could anyone who playes classes like a ranger or berserker show their hotbars or such in a screen shot to help some of us with issues with being low on the dps ladder or give good suggestions on what abilities/a as and spells and such to actually be set up for maximum effort and efficiency.
ITs not so much how you have your bars set up, its a matter of how you are using what you have. Not going to post SS’s of my ranger or berserker UI’s, as they’d both mean nothing to you, being organic to me and me alone, and they are probably not the best of the best of the best anyway. The main thing is going to be class comprehension. How well do you comprehend what the class is supposed to do, to eke pout every last point of DPS? Do you have the right disc keys set up? The right mash keys set up? On my ranger, I have two mash keys set up. One is just a multibind spell key; I use Q for this. The other is a mash disc key, that attempts to use focused squeal of blades, jolting cut kicks, and /pet swarm. I have the W key set to activate that mash button. This lets me hammer both Q and W, right next to each other on the keyboard, to get my nukes and my discs off, provided I’m within range and have the mana. My Q button, as I said, is a spell multibind. Since my muscle memory has certain spells inc retain slots, and those spells are not in an order conducive towards a multibind, I have Hot Bar 10 set up so the first 8 buttons are all activated by pressing Q. I then dragged the spell gems for Forseen Shots, Focused Arrowgale, Dichotomic Fussilade, and Summer’s into the first 4 slots of that hot bar. Because they are in that order, the first press of Q will cast Forseen. the second will cast Focused, the third Dichotomic, and the 4th and beyond will cast Summer’s, until one of the other three comes off of recast. I’ve heard other classes being called “ABC” - Always Be Casting. This describes rangers very very well, if you want to maximize your DPS, in addition to using AA’s and discs, you need to Always Be Casting. If you have other questions .. ask the high parsing people of your class in your raid what they are doing. It only benefits everyone on the raid when everyone in any given class is on the same page on how to maximize the DPS.
UI arrangements aren't really the thing? Especially since one of the "keys" (hur hur.) is using key-binding to make a mash key arrangement, sometimes called a multibind. The UI element facilitating that doesn't even have to be visible. As to class abilities - haaave you searched the forum? I think that's been covered lots
I got you little buddy. I use Fintanks set up. i can hit number one if the mage doesn't show up for burn raids. http://forums.eqfreelance.net/index.php?topic=16647.0
Here is my contribution on the matter, I hope its useful to you. I play a Ranger, so I'll write it from that perspective. To begin, lets focus on the Damage part of DPS. You want to maximize your potential, so obviously get max level and grind them AAs. While choosing AAs to buy, focus on obvious damage increasing AAs first. There are plenty of guides on that topic. Just like level and AAs, go get the best gear, weps, augs, spells and discs you can. Visible gear is what it is, but for invisibles and augs, you want to focus on the ones with the most Hdex.. EQResource Item search has some wonderful advance search filters to help you determine which gear and augs you want to hunt out. To get a list of the augs you want, set these parameters: set type to "fits type 7", set "AC" greater than 44, set Hdex to greater than 7. **this will give you a list of Type7 augs with 45+AC AND Hdex8+... now go get all of em you can. You also want Type 5 augs. Current Best= run through Ros missions and earn coin to buy the proficiency t5 augs off vendor in OT. If that's not doable for you for whatever reason, then go back into TBM and farm up Remnants of Tranaquility (or buy em in Baz)… then buy the Deftness type t5s. I say this because getting tbm purchasable t5s is waaaay easier than getting the eok purchasable ones. I should note that getting the 3 tbm "Deft" type augs and the rare drop ones from EoK is viable as well.. for 6-7 of your available t5 slots. As for type 3s, go buy em out in OT.. the rest are outdated. As for spells and Discs, obviously you want the highest ranks you can get.. maybe you buy rk2s in baz, maybe you farm names that