Where's the love for ground targeted bow skills?

yeah, additional projectile this, additional projectile that, returning projectiles support, nimis, tattoos, notables, bow/quiver mods for additional arrows, we get it ggg, you want tornado shot to be the best bow skill every league

but what about other bow skills? rain of arrow, storm rain, blast rain, artillery ballista... anything?

Out of interest what are you looking for here?

All of those are pretty viable - though I can't speak for artillery ballista I feel like the one time I was gonna play it I ended up shrapnel instead because I love them.

TS isn't really the best except for clearing where its getting on for the best skill in the game, maybe kinetic blast or explode on kill builds but still you get my point.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Out of interest what are you looking for here?

All of those are pretty viable - though I can't speak for artillery ballista I feel like the one time I was gonna play it I ended up shrapnel instead because I love them.

TS isn't really the best except for clearing where its getting on for the best skill in the game, maybe kinetic blast or explode on kill builds but still you get my point.

buffs, support gems, passives on the tree, unique items, whatever. and ts is pretty much the best for everything because the secondary projectiles can shotgun.

they're not that weak, but I think everyone will admit that they're pretty outdated at this point and not the best for anything, because every single league ggg keeps buffing other skills. additional projectile modifiers don't even work for skills like blast rain because it kinda screws single target dps

"TS is not really the best"

Meanwhile, the most played skill every league in the past few years is literally Tornado shot.

Bruh. It's totally overpowered. You can't even play normally a poison bow build on any other bow skill because the Tornado shot exceeds the performance of all other skills altogether...

My personal opinion about this, and I will totally agree with Auspexa, is that projectile skills should be reworked in a way that all projectiles should be able to hit the target with more than 1 projectile per attack/cast, regardless of what skill you're using. Respectively reducing the global sources of total projectiles for skills. For example the Lesser Multiple Projectiles should add just 1 additional projectile, GMP should add 2. Same for volley, etc. The skills' damage should also be reworked to balance the result from this change.
This will make literally all projectile skills a lot more viable.

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fostaa wrote:

"TS is not really the best"

Meanwhile, the most played skill every league in the past few years is literally Tornado shot.

Bruh. It's totally overpowered. You can't even play normally a poison bow build on any other bow skill because the Tornado shot exceeds the performance of all other skills altogether...

My personal opinion about this, and I will totally agree with Auspexa, is that projectiles skills should be reworked in a way that all projectiles should be able to hit the target with more than 1 projectile per attack/cast, regardless of what skill you're using. Respectively reducing the global sources of total projectiles for skills. For example the Lesser Multiple Projectiles should add just 1 additional projectile, GMP should add 2. Same for volley, etc. The skills' damage should also be reworked to balance the result from this change.
This will make literally all projectile skills a lot more viable.

Spoiler

A bit off topic: in addition to this idea, the Mark-on-hit support should be actually fixed (not just "changed", cus it's currently so absurd that I consider it a bug) so that it simply affects both spells and attacks.

even then, ground targeted bow skills are mechanically inferior because the attacks are always delayed. if anything, they should be stronger than other bow skills to compensate for the delay, but for some reason it's the opposite and TS is just the best for basically any bow build

projectile skills are someone's personal affection or something. addition of 'projectile return', Nimis and generic +proj tatoos is so baffling that there is no other explanation

and Tornado Shot IS the strongest skill in the game, bar none. it can do every playstyle (phys, ele, poison), it has dumb clear potential, it is compatible with each and every 'trick' there is and its single target is amazing

no matter what people do with Ice Shot, Tornado Shot is better in every way. no need for vaal skill, totem setup or gem swap. your clear is your single target and thanks to how returning projectiles work, it is the skill that benefits the most from them

mechanically 'ground targeted' skills are like melee - until you nerf Tornado Shot (and not by 4%, nuke it from orbit) there is no reason to ever touch Blast Rain or whatever that skill is called, it is pure garbage in comparison

get rid of ALL extra projectiles outside of specific skills and lmp/gmp/volley/gvolley. Skills with extra projectiles baked in (ts, split arrow, etc) should get a SEVERE damage penalty by default. EXCEPT in the case of ground-targeted skills like the rain skills.

