I’d like to discuss here if Sapper needs some love. I’ve played the class twice up to circle 3, once in icbt2 and now in the Korean server. With the buffs to other classes, Sapper now feels like a subpar choice for most builds.
I’d like to talk about the skills first. Stockades is good early on, it’s always nice to have a source of pierce damage. It feels relatively worse later as you get high damage skills on but that’s intended. Claymore is ok, but again doesn’t scale that well and I believe there are better sources of knockback later on that don’t require such a long setup (Headshot, Hovering, Pheasant). Conceal is meant for pvp and that’s about it, it doesn’t work with some traps. Punji requires a long setup and does pitiful damage. I know about its interaction with pavise/circling, but it’s still a sapper1 skill with fairly bad scaling and although I find that interaction interesting, I doubt having a skill that weak killing a bunch of 100k+ HP mobs in one go is intended
The circle two skills are good, but have their own shortcomings. Broom trap is a great AoE, a multi hit that does a ton of damage over a wide area, but can’t hit flying enemies and it’s stationary “damage over time” skill, but that just means the skill is balanced imo. Collar bomb is like Multi Shot in the meaning it gets additional hits with more levels, which makes it scale fairly well. However, the simple fact it cannot do any damage at all to single targets makes me frustrated whenever I face a boss, because it can do good damage at lvl 10.
Now, Spike shooter. The only redeeming quality this skill has is the pierce damage at lvl 5, as it gets 2 more potential hits per level. The cooldown is far too long (It stays up for a long time but in my opinion it isn’t a good reason to have a 100s cooldown; Reduce the active time if necessary, I feel like that also sort of applies to Claymore and Stockades, that now have a cooldown higher than Collar bomb that fairly outdamages them with at lvl 10, and slightly lower broom trap, that stays active doing damage for 15 seconds), it only shoots arrows from the right side (you can have the skill activated from the left side and be unharmed by it), if you stretch it too much you’ll most of the times send arrows to hit nothing, but I’m guessing the skill was meant to be an area denial to multiple targets. The skill is also outrageously expensive, $62000 per 100 uses?
Most of the time I was walking the mobs into my traps (and cry whenever I faced a flying mob, but that’s fine), something that really doesn’t seem to happen very often in parties, or using the traps very near to the targets, which can be problematic to a squishy Archer. I really don’t know much how Sapper fares at PvP later on, I’d apreciate if someone who has knowledge of that posted here. Speaking of PvP, Detonate Traps doesn’t seem to let you choose which magic circles can be destroyed, so it’s not that great if there is that one circle you want to nullify and there are a bunch of other, less important circles in front of you.
In my opinion, some skills should receive some buffs. Collar could get a remote detonation attribute, or even have one set detonated per missile attack received. Spike shooter should get its cooldown reduced to half, maybe have the detection reworked and pretty please, reduce the cost of wires and maybe claymores as well, it really hurts the wallet of the beginner now that recipes don’t sell for much money. Detonate traps should be able to destroy more magic circles with more investment, as I sincerely wonder why would I ever put more than one point into it.
That may not apply only to Sapper, but other Archer classes as well. I barely hear people considering to take Reiter or Rogue, for example, although I confess I don’t know much about the current situation of those classes. I mostly see a huge quantity of Quarrel Shooters and a lesser of Rangers, Wugushi seems to be somewhat popular too.
I want to open a discussion about this, and by no means I believe I’m better than anyone here, I could just be expecting something of Sapper that it cannot be.
, i hate spike shooter , expensive low damage and slow/hardest set up, relation damage/cost is ridiculous , spike shooter need a review!