drop em, maybe you raid and spend dkp on rk3s.. As for "What spells"... Set your spell bar in this order: Forseen, Dicho, Focused, Boon, Summers, Alliance. **All but alliance will be set into your mash key. Note: Do what you gotta do to raise your Dicho as high as you can up to srike6, I won't cover that here. If you don't have your Pureshot rk3 yet, CotF raids drop the turn in you need to get it and are groupable now days. One more note on potential damage.. don't forget about clickies!! You want a CoP4 & Dragonmagic focus pots... those 2 are most important and worth mentioning. OK.. The above covered what to get to reach your potential.. now lets talk about WHAT TO DO to maximize the "per second" part of DPS. The main thing to understand is Time can be your friend or enemy.. really, besides potential to dish out more damage, you need to know how to NOT WASTE TIME. A few concepts to learn are Faster targeting, ABC (Always be Casting), Burn macros (socials), & Coordinating ADPS. Time NOT spent on a target is time not doing damage. Set an /assist main key. Set a key to Target nearest NPC. Set a key to Cycle NPC. >>>>99.9% of the time you will use /assist.. as for targeting nearest or cycling= use discretion!! NOTHING is worse than being on the WRONG target, but as your skill improves, both have a place. Too, having key(s) set to specific targets by name is incredibly handy. **Obviously you want to be attacking too! Don't forget to presss /autofire after your target key. Your mana bar is meant to be drained. Cast Cast Cast. Seriously lay into your mash key whenever you are on a target. There are guides to set up your mash key(s). My main masher consists of (in this order). the 5 spells I mentioned above and a few discs: Jolting Wheel Kicks &Focused Squall of Blades. I use a second mash key with a few of my AAs that have fast cooldowns and my epic2.0 and such, but that's me.. idk if others do. Really, the 3 arrow spells, the 2 nuke spells and the 2 discs is a great place to start. As for Burn Macros, there are guides about what stacks with what and which to use when.. I could post mine here... but really, get with your ranger leader & they will tell you which they expect you to use when & how to make em. Ive raided with a few different groups and they have differences in expectations.. so yeah the main point is this: pressing a key is faster than mouse clicking & pressing fewer keys = saves most time. If you mouse over all around clicking, then you are wasting time. Coordination will depend on more than just yourself, ADPS is tricky and all about timing.. again, you will want to work out with your groupmates depending on your group makeup on when to utilize what. Having an understanding of the click abilities of other classes that help you will take you far (Shaman epic, Rogue Fierce eye etc). Also, coordinating with other rangers to set an order for clicking Tranq Blessing and then later Mass buff with Auspice of the Hunter and a cycle for Alliance casts & Summers casts for procs is super important. Wasting these by clicking them while one is already up, or at wrong time, or worse: NOT AT ALL!!-- costs you and everyone valuable ADPS. Get in a private channel and work it out with your fellow rangers... too, set those to a social that includes a tell and set an audio trigger(s) for better awareness. A final lesson.. BE CAREFUL with your DoTs and with your Pack Hunt AA... If you put your wolfs or a Dot on a mob and then switch away from that target.. well, you are still doing dmg, but minimally! yikes this will KILL your parse because ONLY the wolfs or Dot(s) are doing dps to that mob at their incredibly low dmg output. ONLY Dot or Wolf pack a mob that you will be damaging the whole duration of those respectively. (Special thanks to the person who taught me that! You know who you are). well, and some raid mobs you just don't Dot anyway.. for various reasons depending on which raid. Well, that's my contribution to your Q. Hope it makes sense and helps you start to increase your numbers. I'm constantly working on improving mine.
Are you saying that when you have the chance to help kill a mob with dots while your main focus is elsewhere, you are not doing so soley because of how it will make your parse look due to the time of engagement? That is what i interpret you second to last paragraph to mean and if so, shame on you.
