The Big List of Crossbow Inconsistencies (so GGG won't nerf anything while they fix them)
Nades are fine for the most part, but Bolts are... untested, to be polite. Here goes:
A- Changing bolts sometimes won't happen. The input gets lost somewhere in combat, though I've heard reports of the input not working with people simply walking around.
B- The crossbow will sometimes dry-fire when out of bolts, especially if you are spamming the attack button. Even if you are trying to time it right, the reload sound will play after the reload is over if you have any kind of skill speed, so waiting for audio cue lowers your dps.
C- Tapping your attack button once per attack will slow you down less than holding it down or spamming it. This is so massive on some attacks that they can fire while running at full speed. (Note: This is a game-wide issue).
D- Trying to fire bolts with two crossbows requires you to bind two attack buttons, one for each crossbow, on top of your skill icons. It gets very confusing because your skill presses do different things depending on which crossbow is out.
Scattershot
Extra projectiles on crossbows effectively fire in a Barrage for every single-shot bolt skill. For fragmenting skills, it simply adds 2 fragments (effectively useless), and for grenades, it adds two projectiles without consumming extra Cooldowns.
E- With Basic Attack, firing 3 projectiles with Scattershot will fire 3 times and consume 3 bolts which can all hit the same target, though you can still fire a full burst even with only 1 bolt left in the clip.
F- For other bolt skills, they will fire 3x but consume only 1 bolt. Even if you reload 2+ bolts.
G- For Armour Piercing Rounds, Rapid Shot and Ice Shards, this effectively triples their already massive clip size!
H- Some skills have a repeat animation that slows down your attack rate, especially obvious on Plasma Blast. So the dps multiplier of scattershot, which would be 92% more on paper, is less on some skills due to repeat anim, and on basic attack due to wasting 3 bolts per attack.
I- With some skills (e.g. Explosive Shot, HVR), the repeat animation cancels the movement speed penalty entirely! You can effectively move at full speed while firing as long as you only tap your attack once with a small delay between attacks.
J- For Siege Cascade, a candidate for worst skill in the game, scattershot does nothing, but it still gets the damage and AS penalty.
Reloading
K- Attack Speed local on the crossbow does not affect reload speed, although it makes the number blue without changing it.
L- Attack Speed as a global stat (e.g. from gloves or tree) does increase reload speed on every skill tested.
M- Martial Tempo (25% more AS) also affects reload speed on every skill... except Basic Attack.
N- Scattershot, on the other hand, does not negatively affect the reload speed of any skill, even Basic Attack.
Weapon Swap
O- You can bind a skill to both crossbows, and load its bolts in both crossbows. They will have different bolt counts, using the same gem. This is not very useful except...
P- Hailstorm Bolts. This is a skill that reloads passively and does massive sustained damage, assuming you can hit. If you bind an attack button for each crossbow and allow the skill to work on both, you can effectively have it load passively into both crossbows, doubling your bolts.
Q- Rapid Shot has a Heat mechanic that adds Fire Dmg to its attack and to grenades. Heat isn't crossbow dependant, even if visually your 2nd crossbow won't be glowing unless you allow Rapid Shot on both crossbows.
R- While the Heat buff icon may disappear when you swap to a weapon for which Rapid Shot isn't allowed, it still shows the grenades as glowing when fired, so we assume the added damage is still there. Testing required.
Rant
S- Armour Piercing Round, a single target armour-breaking skill, has 63% the DPS of basic attack. And it's not even the best armour breaker Merc has (spoiler: it's gas grenade).
T- Siege Cascade. The last tier of Crossbow Skills. A skill that triples its damage vs immobilized targets (aka stunned/frozen/pinned). It fires at every enemy in a 2.5m radius, and then it explodes... in a 0.5m radius for 30% basic attack dmg. You'll soon realize that the flashbang you are stunning with clears better than Siege Cascade.
U- Plasma Blast. The other last tier skill. It has +2s unscalable base attack time and 50% less reload speed. If you release it a bit early, it does nothing. If you have to roll, enjoy restarting the channel entirely. On hitting a wall, it releases a massive explosion for 1000% dmg! Except, most things that block you don't count (i.e. medium trees, shield barricades, boxes, bones). You need to hit a rigid wall or big tree. A lot of boss arenas don't even have walls. Unfortunately, the beam itself gets out damaged by, you guessed it, basic attack. Also gas grenade.
V- In some maps, grenades can fall off cliffs and holes and don't seem to do anything. Sure, it makes sense, but... really?
And I'm sure I missed a few. This should keep them busy for a solid afternoon!
Edit: W- How could I forget? Adding any cooldown to bolt skills triggers the cooldown both when firing and reloading, and sometimes even switching? I'd have to re-test it, but it was so painful I'm not sure I can handle it.
Comments
I wanted to use crossbow but did find them inconsistent and buggy at times. Some really solid feedback here.
I’m sure lots of things like this will get ironed out in due time.
