SR3 feels…bad.
As someone who played QS3>SR3 before the patch, here are my feelings on SR afterwards.
Concentrated Fire and Wild Shot: Why would I ever take Concentrated Fire? It does less damage, takes more time, and costs more skill points than Wild Shot.And even Wild Shot seems to have horrendous damage. While before the patch I was hitting 120k~ with a single Concentrated Fire using a +5 Manamana, afterwards I’m lucky to hit 20k~ with a +10 Manamana using Wild Shot. While Mob HPs at my level range took a good 50% cut, the 80% cut to my burst damage kind of makes it irrelevant.
Limacon: Ok, maybe I was spoiled by Running Shot, but this just feels incredibly weak. I didn’t use Limacon prepatch, so I have nothing to compare it to but Running Shot, which I understand isn’t really a fair comparison, but here it goes anyways. RS has a 200% modifier for 5 skill points, compared to Limacon’s 100% for 15 skill points. Already I see a big problem. Yes, Limacon has a damage attribute, but even maxed (lol) it only puts you up to 150%. And sure, it has a splash attribute to hit an extra mob, so in a mob it may be slightly more efficient. But single target damage is objectively worse, and anyone who’s serious about RS will get a Didel GC, putting them up to 260% - requiring level 60 Limacon attribute to even compete against mobs.
But okay, Limacon is not Running Shot, so let’s compare it on its own merits. At level 277, using a +10 Manamana, with a full Dex build, Limacon is hitting for about 2k~. With a 1:1 Str:Dex build, I get about 3k. Even with double Sissel, Crit rate headgears, swift step, and a level 6 Green gem in the Manamana, my crit rate is negligible, so we can mostly ignore that. That means to fight mobs at my level range, I’m taking about 20 shots to kill one monster with some STR, and about 30 without any. Using the dex build, I actually get more damage from my shop buffs then my own skill gives me. It’s too low for grinding to be any sort of effective, and its horrendous for fighting any bosses.
Yes I have seen videos of Limacon performing extremely well, but the vast majority of that performance seems to be buff-stacking. Sure, if I get Sacrament + Cafrisun + Enchant Fire + a 1500 Blessing, I’ll do decent damage single target, and absolutely shred mobs of normal monsters. None of that damage is actually mine, AND it requires me to go with basically no armor. Limacon seems to me to be the only saving grace of SR at the moment, and even that is just because it is a convenient vehicle for outputting Blessing damage.
Caracole: I’ve heard good things about Caracole, but I haven’t tested it myself yet. Frankly though, I doubt it’ll be enough to make much of a difference unless it has a hidden AoE Ratio boost in it. Hitting multiple targets with the Splash attribute sounds like it could be a viable way to deal damage, but on a 35s cooldown, its just not enough to carry you anywhere. Especially not when it still has half the modifier of Wild Shot. Again though, I haven’t tested this skill personally, so if I’m misjudging it please by all means let me know.
Evasive Action: This is a really cool skill in theory, but I feel like it just doesn’t play out. It wasn’t worth the skill points pre-patch because all other SR skills were very strong, but now its not worth the points because it by itself is too weak. 10% extra evasion isn’t going to have any noticeable impact, and while there aren’t exactly many places that can use the points better, there’s enough that its not worth taking. The minus movement speed still works as a cool interaction for Retreat Shot, but the reduction is actually too small to make much of a difference, especially when you can just spam oblique/heavy shot to slow yourself down. Though speaking of Retreat Shot…
Retreat Shot and Marching Fire: This is where the real pain came for me. Pre-patch, these skills were incredibly strong, basically being the defining skills for SR. But now? Before the patch, I was hitting maybe 6k or 7k per crit with these skills (using a +5 Manamana), non-crits dealing about 4k to 5k, With the tough mobs in my level range having 100k~150k HP, that made them effective means of dispatching them, even with the penalty of having to find a wall to hug or face tank just to try and squeeze most of the 30~ hits in, praying that no CC came my way to interrupt. Now, with a +10 Manamana, I’m hitting 2k to 3k, virtually never critting. With the mobs around my level having about 60k HP, I’m able to kill them with a cast IF I land every single hit. Meanwhile I have to face tank for 10 seconds, getting ■■■■ on by the armor and evasion changes, and for each KD or CC that hits me I lose 40%~ of my damage.
I can literally do more damage by dropping a Broom Trap and running away. And Broom Trap lasts longer, hits more mobs, has a 50% crit rate attribute, has a better armor modifier…the only penalty to it is the awkward animation and the fact that using it demounts you, which strips Limacon - irrelevant if I just drop SR. Retreat Shot and Marching Fire feel like they’ve been nerfed to bring them in line with other similar AoE skills, but those nerfs didn’t seem to take into account the huge drawbacks the skills already had built in. They were very strong before, but they had significant weaknesses that kept them in check. Now they feel incredibly weak, and are still very punishing to use. You are really better off just circling the mob with Limacon than trying to position and tank long enough to use these skills.