Well. ROFL. troll much? mmmkay, Im game to entertain you... and incase someone else "misunderstands": The purpose of the post wasn't "how to Ranger" In every way that Rangers do what Rangers do.. I didn't talk about setting heal keys targeted to groupmates to backup the Shaman in emergency or a whole plethora of different things I do. … The spirit I intended was INCREASING DPS, as per the OP's Question. How crappy would it be if the OP did all things suggested, but didn't know about the DoT or Pack parse mechanic.. and ended up parsing LOWER than usual? I mentioned it because it IS a thing. Every situation is different and of course Dotting a mob at the expense of a parse has its place.. but also, Doting a mob in a situation where it takes valuable real estate away from Necros is a bad thing. Hope you weren't trolling and genuinely misunderstood.
I honestly think multibind mash keys are a bad thing. They work but should not be in game. I hope that developers could find ways to change the game so that they are not functional. Multibind yes; all in one no.
Not trolling at all. I am gonna assume by parse you mean overall damage. Cause the goal for everyone should be to win. Wethers its the fight, the mission, or the raid. Parse be damned. So if dotting the mob is somehow going to lower your overall damage(parse), then yeah, it wouldnt make sense. As in i am in the middle of a burn and switching targets would cause me to do less overall damage or mob x has to die as quick as possible. Your use of the verbiage "dot or pack parse mechanic" gives me pause as to wether i am miss understanding or not. Fake example, 3 mobs, A, B, and C. Both mobs A and B will arrive 10sec before mob C. They will be tanked and have to be killed at the end. Mob C had to be burned before it powers up. Mob C burn time is usually 1.5 to 2mins untill it dies. Are you saying that someone who is capable shouldnt hit mobs A and B with some long duration dots/swarm pets before mob C gets there because on gamepase it will show a longer duration of fight time and as such make your damage per second lower?
Read the guides below for your class. Try out their burn orders for an evening. Read the guides again, tweak, try again. After about a week you should be doing pretty well. .
A couple of things.. 1> I certainly am not the best of the best.. and in all likelihood.. I'm not even one of the best. Just a try hard tbh. 2> I answered the OP's Q with some ideas of How to increase DPS. 3> I did not intend to write a how to be a Ranger in all ways vs all things. 4> I did not write a How to be an excellent raider guide, as I myself am still learning. I really do not want to get baited into an argument of Do Dot & Pack or Don't. From what I've learned, in a raid situation, you would probably be accused of padding your parse if you DONT Dot something that could/should be (which honestly is exactly what you would be doing), and heck-- that would be shameful, as the goal is to win & not necessarily look good! duh. There are many other things a Ranger can do and is sometimes required to do that will effectively blow your overall parse... and FWT that is totally normal and proper as per the situation may call for it. Things like punting mobs to SKs, tracking out a specific target to get it down,, many more things that blow off scoring high parse as they have nothing to do with DPS... but really isn't all that a topic for another thread? I didn't post my burns, as sometimes they change in different situations.. using raid for an example; some raid mobs are just straight up Kill it FAST.. others will lock HP and of course a bunch of other mechanics that come into play sometimes... this equates into some burns are all out all you got.. others are drawn out over a longer period and thus your burn(s) get broken in order to keep a semi high amount of damage over a longer period of time and yet sometimes you do regular attacks on main boss target and save burns for adds and such. Every situation has its way to deal with. I will restate that if increasing your DPS is a goal in and of itself.. be cautious of the mechanic that a Dot and a Pack Hunt & any sort of clicky pet will continue to do damage to the target it was placed on after you switch targets... which will increase the "time" you spent on that target and lower your overall DPS for that target. Go parse a dummy and play around.. you will see what I mean. I intended to write a shortish guide on the things Ive learned to do and or consider in order to achieve a higher DPS... I hope the guide is helpful, because as I've progressed my abilities and read read read everything I could.. I mostly found guides written like: I press these.. you should to (some of which were really great and helpful in certain ways>> to those post's authors: BIG THANKS). I read and copied those guides and still parsed horrible while doing the things I read about ... my intention was to fill some gaps in what I felt were missing pieces in the overall thought process that goes into achieving more DPS in and of itself as a goal. Anyway.. BEST thing to do really is talk with your class leader! Ask questions & practice. Tweak certain things to your own style. Maybe you are left handed and use the mouse with your left hand and your hotkeys should be placed on the right side of your keyboard.. maybe you use a fancy mouse with extra buttons and want your hotkeys there..? I don't know! If I were to SS my setup.. what would you gain from it>>nada.. You'd see a pile of hotbars with AAs & clicky icons and whatnot, a spell bar with 3x arrows, 2x fireballs and such.. not exactly helpful toward increasing your DPS. Understanding that wasting time between targets and ability, spell presses will be your best gain with the equipment you have. Just felt it was time to contribute a lil bit of what I think I know and not just be a leach!
