through a door. This is something that simply should not be allowed with a skill of this type, as it is incredibly harsh and underwhelming when you spend time charging up (doing nothing in the meantime) just to have the arrow immediately stop, dealing no damage and leaving no spore pods.
2. The pods don't fire off enough projectiles to clear reliably even with Pierce in my opinion. There is too much distance between each projectile to reliably cover the screen, and adding more projectiles doesn't really help unless you are adding an unreasonable amount of projectiles, such as by using GMP, LMP, and other sources at once, which would lower your damage to the point that it would be impractical. I have found however, that Chain works amazingly for the spore pods, as it let's the pods redirect themselves.
3. Spore spread. This may be a bit more personal preference, but I do not like how putting your cursor farther away causes the spores to spread out more, I would much rather they be in a fixed spread as though you were aiming just in front of your character so they are clumped up.
4. Sometimes the spore pods are a bit unreliable. This just comes down to chance, as it is always possible that the pods decide to just not aim at the target you are, and result in you dealing less damage than expected.

What I would do with Scourge Arrow:
Honestly, I wouldn't change it much mechanically. The main thing I would do is change the way it works around doors and obstacles.
1. First I would want the main projectile to not be blocked by obstacles unless a significant portion of the arrow is being blocked. This would make it more lenient with doors, as so long as at least half or so of the arrow would make it through, it would still go to deal damage. (This same fix could be implemented with skills such as Freezing Pulse as well)
2. Change the way spores are placed, make them still appear even if the arrow is blocked by an obstacle. First, I would remove the increasing spread of the spores based off of the cursor position, so that they are always as clumped as possible. Additionally, I would make it so that the spores are always placed even if the main arrow is blocked by an obstacle. Make it so that they are placed via pathfinding or placed randomly around the obstacle when the arrow is blocked. This would make it less punishing if the main arrow is blocked, as the spores could still appear and pop so the skill isn't wasted because you fired in the same direction as a pebble.
Alternatively, perhaps the spores are placed in a clumped around the cursor rather than in a line. This would allow for remote placement of them and would give you more control over their placement. It could also enable some cool uses of the skill. (Compare this idea to if you were to throw some EK nova traps)
3. A fairly simple solution to the area coverage issue would be to just increase the amount of projectiles fire by each spore. Perhaps increasing the spore projectile count to 10 instead of 7 would feel more reliable. Maybe this could be a Labyrinth enchant?
4. Improve spore targeting. Make it so that when spores explode, they target the nearest enemy. This would make the skill more reliable since it would remove the random aspect from it.

What I would NOT do:
Really there is only one thing I do not want them to change, and that is that I DON'T want to see extra projectiles added to the initial shot. I feel like this would take away from the feel of the skill, the clear is not supposed to come from the main arrow. Adding more projectiles to the main shot would also do weird things with the spores. Either the spores would be spread out between each projectile, which really wouldn't help clear at all, and would just be weird, or each arrow would create a path of spores, which would make extra projectiles mandatory for the skill, and I don't think that is in the spirit of the skill design.
If additional projectiles for the main arrow are in it's future, I think it should be done like so: Only the middle arrow would leave spores (in the case of an even number of projectiles, the spore placement alternates between the middle two). Each side arrow will also place a single spore nearest to the player. This would provide some good incentive to adding more projectiles, but also wouldn't be too strong.

All in all, I love this skill, and think it only needs some minor changes to make it great.
What do you think of Scourge Arrow as of now?

I'll make it simple of my thoughts.

It's dogshit see if it was like blade flurry it would of been fine but your COMPLETELY vulnerable charging.

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I_NO wrote:

I'll make it simple of my thoughts.

It's dogshit see if it was like blade flurry it would of been fine but your COMPLETELY vulnerable charging.

You really aren't vulnerable for too long though, the 85% More attack speed helps to mitigate that a lot. Against normal mobs you really don't need to reach the maximum stacks. Against bosses, you will generally have enough time to fully charge a shot.

I agree that it is definitely a drawback, but I don't think that it should be removed. Rather the other aspects of the skill could be buffed or something so that it makes up for the drawback.

Additionally, Blade Flurry is a very powerful skill, and the argument could be made that perhaps it should be nerfed to a more balanced state. Comparing an "underpowered" skill to an overtuned one is not a very good way to look at it.

My biggest problem with Scourge Arrow is that it repeats the exact mistake they made (and corrected) with Charged Dash: you simply cannot have a channeled skill that does nothing while channeling. The main drawback of channeling skills is the risk that comes with having to be stationary, and they incentivize this with ramping damage. But fully backloading the damage to the release of the skill is suicidal. With something like Blade Flurry or Incinerate, you can attack a pack with a rare and kill the trash while charging up, then finish the rare with the release. With Scourge Arrow, you kill nothing until release, and there's an additional delay for the pods to explode. That simply doesn't work with the glass cannon design of mobs in PoE. It's also bad for clear speed, and punishes the player for channeling any amount of time after reaching maximum stages. The backloading doesn't work well while delving, either, as the crawler can move to put monsters in darkness by the time the spore pods erupt.

The doorway/obstacle thing is bad, too, and it's exacerbated by the previous, because there's no way to know if the projectile will clear the door until firing. Here's my fix to both of these:

1) Lower the damage slightly, maybe 10-15%.
2) The primary arrow is no longer fired on release and no longer creates spore pods. Additional projectiles can add primary arrows.
3) Instead, the primary arrow is fired on the first stage, then again every two stages gained thereafter (or equivalent amount of time at maximum stages). This gives the skill some immediacy and also allows the player to adjust their aim to pass through a doorway.
5) On release, the character fires a number of spores equal to the stages gained in a randomized area spread around the cursor. This also solves the doorway issue where even if the arrow goes through, some pods are on the wrong side. A clump also makes it more likely to hit a single target with all the pods.

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Elendarulianreo wrote:

2) The primary arrow is no longer fired on release and no longer creates spore pods. Additional projectiles can add primary arrows.

This is the exact thing I do not want to see with the skill. I feel like doing this would get rid of some of it's identity.

One thing that I was thinking could be cool is, since the skill is without a doubt inspired by The Constrictor elder guardian, perhaps it releases a ton of wild curving projectiles while channelling just like his "Arrow Volley" attack.

Make it a wand skill gem.

Playing a poison focused Scourge Arrow build, I can agree with a few things, doorways and corners are the bane of it, pods get eaten by corners or worse the entire arrow. This makes indoor maps a bit of a chore. But outside and against bosses it does shine. The DPS is incredible and the clear, especially with poison proliferate is just nuts. I offscreen to a point where I can only tell where drops are thanks to minimap symbols.

I love the identity of the skill that it only gets devestating on release. Especially stacking some attack speed, I'm at a point where I have to hold down about as long to fully charge as you're locked in place when you use multistrike on a melee skill, with the upside that I can release at any point.

I really don't hope that they don't vastly rework the skill during the league, I feel like that could potentially ruin my build.

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Telperion_sr wrote:

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Elendarulianreo wrote:

2) The primary arrow is no longer fired on release and no longer creates spore pods. Additional projectiles can add primary arrows.

This is the exact thing I do not want to see with the skill. I feel like doing this would get rid of some of it's identity.

That's fine. It doesn't really matter as far as my proposed rework is concerned.