Smokewolf
An Excited Member
Which, the Dev's should of pushed the dbl shot rates higher while lowering the rate of fire. Unfortunately this did not happen, and now few if any, use the (not so) Great-Crossbow.
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Are crossbows supposed to be this slow?
- Thread starter Minako
- Start date
DDO Gaming
Well-known member
xbow has been NOTICEABLY nerfed. I remember almost crying after all the changes, impact finally seeped through all the servers.
Putting a build together takes time and all this nerfing is almost criminal
Minako
Well-known member
I am only second level and I picked two rogue skill specials as my two feats at level 1. I will just remake them and I don't have vip anymore, but I do have the expansions save myth dranor. The shooting and reloading just seemed like I was in a pit of tar trying to fight.
Phoenicis
Savage's Husband
Crossbows are really slow until NHB (inq) or EF (Arti).
Repeaters are slightly better than dual shooting, but overall the style is a slog. Attack speed action boosts help, and are available before both NHB and EF.
Note, most mobs should still die before they get to you, but it feels bad. Not so noticeable in a group, but solo? Yuch.
FaceDancer
Olde Wurm
It is. Depressingly so! They ramp up after time, but they have been taken down a peg. The suggestion to run a repeater early on is less bad than duals (repeaters got nerfed as well, so not as fun as it used to be too ). Both are not so fast that you won't get mobs in your face at lower levels.
For levelling yes, because you have a good AoE attack on AA which is actually good and not useless than almost all any other aoe ranged attacks.
Bows are stupidly slow to level up, you don't have plenty of aoe options (actually few ones which do something, forget the idea to 1 shot all trash), your single target is not that great and until you get AS and BAB they are slow. Compartin against a caster you'll be always be slower on heroic no matter which ranged build you play.
Compared to any decent DPS caster, ranged weapons in general are gonna feel weak in heroics. That's simply the nature of DDO's current power (im)balance. At least you aren't trying to level a thrower!
That said, repeaters and dual crossbows were rebalanced last year. The tl;dr summary is SSG reduced their attack speed but removed the Doubleshot penalties; so they're worse for heroic leveling than they used to be, but better in Legendaries. You'll probably see a bunch of Artificer 4-based Inquisitives going for Inquisitive capstone + T4 Battle Engineer.
The other major change last year was the addition of AoE attacks. Here's where pure rogues missed out, as there's no AoEs in the Mechanic tree - unless you count traps which have never scaled well and are badly in need of either buffs or replacement IMO - hence why hardly anyone plays pure Mechanics anymore.
For better or worse, SSG has always tried to pigeon-hole archery into the "low rate of fire / high damage per shot" category, with varying degrees of success. One advantage to ranged ranger is access to more AoE attacks; a pure ranger with 42 Deepwood Stalker / 23 Horizon Walker / 7 Arcane Archer has 4 AoEs, with enough points left to grab Haste Boost (still Best Boost 99.9% of the time) from Tempest or Vistani.
That said, it's still gonna feel hella low-n-slow compared to pure casters. I feel like leveling a ranged toon these days is a test of patience more than anything else.
Except that some of the aoe options are kinda crap and expensive:
-Scattershot is utterly crap, nothing positive from it. Even you sacrifice many shots charges
-elemental inferno is actually good (spcially during heroics, using some Imbues as a bonus damage)
-don't tested yet devastating shot but i don't like the whole tree and their capstone
-shoot first is useful (and cheap) but only xbows
-the pally ones are meh, better than nothing but don't expect a lot from them.
-Can't speak about arti aoes
tldr: the idea to have aoe options for make heroics less painfull on ranged toons was nice, the result was a disaster, they are too unbalanced between extremely crap or decent and depending on your build you can't use all of them (maye not a bad idea if you only care of heroic life to do something exotic only picking trees with aoe)
-Scattershot is utterly crap, nothing positive from it. Even you sacrifice many shots charges
-elemental inferno is actually good (spcially during heroics, using some Imbues as a bonus damage)
-don't tested yet devastating shot but i don't like the whole tree and their capstone
-shoot first is useful (and cheap) but only xbows
-the pally ones are meh, better than nothing but don't expect a lot from them.
-Can't speak about arti aoes
tldr: the idea to have aoe options for make heroics less painfull on ranged toons was nice, the result was a disaster, they are too unbalanced between extremely crap or decent and depending on your build you can't use all of them (maye not a bad idea if you only care of heroic life to do something exotic only picking trees with aoe)
Bobbryan2
Well-known member
Honestly... the real issue here is the double whammy from the attack speed bonus based on BAB, coupled with the lack of available feats at low levels.
DDO scales the attack speed pretty quickly for the first 10 levels... but when you're used to playing at cap, and go back down to level 1, it's like playing in molasses for the first few levels.
It's honestly a pretty jarring experience... I'd be in favor of giving some attack speed increases to those lowbies... unless it would be too much for newer people coming in.
DDO scales the attack speed pretty quickly for the first 10 levels... but when you're used to playing at cap, and go back down to level 1, it's like playing in molasses for the first few levels.
It's honestly a pretty jarring experience... I'd be in favor of giving some attack speed increases to those lowbies... unless it would be too much for newer people coming in.
Bobbryan2
Well-known member
Give them a stamina bar!
Teh_Troll
Master of Baiting
I like that idea, we'll refer to it as "girth."
Roper
Lifetime Gamer
LOL whatever Smoke