Archery (full) - 2HAxe (full) Post Mortem

[Lujo]

So, I got those two achievements, and went for a longer run than usual, with more exploration, some survival skills, experimental on-the-fly gear builds etc. Got some thoughts.

Ended up with 25 PER, 24 AGI. It was all I boosted.

At Brynn Amity I decided to try a full dodge gear setup. Ultimately got +dodge enchants on most things, so I ended up with a respectable 71% Dodge (I could've got more if I tried to get +dodge on the rings, too). Had ~40+ Counter and 25% crit (more with skill buffs).

I thought it would work less well than it did, but since my killing power just kept going up madly, and the setup was working out for me, I never found a reason to go for actual serious armor. In fact, I was having trouble with energy costs, and those would've been worse if I was wearing heavier armor.

So, thoughts, in order of priority, I guess:

1) 2 Handed Axes were quite a letdown tbh. The weapons themselves are sorta all over the place in terms of what they do, but the skills only care about injuries and bleeds. I can see the notion of, IDK, taking a crit or block heavy poleaxe - and those seem to be the only variety at the high end - and then boosting that with other gear. I can't see any connection between that and the skills.

I also felt like the style doesn't really work with it's skills? Like, half the skills require the opponents to have bleeds and injuries to work, but the ones which are supposed to cause them don't really cause them very much? So I'd often fire off my two supposedly injury causing skills... and then the opponent would have no injuries, and my payoffs didn't do anything.

Also, the "longaxe" style weapons simply never looked like a serious option compared to the poleaxes.

IDK, maybe if I was doing a straight STR + AGI playthrough and went for different gear, it would click, but I found every other weapon I tried so far (haven't done Staves or 2HSword) to play better than these things. I *like* them, I just don't feel like they work, almost as if there was a pivot about something at some point which would require some kind of rework, of either the skills, or the weapons or smth.

I took 2 of the 3 tier 3 skills as the last things (and the last skill in this kind of run sees no use, as that's when you get the achievement), because they felt useless. TBH the most I got out of the whole skill tree is the fact that 2 of the skills had "reach".

2) Way, waaaaay too much of my progression ended at Brynn Amity.

- All the top dodge stuff became available, so all I needed to do was to get the Coiff from the Prison and that was that armor-wise.

- I ended up trading up a Skandian Sovnya for a Forholt Staff (which may or may not have been available at Amity somewhere), but no poleaxe above the Staff had the bleed and the bodypart damage that your skills work with.

- I actually regretted buying a bow above Curved Bow, and should've stopped at Curved Bow, because it has -15% skill costs, and all the higher tier ones, including the relic ones, have way more. Ultimately skill costs were the biggest limiting factor to my power, and I would've been way deadlier with an Amity tier Bow.

The thing is that I actually felt like I could use some weapon / armor upgrades in terms of general stats, but none of the endgame "models" matched the "model" that felt like the most sensible thing to use, for any of my gear.

3) Ranged is murderous, and what I was doing was very much enabled by how silly indeed it gets after a while. Especially with 25 PER + Pathfinder.

I have two different feelings about the skill tree.

On the one hand, I liked how it made me pick up some basic skills and then force me to buff up a sidearm skill tree (in my case 2HAxe) before I break it completely, because I'd run out of arrows or stuff would close in on me, and it became imperative to be able to actually do something when that happens. So in that way, even though it's silly powerful, it kinda doesn't come online as fast as some other silly skill trees.

On the other hand, what Hunter's Mark doesn't spell out explicitly, is that it's p much just "always on, 4 stacks, +20% crit among other things, also full Supression". And how completely out of control things get when you get it going. I'm not really sure that could've been intended, as I was just rolling everything way harder than I did even with builds I thought were hilariously overpowered.

VERDICT ON RANGED: Honestly, the tree would be completely fine without the Hunter's Mark line. The ability that lets you switch to your melee weapon for free changes how the whole thing works, and it works rather fine now, so the tree feels bloated, and that whole line feels like just blatant overkill.

4) There's currently a lot of bugged POI's. Ones with Deathstinger Hives and Harpy Nests.

5) Gulons and Bisons are a complete pain. Gulons because they come in pairs, Bisons because they come in packs, so they both sorta force you to be silly powerful to tangle with them. IDK how it is for other builds, but I only ever managed to get one Bison and skin it with this build, and I was only able to kill both Gulons at lvl 23.

6) Other than those, young Trolls and Moose, no other enemy was a problem after some point. I even creamed double murkstalkers and tentacle bossess without much problems, especially after I maxed out Ranged. No other build had it this easy, other than maybe a shield build which just never took any serious damage from anything, ever. But even that could get random limb injury.

7) The biggest limiting factor by far was energy consumption, followed by ammo availability once constant crits start depleting your ammo supply. The later is due to Hunter's Mark easily pushing the crit chance to 50% / over 50%, and the former is due to not sticking with Curved Bow. But yeah, it even made me consider that I should've actually been building WILL instead of AGI, except the bonus from WILL is just too small to keep up with the ridiculous spam once Precision starts lowering cooldowns.

--- And that's that.

Saving Staves for the next spell tree, gonna do 2HSwords + Warfare next.

[Heau]

Regarding your point 1)
I think its because you built your primary stats around your ranged tree. The 2h axe tree leans more heavily into STR with unlocks and that should push extra weapon and body part damage just about enough to reliably injure on first swing. It also makes block power as a stat more relevant even if you don't heavily commit to it.

