So it’s been known for a time that the waystalker level 30 row is pretty lackluster and even limiting for build options. You kinda have no choice but to use kurnous reward if you want ammo sustain which is absolutely mandatory if you are consistently using a draining bow like hagbane or swiftbow.
I’ve seen some discussion on that topic here and there and even a few suggestions on improvements which i feel are worth highlighting/repeating for those who havent.
So first up is a suggestion i read somewhere and truly liked is that all the level 30 options should have the ability to restore ammo when used correctly, this is necessary to cut kurnous reward away from it´s way too firm keystone position for too many builds.
And so i’ve got some suggestions for a new level 30 row, part taken from others and part original. I´d give credit for the taken stuff but my goldfish memory has forgotten the sources
Piercing arrow
I honestly think its good at it´s job even now, but for the sake of opening build diversity it can use a ammo restoration component with a cooldown. Specific numbers are up for debate.
Drakira’s volley
Kerillian goes down on 1 knee and draws her bow to the limit sending a prayer to Drakira to rain vengeance on her foes. The result is a multishot volley of arrows that spread out in a fan infront of her damaging and wounding enemies causing them to bleed.
If possible i think it´d be cool if the specific effects of the volley were dependent on the bowtype used, like hagbane switching the bleed for a poison effect or swiftbow greatly increasing the number of arrows fired.
HOWEVER this should probably either not have an ammo restoration component or it should be more limited. And i take credit for the idea.
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Now as much as i´d let mine or anyone´s creative freedom run wild on the final option as well i think that might be too much to have 3 choices that completely transform the original ability. So having it keep the same format but maybe with some new fun effect is probably the way to go.
Her level 30 row is one of the few with all 3 choices being viable.Piercing Shot not having any ammo restore(outside of Conservative Shooter and very far away shots) is moot as she now has access to 2 infinite ammo ranged.
Kurnous Reward is fine as it is,used for ammo hungry ranged like Swiftbow and Hagbane.Even when not running that ult talent Swiftbow still has decent ammo sustain with Scrounger as it crits alot.
Loaded Bow is also fine as it it,fairly easy to get ammo back with Conservative Shooter,good pairing with Longbow as Kurnous Reward is overkill for it.
If you’re referring to the interaction between her Ult and conservative shooter when you have your bow out that interaction was sadly stealth removed recently.
Why on earth it was removed is beyond me, because it was the only way to get decent ammo regen without Kurnous, and even then was only good for longbow and useable with swift bow if you also ran Scrounger (thereby giving up Hunter or barrage which gives Kurnous a definite edge for swift anyway).
With this interaction removed the row is in a dire situation, as Kurnous is now always the right choice unless running an infinite ammo ranged weapon. On that note, I disagree having access to infinite ammo ranged weapons makes the lack of options for her original ranged weapons moot, though it does help somewhat.
How so? You can only really use piercing arrow or loaded bow with moonbow or javelin which is pretty dang lame i think. Means 3 bows are always locked into using kurnous reward with only really one exception.
That´s the same three bows that waystalker has better synergy with than the other elf careers supposedly…why use ranged weapons on waystalker that she isnt even noticeably better at using? So she can use level 30 talents that arent even that amazing?
So you can spam that 1 extra arrow aimbot shot or maybe have a powerful shot that while fun to use, sacrifices most of your ranged potential?
But i should have mentioned what @alsozara stated, that´s a big part of it that wasnt mentioned anywhere indeed.
I honestly think it´s pretty bad that 3 bows are basically locked into kurnous reward with no options. And even if loaded bow had not gotten that stealth nerf that talent is still just a very boring and stale option, even weak and unreliable at times since trueflight is still prone to bugging and going haywire at the worst possible times. Largely caused by how quickly it drops the “lock on”.
Eh, as comfortable as it was not having to ever pay much attention to the ammo supply i am also in favor of having the player make some effort to get their rewards, if done well that´d be more active and engaging gameplay i think.
I think @Velsix likes stuff like that too even if my suggestions above may or may not be to his taste^^
(I am curious though)
But in our Waystalkers case i think it´s thematically fitting that the effort should be made to score good ability shots with the reward being ammo to keep her going. A spin on the present kurnous reward that is just her default ability but it also gives you ammo if you happen to hit a special or elite.
Not terribly engaging in any way, but it´s probably for the best to have at least one option like that, however i´d still like to believe that leaves room for two options that are more engaging and perhaps more rewarding but in a niche way. Like piercing arrow for single target and my proposed volley option for a more AOE based one.
Kind of along these lines, I also think talents that encourage / reward meaningful changes in player behavior are fun and interesting. I’d also like to see some ammo sustain on non-ult rows so players have options if they don’t want one or the other.
For example, replace ricochet with:
Point blank shot: ranged weapon attacks that hit enemies that are closer than 5 meters consume no (replenish one) ammunition.
Which would synergize strongly with something like bloodshot which favors hot swapping between ranged and melee, which creates good dynamics, but more importantly would favor high risk close combat gameplay with ranged weapons which could be super fun.
It also would work well with the bleed arrow talent and swiftbow which could create some new waystalker build paths that aren’t necessarily just special snipers.
You could easily tune it around distance and chance to trigger.
Sad and annoying as that is, that doesn’t really obviate DameAstor’s point. All 3 Waystalker ult talents are perfectly usable and fill their own niches. And that’s a quality that is pretty rare in this game.
I still hate vanilla AI Trueflight though. Only Loaded Bow & Piercing Shot make the ult tolerable to me. And now they have no synergy with my favorite weapon, the longbow. It makes me not want to play the career anymore.
