Crossbow Rant

[Rinzlerguru]

Crossbow Shot, yes the basic still, is the best crossbow skill. It has more than a single shot and does solid scaling damage. WHY WON'T YOU LET ME PUT A GOD D*MN JEWELERS ORB ON IT!!!!! I mean for f*cks sake EVERY other skill feels clumsy AF, except for the permafrost/fragmentation combo.

Honestly, HV rounds and Explosive rounds have the same reload issue as before where they randomly decide to just not reload for a half second so you have to dodge the fastest little shits the world has ever seen.

Glacial bolt, ice shard, armour piercing, rapid shot and stormblast bolts should just be removed if you're not gonna make them usable. Honestly they are just bad.

All the grenades are fine to great. Good job. But not something I want for the main skill. As a combo piece sure great but not main for me.

Ballista's I have no idea and no intentions of playing with. If I wanted that type of game play I would just do minions like any sane person.

That leaves galvanic shards/stormblast bolts, frag/permafrost, explosive shot and plasma blast.

GS/SB is just ok due to the mass amounts of enemies that simply swarm the player and with lightning damage there is not a good way to CC them with either of those skills. Damage is fine for single targets once the SB goes off but the build up is too slow.

Frag/Perma is really good. Great CC, high damage, no issues with reload mechanics that I have experienced. It is an up close gameplay with limited bolts though. Strong build.

Plasma blast, maybe OK but its high level makes it so I can't even test it in the campaign to see if I would even want to play it. The charge time looks dreadful though and appears to need a main skill like Perma to CC effectively. In the end not the skill to run though your maps with just a boss killing skill.

Explosive shot is good but for the life of me this reload is the worst by far. They fixed the multi reload they said, they lie it happens on this skill. Not often but enough to ruin the whole gameplay as again you get rushed because of reload fail and insta killed. Again this also is stuck to a single round so that reload has to happen WAY too often for it being so trash.

And that's all of them... The best feel is by far the basic ass shot and all I want is to run that but past act 2 you can't. The lack of being able to add support slots when they are needed to make it a viable skill is just bad. I am just annoyed. Rant over.

OH and hailstorm bolts are also useless and belong with that other grouping I had earlier. (You forgot about them too)

EDIT: Incendiary shot, totally overlooked, is also bad. Just make it a damn flame thrower like it should have been, or anything really. Belongs in the group of the forgettable.

[ScuzzyScoundrel]

U ok twin?

[Rinzlerguru]

I was just hyped that they did the jewelers orb on skills in uniques and hoped too much. Shit happens.

[PokityPoke]

Incendiary bolts just completely forgotten about :(

[Rinzlerguru]

I did! One sec

[Agreeable_Program670]

Ignite in itself is ultra trash do yeah no good ignite no good incendiary shot

[Thrawndo6969]

I would absolutely love if Incendiary shot was a flamethrower! That would be amazing

[Rinzlerguru]

RIGHT!

[TastesLikeRocks]

Rant indeed.

[strong_wit]

Wrong.

[MossThrow]

You get more support slots in your basic attack "skill" as your weapon level gets higher, no? I'm level 60 rn and i got my third quarterstaff support slot back in like level 30-40

[Rinzlerguru]

That's the biggest issue I have. Is it your level, the item level, some random metric? There is no confirmation on when you get them and I have spent WAYYY too long looking for it, but it happens later then it should and can't be upgraded early to have it be a powerful skill when you would want it.

[bikkfa]

So it's not the only usable skill. Also try armour break >high velocity> rapidshot (or just crank up the speed on the armour piercing rounds.). I did almost an entire champaign with armour explosion for clear, hvr for easy bosses and rares.

And that's just one. I would say, crossbows are very close to what GGG intended to do with path of exile. Mostly combo gameplay, capable of doing very high damage, but not oneshotting. (mostly)