600+ HOURS BOW ONLY USER FEEDBACK

Hey guys, I spend the majority of my time playing early access with only using bows and crossbows as my main weapons. Here's my feedback and opinions on the strengths and downfall of the POE2 Bow experience.

* Bow is very good until it hurts your hands (heh...). The bow experience is much better than it was in POE1 and the smooth experience reminds me of playing a MOBA. The WASD experience is great and the controller experience is fun and unique ARPG experience. From a mechanical experience, it's chill until you hit the late game mapping portion of the game. The builds are limited by the current gem and bow options. I hope this gets better in the future.

* The bow variety is severely lacking. There are many different looking bows and crossbows but they function fairly the same and offers no uniqueness except for some handful. For example, Dual String bow is the best bow since if fires an additional projectile. The additional projectile is doubling your damage at the early-mid game portion of the game and is mandatory to hit a certain dps range for majority of the bow builds in the game since you get an extra arrow. There are many kinds of bows but there is not much variety of playstyle that you can switch to based on the bow your equipped. Bow should offer different unique stats such as attack range, arrow patter, attack speed, reload speed, and so forth. Instead the bow experience is gimped by the imagination of the developers.

* Heralds are too strong. The majority of the damage from bow builds come from the heralds AOE splash damage. If that is the intent of the devs then so be it but it gives a very unfun experience when the initial damaging ability is weaker than the Heralds. The bow user is essentially just waiting for the Herald DPS AOE splash to do it the work.

* There needs to be more unique quiver for the late game with great trade off. The lack of late game unique quiver is not motivating since there is nothing to look forward to after beating bosses and spending hundreds of hours doing maps. The game is has very little to no rewards once you get a full build while using a bow.

* Lack of health nodes. I'm sure there are hundreds of people already complaining how reliant some builds are on energy shield and some even say it's a requirement for late game. Some fun and unique bow builds actually require plenty of health nodes. The lack of health nodes at the bottom half of the skill point tree is very much someting to look into. Warrior bow builds severly lack access to a higher effective health pool and compared to the other class who shall not be named (multiplies stats class btw) just abusses the top half of the skill tree. Add more health point multiplier or give player more access to health point multiplier stats in the game.

* The game relies too much on shield dash during race. The lack of mobility skill for bow rangers are concerning. The backflip ice shot is too clunky and can't be used for mobility porpuses. There is a mobility access creep in this game that needs to be addressed.

**The game is fun overall but I will be taking a long break until the above is addressed.