[Merc] Rapid Shot does not work with the game's dessign philosophy

Glancing over the skill stats and description, you get a clear idea of what the goal with the skill is: You have to use it constantly to maintain high heat, and in exchange you are rewarded with enhanced damage and, more importantly, very enhanced grenade damage. That sounds great on paper, and I really wanted to like this skill. However the heat mechanic is too punishing in the current game that requires high downtime on bosses and many rares. I can weave in a single attack while keeping up heat, or I can weave in dodge rolls, but if I have to do both then heat will deplete faster than I can keep it up. This makes the skill effectively worthless on any boss except the forge dude which is basically just a DPS race anyhow.

The idea of rewarding players for mixing skills does not mesh with a skill that rewards you for only using that one skill, especially when most of the 'reward' is tied to using another skill. All of the bonus damage is fire damage, so the obvious thing for someone building around the skill is to mix it with oil grenades to maximise fire damage, however oil grenade does very little damage itself so you would want to weave in another grenade as the heavy hitter, but now you have a 3 skill rotation on a heat mechanic that can only barely support a 2 skill rotation under ideal circumstances. At this point you're better off just building for pure grenades and spamming an oil/gas/explosive rotation, with explosive shot on the crossbow to force early detonates when needed. This leaves you more mobile and from my own benchmarking gives you higher DPS anyhow.

There is also very few options for building around the heat mechanic - there is all of 1 node on the tree to help it (Buffs on you expire 10% slower), which has a barely noticeable impact.

My suggestion if you want to make the skill useable is to change the quality bonus from +max heat to +1% heat buildup speed AND -1% heat decay rate. Add a support for buff expiration similar to the skill tree node, and most importantly add a short delay before heat decay starts (around 0.2-0.25 seconds), so that you aren't overly punished if a boss requires you to dodgeroll twice in a row or makes you dodgeroll while already weaving in another skill/reloading.

Until some of the above are implemented, this skill simply doesn't have a place in the game as it is currently designed.

You are not supposed to keep for several cycles. At a tad above half of a cycle you already reach max damage. The idea is that you do not splityour clip....


My experience is that MErecnary/crossbow is the mechanic that is working BEST by far in this game.