Primary Concern:
Shortbow 2 seems really clumsy to me. I liked the concept but the execution is very difficult a lot of times. With the wrong camera angle it can be hard to time precisely (I frequently try to make a quick, tricky shot, detonate when the shot is over the target’s head, only to realize it was still several feet away because I was shooting at max range, making the arc low, and since I was aiming over my character’s shoulder I had poor depth perception), and in a zerg or group event or even just a 5 man dungeon things can get far too hectic for you to monitor your shot in flight and detonate it at the right moment. So its main use for now is spamming on fields under your own feet to proc blast finishers without detonating it.
What I’ve been dreaming of for a while now is Shortbow 2 firing the 3 bombs by default, sort of how engineers throw multiple projectiles themselves. So no need to worry about detonating them right before they hit the ground. Their spread could be variable. No need to make them all blast finishers, but it would be cool if one shot were still a finisher. Maybe make the other 2 explosives spiral around the core one with the blast finisher.
Or maybe just give it a single projectile that explodes into three explosions.
Then there’s the idea of a sticky bomb. Lower the arc and increase the speed on the shot and make it stick to what it hits, or if terrain interaction is too hard to swing, require a target, and after a second or two it explodes and bleeds foes in a small radius around the target the shot stuck to. Maybe it explodes and drops a few smaller bombs around the target. Again, the core sticky explosive could be the blast finisher and the little ones around it wouldn’t be finishers.
Secondarily, it’d be nice to see a Shortbow trait somewhere for Thieves.
Maybe one that returns the blast finisher to it if Cluster Bomb were to change.
Or one that proc’d swiftness on crit for like 3 seconds.
Or one that tormented or confused on crit.
Or a generic range increase.
Or -1 initiative cost to all shortbow abilities.
Or Trick Shot/Surprise Shot now splits into two arrows on the first bounce and hits two nearby enemies instead of just one. (Maybe make each of those second bounces also split. That’s 8 hits. I’m not sure Trick Shot damage is so high that 8 hits would be an insane amount of damage but it could always be lowered to compensate.)
Or Trickshot/Surprise Shot now confuses/torments (or both!) each enemy hit for a few seconds.
Or maybe pick a few of those out. The sort of trait I’d expect to see is the -1 initiative cost coupled with the swiftness on crit. That’d just be par for the course. The kind of trait I’d dream of seeing in game would be “Trick Shot applies confusion and splits after the first target. Shortbow criticals apply torment (with a small ICD).”
It’d hit the first target and bounce, then each secondary target would not split, but still get the second bounce, for 5 total hits, all would trigger a bit of confusion, and crits would provide slightly more condi coverage.
Thirdly and lastly is a more general concern about poison. It feels pretty weak. Likely in exchange for its healing debuff, which doesn’t seem all that helpful outside of PvP. I try to use it on Mordrem Menders and the like and they heal for so much that a debuff doesn’t really dent their output much. So you spend all your initiative on stacking poison clouds, get like 10 stacks up, and those tick for 1k-2k max. It seems like poison effects need their duration increased or their damage increased. Personally, I like the idea of them being even more of an attrition condition than bleeds.
Burns are explosive. They damage you hard and fast.
Bleeds last longer and do more moderate damage.
Poison is brief AND weak. But what if it had a long duration and medium or low damage? That fits the theme of poison to me a great deal more. Most poisons in the real world take a while to set in and slowly cause their damage.
To circle back to the initial point: The reason you end up spamming Choking Gas is because Cluster Bomb is so hard to use in group play. There’s no much going on it’s just easier to stack some poison on everything than try to follow your bomb and detonate it perfectly. But this causes problems in that your poison field might well prevent a more desired field, like a fire field, from comboing for people.
So I’d like to humbly put forward these suggestions, and request other players do the same. Shortbow seems like a mainstay in most Thief builds because of its versatility, but it’s also one of the less well-polished weapon kits in the game. I’m curious about what other players think of the skillset.
And it seems to me like this current period of finalizing the various professions for HoT launch might be the best time to make such changes.
(edited by Tasao.4623)