Fully Broken Armor Detonators (High Velocity Rounds/Exploit Weakness) Need Some Love.

TL-DR: Armor break is a fun mechanic with some use in it, but the detonation of fully broken armour though High Velocity Rounds or Exploit Weakness support is massively underpowered and not worth the effort of breaking the armor to utilise.

Let me start this by saying I am -Loving- the game. The first 50 hours have been almost everything I could have dreamed PoE 2 would be, and everything I have wanted out of an ARPG for over a decade. The story, music, environments, characters, moment to moment gameplay and RPG mechanics are all top-notch, and in many places exceed GGG's usual stellar standard. I have my complaints and gripes, but only because I want to see the game be everything I hope it can be. IMO, GGG have done a truly exceptional job with the game.

As my main character right now, I'm playing a crossbow merc, currently resorting to a mix of Rapid shot and plasma blast, both of which are good fun to play. However, the build I really wanted to play was Armor Piercing rounds, and High Velocity Rounds.

The idea of using the APR to break the armor and set up a heavy stun, then wait for an opening to detonate the fully broken armor with HVR seemed like a fantastic way to play. Paired with a grenade skill for dealing with swarms of trash mobs, it was a build that was complicated enough to be interesting, but not so skill juggly as to be overwhelming to me.

Sadly, it was far more effective to just attach a 'split shot' to the HVR, and spam that.

This is something I would like to suggest be looked into. HVR is listed as a 'payoff' skill, however there's no payoff to an interaction when using it actually hurts your capability.

Personally, I would rework High Velocity Rounds:
A) Make it highlight Fully Armor Broken targets,
B) Reduce it's base damage to normal targets but Vastly increase it's damage versus Fully Armor Broken targets, even as high as 4-5x it's current level.
C) Give it a 1-1.5s total attack time, and an 8-10s Total Cooldown

This would make it a wonderful, situational heavy target / bosskiller that requires not only setting up with another skill, but also waiting for an appropriate opening to actually get the skill off, but then reward the player with a huge damage spike for achieving this correctly. The cooldown would make it non spammable and would even prevent scatter shot from making it unreasonable, since only the first hit would consume the fully broken armor and get the damage boost.

Thanks again to GGG for making a wonderful game that is a huge amount of fun to play.

+1

Looks like a lot of prep work, but the payout seems hardly worth the effort despite how much GGG hyped up that mechanic/playstyle in older streams.

+1

I think "build up" payoffs make boss fights and rare battles significantly more engaging. Static and steady damage is not as engaging, but not every build has access to those types of playstyles so GGG is probably trying to find a decent compromise around multipliers.

Rapid Fire with a shitload of grenades is a lot better if you like that playstyle. You can even slap Envenom and Corrosion on Rapid Fire to get armor break and then Armour Explosion to get the payoff. No need to swap between 2 ammo types.

Personally though I prefer Fresh Clip so I can just have 60%+ increased damage up constantly.

Rapid fire + grenades just means I'm using my group clear skills as my boss DPS, something I was trying to avoid, because then the game just devolves into 'spam these two skills at everything', and there's significantly less finesse involved. Plus, that's not setting up a payoff to exploit, just using one skill to maintain a buff for another. Its a very different playstyle, and different philosophy.

if the skill swap wasnt so clunky it would probably work better but as it stands now I'd rather just spam one skill than switch between skills as an xbow merc. Do other classes have this wierd pause between switching to a skill and using it? It feel so slow and everything thats NOT you is so fast.

"

Doomhammer5#4010 wrote:

if the skill swap wasnt so clunky it would probably work better but as it stands now I'd rather just spam one skill than switch between skills as an xbow merc. Do other classes have this wierd pause between switching to a skill and using it? It feel so slow and everything thats NOT you is so fast.

Specifically with crossbow, I've found that a lot of that delay is attributed to having to reload the crossbow if you left it on an empty mag when you switched away. Improving my crossbow reload improved that immensely. Haven't really noticed much of a delay between using other skills on either my merc or sorc otherwise.

"

KreldinFoxclaw#2687 wrote:

Rapid fire + grenades just means I'm using my group clear skills as my boss DPS, something I was trying to avoid, because then the game just devolves into 'spam these two skills at everything', and there's significantly less finesse involved. Plus, that's not setting up a payoff to exploit, just using one skill to maintain a buff for another. Its a very different playstyle, and different philosophy.

I understand that, I'm just stating how it is now.

id even go so far and make HVR instantly reload if it consumed broken armor. and increase damage dealt by ailments.

given that monks just onetap entire screens with froststrike and a bell... yea feels a little underwhelming

+1