General Crossbow feedback from a 300+ hour user
The crossbow is a great weapon late game that provides versatility, mobility, and great damage. But it has a few flaws. The crossbows early game is bad. It’s in the same boat as the spear in that there’s a lot of potential combo chaining and variety, but most of the skills just don’t do their job very well. Leaving you with little variety and monotonous one skill gameplay with some grenade lobs. The movement penalty (especially early game) is harsh when using skills and it’s not for the reason you think. Crossbow skills are mostly designed for either linear damage or narrow cone damage. Because of this, when monsters get in your face, you don’t have many options for getting out of the danger zone where your in melee range and can’t really add clear. I think the section of the passive tree that allows projectiles to chain additionally (Merc Start) on the terrain should instead be swapped for chain on hit chance. It will give early game builds the ability to add clear more effectively and is more than likely a branch of the passive tree that would get left behind at the later stages of the game. Accuracy seems… strange at a distance right now. With rapid fire skills this is apparent. After about 7m rapid fire projectiles from skills fan out quite a lot even with ridiculously high accuracy. I do feel like this should be reduced about 10%. The support gems for the crossbow skills (spec. the pierce, chain, scatter) have too many down sides. IE Give me a chance for extra projectiles instead of a damage reduction. The last thing is, get rid of the weapon set passives on the witch hunter tree and let us change elemental damage types for different xbow skills. I would love a rapid fire phys based build, or cold cluster grenades.
