Mercenary - Bow & Crossbow. Primary left mouse button fire

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POEHero#6816 wrote:

So I need another crossbow to be able to shot standard crossbow bolts with my Left Mouse Button.

I did purchase another crossbow & I did manage to shot standard crossbow bolts but, if I by mistake press on....lets say "Permafrost" & the last crossbow I shot from was the new crossbow. It will reload the new crossbow with Permafrost, while I got Armour Piercing Rounds on my Right Mouse Button which is the old crossbow.

Maybe the other poster wasn't clear in how it works, I'll try to help out.

The skill that actually fires crossbow bolts is separate from the ammunition-based skills (Crossbow Shot, Permafrost, Fragmentation, Armour Piercing, etc.).

The basic "Crossbow Shot" that comes standard on any crossbow, along with any thing from a skill gem, are "ammunition" skills - all they do is "load" your crossbow with ammunition, then when you use/press the skill that actually fires the bolts, it will fire the bolts you have loaded into the crossbow at that moment.

Weapon swapping with two separate crossbows lets you utilize TWO unique "fire the crossbow" icons on the skill bar, because there are two crossbows each with their own unique ability to fire a bolt. Each crossbow can be loaded with it's own separate ammunition, and they both also come with the standard "Crossbow Shot" ammo. But those are still all ammo.

If you put a specific ammunition skill, like AP rounds, on Weapon-Set One and bind it to right mouse-click, and your "fire the crossbow" skill that corresponds to weapon set 1 is on left mouse-click, pressing the RMB will load the ammo, and pressing LMB will fire it.

If you instead switch AP rounds to Weapon-Set Two, without changing anything else, you will now load the AP rounds into whichever crossbow is in your 2nd weapon slot, and you need to fire it using the "fire the crossbow" skill for the 2nd crossbow - it can not also be set to the LMB, as it is already assigned to fire the crossbow in the first weapon slot, it will not apply to both crossbows.

People with two crossbows typically have "fire the first crossbow" on LMB and "fire the second crossbow" on RMB, and then the ammunition skills are on supporting buttons like Q,E,R,T,F,G or whatever - could be different if you are using WASD or click-to-move setups. Then you would assign specific ammunitions to be used with a specific weapon set, and you would use the corresponding LMB or RMB to fire it.

*As a sidenote, if you are using the same crossbow in both weapon slots, everything still applies, the game is just pretending you have two identical crossbows instead of two different ones. You will still have two "firing" skills where you can put one on LMB and the other on RMB.

Nice information.

I have been testing & I can reload the crossbow with Load Armour Piercing Rounds, Load Permafrost Bolts, Load Incendiary shot & probably more.
I cant reload the crossbow with Explosive Grenade or Flash Grenade.
I use E & R key for those 2 skills, so every time I want to fire one of those Grenades, I have to press the E or R key.

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karsey#2995 wrote:

Crossbow loading is so wonky and makes no sense and I'm not surprised to see it confuse someone using click-to-move on PC.

It feels a bit more intuitive when you use WASD and honestly, I played click-to-move on every ARPG ever since the 90s including 10 years of PoE1 but after getting used to WASD in PoE2 it makes click-to-move feel so inferior I don't even like going back to PoE1 for the new leagues for long anymore.

Back to crossbow ammo-loading, I think switching ammo should result in a fully-stocked clip, every time. The way they have it now doesn't even make sense from an animation standpoint because you can see a clip spring out every time you switch ammo types.

Like if you load in your Armour Piercing Rounds, and you have 20 "bolts" in the clip, fire them off, and then switch to High Velocity Rounds or Fragmentation Rounds where you have 3 (+1 from Double Barrel Support and +1 from crossbow implicit) and you fire all 3, when you switch BACK to armour piercing rounds, you should go back to 20, NOT 0 - because then you have to re-load a re-load!

This is made even worse because when you exhaust that re-re-loaded clip of 20 AP rounds again, when you switch BACK to HVR or FR, you will have to re-re-load THAT empty clip!! And it just keeps repeating! You have to reload twice every time from then on out!

Here it is visualized:

Shoot 20 AP bolts
[Load HVR]
Shoot 3 HVR bolts
[Load AP]
[Reload AP]
Shoot 20 AP bolts
[Load HVR]
[Reload HVR]
Shoot 3 HVR Bolts
[Load AP]
[Reload AP]
and so on

They also need to have some way to assign a dedicated "make this button shoot only this specific kind of ammo" skill on the skill bar because using a weapon-swap key-bind workaround just to not go insane while switching back and forth between frag and permafrost rounds is a band-aid solution.

Even the OP is confused by the way ammo-loading works lol.

Crossbows are so cool but they need a lot of love mechanically unless we want people to gravitate towards 1-skill spam builds.

I agree with you, reloading to 0 ammo & reloading again that doesnt make sense.