I just find that a Poe player is complaining the bow skills on r/pathofexile, and I think some of his words are right, but I do not agree with all his point of view. So I'd like to share my opinions about POE Bow and Wands. I think the problem is it would highlight just how powerful wands are (or just how weak bows are in comparison), even though I feel wands are, at least the kind it is easy to get your hands on (excluding piscators, that thing is skewing wands as "viable" as a concept by a huge amount) tend to be slightly weaker than your typical bow. after all, most wands tend to be t1 lightning, some sort of crit/wed and a crafted attack speed roll, whereas most desirable bows that are readily available are uniques (windripper, stormcloud, doomfletch) but without intense investment aren't really used to push through end game bosses and are instead used to effectively farm currency. And when you are going to buy POE Orbs, you should choose some websites that have a really good reputation, which will protect you from scams. For example, you can purchase Orbs in PoE from R4PG, PoecurrencyBuy, Poe4orbs and so on. In a word, you need to be careful when choosing right POE money suppliers. Also, although I agree that wands need more attacks (and bows), I feel that making more skills usable with more weapons makes weapons lose their identity and turns them into stat sticks. stats sticks are bad for immersion and bad game design. if your entire skill tree system is replaced with a skill gem system, the weapons need to have restricted skills to make different weapons viable for different kinds of roles and purposes. sure skill gems are meant to give us super human powers, but its still weird thinking that you are expected to wield an exquisite blade exactly the same way as you would a Vaal axe, but without move sets in this game (doesn't really make sense for the genre, but it is what skill trees are meant to represent) there needs to be some way to differentiate different weapon types and how they would be realistically wielded. otherwise you pick up a skill like ancestral warchief which works with all weapons (but gets a free pass for being some kind of totem that is meant to be, technically, some kind of clone of you) or cyclone and the only question you ask is "what weapon (stat stick) has the biggest number in the attack slot? if we are only interested in the damage number, then a weapon just becomes a spell that for some reason needs a gear slot to be used (instead of a gem slot in a piece of gear) and has a short range. if it doesn't feel like an actual attack, what is the point of differentiating? just make all spells and attacks %dps based and we can turn into d3, I'm sure everybody would love that trainwreck. (oh god I hope this never happens to PoE, I wouldn't be able to play it) This is why staves as attack weapons are pretty much extinct right now, they are meant to be the crit themed 2 hander which is already a hard sell because a "chance" to do a thing lends itself to high attack speed themed builds, which 2 handers naturally aren't. every time you could pick up a rare staff starforge, voidforge, disfavour, tidebreaker, marohi, and all the other 400+dps weapons are just better choices, and are in better supply (staves roll caster mods so rare phys staves are just hard to get, also they are too big to bother ever picking up and identifying, and their implicit rolls are either nothing or boring and so even end league crafting favours bases that have dps themed implicit rolls, or just straight up high dps bases. disintegrator might be a viable choice, but also is not easy to mass Exalted Orb farm and so disfavor/starforge are preferred) and their nodes lead to trees that are nearer to more life nodes and more strength nodes, and their notables are more situational where as axe/sword/mace nodes are more dps/clear oriented. sorry for getting off track, but my point is, make an attack that only staves can use and then suddenly if people want to use that attack, they will be using staves. also it will be much easier to balance if the balance team aren't having to constantly say "well we could buff [staff skill], but will it over perform with starforge if we do?", no other weapons need to be considered, just top end rares and the few unique staves that aren't caster themed. so yeah, wands and bows could use some new skills, but making all the bow skills wand skills too may kill bows. (although bows still have quivers so it might kill them as bad as staves have been killed)
