Moonfire Bow is Overpowered

I’d disagree.
I don’t care much about breakpoints: the game has too many variables, difficulty levels and team compositions to worry about them.
All I see is 25% more damage - that’s a lot of damage - sign me up.
This talent would be worth to pick up for bosses only - but as a matter of fact it works on all enemies!
Yeah, getting there might be tough and if you run truesolo or just don’t care about your teammates this talent is worthless.
Vanish’d be my second choice for one reason - once you’re behind the enemy lines you’ve already won and they are dead (real soon).
Now Hagbane… I’ve tried running several games with it and I quickly dropped this hot garbage. I just don’t see what people see in it. Yeah, monsters die a bit faster (if you don’t run out of arrows), but you always run out of arrows even with WS even with Kuronos. Killing armour is a hassle.
I’m a strong believer that hagbane is situational at best.

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Problem is that that 25% damage was not actually 25% more damage, you still needed say 2 hits to kill that one target and that target only has say 50 health in the end.

Of course that doesnt apply to some much beefier targets like monsters, but on others like chaos warriors for instance…you still get more from just headshotting them. Which goes for monsters too.

We´re talking the old row here, before vanish was added and honestly bloodfletcher was the only option with a consistently good yield. Backstab bonus damage didnt yield enough and was too difficult to use.

Then you are not building or using it right.

Do remember, this is a weapon endorsed by cata 3 runners and as arrogant as it is to say, i myself as someone with way too much waystalker playtime also see it as nothing but overpowered.

I can pretty easily outpace a moonfire user with hagbane during a run with a lot of hordes, that one is silly powerful per shot but the downtime is too high to compete for a long haul with large number of enemies about.

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That is true for melee breakpoints. They don’t really matter when four people are swinging into stuff, though if you really want to they are researched for specific weapons. However, they matter quite a lot for ranged attacks on high difficulties, as they mean the difference between one extra special potentially murdering someone and one extra dead rat in one shot. Properties are usually chosen such that they reach specific ranged breakpoints given your build and weapon. Otherwise they make no difference during gameplay. Of course you can ignore them, but it’s usually not a good idea once the game becomes difficult enough. They are well researched, all you have to do is look up a guide if interested.

As for hagbane, you will struggle a lot on lower difficulties. But from Cataclysm and up you can very much spam it non-stop on Waystalker, provided you take Kurnous’ Reward. This is because the game throws specials at a very fast rate and hordes usually come mixed with elites as well, so you can just restock on the fly and continue blasting. On every other elf career it’s quite underwhelming, but due to this flaw in the Waystalker’s design it becomes quite powerful.

Personally, I would remove Kurnous’ Reward for something else and reintroduce something like the Verm1 scavenger trait for melee attacks. To give the Waystalker a reason to go into melee and still allow her to make good use of the hagbane, without it being a non-stop blast spam.

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So damage on backstabs is “difficult to use” but arrows back on backstabs isn’t ? :thinking:


It’s not though. It’s 25% more backstab damage. This is insidious in the wording, but damage is actually calculated separately for base, headshots/crits, and backstabs, and then added together.
When you have +75% backstab damage, it means you deal [ base + (backstab x 1.75) ] damage.
On a crit headshot on WHC, you deal [ base + crit + (headshot x 1.25) ] damage without Deathknell ; and [ base + crit + (headshot x 1.75) ] with Deathknell.

(This is overly simplified, and crit/headshots are mixed together in the calculations, but you get the point.
There are 2 very instructive videos on j_sat’s channel that go in depth about the way damage is calculated. - part one and part two.)

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The difference is in how many backstabs you need to get good mileage out of the talent. With hagbane’s low base ammo, you really don’t need many backstabs to fill it up, whereas with extra backstab damage you need to have a pretty high backstab percent to actually get good mileage from the talent.

To be clear I’m talking about the old version of bloodfletcher without the cooldown, not the current iteration.

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Fair, but the point of being “difficult to use” is on the backstabs in themselves.
Getting mileage out of them isn’t difficulty to use, it’s that it requires a certain level of skill to benefit from.
I might be nitpicking on semantics.

I think “difficult to use in a way that is impactful” would probably be more accurate, but yeah backstabs are generally janky, old bloodfletcher with hagbane somewhat circumvented this be requiring relatively few backstabs to be very effective.

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It used to give a fair lot of shots just for like 3-4 stabs, so even if you started wasting a lot of time just to get a few in on this one enemy it was still worth it. Comparatively the bonus damage option just…didnt give anything worthwhile for the time spent.

Or just nothing at all generally.

My vague memory x)

But yeah hgjw nails it, just any random elite(not quite zerkers) really and if you so wished it was possible to gain a lot of ammo even if it meant spending some time. Which translated into a lot of mileage with a hagbane in hand,

1 backstab equalled 1 ammo back.

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Just have 1 chaos warrior or boss and you were pretty much full ammo.

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Nerf Kerillian this year please. i dont want to even start with any arguments , there is enough discussion going on already. For me the recent changes ruined this game. Cataclysm has become a Joke.

