Crossbow ammo swap delay needs to be re-evaluated
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Bear with me for a second while I first talk about the reload mechanic to set up as a comparison, before getting to the issues with the ammo swap mechanic. I'll spoiler-wrap it because it's probably more like an optional pre-amble.
Spoiler
Hot take, I think the reload mechanic itself is actually solid - the base damage of crossbow abilities and their base attack speed, along with the base attack speed of crossbows themself, are balanced against your reload speed so that it works out to be comparable effective dps to other weapons' abilities.
Take, in a vacuum, quartstaff's 'ice strike' ability in comparison to e.g. fragmentation rounds, using just super basic base stats. Ice strike at level 20, the first two hits do 203% of attack damage at 40% higher attack speed, and then the final strike does 452% of attack damage at half attack speed. 1.5 attacks per second means each of the first two hits have 2.1 attacks per second base, or ~0.476s per attack. The third attack would be 0.75 attacks per second, taking 1.33s baseline. Put all together, the three attacks takes ~2.285s, and deals 858% attack damage, resulting in 858 / 2.285 = 375.49% attack damage per second baseline. Fragmentation rounds does 69% attack damage per fragment, with 10 fragments resulting in 690% max per shot. Crossbows baseline are 1.6 attacks per second, or 0.625s per attack, with 0.8s reload time. The shot and the reload combined then takes 1.425s to do 690% attack damage, resulting in 690 / 1.425 = 484.21% attack damage per second. So frag rounds actually comes on top by a non-negligible amount, but we should then consider weapon base damage and it get's a bit more complicated. The highest base damage qstaff does 65-108 (86.5 average) damage and has 10% base crit chance, the highest base damage xbow does 28-112 (70 average) damage and has 5% base crit. So the skill base stats of frag rounds does about 29% more dps than ice strike, but the base stats on the weapon itself for qstaff is about 24% higher base damage, with 5% more base crit. While this all should be taken with a grain of salt, the bare bones of a comparable crossbow and quarterstaff ability are ultimately pretty similar, and it's all the extraneous stuff that makes any further difference. All this to say, clearly reload time has been carefully tuned against the actual base stats of abilities and the base stats of the weapon to come out to be roughly comparable to other weapons without such a reload mechanic. Kudos to GGG, there's some work that needs to be done with smoothness of operation and some bugs that others have detailed, but as a baseline design this was well thought out, and personally I like it. Now to get to the intended topic of this post - unlike the basic reload mechanic, the delay from swapping between ammo types has no such well thought out design. From my testing, this delay appears to be roughly a flat 0.3s that you're forced to go through when switching between ammo types. I have heard others say this is scaleable, for example from increasing reload speed, the testing I've done so far does not indicate that such is the case, though I'd love to hear what others have managed to find out on this front. Even if it were scaleable, I'd argue that the ammo swap delay is a problem. Because at its very core, it disincentivizes using more than one ability, which not only is fairly antithetical to how poe2 was advertised, but it's antithetical to how crossbow specifically was advertised. (Set aside for the moment that for this sort of thing I would argue positive incentives are generally better to use than negative incentives i.e., we should be positively incentivized to stick with one ammo type if that is for some reason the devs intention, rather than actively punished for not doing so.) To demonstrate what I'm referring to, look no further the descriptions given for each class during the character creation screen, here's some of what we see when selecting Mercenary: 1. "Ammunition: Switch between varied crossbow ammunition. Adapt to enemy behavior. Exploit their weaknesses." 2. "Versatile Range: Adapt to enemy behavior. Pick them off from afar. Destroy any that get close." Clearly, there is a core theme where a selling point of crossbow is the versatility of using different ammo types. Set aside that there's nothing really unique at play in terms of providing more versatility than any other weapon type, but the ammo swap delay inherent to the ammunition mechanic does nothing but punish you for attempting to doing what was advertised as a strength. No other weapon has to be forced through a 0.3s delay to use a different ability. This delay means that the more you alternate between different abilities, the more 0.3s delays you're taking, eating into your damage output. Almost comically, you're actually just better off using a weapon swap instead, literally carrying 2 crossbows with one dedicated to each of the ammo types you want to swap between, because at least with the weapon swap you can DRASTICALLY cut down on the weapon swap delay via passives and jewels. This, however, is a silly, unideal, and imperfect solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. Conclusion Not only is crossbow not rewarded for attempting to utilize the versatility that the weapon has been advertised as specializing in, it's actively punished for trying to do so. I don't know what to do about this. On the one hand, the animation makes sense for non-gameplay reasons - given the reload mechanic, it would be weird swapping to a different type of bolt while bypassing the clear thing that has been established your character must do to load in new bolts. Theoretically, you could have the animation while somehow not cutting into the actual attack time, but I'm guessing this is more of a challenge to design than how it might sound. The same approach that they took with reloading, frontloading the damage and attack speed of your abilities to offset it, isn't able to be likewise applied here, because the problem still would remain that you'd still just be better off not swapping ammo - it would only improve the comparison to other weapons. Which obviously creates other problems. I don't know what to do about this, all I can say is that the current state of affairs of this aspect of crossbow's design needs to be re-evaluated. I can only leave it to GGG's expertise as actual game designers to find a solution that fits. Last bumped on Feb 28, 2025, 6:29:07 PM
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