Mercenary combos with ammunition are inherently bad

I like the mercenary. It is probably my favorite class. And so, on the eve of the league, I played a little bit with a zero start. And as Jonathan advised, I decided to try skills and combos that I hadn’t tried before.

Permafrost Bolts freeze the target and Fragmentation Rounds gets bonus explosion versus frozen targets. It is very bad. There are many things wrong, but the biggest problem is switching between ammo.

And the solution is simple - there shouldn't be any combos between different ammo types.

How I usually started: grenades with scatter and... a regular crossbow shot. I don't see any point in using any of the early ammunition. The grenade takes care of any mob packs; just group them up, roll, and that's it. And the crossbow's regular shots are great when the monster has a lot of HP. All starting ammunition is worse than this. You don't need AoE, grenades can handle that, and for single target, a standard shot is better. The standard shot has full damage at any range, and lots of bolts.

And most importantly: AMMUNITION AND GRENADES ARE RELOADED SEPARATELY.

So what did I get instead with the frozen kombo? It's much more difficult to use, you need to pay attention and keep track of where the frozen mob is, whether anyone is frozen at all. Whereas you can throw a grenade at any time and forget about it. You waste time switching between ammo. And the worst part is that you run out of both ammo and need to reload twice. For what? Why? And I can list even more reasons why this is all bad.

How it should actually be:
1) ammunition and grenade combo
2) ammunition and ballista combo

The end. No ammunition and ammunition combo. That's bad.

This way, you'll never have to switch between ammo and reload twice. Grenades reload simultaneously, and ballistas are always available. Convenient and simple. And if, for example, you use 2 ammunition and grenades, then there will not be enough time to use the grenades. With grenades, you only have time to use 1 ammo.

There are probably some combos between ammo types that can one-shot bosses in one switch. But there can't be any viseral combat with constant switching of ammunition.

Armour Piercing Rounds with Armour Explosion support is fun (although this gem is not recommended by default) but still worse than grenades with a regular shot. And the combo with freezing is not fun and just bad.

!! And speaking of the mercenary, at the start of this league I was inspired by this build idea: Tactian with "Watch how i do it" and a new support gem "Living lightning". The idea was to give 25% of the damage from my two-handed crossbow to the summoned lightning spirits. But it just doesn't work. According to my tests, no damage is transferred to them. For some reason, summoned lightning spirits are not considered allies.

I understand that this is a beta test and I hope that someday everything will work as it should.

I can't tell if you're talking with consideration of fact that you can lock a weapon to both Weapon Sets and use separate ammo on each, so you don't need to swap ammo, just reload when out of bolts in two separate weapon sets. Just wanted to leave it here for the record.

Yes, that's true, I didn't think about that. It does solve some of the problems. But it still requires two reloads, while using one ammo and grenades is one reload. And Permafrost Bolts and Fragmentation Rounds still suck, at least at the start.

And from the point of immersion, it’s strange that bolts in a crossbow appear out of nowhere. Changing your weapon set means that you take a different weapon. That you take another crossbow that was loaded in advance. If you use one crossbow for two sets then bolts appear out of nowhere.

The weapon swap pretends you have 2 copies of the same weapon, you're really trying to bring realistic scenerios into a fantasy game right now? seriously?

grenades cooldown = ammo reload ?

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IILU81II#8410 написал:

grenades cooldown = ammo reload ?

Summary: Mercenary+Crossbow completely sucks in bosses flights. Other classes do insane damage with Crossbow use.

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Falginton#0485 написал:

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IILU81II#8410 написал:

grenades cooldown = ammo reload ?

Summary: Mercenary+Crossbow completely sucks in bosses flights. Other classes do insane damage with Crossbow use.

Try stormblast bolt + mortar cannon or any detonator skill on each merc ascendancy and say that again.

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Falginton#0485 написал:

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IILU81II#8410 написал:

grenades cooldown = ammo reload ?

Summary: Mercenary+Crossbow completely sucks in bosses flights. Other classes do insane damage with Crossbow use.

makes 0 sense.
Any ascendancy can 1 shot any boss with crossbows and probably with any weapon.

This topic has nothing to do with merc and everything to do with xbow alone.

I like the ammo system of the crossbow. Please don't change it.
It's really an L2P issue.