Gonna toss my opinions into the ringer based off of things already said, (Inc shameless plug) I would suggest you read my guide on the Freelance forums, link in a prior post. Although it is far from all encompassing of the ranger class it does go over the DPS aspect pretty well, at least in my opinion it does. However, I do not think it explains a lot of the "why" to why things are the way they are, so your overall understanding of the interworking cogs of Ranger DPS are going to be lacking till you gradually see them yourself. The same goes for every other class, so whichever one you end up running with is going to be a somewhat similar uphill battle. Boon was mentioned in this thread which needs to be clarified a bit. The boon line has certain caveats where its use is great, however in most DPS cases it is a waste of a cast. The reason in most scenarios this is a waste of a cast is due to it being lower total damage than Summer's. The initial DD + the 2 bonuses it provides still lose damage wise to Summer's. On top of that, Summer's is unique in the fact that each of it's components can proc your Dragonmagic potion (or whichever version you're using) so 1 cast can potentially be 2 procs. So most of the time Summer's > Boon. However let's go into some of the caveats. Boon is great mana wise, its damage isn't astronomically worse than Summer's so if you have a hard time controlling your mana using this spell is a great idea to help with that and still keep DPS decent. There are also mobs that resist Fire and Cold, so only 1 portion of your Summer's will land. Examples for raids are: Xygoz, Silverwing, and Talendor (Also the bones and goos in Sathir Vault raid, as only 1 portion will do Bane damage) these are events that get great use out of our VERY neglected Ash and Wind nukes too! I would recommend using the Mash order of Foreseen Shots > Focused Arrowgale > Dichotomic > Summer's as far as spamming goes for spells. I use Dichotomic as my last arrow spell in order to crank out a few more Focused Arrowgales per event (Generally this leads to more total damage done), also you can potentially trigger GOM before you drop a few thousand on Dichotomic. There also seems to be some confusion on how DPS is calculated in regards to our DoT and Pack Hunt to a lesser extent. As Sancus already pointed out, total damage is the only thing that matters. DPS can be absolutely meaningless, if all you do is Dicho the mob and do nothing else till it dies your DPS will be very high, however your total damage will be absolute crap. Mobs have an HP pool, not a DPS pool. When you have multiple mobs it's the perfect time to DoT in terms of efficiency. The best thing to do is load your DoT on the mob that you perceive to be the last one killed (same with Pack Hunt) in order to crank out the most damage. Once your DoT is on you just go about your normal DPSing on the MA's mob. This will IMPROVE your DPS, not the other way around. It's a strategy I use A LOT. You basically end up weighing your cast as spell vs spell. So in our scenario it's DoT vs Summer's, so we have DoT on a mob being killed later or DD on a mob being killed now. So we have to measure damage output, since our DoT has a decent global cooldown we have to do funky numbers. So at this point we're doing 1 DoT vs 1.5 Summer's roughly. So let's just say you have a PERFECT Summer's cast, Twincast and quad proc (OH BABY) that's roughly 440k damage on a perfect cast. So now let's add half of that to it to meet our 1.5 cast count, now we have 660k damage done in a perfect world. So we're at 660k vs 1 DoT, let's say your DoT lasts for 30 seconds before the mob dies. So we have 5 tics of damage, the minimum amount of damage off 5 tics is around 250k, adding a crit proc from your sympathetic pot takes us up to 300k damage. If 1 tic of your DoT crits we add around 180k damage. Now we're rocking 480k damage. Add 1 more crit and bam we're tied at 660k vs that PERFECT Summer's cast. So with all that jumbled together math you can probably conclude that as you get your average damage off of Summer's it's going to end up being vastly lower than that DoT on a mob or 2 in multi-pulls. The Perfect scenario for that DD gets tied up or overdone on a relatively common occurrence assuming your fights are around 30 seconds long. That's before you factor in if your DoT is a twincast, then it becomes an absolute monster, talking 450-500k DoT crits PER TIC. Moral of the story is if you have a high hp target or multiple mobs using the DoT is pretty much always going to increase your overall DPS. Just wait till your arrow nukes are down. ;P Also don't worry about taking the 1 slot on raids from a Necromancer, unless you're running like 5 or some obscene amount your 1 DoT will outdo their last/weakest one. More DPS for the raid is better than more for 1 person. I'm sure some will disagree with me on this, as a former raiding Necro I endorse this idea though. As always if you want to talk shop or have possible improvements to how I do things drop me an in-game email! Cazic.Fintank or Cazic.Findictive
