What I realized is that for Musketeer skills generally, the Penetration Shot, and Sniper’s Serenity is really not that good in execution currently.
Penetration Shot is good when it hits, but for the most time as a Controller user, I have a hard time to line up enemies in a straight line for me to utilize Penetration Shot to push them away and damage them as much as other skills, for most of the time, Penetration Shot always misses for me and I’ll get hit instead.
Sniper’s Serenity’s skill is really REALLY bad to execute when you are fighting bosses, especially on bosses that actually moves towards you or chases you or have an attack cycle that moves their positions very quickly to attack you etc, not only staying in Movement Speed of 10 is pretty much a dead sentence for you when melee enemies or bosses are able to run towards you to hit you, you only gain like 50% critical increase, which is pretty not worth it for how much points it requires for you to decrease the charge time. IMHO it is terrible to invest points into it, because 10 points doesn’t let you increase the Crit rate any further than level 1 and Critical Damage +50% for like 30seconds is so brief that you might as well not use it and just use Swift Step to run and gun instead for higher survival chance and DPS buildup instead of being ‘Semi-Stationary’.
Also Prime and Loaded is not the worst one for me since it does help you when all your Musketeer skills are on CD, it is sorta useful on emergency situations but for the most part you end up never using it when you have other skills to use from other classes. Not to mention with current Re: Build SP consumption, you would most likely end up with no more SP after you keep spamming your Musket skills anyways. But it is a pass since it costs only 1 skill point to max it.
I think Musketeer do benefit from higher Crits when used with Archer’s Oblique Shot for Slowing enemies/bosses or Hunter’s immobilizing skills like Retrieve or Rush Dog etc, Howling and Growling also helps aton on keeping massive numbers of monsters stay on their position if you know how to utilize and predict your Pet’s AI and also knowledge of resetting the AI by either feeding or using attack skills to an enemy close to it. I also utilize Praise if the pet AI is broken/doesn’t follow you when you need it. Basically when you are being swarmed, just use Praise and immediately Growl and Howl for the enemies to stay put and decrease their Critical Resistance so you can fire at them after positioning at a safer spot.
However I do agree that Pied Piper and Falconer might still overall still better than Hunter/Wugushi probably, but I don’t really know about Pied Piper/Falconer that well.
