Some thoughts on Crossbow Ammo Skills

I'm enjoying my crossbow witchhunter for the most part but right now some ammo skills specifically feel significantly less smooth than most of the other skills in the game. Ice strike monk is so smooth that its ridiculous, but even other spells I've tried as a Witch/Sorceress feel so smooth and fun to use. Hell, the crossbow grenades all feel solid and great too!

My problem #1 is that the ammo skills can be a little clunky to use, even if they are effective. Glacial Bolt -> Fragmentation Rounds to clear is insanely satisfying to watch + the sound/visual effects are great, but its slow and clunky and really awkward to try to regularly use in endgame maps (especially in Breaches) where there are far more monsters than there are in a campaign area. Basically I end up moving backwards and poorly freezing a small batch of 2-3 mobs and extremely slowly kill packs with that method.

Problem #2 is that the build-up and pay-off crossbow ammo skills feel like a lot of work to do a small increase in damage, at least vs a boss. Freeze gets consumed when you hit a frozen target with Fragmentation Rounds, Broken Armour gets consumed when you hit a target with High Velocity Rounds, meanwhile Shockburst Rounds do NOT consume Shock and can still destroy a target as long as the Shock debuff is still on the enemy. I DO NOT want shockburst nerfed, I just want the payoff skills to be significantly better since they get rid of the debuff entirely.

The main issue i have with crossbows, while i understand why its like this, you are punished severely when you have to attack then immediately dodge roll. For this reason I'm just using gas + explosion grenade with oil grenade for exposure. I do use explosive shot occasionally but not as often as i feel like i should.

Get rid of the individual ammo counters/load skills and just add ammo as a secondary resource.



Yellow is spirit (not that we actually need a meter for it, you aren't spending it during combat), red could track ammo or another secondary resource.

Different shot types already have attack speed modifiers. They don't need to mess around with clip size restrictions on top of that.