Please make the focus skill a 3 rank skill to help out bow. Right now bow needs focus and at 5 ranks is a huge skill tax that prevents build diversity since so much has to be invested into focus.
Right now focus is a 5 rank skill. It makes building around it very difficult and keave little iptions for bow users.
Focus itself is a DPS skill. It should be considered similarly as other damage-bonus skills that also have 5 levels.
A 30% reduction in charging time is about equivalent to +40% in terms of DPS (1 / 0.7 = 1.429), assuming you keep charging and fire as soon as you can. The condition is that you’re using a charging attack, which is about the only attack for default bows and power volley bows. Moreover, being able to charge faster also allows you to be more flexible in your attacks and squeeze in an attack where lower levels of Focus won’t allow. A shot not fired, no matter how absurd its damage bonus is, is still 0% until it connects. The more times you can fire within the same time period, the more leeway you have to connect shots.
This is already higher than most damage bonus skills, which while they may confer slightly higher damage bonus, but are conditional and therefore their effective DPS contribution is about the same as Focus, if not lower, depending on strategy and monster compatibility with bow and the particular bow you’re using.
Without even any skill compression for Artillery, we unexpectedly got Advanced skills, so maybe Advanced Focus is coming.
Sure, the Focus skill’s contribution to DPS might be higher than other average damage skills.
But what makes it different from those is that Bow is designed with Focus as a mandatory skill.
In other words, Bow’s damage output is adjusted “on the premise of having the Focus skill.”
Other skills “add a bonus when equipped,” but for Bow, Focus is a skill that “brings a negative back to zero.”
(This was the same for Great Sword, but Great Sword found another path with Perfect Evade, allowing it to bypass this restriction.)
So no matter how high its DPS contribution is, it’s meaningless.
Equipping Focus only gets you to the starting line. It’s just a skill that takes up space.
I reconsidered.
The very concept of “it’s balanced around it” is merely the players’ perspective, and I realized that as long as there is no official statement from management saying “we balance it around that,” there’s no basis for it, so I’m taking it back.
I disagree. There have been builds that out-DPS Focus 5 and used no Focus, so Focus 5 is not the starting line. Just because it feels natural in the hand doesn’t mean it’s a permanent fixture.
And DPS is DPS. There’s little point in comparing bare-bones when the point of the game is to have a build that works efficiently and effectively, and the game is balanced with that in mind, not with nothing in mind. So long as a weapon type performs as expected for its characteristics versus the different monsters (which naturally brings up weapon-monster compatibility) and the performance distribution is in-line with how the weapon type is positioned among other weapon types, which means some weapons would be better/worse than other weapons against the various monsters and no single weapon stands out above the rest across all monsters, then the balancing works.
And right now bow is not suffering because of the need for Focus 5, nor is it so good that it stands far out above the rest.
I think we’ll probably get “集中境地”.
Activates at Focus 5 and gives a 30% damage boost, maybe?
Since 砲術境地 was a 30% boost, it might be the same.
Well, come to think of it though, Focus isn’t a skill just for Bow, so it seems unlikely they’d make changes solely because of Bow.
As for a Bow buff, it seems more likely they’d just straightforwardly increase motion values or something instead.