Rangers ever use range in VoS?

[Daldaen]

Originally Posted by Kutsumo [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

During burns with trueshot up, YES. I even mentioned that in my post. Again, 2 minutes out of every 60. Melee has always been better without trueshot burning unless you have bad weapons or have neglected melee AAs.

Not really no.

Especially during PoP. Partially due to itemization. Because the 2nd/3rd best bows of the day were the Obsidianwood/Primordial Driftwood Bows. Though they required drops from the elemental plane to make, they were tradeable (the later being easily farmed with a group at D3 camp).

Basically it lead to situations where many Rangers had access to an EP quality bow and their weapons were just VT quality or Epic quality. The difference between them was stark.

Even once Ranger got access to EP No Drop 1handers, the bows still out parsed. Looking through some posts from EQMac, 65 Ranger with max AA/ATK pulled out 150 DPS with Coirnav Hammer/Agnarr Sword during a 10 hour parse with 100% Haste. Now bow parses of 11+ hours pulled up:

Featherwood - 150
Stonewood - 153.5
Primordial - 156.8
Obsidianwood - 166.2
Bow of the Tempest (PoTime) - 175.5

All done with 100% Haste. Bows were the best option even when other things were equal. The reason many Rangers didn't use bows 100% of the time was because of arrow collision. Any mob being corner tanked, the arrows would get lost in the wall and do 0 damage. As a result If you wanted that ranger burn and solid sustained DPS, you had to tank the mob out of a wall/corner which meant balancing push and less easy to avoid AEs.

Archery also had the benefit (atleast on Mac server, but I'm fairly sure this is a classic feature) that it generated nearly 0 hate. So while Rogues had to evade and monks had to FD and Wizards had to Concussion pants and Necros had to FD... Rangers were always the last to die in a wipe because of how little hate archery generated. I would imagine it calculated the hate off the arrow instead of off the bow, which bugged it to be 1 hate per arrow or something.