Same here, truly, vanilla trueflight without a crit often struggles to kill more than 1 stormvermin reliably ( between arrows just flying to nowhere or randomly going for bodyshots) and loaded bow really does make a difference on average. But that said, i really do not like trueflight much to start with simply because the ability to me feels so unengaging to use. Even if they all have their niche i think there´s a problem with this setup killing build diversity and not being very fun to use.
You got kurnous? Alright just point it toward some hapless roaming elite or special wobbling towards you and release, no need to particularly aim well or anything and you´ll have enough ammo to keep shooting your bow.
Got loaded bow? Aight just wait until there´s enough targets about to get good use out of it then press and hit release to wipe em and keep moving using your other weapons until it comes back.
I see your point, though I’d disagree removing your only ammo sustain option from 2 of them does hurt their useability. You even go on to say that the removal of the interaction makes you not want to play the career anymore. I personally wouldn’t advocate for heavily reworking the level 30 row, but as things are they do play into the overall ammo sustain issues in the tree. Kurnous is really the only option on 3 out of 5 of her ranged weapons, and I hope we could all at least agree that that is not ideal.
She needs another ammo regen option somewhere in her tree. That could be by adding an additional regen option to the other 2 Ult talents, though obviously less effective ones than Kurnous to balance the other effects they bring to the table, or by swapping out a rarely used talent like ricochet. From there you could even nerf the ammo regen of Kurnous a bit though that may be an unpopular suggestion.
Newly added weapons changed my thouhts on WS’s ults a lot. I now use Hagbane with Kurnou’s, MB with PS, and Javelin with LB, solely for practical reason which I believe is obvious to the point where I don’t feel the need of explaining them one by one. Not many other classes have this level of finely distributed competitiveness on their 3 ults, as most of them have the one that obviously stands out or falls behind.
As a matter of ammo sustain issue I think WS could use a new talent that helps her on that other than Kurnou’s, but I find it quite independant to her ult talents and they don’t seem to be in need of rework.
That’s always been kind of the point. Piercing Shot is balanced such that it would be big stupid if it wasn’t directly competing for her only ammo sustain talent. Of course, that’s been slightly derailed by the arrival of two separate weapons that don’t give a toss about ammo at all. But hope still springs eternal that Fatshark will nerf the moonbow and the javelin sometime in the near future…
I don’t agree at all. I would say your take on the subject is a rather hyperbolic one to be honest.
The only weapon that out and out requires ammo sustain is hagbane. Swiftbow ammo concerns can easily be alleviated with a crit build & Scrounger. Longbow has enough reserve ammo that one can function on normal Cata and below.
The major problem I see in the talent row is default Truefart Volley is an obnoxious turd of an ult. Which mean that any talent that doesn’t modify the behavior of it is similarly going to be unfun. Enter Kurnous’ Reward, which offers a very enticing effect but has no impact on the ult’s behavior; i.e. an unfun talent.
Ideally, I think, Trueshot Volley should have its behavior adjusted so that it is a functional and fun ult without any talents at all. Then Loaded Bow can be adjusted in some way so as to still be an alternative to Kurnous’ and Piercing Shot.
Why? Literally only one career gets multiple ammo sustain talents that see significant use and that is Huntsman. What makes Waystalker different than BH or RV except ‘because elf lol’?
I’m not a big elf player so I’ll bow to others’ experience here. Nonetheless I’ll elaborate on my thought process here.
I just don’t like how extreme it is for weapons like longbow and hagbane. Either you take Kurnous and are swimming in ammo, allowing a very ranged focused playstyle, or you don’t take Kurnous and the difference to your ammo pool is pretty stark. Certainly not unworkable for longbow, but you do give up a fair bit of ranged uptime if you’re not always hitting heads Yes you can go the Scrounger route with swift bow, but you give up potentially running barrage or Hunter which seems a significant loss compared to just letting Kurnous handle the ammo regen and benefiting from all the bonus damage.
I’d rather see Kurnous given a reasonable restriction, like proccing once per Ult, and giving her other ammo sustain options to spread that regen a little more thinly across more builds. I certainly don’t think her current ammo regen with Kurnous is too little compared to other ranged classes. Quite the opposite.
Anyway I’m no WS main, so if people who play her more think it’s fine as is, sure, I won’t argue further.
I mean, that’s just how it is in general for the ranged careers: if you don’t do the one thing that enables endless spam then you have to play a lot more conservative.
Look at BH without Scrounger. Or Huntsman without Shot Crafter. RV can sometimes get away maintaining a ranged heavy playstyle without taking Grungi’s Cunning on some weapons, but a lot of that is due to how few allies are looking to take bags these days between GK and the new elf weapons.
Have to say I’m not a fan of that one either. HS at least has built in CS, RV has 10% ammo bags, Sienna has no ammo to begin with. If anything BH and WS feel more like the exception to the rule. WS does get +100% ammo which definitely helps and enables things like Scrounger Swift bow but it’s not ammo regen in and of itself. Anyway that discussion is turning into another topic altogether so I’ll leave it at I agree it’s not massively out of line with other things in the game but I don’t enjoy the effect it has on build variety.
That´s the setup i use myself even now, but, i find that on maps with terror events or just during high pressure situations where you end up forced to bodyshot (packmaster behind something tall etc) the ammo depletes really quickly. Piercing does alleviate that but there´s a lot of stuff that can cause it to fail x)
Being forced into using conservative shooter or kurnous no matter what on the longbow is also kind of killing build options in a way. Why have all those options if only those are legit? How this affects the chaos wastes is also a deep hole.