Preach brother, also ammo can end up costing over 50% of my mana bar with Rappid shot (clip, chain, chance to not use ammo) and with a bow with + 4 to projectile levels and with gemlings + 1 to levels it just eats through mana as a +5 to levels makes the mana cost of skills ridiculous
Yeah, those final tier skills were very disappointing. Siege cascade sounded really cool but was lame when I tried it. Rocking scattershot exploding arrow has been my go to.
I'm playing with a controller, and sometimes after a reload it feels like Scattershot jams or something. The character fires you see the recoil, but nothing happens. When that happens you have to let go of right trigger and repull it b/c it won't recover on it's own.
I totally agree. These issues with the bolts frustrated me so much i rerolled to ranger.
Idk why, but some times drinking a potion empty a mag which is loaded and im not using. It's always the same but i cant understand why
Please post this to their forums plz, ton of good feedback that I've mostly experienced myself
Another thing that can happen is you reload and audibly hear the crossbow reload but then roll and you will have to reload your crossbow again.
So either the audible reload sound isn't timed correctly to when the bow is reloaded or something is bugged.
You have to wait like a half second after the sound effect before you can roll which is awkward at first until you get used to it.
Edit: A note about Plasma Bolt. I don't remember exactly what it was but there is a combo with it that makes it chunk bosses doing like 30%-40% in a single bolt. So it's not totally useless.
Great work! I need to do the same with couch coop ..
If you use a support gem that adds a cooldown to one of the ammo skills like hourglass, It will trigger the cooldown when you shoot and again when you reload and you cant reload when on cooldown.
Also with rapid shot and plasma burst. If they dont want us to be able to reduce the chargeup time then i think it would at least help if the progress of the chargeup is saved for at least a second or two so we can dodgeroll or something and continue charging without having to start over.
Siege cascade isnt the worse skill I have build with it. I agree crossbow needs tweeking to feel better
I was using crossbow up until act 3, I just can't use it when enemies are getting faster while reloading takes time and I can't do much to slow them down that I get swarmed easily. Those scattershot, Pierce and chain are essential in the gem slots which is a bummer considering the skill already needs those things to be effective in groups. The only purpose I've had for crossbows now are the grenades because they are very useful especially with those added grenades in the bombard crossbows. But as purely a shooting crossbow, I can't really be consistent with it, it just doesn't work for me and add the cost for respec I cant easily experiment what works and what doesnt work in my build.
I’m using crossbows because I find them fun and this issue list is just perfect! Thank you so much for the time you’ve taken to write it down!
It also seems like herald of ash ignites dont epxlode gas grenades, which is quite annoying.
Bow is just a better crossbow at this point.
Thx for your service
D is great for gameplay but definitely needs ui fixing, for one it doesn't show until you force a skill to use only set 2, but it functions just fine if you unset it immediately after getting the slot on your bar, but then you can't set it again until you do that trick, including support gems!
It's not based on what's out, it's based on the ammo you loaded into that xbow. Hit LT for set 2, fire ice shot to make sure it's loaded, hit RT for frag load, hit LT, hit RT, alternate forever.
This goes for O too, load 2x frag, and now if you are dipping in and out to reload you can double tap and reload both on the out, which feels like more than double dps from the massive uptime gains, though that's mostly a1
Here's a fun one for the list.
If you equip a crossbow with "loads an extra bolt" and attach double barreled to a crossbow skill while it is equipped, you can then swap the extra bolt crossbow to a different crossbow and retain the extra bolt, granting you three shots of things like frag round instead of 2.
Sometimes (really way too much) explosive bolt explodes at your feet.
Great writeup. I'm only in Act 1 with merc, but I agree that something feels off about crossbow bolts. The skills feel a bit sticky or unresponsive sometimes. A couple skills feel very low-utility early game relative to one another (incendiary bolt relative to permafrost bolt, armor piercing rounds relative even to basic attack).
It would also be really nice if there was some reload speed available on the tree at act 1 levels. That was the first thing I looked up on passives after my first few min of Merc gameplay. Damage feels good, but reloading feels very slow, and the reload speed clusters require a pretty significant amount of points to get to. It feels a little bad relative to my sorc, where mana isn't even a limiting factor early-game and you have access to cast speed in the first few levels. On merc I feel not particularly excited about the starting nearby passives because I want to solve my reload speed problem, but only have access to things it feels like I don't "need" yet.
Plasma blast has been a pretty great opener for bosses for me, does around half hp and pretty much guarantees a shock. Other than that though, it's pretty rough.
X- When supporting Voltaic Grenades with Second Wind and Payload, the Cooldown can fail to start recovering when you fire all grenades rapidly after each other. The cooldown never recovers a single charge for the rest of the area.
Recently I also had my rapid shot just stop shooting in the middle of the fight. Like my Char way still pointing the crossbow but just not shooting. Have to release lmb and refire with windup to fix it.
It's so annoying that I switched chars
Y - why, when I enter a map, are all my bolts unloaded except my first type?
