Merc/Crossbow balancing suggestions

First i'd like to say that i really like the feel to crossbowplay and the abilities but there are some big issues with crossbows and mercenary skills in my opinion which could easily be balanced.
After 300 Hours played on Merc i think i got a good understanding for what could be improved.

1.) Reloading Mechanic
I understand that there are a lot of Interactions on supportgems and the Tree with reloading - which would be fine if reloading didnt have so many issues.

* Reloadspeed/Attackspeed:
The Problem with 2 Instances there is that things like Temporal Chains or Chill influences Crossbow players 3x (Reload-, Attack- & Movement- speed), while all the other options only get slowed in attack/cast and Movespeed.
This is allready a bad thing but other things about reloading add up to that issue

* Movementspeed Penalty while Reloading:
While Reloading your Movementspeed slows down significantly which is first of all flow-breaking for gameplay and additionally leaves you open for being Attacked. which leads into the next problem.

* Interruption of Reloading:
Basicly everything can interrupt the process of reloading, for me it looks like its not only being stunned or dodgerolling, it feels like being attacked at all during the ~0.8 seconds of reload time sometimes interrupts it and makes it feel as if the crossbow "jams" and you have to try to reload multiple times which oftentimes makes you unable to attack for a long time and often die because of it.

*General Clunkyness
It feels super clunky to switch bolts - thats it, just doenst feel fluid and the Interactions from the Tree or Supportgems dont feel rewarding enough to switch bolt more than only for bosskilling.

Suggestions to fix this:
Here are some possible Solutions for those problems. The first 2 should be done anyways for balancing-reasons:

*Seperate Reloading from all ways of Interruption or Influence on Speed
(meaning make it so reloading cant be interrupted other than being stunned or frozen, make it not being slowed down by Temp chains or chill)

*Remove the movementspeed penalty while reloading!!!

* Increasing the Clipsize of Bolt by Like 3-5 Bolts - especcialy on the 1Bolt Ammunitions.

*Give us specific Quivers that reduce Reloadspeed significantly (could add the first suggestion there too)

*Remove Reloading and its Interactions (would make Crossbows just be different looking bows, but Swords/axes are also just different looking Maces if you view it from that perspective)



2.) Granades

Currently Granades feel pretty bad as the Monsters are just too fast and dangerous to wait until something explodes to kill them.
Also the Mana-Cost is WAAAAY to high.

They feel impactfull as utility - but utility skills with such a high mana cost removes its purpose for using them on non-granade-focused builds.


Suggestions to fix this:

* (at least) Half the Fuse duration for all the Granades

* Give more options to reduce Fuse duration without reducing general skill duration (on Gas Granades, normal "reduce skill effect duration" is bad because the duration the gas stays is reduced too which eliminates build options that are not focused on explosiondamage)

* Reduce the Mana cost


3.)Ascendancy

Gemling Legionaire
is kinda fine but doesnt really promote the Archetype of the Merc. (Crossbow or Granade)
In fact the best Gemling Build is not using Merc-Skills at all - thats sad.
The +max res also seems kinda Unimpactful, but that might be a tuning issue for elemental (especcially fire) damage.

Witchhunter

Compared to other forms of Defense (that might be better than intended currently) Sorcery Ward's 50% Penalty to Armour and Evasion feels too harsh.
Sorceryward feels pretty good in general though.

The Explode Node feels pretty unneccessary due to Heralds.

Concentration is in a weird spot - its pretty useless for Mapping and bosses are just too overtuned in their damageoutput to really make use of the Mechanic.

Culling Strike being nerfed compared to Poe1 feels odd. I dont like it - thats kinda it.

Weapon Master (Weapon set Skill points)

I really dont see any reason to take this. It might be pretty strong later on when doing a Mercenary that uses Meele & Ranged combat but this honestly then should be combined with a Similar Node like the Gemling legionaire's 2 Extra Skill Slots.


4.) Things i hope will get changed about the game in general:

* The 1 Portal thing - i think most of the community agrees - its too punishing, especcially in Bossbattles or citadels. Please change it!!

* Class and Defense Balancing - obvious thing GGG will for sure do until the launch

*On Death Effects / Untargetable Monsters
It feels like more than 50% of the monsters are periodicly Untargetable or have on Death Effects - i dont mind some monstertypes being that way - but its way too much

Oneshot-Endgame: It again feels like Poe1 thing: Kill fast or Die, while the options on the Player side are very limited compared to the speed monsters rush at you (especcially hasted ones) - There is a lot of Finetuning to do there.


I hope somebody will read this as it took some time to write xD
Open for discussion and curious what other people think about the crossbowthings

Some of this is out of sorts. Fully investing in reload speed on the tree, getting attack speed on your xbow, and not taking a long reload base does make it worth it.

The major issue is galvanic shards thumps and has six rounds so why build permafrost? ice and shatter with full reload speed is super fun and I was cruising. I put galvanic shards on to just look at it and with very little applicable on my tree it outshone perma/fragmentation for everything but swarmers.

I can't say enough nice about skill interactions, but the lack of bolts for permafrost and fragmentation make looking for plus 1/2 bolts mods and corruption is absolutely neccessary to make it purr and I don't want to look for that many mods. I'm also needing the support gem for chance to not consume a bolt. There is a decidedly uninteresting assortment of low level uniques to show you a couple archetypes in how you want the merc to hum, but uniques that interact with this brand new mechanic (reload) are precisely 1. as far as I've seen at least.

I'll wait on the merc. I did appreciate the loading mechanic a lot. I vastly prefer the load bolts and use one button for kill thing. I kinda wish i could change the behavior of my spam button with other skills.

Which Maplevel are we talking about?

I Play Explosive Shot / Shockburst currently and Played a Granade Build before.

I'm wondering how far you went with permafrost

Sound like we look at two completly different levels of gameplay to me, Permafrost and galvanic felt super underwhelming to me when it comes to t15 - t16 map mechanic gameplay.

Pinnaclebosses are generally a pain without the broken defenses other builds can have