For starters I’ve been playing bow and spear/rapier for PVP and PVE content since launch and I’m having a great time. However recently I’m hitting a wall when it comes to fighting more geared players or being effective as a dex player in a general sense. There is a lot of people who are complaining about trying to land the arrows at a medium range on players who are mobile when your arrows have a random direction they fire in. For starters the cross hair is not lined up with the path of the arrow, it deviates to the left for some reason. I tried to use the accuracy perk on a 600 bow and it doesn’t change this for me.
I’m not a big fan of RNG when it comes to pvp and this arrow deviation on top of laggy players/laggy wars makes it difficult to use properly. At point blank range the bow will miss entirely and thats where the crosshair alignment really fails since you have to overcorrect to the right heavily to land a close range shot where the cross hair isnt even on the target anymore.
Just as well the bow perks and weapon perks feel a little underwhelming when comparing them to other stat type weapons and maybe this is just dexterity weapons in general.
-refreshing pen shot shaves 1.7 seconds off the cooldown on a kill, but not a player knockdown
-fortifying rain of arrows tool tip is bugged, it says 18% for 22 seconds on a hit, but in reality it stacks 2 times on 2 or more hits for 36% for 5 seconds.
-energizing evade shot gives 15 stamina on a hit, works as intended but a little underwhelming
-enfeebling poison shot works as intended but last just 4 seconds, and must be a direct hit. an aoe ability with a perk that works only with 1 target
-empowered splinter shot. Empower is good for the next 1 attack, then its gone. The only people who use this ability are people in dungeons with fat boss targets for the instant reset, or the people playing in OPR trying to do the same thing on players. Its an AOE cone ability that no one uses for AOE as intended.
-armor pen rapid shot, the last hit does boosted dmg. Very good in PVE and maybe PVP if thats your thing but this ability gets snuffed out by any staggers and stuns from other bow/musket players and has the same aim problem as stated before. Its not even an ADS ability as it takes out outside ADS to use it.
people are buying other weapon craft mods for 500g-1000g where as the bow craft mods are under 5g on my server.
I’ve also shot players and watch my arrow pass through the character for no damage while they weren’t rolling/blocking etc. At the same time, I’ve shot next to a player in thin air and managed to hit them. For these players I can get into melee range to hit consistently but anything further it seems to miss. I’m sure this is due to someone using cheap VPNs or something and I doubt the game has anything to do with it but its annoying.
All in all, I agree with the animation cancel jump being addressed, but if possible I would hope these other issues are looked at as well. I miss the heavy attack into pen shot burst from launch and the bow just feels clunky now.
An idea I had was to remove splinter shot, place rain of arrows there, and then add a new ability called ensnare shot where it would slow the target for a set time instead. The other weapons all have great CC but the Bow is so lack luster with the elite slow skill in the left tree. Bow CC build isnt a thing, its either DMG or get rolled on.