Quote from: RedMattis on 04 July 2020, 20:55:45

Is the Bow Auto-attack ability from the nature tree intended to make the attacks much slower than the regular bow attacks? I figured since it was there the Nature tree was intended to be a functional bow-user without involving the Hunting tree. Kiting with it seems somewhat futile, which makes it tricky to use along with the tactic of dragging around trains of plagued enemies.

I figured I'd go Nature/Occult utilizing the bow and poisons, but perhaps I'm not building things in the intended manner?

Of course it's intended to have less attack speed, it would be broken otherwise.
Maybe increasing attack speed on a lvl 32-40 modifier would be needed to make it scale better in endgame.

After leveling it a bit, I can see that being the case, dumping points into the second skill in that chain nets a lot of damage (Though the AoE is a bit iffy at my current 1.1m radius since enemies are usually running in a line/curved line whenever they are close together). It is still a bit fringe in usefulness since most enemies will run up in your face, and you're forced to kite them, which prevents using that skill (many enemies would reach and hit me from a screen away). I'm playing in multiplayer, but our tanky rune-guy can't seem to get aggro off me (using the taunt skill everyone starts out with). Especially Plague seems very prone to instantly get me aggro, for some reason.

Using it I feel like I either need a better method of keeping enemies distracted (like an aggro-drop ability), or slightly more kite-friendly mechanics such as it procing the full power arrow only every 4 shots, or a 5 second cooldown reduced when hitting enemies, etc. When dealing with fast & deadly, or ranged enemies I usually end up running around throwing Plague and the thorn-spitting plants while my buddies hit the boss instead of actually using my bow. Perhaps the AoE could be a regular (bow-based) cooldown ability which scales in some way the first piercing-shot-esque slot?

Anyway, the impression I got as a player seeing it in the nature tree was basically "Oh, I don't need to pick the hunting tree to be a bow-user?", but compared to playing the Hunting tree where you just spam ultra-deadly arrows which clear out mobs everywhere, the Nature-bow feels a bit off. Not that I'm expecting it to be as good as the Hunting tree bow, but the cast time makes it feel like I shouldn't use it unless I can remain stationary, which doesn't really happen, especially since using the Plague spell encourages running around and bunching up enemies.

Finally, I didn't quite grasp that it would be slower than my autos based on reading the description, and I'm still not sure if it scales with cast speed or attack speed?