And while it maybe doesn't synergize as well with 2h axe as with 1h axe, I think Finisher is a big energy problem solver and the massive crit bonus helps cleave injuries to extra targets for more dangerous multipulls.

regarding 4) so far I've only had POI issues in the south of the map, particularly south east. Never seemed to be about specific POI types although camps on a clearing are very common down south.

regarding 5)
Bisons are pretty manageable with -75% damage taken geomancy builds but feel like run killers for about anything else unless you pull them afar to leash them and then repull as they leash thus pulling only one (or exploiting screen transitions to split the herd).

[Lujo]

1) Yeah, that makes sense, except... with the new "quickdraw" on bows, polearms feel like ideal weapons to pair the bow with, what with bow having all the bleed and injury setup potential. So it'd be nice if there was an actual "agi poleaxe" at the top end or in the dungeons or something. Also if Hunter's Mark didn't just break ranged so hard that you don't need a sidearm.

Also, counter + polearms is so sweet, it's such a shame that the whole approach feels so underdeveloped. Maybe it's just because the whole quickdraw thing is brand new, and this is emergent gameplay, but it really gives polearms something to be mad good at.

5) The reason I'm noting the problems I had with Bisons and Gulons is that... this was a "full hunter" build, with all three hunting survival skills, full ranged with a bleed/injury sidearm and quickdraw (with a lot of counter to boot) and 25 PER + Pathfinder.

I mean, if *this* build was having this much trouble with Bisons and Gulons, something's wrong. I managed to kill maybe 4-5 Gulons (and 4 of them once I was lvl 24 and deleting the rest of the content effortlessly), and I managed a grand total of 1 single bison (well, I killed 2 more due to lucky crits but couldn't skin them because the rest of their herds were chasing me).

So IDK, maybe figure out how to make these things a bit easier to hunt? I think the Gulons never really got a proper powering down once their abilities got in place. And IDK what happened with Bizons, as I used to skin them by the truckload with only one point in archery back in the day.

[brown29knight]

4) These PoI are fine if you get next to the hive WHILE it is alive. But if it is killed before you get close (either by you, with ranged or spells, or by other NPC actions before you get there) THEN the bug occurs.

5) This was a recent change. I was able to pull bison one at a time at 15 vision when I built a ranged character after the armor mastery tree, but when they changed it so foes alert each other, that changed how bison work. Now it is whole pack or nothing. I was able to take down 3 with my archer, and Gulion are easy in packs of 2, but 4+ bison will ruin your day.

6) And they just nerfed shield today. My shield bash's damage dropped by 1/2 (36 to 18) with today's shield tree rebalance. So ranged is now the absolute king of damage.

7) With the warfare skill that gives energy per crit, and some -energy cost/energy/energy restoration enchantments, you can manage the higher damage bows. This also means even faster killing, which in turn uses less skills, and thus less energy. It gets really insane when you can crit for huge numbers with an Edders bow. Arrows are still a limiter, but at some point I'll wind up buying an extra eastern quiver for my second weapon, and walk around with 160 arrows. You'll want to be back to town LONG before you use up that many.

So it sounds like you agree with many of us, that ranged is the OP tree right now. TY for the insight on 2H axes, I felt that way when I played them back a few years ago, but didn't know if they changed since.

[funkmonster7]

Ranged is completely OP. That was my first build in this new update, and it was completely broken (as in, brokenly OP).

I know the right side of the skill tree (Thrill of the Hunt mainly) can buff melee builds, so I've tried building a ranger strategy with predominantly melee skills and only using some ranged skills as support, mainly Taking Aim and then the relevant skills to Thrill of the Hunt. But in the end, by the time you've invested enough points to get Thrill of the Hunt, it makes little sense to dabble in melee after all that... considering you can murder everything in sight at range, without so much as taking a hit, if you spend all the remaining AP into completing the ranged weapons skill tree instead.

Basically, off the top of my head you'd save 6-7 AP if you only learn Taking Aim and then the skills that take you to Thrill of the Hunt and its tier 4 passive (and also that accuracy penalty reduction passive; that is the skill that if you don't learn it, you end up saving 1 more AP). The thing is, there is no one-handed weapon tree that can do the sort of damage that a full ranged weapons build can do, even in melee, with only 6-7 more AP investment. You'd come close to maxing out a particular main weapon skill tree, but in the end you end up being a jack-of-all-trades; in exchange if you maxed out ranged weapons completely, almost nobody can touch you.

I also tried pairing this ranger build with DW daggers. It ... just flat out won't work lol. Too little AP to spend is the real issue.

As for Lujo's problem with 2h axes, it is because he leveled PER instead of STR. It is normal. I once questioned why my axe main did so little bodypart damage, only to realize it was because I made him a PER specialist to take advantage of crits.

2h axes have changed now, they are actually better than they were before, but their main problem is that they rely on injuries to cause devastating damage. This means they will always take more than 2-3 turns to kill a single enemy. Whereas if you had gone with something more innately tanky and meant to dps over time, like 2h sword, you'd do a lot better. After all, if you use a 2h sword parry build, you'd end up blocking at some point. That build is meant to be DPS, due to counterattack focus. But 2h axes are more about burst damage, yet the dependency on injuries makes them quite a bit weaker until they get their balls rolling... Hence, if you use a 2h axe, you're kinda a glass cannon.