Rangers ever use range in VoS?

[wormed]

I liked PoP.

[Kutsumo]

There has never been an expansion or patch of EQ where bow was the primary means of DPS for rangers. In most iterations after Trueshot came out, you could do more burn DPS with a bow than with melee, but that's only 2 minutes (can get up to 3ish with extended AAs) out of over an hour cooldown. That's not to say you couldn't keep shooting arrows without TS, but it was usually only ~60% of the dps of melee when not disc'd.

Headshot AA and Vinelash Cascade spell (frontal cone root with unlimited targets) made grinding XP with bow-only a thing, though.

[curtischoy]

There has never been an expansion or patch of EQ where bow was the primary means of DPS for rangers.

what? Bow DPS was insane with the AA. Maybe it was PoP or a bit later, but rangers bow was out dpsing EVERY other class, not just ranger melee. And not just with TS.

[Kutsumo]

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

what? Bow DPS was insane with the AA. Maybe it was PoP or a bit later, but rangers bow was out dpsing EVERY other class, not just ranger melee. And not just with TS.

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.

[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.

[fadetree]

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

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.

I think distance was a factor in the hate calcs too. I always shot from max range. For corner tanking I found that if I could lev up somewhere above the crowd I could get a decent hit rate.

[curtischoy]

Originally Posted by Curtischoy

And not just with TS.

[Kutsumo]

Proof? I only mained ranger from PoP through RoF, with a few breaks thrown in but I do not recall any times when non trueshot bow DPS beat out melee.

[fadetree]

Pop was freakin awesome, the pinnacle of EQ. But yeah, ranger aa's were in luclin...it was glorious to finally have something special to do. We were not top DPS automatically, but we were close for the duration of trueshot.

[uygi]

IIRC ranger DPS in Velious was almost worthwhile with TS and a stationary mob. TS made your DPS kinda-similarly equivalent to AM3.

Ranger bow AAs were really just a Luclin thing. EQ/AM3 were the OP abilities. After that you increased your DPS with gear and by just buying crit AAs and boosting ATK (which applied to melee as well...). Archery stayed viable because for a while they kept putting out good enough bows. By GoD/OoW era the melee AAs had bridged the remaining gap and properly set up melee rangers were doing more DPS.

But that was never really the point. There were lots of raids where only rangers could avoid AEs. I still thought Mystical Arbiter of Earth was super fun as a ranger. Everybody else got hit with the mana/hp DoT and all died, but the rangers stayed out of range. As soon as the mob died, the rangers would race in and heal like fuck to keep 1-2 clerics up. The clerics got a kick out of that. Of course on P99 we'd just use clickies so it wouldn't matter.

The utility of the class was always the point. In any zone with some room (and especially once snare and root stacked) rangers were solid pullers/CCers. The original harmony spell was OP for a long time, but eventually phased out. The new single target harmony was still really powerful combined with root/snare. Add ranged DPS and WS for emergencies and they were badass.