Witch Hunter and Crossbow

Enjoying the witch hunter but definitely feeling the glaring problems compared to other classes.

The Xbox is a 2H and needs to act like it. It attacks slowly and would benefit from DPS upgrade. Bows shoot faster hence do less damage. Xbow supposed to almost 2x the damage when hitting a target within 5 meters. Something along those lines.

The sorcery ward needs a buff. Either it becomes a real ward and absorbs all elemental damage types including chaos and elemental dots. Or the penalty needs to be reduced perhaps 30% evasion and armor.

The witchbane and 30% damage for 4 points is great. Zealous inquisition and the decimating strike are rng based and are easily negated with higher gear. 5-30% of a boss HP is great but why so much rng. The culling strike feels weak after some time since it can be replaced with a spirit gem attrition with quality.

Hopefully armor gets fixed. It should make warriors extremely tanky to physical but currently doesn't do enough.

Weapon specialist is too confusing and I don't know how to make it work.

Crossbow:

The crossbow is now quite disappointing, ShockBurst Rounds is the only strong side of it.

First, talking about Passive Skills, I don't know how the grenades are now, but trying a little, I didn't get any more projectiles, the grenades can explode twice, the grenade nodes nor the area damage ones, but without them I already feel like they are bad. But no real opinion about them.

Reusable Ammunition:
This looks like the WORST NODE by a wide margin for a weapon.
It might be nice if the position was swapped with Full Salvo, but it would be the ultimate crossbow NODE, where you can load 2 ammunitions at the same time and fire them together. There could be some trade-off for this, for sure, like less damage, less reload speed.

Full Salvo:
It position should be swapped with Reusable Ammunition which has been changed as I said above. Change it from 25% increased damage with crossbow for each type of ammunition fired in the past 10 seconds to > 10% more damage with crossbow for each type of ammunition fired in the past 5 seconds. That will make it a nice combo with the new Reusable Ammunition.

Now the Crossbow Attacks:

Galvanic Shards:
It's a good skill, but the Quality seems a bit off.
What about instead of +0-2 bolts loaded, +0-2 chains.

Ripwire Ballista and Artillery Ballista:
Their attack time should be a bit shorter (numbers are just for clarification), 1.6 to 1.2, 2.5 to 2.0.

Stormblast Rounds:
This skill need to interact with the lightning beams, something like if a lightning beam interact with, it will explode with double the range. The quality is a bit off, changed to 20% increased shock magnitude instead of lightning resistance penetration.

Emergency Reload:
Another good skill, but I think it should interact in a different way, instead of instantly reloading the crossbow, it should change if you activate it and the ammo becomes 0, it reloads.

Hailstorm Rounds and Siege Cascade:
Greatly increases the explosion radius.

Plasma Blast:
The skill is already interesting, but if the Reusable Ammunition get changed for the new way, it will be an insane skill.
But if that doesn't happen, as if it would break something or it was impossible:
Remove the explosion, make it chain from the terrain making it interesting with chaining the beam in a room doing an insane amount of damage, sure, each time it chains, the damage is greatly reduced.

I don't have much to say about grenades at the moment, as I haven't tried them myself.

If anyone has any ideas about what I've said, also about grenades, will be cool.

If we're only thinking about the farming / mapping / bossing aspects of the game and how fast we can 1-shot these, then yes, there are a lot of things to fix.

But if we're going to strictly talk about the RP aspect of the class, then this class is FANTASTIC.

Crossbow jams, frantic reloading, grenades taking too long to explode, flanking hoards that are trying to kill you and cursing the whole time, the Merc gives constant shots of adrenaline (and yes, frustration) like no other class can.