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Oh man, don’t get me started on the convolutedness of the game. And some people call D&D mechanics-heavy…
In this game you need an excel calculator to understand the difference between 2 weapons. Many talent descriptions are misleading.
It’s true that 25% extra dmg does not mean much if you still kill the target with the same number of hits. My point is: actually finding out the breakpoint is meaningless because then you need to have a build for a special comp a special difficulty and probably a special map (chaos/scaven). I just run QPs with randoms who cares zilch about my breakpoints and go full berzerker mode (no healing, no waiting, no picking up consumables - just run’n’smash). That’s why I rather go max crit/AS/HP/Crit Pwr on everything cause it works no matter the difficulty no matter what. Yeah, I might be less efficient vs one’s role of monster skaven cata slayer that one playes with his regular team. I am, though, better equipped with dealing with Monster partol armour horde special FUBAR (usually I still wipe, but that’s not my fault :D) my berzerker buddies got the team into.

Yeah, I rarely play cata, so I can’t judge. What’s the connection between Kurnous’ specials and elite - AFAIK you just get appx 10 extra arrows per ult, no?

It’s additive. So if you trueflight into 3 specials or elites, you will get practically all of your ammo back. This along with the facta that the trueflight volley has a fairly low cooldown and that specials+elites are everywhere on Cataclysm means that you are always fully stocked and always hag-blasting.

It’s important to understand that a lot of things scale differently with the quantity and quality of enemies. Builds that don’t make sense on low difficulties or which are impractical become extremely powerful towards the higher end of the spectrum, since they depend on fighting large numbers of enemies, or rely on high numbers of specials and elites. This is true for other weapons as well. You’ll see some people complaining about the greatsword, which is indeed kinda underwhelming in normal games. But in any game mode involving extremely high enemy densities, like the Twins mutator and derivatives of it, the greatsword quickly becomes one of the very best melee weapons in the game. Context matters quite a lot when judging things and it’s almost never a good idea to make statements in very broad terms (x sucks, x is useless and so on).

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Yup.

I agree on that, and that’s not what I meant with my clarification ; I meant to say and explain why, in my opinion, Vanish or Bloodfletcher have more value than Ereth Khial’s Herald’s 25% extra backstab damage.

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Just spitballing but what if the projectile didn’t pierce armor? The DoT would still kill armored enemies in one shot but having to wait 10 seconds instead of 2 for a ratling gunner to die would at least present a significant drawback when under pressure. I’d also suggest that both the projectile damage and the burn be negated when hitting a chaos warrior anywhere but the head.

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The moonbow problem is that is does too much damage per second.

There are several “levers” to adjust in order to find balance.

At the current power level it does roughly the damage of a regular Bounty Hunter ult. If you wanted that power level to be in line with a BH ult then the recharge speed would be slowed down to around 35-40 seconds. Taking 7 seconds for a quick shot to charge and 10 seconds for a charged shot suddenly puts the weapon on an ammo budget that seems reasonable. By lowering uptime the DPS goes down to be in line with other weapons the elf uses.

If damage needs to go down, put it in line with the hagbane. Having infinite hagbane without the ability to spam beyond 5 shots would still be a balanced weapon.

If wielded DPS needs to go down then lowering the uncharged shot DOT and forcing the charged shot to take .4 seconds (such as Huntsman’s Manbow) it would force greater commitment to the shot. More vulnerability during firing means more powerful shots are fair. Such as Bolt Staff.

If horde damage is too high then shrinking the size of the explosion DOT is fair. Removing the penetration of the arrow is another balance lever.

Reducing specific enemy damage, such as if it does too much armor, infantry, or monster damage are additional points of balance. Flamethrower for example does low damage versus armor while cooking the infantry and staggering it.

The stagger level is also a potential problem. Being able to stagger weapon rats without headshots should be a rare trait.

Reworking the weapon is an option, but obviously the most difficult. For example if the moonbow receives charge for enemies killed in melee while it slowly charges or slowly loses charge. Or causing the DOT to scale with how long the arrow is charged before release, such as beam staff ramp up. Or causing it to charge based on movement. Or giving it a recharge animation like crank gun or throwing axe.

Plenty of ways to make the moonbow fun and usable without being the only way to play Elf.

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Moonbow is good because of its “endless” ammo.
For killing things quick its worse than most weapons. (Chaos Wastes on cataclysm)

Yeah, but that’s just because you start off with low power. Haven’t played it in expos in a while, but iirc it’s enough to do a charged shot+light shot combo to kill most specials fast when at base power. It definitely feels a lot stronger in the campaign mode.

How is this even a thing? An aoe weapon with infinite ammo, solid mobility, fast fire rate, and high monster damage “takes too much time to kill [some] specials in one shot.” In the body no less. Like, repeat that out loud.

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I think @DeLaurec meant Chaos Warriors, not Chaos Wastes.
Moonbow is indeed not optimal against Chaos Warriors, but neither are most other weapons.