I really love SR, and I will probably stick with SR3 even despite everything I’ve written here but…no matter how I look at it, I just don’t see a way out for this class. No part of the class really stands out as powerful, at any rank, which makes it really hard to think of builds that work well because rather than finding another class that complements it, any class I add just…does better. I don’t feel any need to actually use the SR skills. Adding the fact that you have to be mounted and use a pistol, severely restricting what classes you can actually combo with, taking SR feels more like a punishment than a legitimate choice.
SR as a class used to be a competent solo and excellent group choice for almost any content. Now, it can marginally get by soloing quests, and relying entirely on a gimmicky shop-buff based build can make you an effective dungeon farmer (until you run out of blessing, which happens very fast), but it never really adds anything to a party and is abysmal against any sort of boss.
It’s a shame, because from what I’ve played on my other characters, the combat changes have, in general, been great. I haven’t had a chance to spend a lot of time testing, but for the most part things feel really good - heck, even my level 250 Templar feels stronger, and I thought for sure he’d be a throw away. But even though I plan to keep my SR3 as an SR, I just don’t see any viable use for him. He can’t do Saalus, he can’t do world bosses, he can barely level himself…the only reason to use him seems to be as a way to get Blessing damage out.
So I guess after all that complaining, I should add some thoughts of what I think could fix it. These are just based on my first impressions, since I haven’t spent a lot of time testing, but what I would like to see added would be something like the following:
Concentrated Fire: MUCH higher damage modifier. While the skill uses less hits than Pre-Patch, it still takes a while to get those hits out, and so is vulnerable to any sort of knock back or knock down. As such, I think just tuning the damage way up is enough to fix it. You could also add more hits per skill level, so it looks like Pre-Patch, balancing the high damage with a longer “channel” basically, but I don’t feel like it needs that kind of balance at the moment.
Caracole: Again, I haven’t tested this skill yet personally, so I don’t have much to say. I could see it being a nice burst if it had built in AoE ratio to go with the Splash attribute though. EDIT: I’ve been testing this now, it does seem to have a built in AoE ratio. This skill might be in a good place already.
Limacon: Give us back the piercing effect that pistols lose when we use this skill and make all three of those hits Splash with the attribute. Then tune up the damage a little bit. Make it do enough damage that its worth using even if you don’t have Blessing and four extra lines of damage. And don’t worry about this change making the gimmick build obscenely strong, because the extra hits will absolutely shred your Blessing count. Shop Blessing would be effectively useless for anything longer than 5 minutes of fighting.
Retreat Shot: WAY higher damage. Yes, it feels very strong on paper (147% x 33 hits x 15 targets), but you will almost never be able to maximize - or even efficiently utilize - that damage. I feel like if this did two or three times more damage, it might be in a good spot - maybe a little less because of the huge number of targets it can hit.
Wild Shot: This needs something to distinguish it from Concentrated Fire. Personally, I would tune up its damage to make it worth casting in the first place, then I would probably either add an attribute or just an inherent AoE Ratio to it. The goal would be to use it as a fast mob-clear: not as high impact as Concentrated Fire or Retreat Shot, but something quick you can snap off to cut down a small mob, or thin a large one.
Evasive Action: I would probably change this to give a flat % to dodge, rather than an evasion boost, maybe something like 15% per skill level. So 75% at level 5/90% with Divine Might. Then I would slash the duration to a flat 11 or 12 seconds, and make it cut your movement speed by 15 or 20 (or maybe something like reducing it to 10), and probably bump the CD to at least 60 seconds. This would change it from a dumb evasion boost that no one needs to a powerful combo/enabler skill to protect you and increase your effective damage while using Retreat Shot/Marching Fire, without making it so strong as to be a reliably sustainable defensive option.
Marching Fire: Like Retreat Shot, this needs a HUGE damage boost. Much more so I’d say. The difference between this and Retreat Shot is that Retreat Shot lets you…retreat. In order to really maximize damage out of Marching Fire, you really have to stay still, which means tanking a lot of hits with no real means of protecting yourself. Add to that the fact that, unlike with Retreat Shot, you’re effectively silenced while you wait for the 10 second channel to finish - which again you lose a huge portion of if you are CC’d in any way - creates a situation where you need a big damage modifier to justify the high difficulty in getting your on-paper damage to show up in game. Also give it a damage attribute for goodness sake. There was barely a reason for not having it before the patch, but now not having one is just ridiculous.
So those are my thoughts on SR. I’d love to hear other people’s opinions as well, since I haven’t had the time to test a lot in the past week, and I’m not sure I’ll have the heart to keep testing my SR with how poor he performs in every category.
