While there are lots of improvements on Cannoneer C3, especially to all the normal Cannon skills to hit more often or have less CD time, I think there is one big problem for Cannoneer, which is the skill Siege Burst.
If we look at the skill from a technical perspective, it looks pretty decent from its specs.
It has a ± decent damage growth if used in combination with Bazooka, a high AoE attack ratio bonus and a low CD time.
However, this gets quickly overshadowed by its high SP costs, the high additional SP costs from the attributes and the long casting time.
As far as I know, except for Cryomancers Ice Bolt, there is no skill with such a bad casting time/damage growth ratio. It’s especially bad if you level up the skill to max level, as it takes several seconds just to cast it + the long animation time till the shot is fired and till it lands on the ground.
And if this wasn’t already bad enough, the skill even knocks the monsters around,
and only in one direction in contrast to other circular shaped explosion patterns,
e.g. Astral Body Explosion, where you can control the direction the monsters get blown into indirectly because they get pushed back by a circular wave (i.e. if you trigger the explosion behind the monster, it gets pushed into your direction, while Siege Burst always pushes Monsters away from you no matter where the explosion happens; targeting the area behind them e.g. will still knock them away from you, which is pretty awkward given that other skills act differently).
To counter this, I suggest that Cannoneer gets another attribute which reduces the cast time of Siege Burst when used during Kneeling Shot and Bazooka and scales with the skillevel of said skills, e.g. 8% cast time reduction of Siege Burst per skillevel of Bazooka/Kneeling Shot.
No Cannoneer should be forced to party with a Wizard3>Linker2 to get Quickcast just to have a viable damageoutput with Siege Burst after all, given that the other Cannoneer skills don’t have any cast time and have similar/better damage output.
Last but not least, I’d like to suggest another effect added to the Cannoneers roster via an attribute which is based on real rocket-propelled grenade launchers (e.g. the Bazooka) and recoilless rifles:
Cannon: Rear Exhaust
It seems pretty strange that there is muzzle fire coming from the cannon when using Cannoneer skills, but at the same time there is barely recoil and no visible gas exhaustion from the rear.
Normally,there are two ways to propell a grenade/rocket/shell , one using explosive propelling in the barrel, which causes recoil and gas exhaustion, and another one which is the recoilless which just creates a lot of exhaustion and barely any recoil, e.g. this one here:
As you can see, there’s a huge fireball created behind the soldier from firing the ballistic shell with the recoilless rifle (which is what Cannoneers “Cannon” is in reality, a recoilless rifle firing shells).
That’s why I’d like to see this introduced in TOS as well, causing damage and by chance, burning ailment to the enemies standing directly behind the Cannoneer when attacking in Bazooka stance.
Would make a great attribute for Cannoneer C2.