Are you really parsing single targets vs. combined all targets? What should be cared about is the total damage done to all targets. And if you're comparing dps vs. damage, it needs to be the dps that uses the total time of raid engagement, not the time of each individual person which gives an inflated number and is meaningless as it can inflate numbers for people that are actually slacking off half the raid. You can win that parse by using your burn, then being FD in a corner for the final 5 minutes.
Awesome post Fintank! You really made a lot of sense and clarified some of which I've been told to do/not do re/ Dots! And yeah, the part about Boon is spot on for sure. TYVM. Yes I do check how I parse single targets ALSO. I do watch the Live overlay to monitor myself. **This is where you find your mistakes and areas to improve.. or realize something more may be going on like does the mob have a bane? No.. I don't ONLY care about total damage done to all targets. **If you only care about your total end of event rank on the parse.. are you doing anything to improve your dps ability?? (There is more to it than just getting newer better loot) I didn't propose utilizing a low time engagement to trick some parse output. smh… Did you really get that from what I posted, as if Im trying to teach the OP how to "trick" a parse?? **You made that up, wasn't said by me. Individual numbers on individual targets are not meaningless.. especially if you are examining your own numbers looking for areas to improve and checking log for possible reasons why certain parts of an event #'d the way they did. Never suggested "winning" a parse. I'm only sharing things I've learned to increase DPS. Good Day Sir.
That has been your explicit instruction multiple times. EVERYONE here "got that from what you posted" because that's exactly what you posted, over & over
2x trolls.. that ain't so bad. Hey you two.. where is your advice on the topic? All I see is bashing and an attempt to derail the thread. Good Day Trolls.
For those keeping score at home, which 2 out of the 6 people who have called you out over your super bad approach to evaluating performance are the trolls?
Most dps classes have peaks and valleys to their output. Maximizing your contribution is figuring out how to get the most out of the entire duration of an event. For events that last 15 minutes, figuring out how to sustain the most dps (and hence the most total damage) you can for that 15 minutes. For 5 minute events, how to stack the most you can in that 5 minutes not caring about saving something for a longer event (saving being maximizing your stacking to flatten out your curve for higher sustained/more total damage versus inefficiently throwing the kitchen sink at a burn for peak burst, or sustaining resources such as mana/endurance for the longer duration so you don't sputter out). Looking at individual targets of adds is meaningless. As a Ranger, if there are blue humanoids, you're going to have a really big number on some from headshots. That has nothing to do with getting better. There are anomalies all over the place which require looking at the bigger picture. Targets that live for 30 seconds with 30 people all attacking it are not going to give any meaningful data. Too much RNG. Now, there are some times that taking a snapshot of the parse is useful. If a raid strat requires burst at certain times, looking at that time frame in isolation helps you figure out if you're aligning your burst well or potentially reserving the right things for that time while using other things outside it (keeping an eye on how you're performing both when burst is needed and still being effective when it's not). It's also helpful to remove the boss from some parses to see if people are being effective on adds (time/willingness to switch targets).