Yeah, I certainly feel this post pretty hard as someone who's exclusively played Merc to 84 in T12s. Probably rerolling for now because red maps just are not balanced relative to how punishing they are, and this post summarizes a ton of fundamental issues with crossbows.
Your points summarize why I went pure grenades (except for Explosive Shot to detonate on demand), especially point B. I even checked my skills' tooltips several times to see if they had a chance to cause your crossbow to "jam" or something, because I wasn't sure if it was fine print I missed, or if it was just buggy jank.
One thing I'd like to add about grenades is that I've had issues where I press the buttons and nothing happens. I'm pretty sure I wasn't stunned or anything (and I absolutely had mana). The game just wouldn't respond to commands, and I'd find myself dying to swarms of mobs sometimes as a result.
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On console, I can't get my crossbows to swap, and I've tried everything. I wanted a crit xbow for high velocity with crit passives and damage on low health and more armour on my fragmentation rounds, but no matter how I bind it, it will not swap.
I have a huge drama with point b. Sometimes, my ranger just does a little dance in a boss fight when she should be shooting.
Scattershot on high velocity rounds make them do more damage than doing an armour break combo with ap arounds.
Why didn't you or anyone else here mention the animation? I know of no crossbow anywhere that ejects brass casings, or any other type of casing.
I have a feeling the crossbow was just a gun in some earlier version of the game but they just forgot to take that bit out.
Another thing that happens with grenades falling infinitely for some reason they start to lag the map and i get lower fps each minute.
Tried it in utzaal and similar areas.
I believe there is a big with normal bolts and attack while moving. If you attack while moving with regular bolts, I stutter back and forth in place, I haven't seen the same interaction on any of the other bolts I have tried.
Also, I wish we could have weapon set specific keybindings. That way one could set up Left Mouse button to be fire bolt with each different weapon, and use out ammo types to swap between the sets.
Good list. For point d I'm not sure if that's a bug or intended. I was kinda under the impression that bolts are loaded into a crossbow and you can load each one separately with different bolts. Then you can have a weapon swap for those two skills so you avoid loading them between casts. Not sure if this is what you meant, it is kinda odd because it is a bit different that all other weapon swaps since you are loading a bolt as the skill vs using the actual skill with crossbow attack
Respect on making this, sums up everything. I have the same issues on console - at least it’s consistent. I will say the wasd movement can be very awkward with sticks but gets better over time.
What about fragmentation rounds not consistently hitting ice crystals? Sadge
Also there's that skill that plays similar to lightning rod except it's bad. Like terrible bad lol
Respect to the effort put into this post o7
Also everything you listed is so awful, lmao
This is exactly the kind of post we need for EA. Well done
GGG: Nerf and don't fix anything, copy!
(Just bants, no hate)
G- For Armour Piercing Rounds, Rapid Shot and Ice Shards, this effectively triples their already massive clip size!
I've done some testing before, and it's not actually tripling the magazines, you can see the huge reduction in attack speed with per 3bolts, for these skills, I've looked through the video on per-frame, and it's roughly a 62% less attack speed reduction, not 20%, so it's 1-(3*(1-62%) * (1-20%)) = -8.8%, which is actually a slight reduction in damage
I posted a and b to the forums. That dry firing as you put it is especially noticeable on high velocity shot. Even weirder, if you continue to hold the shoot button down it will continue to kick up in rapid succession as if it’s rapidly shooting high velocity rounds. B has gotten me killed in Ultimatum and it’s incredibly frustrating.
Agree with most of these points. I am playing an ice mercenary that constantly switches bolts they need to have some sort of queueing system when switching. There are so many times when I am trying to switch in the middle of shooting only to waste time reloading the same bolt type and makes playing this class really clunky.
Also, does the gem quality for skills that add bolts even do anything? I have +20 quality hailstorm rounds but it does not seem to add any extra bolts. Also glacial bolt seems to have a terrible hitbox when it comes to small mobs or any mobs that are partially underground. Fork also does not seem to work with glacial bolt but not sure if that is intended to work or not.
Really great compilation of information. Crossbows are definitely buggy and feel awkward sometimes, but I just can't quit galvanic and shockburst.
Great work. Do all the classes please lol
I was having fun with Merc early on but now I’m act 3 I’m completely bored of it. Grenade build and it’s kinda meh. I use 3 skills at most. Also the delay is killing the fun
Yknow I went back and looked at the crossbow skills and like..the only thing im wondering is why do all the crossbow shooting based skills have sub 40% attack damage?? That's crazy
they're the only skills that scale this poorly. No wonder everyone's just defaulting to grenades.
I ain’t gonna lie AP rounds were ridiculously disappointing to use and rapid shot felt the same, I haven’t gotten far enough to make a verdict but the only thing that felt good to use from the skills I tried were galvanic shards. For a full auto style skill galvanic was the only way tragically
Also, fyi, the Heat "buff" isn't a buff and neither it's effect nor its expiration can be modified with passives or supports. Which would have been great imho.
Why would you ever use letters to enumerate your points
This is beta test