It's not just TS that is the most powerful skill in the game....bow skills in general far outclass almost anything else you can hope to create, in clearspeed and budget. Perhaps not always for bossing, but EVERYTHING else is bowsbowsbows.

I'm not a fan of nerfing things, I prefer buffs to underperforming skills....but the projectile madness is just....madness. Too much has been added to the game that makes it damn near impossible to match bow skill coverage AND power.



Another thing that can help (which I know they just did the OPPOSITE): make bows roll 1h mods. The fact that you can use a 2H weapon, with 2H power levels, AND use a quiver with awesome defensive AND offensive capability....i mean the entire game is practically designed to make it so NOTHING can compete with bows.

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sidtherat wrote:

projectile skills are someone's personal affection or something. addition of 'projectile return', Nimis and generic +proj tatoos is so baffling that there is no other explanation

and Tornado Shot IS the strongest skill in the game, bar none. it can do every playstyle (phys, ele, poison), it has dumb clear potential, it is compatible with each and every 'trick' there is and its single target is amazing

no matter what people do with Ice Shot, Tornado Shot is better in every way. no need for vaal skill, totem setup or gem swap. your clear is your single target and thanks to how returning projectiles work, it is the skill that benefits the most from them

mechanically 'ground targeted' skills are like melee - until you nerf Tornado Shot (and not by 4%, nuke it from orbit) there is no reason to ever touch Blast Rain or whatever that skill is called, it is pure garbage in comparison

You do understand that's the whole problem, don't you?
We literally agreed on that on all comments until now.
And we're looking for a solution of this problem, bruh.


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jsuslak313 wrote:

i mean the entire game is practically designed to make it so NOTHING can compete with bows

This is wrong on so many levels and I don't even wanna go into the first step to argue.

the only solution is to a) tripple damage on Blast Rain (just an example of 'bad' skill) or b) nuke Tornado Shot from orbit (i mean like remove shotgunning of secondary projectiles or something of similar magnitude)

b) wont ever happen
a) wont make turd skill into great skill because Blast Rain has ZERO coverage and 'modern POE content' is 'monster soup' with mobs attacking you from every direction and constantly spawning around you. focused area skills like Blast Rain are useless and in fact should be removed (along with most melee skills that share the same problem). finally realising true (but unspoken of) vision GGG has for POE - bullet hell game with 500+ projectiles and mobs on the same screen

there are no other solutions. Tornado Shot and projectiles in general are SO BROKEN right now that there is no longer any weakness, or niche that other skills can excel and compete

TS has best clear, single target and mechanic compatibility making it - ironically - also easiest to scale thus cheaper

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auspexa wrote:

even then, ground targeted bow skills are mechanically inferior because the attacks are always delayed.

And other things too.

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auspexa wrote:

if anything, they should be stronger than other bow skills to compensate for the delay, but for some reason it's the opposite and TS is just the best for basically any bow build

DPS-comparing Artillery Ballista with TS from simple vanilla perspective:

TS: 120% * #arrows *hit_chance_per_arrow
AB: #totems * (#arrows + 5) * 0.5as * 65% *hit_chance_per_arrow

AB totem count: 7
#arrows: 8
Guessing hit-chance-per-arrow (with TS enchant, without AB enchant):
TS: 0.8
AB: 0.65

=>
TS: 1.2 * 8 * 0.8 = 7,68
AB: 7 * 13 * 0.5 * 0.65 * 0.65 = 19.2

So in terms of achievable DPS on one link Artillery Ballista is far superior to Tornado Shot. Even if you add 40% more for Deadeye its still ahead. This is blatantly ignoring various things. But the base balance here actually is so that the ground targeted skill does have better numbers.

Also IIRC from pure DPS vs static target Storm Rain may be even better than Artillery Ballista. I dont have numbers handy for it though.

Edit: TS ballista gives ~= 7.68 * 5totems *0.5as *0.76link /1.4linkcost ~= 10.4