Heart Seeker with multiple projectiles

[Scrapulous]

I have not historically been a fan of the Ranger AL9 power Heart Seeker. It doesn't benefit from Driving Flight, it's not foe-only, which makes the line projecting straight out from the user problematic for a ranged character, and it's reall y expensive in terms of Bond. I found it hard to justify using it over other Ranger powers.

But I installed Elric Galad's Balance Polishing Mod and complained about even his version of the power. He pointed out that the Enfeebled affliction from the power has no duration, meaning it won't end naturally. That convinced me to give it another try. So I have been playing around with it.

Then I tried it while using Frostseeker:

Each projectile gets its own, miniature Heart Seeker (usually the aoe line is thicker).

The spread is tighter with Xefa's Empirical Explication, but it's overall wider after a few feet than the default ability:

Unfortunately the ability is still limited by Xefa's range, so my character in the situation above would run toward that marauder and spoil the effect of the spread. So doing this with a blunderbuss is less useful than with Frostseeker.

 

Are there other multi-projectile weapons I should try this with?

[thelee]

have you tried with scourge of bezello? that's the only other one i can think of (it's in FS)

[Elric Galad]

Fun fact : Heart Seeker does not benefit from driving flight but Whirling Strikes does, if you hold a ranged weapon in left Hand.

[Scrapulous]

@Elric Galad: Yes, my pistol ranger uses whirling strikes with Lover's Embrace and Scordeo's Trophy as a fight opener to get big DoTs on everybody in the range of the power (which is longer than the range of the dagger), and then get speed buffs from everybody in pistol range. It's a nice way to start the fight killing or nearly killing some people outright and hurting a few others and with -20% or -25% recovery time. It's a strong power with a lot of weird, hidden facets.

@thelee: Oh, good catch. Here's Scourge of Bezzello:

A much tighter spread than Frostseeker! Here's Frostseeker in the same situation:

So I'm guessing that what determines the angle of the rays is just the animation. Frostseeker shows the three arrows emerging from from the bow on autoattacks at about that wide angle before they turn and converge on the target. It seems weird that something so relatively important would be left to something as unbound by balance concerns as animations, but there it is.

[thelee]

possibly silly question, but for tight, overlapping areas, does that correspond to multiple hits on a target? or is it one hit per target regardless of how many area of effect lines there are?

[Scrapulous]

1 hour ago, thelee said:

possibly silly question, but for tight, overlapping areas, does that correspond to multiple hits on a target? or is it one hit per target regardless of how many area of effect lines there are?

Interesting question! I didn't know, so I asked Furrante what he thought.

He said that each ray gets its own hit on a target regardless of whether any of the others hit that target:

 

But there's more weirdness now. The only reason I know that I would have interrupted Furrante was if those hits had been crits (Stunning Shots). But they appear in the log as hits. When I mouse over them to see the roll, no hit roll appears:

 

It's true of Heart Seeker even on single-projectile weapons, too: it appears to be auto-hit. Or at least it shows no to-hit roll and always appears as "Hits" in the combat log. I didn't know that could happen.

 

[Elric Galad]

It's not me I sweat ! I only added auto hit to Hand of Berath

[thelee]

15 hours ago, Scrapulous said:

Interesting question! I didn't know, so I asked Furrante what he thought.

literally lol'd