Crossbow Skill Change Ideas

At a baseline, I've been really enjoying POE2 lately, but I feel like the crossbow is in a bit of a weird spot.

Grenades, Explosive shot, Shockburst, and Galvanic rounds are all in a pretty good spot currently. They feel pretty good to use, and they have a decent time with maps.

However, I feel there is a general lack of synergy between skills. Skills will generally interact with individual skills, but not with the wider pantheon that crossbows offer. In addition, some skills requiring an ammo swap before use makes them both clunkier and have less uptime when they probably shouldn't.

==Examples==
Rapid Shot - Decent, if underpowered skill. Lotta potential. However, most skills don't interact with heat in any way, and builds that do would generally rather not run it. Basically impossible to run in any build that needs ammo swaps.

High Velocity Round - Generally weak compared to most other options. Rarely gets use out of its damage because its faster to kill enemies than to break their armor and swap ammo.

Plasma Blast - Despite incredibly high attack numbers, the massive slow-down on use(2 full seconds plus attack speed and reload) makes it infeasible for clearing maps with, and makes fighting bosses tedious, as you can get substantially more out of grenades.

Siege Cascade - Very interesting skill with a lot of potential. However, the bolts rain down too slowly, and enemies will often move out of the way of them before they are hit by the bolt OR the detonation. It already can't be used for single target with its 'each enemy in area' bit, but it can't even be used for dealing with packs. Also doesn't interact with normal projectile mechanics like pierce or fork.

Hailstorm Rounds - See Siege Cascade.

Fresh Clip - Actively has ANTI synergy with the other crossbow skills, as well as passives on the tree. '25% chance to not consume a bolt' actively hurts its scaling, and its on a number of big crossbow nodes. Not to mention its not best in slot for anything save Armor Piercing/Rapid Shot/Shockburst. It also takes 6 seconds to fully ramp even on those builds, so it'll always be a niche choice, even with 100% uptime.

Auto Reload - Most crossbow skills are not held back by their reload time, they are held back by their ammo capacity. This gem would only potentially be useful in a situation where the reload time would be worth skipping, and going for 100% chance not to consume a bolt wouldn't be better. Plainly put, this support is kinda useless, and making it more useful would be tricky. Not to even mention that if you're heavy stunning most enemies, they are likely already about to be dead, if not dead already.

==Suggestions==
-Make some ammo types not require ammo swaps, like the grenade skills. I can easily see siege cascade being added into many builds this way.
-Make heat used/interacted with by more skills. Having more heat generation would be great, as well as more heat retention and ways to spend.
-Make fresh clip better and less swingy. Its pretty useless for the most part, save on rapid firing builds, but I feel like it could/should be a lot better for builds that go that route.
-Make crossbow skills either have better scaling to keep up with grenade skills, or allow for more interactions between skills, or both.

Anyhow, that's my 2 cents. Really like the game, feel like crossbows could be in a better state without buffing the things that they're already good at.