I actually like the concept of bow attacks costing focus so the player is forced to engage in melee.
Thank you for listening to my TED talk 
Do we know all the details of the new changes planned for bows/staffs?
First patch just made the standard bow attack cost stamina instead of focus.
I think my intuition was correct. Made the build, at least for me, very dull.
The flow of using stamina in melee and focus while ranged was way smoother. Now the playstyle feels reduced to shoot / dodge / shoot / dodge. But maybe that’s just me 
Before you had to go into danger, and then had a moment of relative safety while shooting. Now you are always in the safety zone (which feels overpowered) and just sometimes get annoyed by not having stamina to dodge (which never happened before when arrows cost only focus)
Also seems that when you kite enemies sometimes they just stop chasing you (maybe they’re at the end of their designated area?) and let themselves be shot endlessly. Same with enemies on different platforms, they can’t do anything. With limited arrows, I never took these as an issue.
2 Likes
Yeah, ranged doesnt really sit well without costing focus.
A healthier balance would be for basic bow shot to deal low damage, while recovering Focus which can be spent on higher damage bow abilities, BUT for Focus to still be scarce enough that you would be rewarded for dipping into melee to get Focus faster.
Currently the game allows you to build so much Focus so quickly even while using Focus attacks that ‘Focus building’ doesn’t exist and gameplay only involves spending it.
1 Like