Where's the love for ground targeted bow skills?

It's not about damage, it's about damage projection.

Heavy Strike could literally do 10x its current damage, and it would still be garbage, because the skill is terrible at projecting its sheet DPS numbers onto enemies.

Tornado Shot, Lightning Arrow, etc are mechanically superior to skills like Blast Rain because their damage projection is so much better that they're not even playing the same SPORT.

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fostaa wrote:

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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.

I mean....it's not. For more leagues than I can count, bows have been used in nearly 1/3 or more than 1/3 of ALL builds on PoE Ninja. For more leagues than I can count, projectile skills (spell and bow) have been the top build (sometimes 3 or 4 of the top 5 skills). Projectile builds and bows in general have received buffs both indirect and direct, while nearly everything else has received nerfs.

You can make kickass wand builds. You can make kickass 2H builds. You can make awesome shield builds...I'm not saying you CAN'T. I'm saying the balance of this game is so heavily skewed towards bows and bow power that its damn near impossible to get rid of the bow meta at this point without a total overhaul of the entire projectile system itself.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

It's not about damage, it's about damage projection.

<snip>

Tornado Shot, Lightning Arrow, etc are mechanically superior to skills like Blast Rain because their damage projection is so much better that they're not even playing the same SPORT.

If you are responding to me: I wasnt saying anything about Blast Rain. And Artillery Ballista does have issues. Its however not terrible for everything. And at low cost/invest levels its better than Tornado Shot, especially if not Deadeye.

i had an acc stacker jugg art balista. it dealt shapers-per-second paper damage, that was before nerf to abyss %accuracy if you havent killed jewels. i had LOTS of these jewels.

but its clear speed was hot garbage (targeting, delay). it was worse than strike skill + splash in fact (placing totems, totems dying all the time, mobs moving away, all ground degens)

and ofc with 8 totems you cant see shit, like literally - you cannot see ground at all

same story for Storm Rain. its peak damage is probably the best in the game. but that requires target to not move and preferably not to fight back, because you need 100 planted arrows for max dps. and that is A LOT of arrows, even with totems (placement time, totems dying.. etc)

my experience is opposite - at low, mid and high investment TS is superior. at low levels - your totems die too much and you mostly get 2-3 volleys and they die, at mid investment you start running out of scaling for totems (extra projectiles do not help because they do not hit the hitbox) and at high investment (and playing juiced stuff) your totems both die quickly and cannot hit shit due to delay and firing patter

sure, it was cool to setup 'turrets' and kill anything in 10 seconds, the damage was bonkers. but with that character i could made Split Arrow look like hot shit

with both AB and TS experience i would never, ever pick AB in a competitive setting

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sidtherat wrote:

but its clear speed was hot garbage (targeting, delay).

It does not have top tier clear speed. If you want ok clear you need to build for it and pick suitable map layouts. AB clear is bad in open layouts. In tight lanes (Crater, parts of Lookout, probably Toxic Sewer etc) its better.

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sidtherat wrote:

all ground degens)

For mapping: Player skill issue - those builds need to be played with preempting not with reacting. For bossing: Agree, this is annoying/bad.

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sidtherat wrote:

and ofc with 8 totems you cant see shit, like literally - you cannot see ground at all

One of the bads of AB, do not disagree.

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sidtherat wrote:

same story for Storm Rain. its peak damage is probably the best in the game. but that requires target to not move and preferably not to fight back, because you need 100 planted arrows for max dps. and that is A LOT of arrows, even with totems (placement time, totems dying.. etc)

Cant comment on Storm Rain, never played.

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sidtherat wrote:

at low levels - your totems die too much and you mostly get 2-3 volleys and they die,

Unless you are talking about upper bossing - didnt do any of that with AB ever IIRC: Does not match my personal experience. I have read this kind of complaint alot about totem builds but my take/experience is: You need to replace totems and watch the totem count in the buff bar. Then its not a big deal.

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sidtherat wrote:

at mid investment you start running out of scaling for totems (extra projectiles do not help because they do not hit the hitbox)

I have tested this and my results suggested that effective DPS is multiplied by number of arrows. Meaning the testing suggested that the spread range is identical independent of the number of arrows. I did not test with the AB helmet enchant though. According to some comments it has better arrow hit count with the "right" AoE investments.

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sidtherat wrote:

and at high investment (and playing juiced stuff) your totems both die quickly and cannot hit shit due to delay and firing patter

Have no AB experience with "at high investment". If DPS is good enough for mechanically better skills then AB is IME too clunky and unreliable for mapping.
If you look at poe.ninja you will however see that its popular as a second skill for LA builds: https://poe.ninja/builds/ancestor?skills=Artillery+Ballista In that setup some of the issues with it are not such issues especially if using 'focused ballista' which most of those builds do use.