Until AAs, there's nothing that makes rangers great DPS. They melee like a rogue who doesn't backstab, and their nukes are really weak and they can't keep up casting them with any kind of regularity in a long fight or chain-pull scenario. There exist no mechanics or ranger-only items that would somehow make them top DPS. They're around warrior DPS as warrior crits pretty much equal the ranger's spell damage. In Kunark they get access to a 2hb that's like 5% better to the comparable weapons available to other melee classes, but this is only relevant until epics. By this time, all the pure melees have disciplines that blow a ranger out of the water and can generally be saved for the important fights. Rangers then get trueshot disc in Velious, but this isn't that much of a DPS boost, rather it allows them to do DPS on par with their melee output but from long range. Ranger DPS is extremely average.
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