Combo Master & Bleeding Edge works inconsistently with Rapid 1 Vs Rapid 2-4.
Rapid 1 activates Combo Master / Bleeding Edge after 20 Fired Shots resulting in 40 Hits of Rapid 1 (2 Arrows).
Rapid 4 activates after 4 Fired shots resulting in 20 Hits counting every Arrow of Rapid 4 (5 Arrows) as an action.
その他の情報/Other Information
This is very inconsistent because every Tick of Pierce 1-4 and every projectile of Spread 1-4 all count as one action. Is this intentional or a bug that occured when Rapid 2/3/4 got changed?
Any equipment that confers the Combo Master skill or the Bleeding Edge will work.
Any bow capable of firing Rapid shots at the specified shot levels will work (it does not have to be a single bow that can fire all 4 shot levels of Rapid).
Equipping both Combo Master and Bleeding Edge skills, compare the number of standing salvos it takes to activate both skills when using:
A bow with Rapid Lv. 4 shot
A bow with Spread Lv. 4 shot
A bow with Pierce Lv. 4 shot
Just charge and fire without doing anything else that would complicate the counting. Fire the charged shot and the powershot as well.
You can try this on the Training Dummy. The result is the same in actual hunts too.
Current observation is that there’s a clear and significant difference between Rapid shots and the other 2 shot types when it comes to activating Combo Master/Bleeding Edge (i.e. action-count skills), and we’re wondering if this is as designed or not.
Thank you for your response let us know if you need any more footage , gear info etc we could try to mobilise some bow user to share more Infos
But it’s not a specific problem it’s just how the skill works on different shottypes so it’s kinda universal and not gear monster or situation depending
I’m thinking maybe the Spread Shot and Pierce Shots are the ones that are bugged, because for other weapon types, it takes ~20 dodges and/or hits to activate Combo Master, even for attacks that are multi-hit but 1 action:
Hammer (normal tap attacks only): 20 hits, 16 taps
Hammer (Waterstrike, Spinning Bludgeon only): 19 hits but 1 action only since I just charge to level 3 and then release.
Dual Blades (normal mode): 20 hits, 9 taps
Dual Blades (demon mode, tap only): 24 hits, 7 taps
Great Sword (charged attacks only): 20 hits, 20 tap-holds
Without trying out on all other weapon types, I believe the outlier is actually the Bow Spread Shot and Bow Pierce shots, which currently take 20 shots to activate instead of 20 hits, while the other weapon types take around 20 hits to activate, not 20 actions.
If they go by ammo count on bowguns, that somewhat makes sense because the power of the bowgun shots is spread out over several shots.
But for Bow that relies on charging, if we go by shots only and not hits, it’ll take way too long just to activate Combo Master, even longer than a Great Sword.
Bow default style and Power Volley style ought to go by the number of hits.
Bow Dodgebolt style ought to go by the number of attacks instead of hits since it has a much higher hits/s, almost on par with Dual Blades.
Some attacks hit multiple times in a single move, but the number of hits doesn’t change how many actions the game counts. Even if some hits fail to connect, the action itself is still considered completed.
The number of taps also isn’t directly tied to the action count, since a single input can trigger multiple actions depending on the weapon. Dual Blades attacks often perform two or more swings from a single input, so they register as multiple actions even though you only tapped once.
For the Bow, each shot counts as one action.
Piercing-type arrows fire a single arrow per input, and that arrow deals multiple hits as it passes through the target.
Spread-type arrows nock several arrows at once and release them in a single shot, so the entire volley still counts as one action.
Rapid-fire shots can be thought of as the Bow performing the “fire one arrow” action several times in extremely quick succession from a single input.
I understand that misses are counted, but I’m not talking about whether the misses are counted or not. I mentioned the hits just so that we have a clear understanding of when Combo Master activates for the various weapons when using different moves. Right now, the number of hits/actions needed is just not very consistent for Bow, compared to how it is for the other weapons, especially when you look at the time-to-activate.
For the weapons I checked above, they all go by number of hits except for Spread and Pierce arrows. While this is slow for the Great Sword, I would say this is “expected” because I wouldn’t consider Great Sword having anything to do with “combos”, if we consider it as a term that’s usually associated with agile weapons. But if Bow takes even longer than a Great Sword just to activate Combo Master… Is Bow not an agility weapon? What’s so special about the Rapid arrow? Or rather, what’s so special about Spread/Pierce arrows?
It even saved 1 hit for Waterstrike Hammer’s Spinning Bludgeon (19 hits, 1 action)
But if the bow shots are an issue… I’m more worried about the quality of internal tests occurring within the developers… This should have been something that’s easily tested against a set of design documents and fixed before it’s even released to the general public. Why leave it like this until now?
Given that the arrow has innate piercing capability, it would make no sense if a single shot that happens to hit multiple times were counted as multiple actions based on the number of pierce hits. As Bowguns demonstrate, that kind of attack is still just one action.
If there is anything strange about Bow, it would be the unusually high number of actions assigned to Rapid shot. However, that can be explained by the reason I mentioned earlier: Rapid shot is different from other bow attacks in that it repeats the single action of firing one arrow multiple times in an instant.
For Water Strike Hammer’s Charged Spinning Bludgeon, it appears to count one action per hit, plus an additional action on the 10th hit. This is likely because the finishing blow changes at that timing, meaning some kind of indistinguishable internal action is occurring there.
Axe Boosted Charge Blade, its continuous hits seem to be treated as two actions: swinging the axe and rotating the blade.
Gunlance’s Wyrmstake Cannon consists of three actions: thrusting the lance, pulling the trigger, and the stake being launched.
By the way, you might feel that the name “Combo Master” doesn’t match the image, but in Japanese this skill is actually called “本領発揮(Show Full Potential)”. The English name was simply chosen to make the activation condition easier to understand, and the skill itself is originally unrelated to “combos” - after all, it activates even when you’re just dodging. If anything, the effect implied by the name “Combo Master” is far closer to what the skill “連撃(Burst)” provides.
Now that gives a very different feel of how each weapon type could activate this skill.
If anything, I feel that if one is able to pull off the full series of a weapon’s move and let it activate on that, that would have been cool.
But yeah, let’s see what they say about this. We may have plausible explanations for each scenario but it feels “forced” to me in the sense that the activation rule for this skill is not consistent across all weapon types while all other skills are activating based on a simple rule that applies consistently. Even Latent Power is simple once we understand that it’s based on incurred MV and a threshold, while Combo Master behaves differently for different attacks.
let us know if you need any more footage , gear info etc we could try to mobilise some bow user to share more Infos
