The passives of bow are lackluster in general. Compare DW for example.

aco5712 wrote: »

As far as i know, vulnerable means stun/disorient/silenced/feared? Thats what i have come to understand it as. Now idk if this is a NB only thing (i think it is) but stealth attacking anything stuns them. So in pvp, i know when i snipe someone from stealth, they go into a 2-3 second stun i believe. Its really this time, where the skill comes into play. I do agree that bow needs new passives, maybe increased armour/spell penetration but thats another topic.

Doesn't Ruffian tooltip says it works against a Disable target?

So a Vulnerable target might actualy be something completely different as far as I know, maybe Armour/Attack debuff or even the Staggered state maybe?

Edit : I think they need to clarify the tooltip like they did with Ruffian, it would actualy answer a lot of questions around that passive.

Back with results. The passive hawkeye, as I had assumed, provides a 15% damage bonus to bow light/heavy attacks and abilities when the target is 'off-balance'. Meaning the state that occurs naturally when interrupted mid spell/ability cast which can turn into a prolonged stun if the off-balance individual is hit by a heavy attack.

Of course there are other abilities that trigger this state, but they are few and far between. But the bottom line is that the off-balance vulnerable state is merely a setup for one to heavy attack the off-balance target furthering the duration of the stun.

That means that in solo situations you get one heavy attack with a 15% damage bonus if you want to actually take advantage of the stun mechanic. Maybe you could weave in a bow ability before starting the heavy attack. At it's base, this ability is good for one to two attacks solo, and no more than three or four when you have an ally to do the heavy attack stun for you. That's when a situation occurs when an enemy is actually set off-balance. Which brings me to my next point.

In pvp, people tend to avoid cast time abilities in combat like the plague unless they have one of the few decent cast time abilities at their disposal (Crystal shard prime example). Because of this avoidance of cast-times in a general sense, a target letting himself get interrupted is a very rare occurrence, and even then they have the ability to CC break out immediately making that one time interrupt useless from the perspective of the damage buff.

And the situation isn't much better for using peripheral sources of the vulnerable state. The only ability that is afforded to me which can set a target off balance is one that is illogical to use with my bow since I'd have to be in melee range, a NB ability (veiled strike). Maybe the morph of blur could help when coupled with evasion but that's hardly consistent and takes up two ability slots to be remotely effective.

Anyway, I'll quit ranting and conclude by saying that this passive is synergy-less junk, and the bow tree in general could use some work. So ZOS, how bout we start by scrapping hawkeye and giving us something we have more use of?

EDIT: ZOS stealth changed the tooltip of hawkeye on the PTS, it now clearly states off-balance targets. A little late, but thanks for the clarification guys -.-

aco5712 wrote: »

Well then i will be wanting my 2 skill points back... Only thing that it can benefit from is stunning a caste with venom arrow.... useless passive.

Well you can also trigger it when you block a heavy attack, make an ennemy miss a melee attack with Blinding Flashes or Mirage and Immobilize a target with Bombard followed by a Lava Whip.

That's about it, but you get the idea.

Having the right Armour to have some synergy with what you are trying to do is your friend.

There is some VR6 medium armour that I (and a friend of mine) improved to epic and it works very well when you combine with stealth.

Has someone actually found repeated uses for this passive? I'd like to know how to better utilize this passive if there's something I'm missing, but so far I've never even noticed when doing damage to an enemy that was in a vulnerable state. Maybe that's my problem, but that's why I'm asking, to fix that

Aside from my plea for help, I feel I must question the credibility of this statement:

Beeftips wrote: »

I've crit for 1700s with heavy attack on disabled targets with bow. Don't take away my hawkeye.

Even if I ever saw my vr12 crit for 1700 with a heavy attack against maybe I'd feel similarly to you.

But in pvp, I can't ever get a heavy attack off because your enemies are too smart to just sit there while you charge up.

So now I should ask, how often is this happening in a competitive environment? While leveling up, yeah it's a cool passive I guess and can see a few uses, but in a trial environment? No way. In PVP? You can try, good luck, but I never have to time to put any more than an attack or two in, even if I'm not trying to do one heavy attack.

And while on the discussion of PVP, I'd like to see you crit for more than 1.5k with a heavy attack against an actual semi-armored target, since we all know pve enemies have crap for armor, which would account for such high crits.

Unless you can tell me you're noticing this bonus multiple times in any given play-session like I see for passives like Long-Shots, then I'd like to reassert that Hawk-Eye would probably be best of being scrapped for a talent that's used more often.

But one last time, to be fair, if there's some technique to getting targets off balance all the time with a bow to make this semi useful that I'm just missing, by all means enlighten me. I'd like to get use out of all of our passives the same as anyone else ^.^

Beeftips wrote: »

@Thejollygreenone What faction are you?

Aldmeri, why do you ask?

Beeftips wrote: »

I can give you a demonstration tonight if you like.

Sounds good, you can friend request me if you want, my account name is the same as my forum name.

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