Witchhunter Ascendancy Feedback
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I've spent EA feeling out Mercenary and then comparing it to other classes. I don't play much POE 1 but wanted to learn the game in POE 2 by going SSF so excuse any ignorance i might have.
Weapon Master and Prior points - Maybe reduce it to 10 point and add a damage modifier to it with weapon swap speed or something. I get what they are trying to go with this but I never found myself needing more than then allotted weapon swap point you get from just leveling up. Culling strike into Decimating strike - Another rework needed IMO. The current climate doesn't feel like a boss or rares need a reduction in HP given the damage that is being produced. Perhaps make this into full investment into a culling strike by increasing the threshold? Concentration Branch - Completely needs a rework. I don't know of any reason to take this. You lower the boss ability casts but again, damage out there in game makes this a wasted branch of the ascendancy because they die too fast. Sorcery Ward My main gripe. Some people like this, but I think in the current state of defensives this will brick your character. You are sacrificing 50% evasion and armor for a passive that will absorb some elemental damage that evasion can already dodge. This also doesn't work vs chaos damage or ground effects. Now if you go some ES style build this is nulled but I think the intended build is to go armor/evasion and then sacrifice it for this. I don't understand the logic of this branch when you compare it to something like deadeye that starts in the same area and they get tailwind which provides no downside and investing fully into it gives them evasion, attack speed, movement speed and damage reduction. Fixing Sorcery Ward - Remove the reduction in armor and evasion from taking it. - Add chaos damage to the elemental hits list - Reduce the scaling and recovery time of it Zealous Inquisition I honestly think this is the best two points you can spend early on for leveling. It feels so good when it pops. I don't think any changes need to be made to it. Last bumped on Jan 1, 2025, 5:15:40 PM
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" Agree wholeheartedly. The investment in 3 speeds is also ludicrous. Attack speed, reload time, cooldown recovery, swap speed. then have to reload again. Its a slog fest of slow ass nonsense compared to ANY other build. Playstyle is worse than Diablo 4.. which I quit for this fact alone. Base cool down recovery is 3 seconds lol. With end game maps having 65 less cooldown recovery making it about 5 seconds base.. and tied to your grenade attacks? Sure for travel skills and such. but if you make it above 90 (doubtful as there are less than 1% of over 90 players that are mercs and I am one of the sorry idiots) running high tier content, there is nothing worse than standing in a mob or constant dodge rolling where you can't attack in a game that suppose to be fun. this aint it. Merc SUCKS ass compared to literally every other build. Hell, choose deadeye with a crossbow and its better... until you realize a bow has the same damage and can use a quiver too. Its honestly the worst designed archtype Ive seen in a game despite its cool effect. Last edited by Tomorrowtech#4871 on Jan 1, 2025, 1:15:23 PM
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I agree, I actually rerolled to deadeye crossbows just to validate my opinions before providing this feedback. I lose a little bit of AOE clear without Zealous but I gained so much more just from tailwind.
After thinking about it some more I think going down the Weapon Master path could fix a lot of the crossbow issues - Remove Weapon Passive points - Add "All crossbow skills gain x additional clip size" - Add crossbow reload speed (somewhere in the 100-200% range) - Weapon Swap speed increased by x% Merc in general needs some work done to make thing flow a little better - Allowing reloading to occur automatically between ammunition swapping (perhaps as part of weapon master skill) or just make it base for the class. Why they allow grenades to reload but nothing else is questionable. - Bigger clip sizes either base line or through passives/ascendancy - Create or rework some skills to match galvanic shards style spread with their own elemental flavor - Remove the "Totem" style skills. We have limited support for these around our passive tree and it feels somewhat forced into the class to match a theme but they end up just being unused outside of maybe putting font of rage on one and using it as a buff - Add a bolt bag for the off hand that is quiver equivalent I want to like Merc but at the moment I will probably stay off it until witch hunter gets some love. |
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Shelved my merc because of how clunky the playstyle was.
Nades with their delayed damage made the pacing slow and clunky on maps where the nades would just fall off the terrain edge or bounce back in my face. Doorways or height changes were a challenge. Switched to galvanic shards build - but at higher levels it began to feel inadequate and lacked ability to scale damage beyond some very expensive jewels and very expensive rings. High cost of reloads in terms of mana also began to be problematic. I sold about half my gear and used 4 Div to gear out a stormancer who proceeded to easily demolish all the content that I had to struggle through as a Merc. This wasn't a gearing issue, lowest crossbow with same pdps as what I was using is 20divines right now. Sorc ward is actually a really neat idea and I like the concept, but as others said, the downsides are too harsh. Ranger is just in a better place as they are able to of screen the mobs far easier. For a large part of the endgame I was weapon swapping to a bow to lob stormcaller arrow to apply shock - and often that alone would clear the pack. It felt pretty wild to be using a 1ex box as much as my 20div crossbow...and seeing better results. I think you could do a bow using Witchhunter that would outperform the crossbow. |
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