Mercenary - Problems Analysis and Solution Proposals

I’m fairly certain as of current version almost all crossbow users end up playing nade spam one way or another. Ammo based abilities have next to no synergies with each other or way too much investment for minimal gain. It It also made mercenary objectively the worst class judging by the player class count in top 1000.

One of the main issue is scattershot not working with ammo skills like at all. It forced you into three shot burst per bolt spent instead of firing all three at a time, and you’re lucky if you can even get dps gain out of it due to the atk speed AND dmg penalties. Especially multi bolt skills, they get so little from passive tree they’re never worth using, as one bolt skills at least benefit from reload speed proportionally.

I have played War Thunder (lv100) and Synthetik (Heavy Gunner main). If you’ve played either you know what I’m about to suggest.

Here are my suggestions
First of all, all ammo skills belongs to one of the four archetypes: bolt action, full auto, shotgun and artillery.

- Bolt action: your fps sniper rifle, which should allow turning accuracy into crit. By their large damage per shot nature, they should also allow culling check after hit instead of before.

- Full auto: the fun in war thunder air force is selecting your belt. There should be meta skills that allow you to mix and match ammunitions. We have a very convenient tool to achieve this: trigger on crossbow basic attack. Every basic attack generates X charges, and each ammo type will consume Y charges to fire. The skill gems plugged into the ammo belt meta gem are used in order, so if you have fire/ice/fire plugged in, you’ll be gaining charge toward fire shot first, and after fire shot is being used it swaps to charge toward ice shot, then again to fire due to your belt layout. Then it can start all over. This can create insane amounts of variability for both the crossbow traits and the skill combinations.
Full auto ammunition should also all gain heat on firing per shot, instead of rapid fire 4 heat per second regardless of attack speed. There can be a keystone allowing you to have more heat than is usually allowed but also take damage from overheating as tradeoff.

- Shotguns. Ah uh, shotguns. The eternal “worse sr” argument. To make it stand out, I think it should have larger stun accumulation modifier that is tied to the fragments connected, basically makes it scale in a quadratic function to fragments hit due to each fragment also come with its own share of heavy stun accumulation. This makes sense as almost all enemy heavy stun animation looks like being knocked back. We should also have a support gem that turns shotgun into slug which basically makes it a bolt action with moderate knockback.

- Artillery skills should be allowed to load into artillery totem. Idk why this isn’t a thing. All of them are currently extremely underwhelming.

P.S. belt meta skill doesn’t need to be one only. We can have different tiers of belts/magazines? of different length and properties, maybe at a spirit cost but allows it to modify the attack pattern of basic attack, maybe even a backpack fed belt that no longer requires reloading but cost a lot of spirits.