Bows And Charging, Status Chance

[Dan137W1750n]

Bows and Charging

 

I'm having an issue with keeping the bow charged and ready. I do a roll, and think I'm done rolling and hit the mouse button... but no charge.

 

Would it be possible to just charge the bow after rolls, falls, jumps, whatever, as soon as possible if the mouse button is held down? Mouse button down means charge the weapon when it's in a chargable state.

 

Bows and Status Chance

 

Status Chance has been bugging me. A low ROF weapon like a bow seems to have a decent status chance at 10-15%, but coupled with ROF and charging, that's like a 10-15% chance every couple seconds. Seems like high rate of fire weapons might have a lower base Status Chance, but with several chances per second, they have a higher chance of getting status effects. A Soma with the base 15 shots/second (let's cut off a bunch of potential replies by saying no ROF, multishot, status chance mods, etc) has a ~69% chance of getting at least one status effect in one second of firing, compared to my Cernas 15% chance to get a single status effect. That doesn't seem right.

 

Put Gas and Electric and Hammer Shot on a Soma, increase ROF by 90% with mods, and your Soma has a 50% chance of doing 3 status effect procs/second, with a 94% chance of doing 1 status effect proc/second. It's now an AOE weapon more reliable than a bow with Thunderbolt because Soma needs more advantages. Maybe Blast and Electric is better... get knockdowns and electric chain stuns and keep your enemies from doing anything? In fact, screw Soma... Take a Synapse with ROF increases and status chance increases. It'll proc chain attacks everywhere and they'll all be electrical because that's all it does. AOE stuns.

 

My Cernos with a reload time of .8 secs and a charge time of I don't know means about 1 shot every two seconds if I take zero time to aim. ROF increases of 90% reduce charge time to about .5 secs, Fast Hands reduces reload to .7 seconds, so 1.3 seconds/shot, Hammershot increases status chance to 21%, and I'm figuring a 16% chance/second to get 1 status effect with a bow, and we used another mod slot for Fast Hands compared to the Soma. Except a person does aim with a bow and that takes time.

 

So I'm thinking a marked increase in Status Chance for Bows and Sniper Rifles and any other slow firing weapons like Ogris is in order. Ogris rocket explosions should be causing knockdowns more than an assault rifle, and large caliber sniper rifle doing headshots should really cause a target to do more than look for what hit him. A Vectis proc chance is 5% per shot. That's bullS#&$ compared to a Soma's potential. I'm not sure what a balanced status chance would be for a bow, but I'd start by saying "not 4-6 times less than another weapon that doesn't need any more advantages". A decent status proc chance can make these weapons possibly more effective for high level play when they disable the target consistently.

Edited December 15, 2013 by Dan137W1750n

[shut]

I agree with the whole charging thing. Holding the mouse button down while your character just holds the bow in a peaceful idle position doesn't feel right at all.

 

As for status, the whole system is really broken and useless right now (unless it's the Grakata or something, which you can easily mod into a miniature Chaos gun and create a psychotic army in the middle of battles). Statuses are nonexistent for the worst of weapons, and, for best-case scenarios, are still completely unreliable without glitches. The fact that status mods do pretty much nothing doesn't help this at all.

I think that statuses need to be more reliable, firstly. Giving "minor" statuses like Freeze, Burning, and the like a 100% base chance would be nice (and before anyone says anything about Freeze, it wasn't overpowered in Damage 1.0, and considering how much better Magnetic damage is than Ice damage, it won't be overpowered in Damage 2.0), with "major" statuses like Gas, Blast, and Viral starting at a low chance, but being given the opportunity to increase the chances to something much more reliable by stacking on two or three mods.

[Leuca]

Bows are in a rather bad spot in all regards. They basically could get a buff in every category and they would still lose out to weapons like the Vectis.

[Dan137W1750n]

Bows are in a rather bad spot in all regards. They basically could get a buff in every category and they would still lose out to weapons like the Vectis.

 

I agree. I usually switch out my bow for my Vectis for tougher jobs because my Vectis damage with the same mods is way higher. The Vectis is hitscan, almost balanced primary damage, faster ROF compared to charged bow shots... The "advantage" of bows is silence (when there is no need in the game to ever be silent), and Thunderbolt (which turns your bow into an unreliable Ogris), being able to choose a primary damage type (which still means you'll do less damage than Vectis), and knocking dead enemies into others (poor man's AOE).

 

I haven't got into the high level gameplay yet, but from what I've heard, if a bow is going to viable it needs to be able to one shot enemies because you won't have a chance for a second shot.

 

Alternatively, the status chance increase would help by ccing targets to give you a chance for a second shot. If the status chance increases are applied to Thunderbolt, the blast could knockdown the majority of mobs. The issue with that is that Thunderbolt's proc chance would need to be improved significantly to make it reliably proc when you need it.