Era: The below analysis was conducted on Level 65 and Level 70 Rangers, in PoP/LDoN (65) and OoW/GoD (70) Era. All testing was performed on Test Server Level 75 MotM 5 Dummy facing away from the Ranger. Concern: Archery Proc Rates, measured in procs per minute (PPM), appear to be less unaffected by Heroic Mods compared to Standard Melee; specifically Heroic Dexterity (hDEX) and the Combat Effects Modifier. Consequence: Rangers in this era are not experiencing similar enhancements to their damage output from weapon procs as those experienced by other melee types. Further, customized augmentation decisions omit raid dropped enhancements to bows (damage augment or proc). Context: Assumptions - In conducting this analysis, the goal was to confirm the understanding of the interaction between Heroic Dexterity, the Heroic Modifiers they result in, and Archery. The assumptions tested were the following: (1) Archery Accuracy is unaffected by hDEX and the resulting Heroic Accuracy Modifier. (2) Archery Proc Rate. measured in PPM is unaffected by hDEX and the resulting Heroic Combat Effects Modifier. (3) Archery Crit Rate is unaffected by hDEX. (4) Archery Non-Crit and Critical Damage values are unaffected by hDEX. Outcomes - Items 2 and 3 were confirmed by comparing parses across ~10,000 hits at values of 0 hDEX and 39 hDEX. 39 hDEX caps both the Accuracy Modifier at 150 and the Combat Effects Modifier at 100. Incremental parses were run as needed to confirm various observations noted below related to Eagle Eye, Sharpshooter and proc rates with less than maximum basic dexterity. Assumption 1: Archery Accuracy remained constant at 70% at both 0 and 39 values. The only items that improved Archery Accuracy were the Eagle Eye Ranger Buff line and the Sharpshooter focus. Confirmed that hDEX and Accuracy Modifier do NOT improve Archery Accuracy. This contrasts the interaction for other melee methods, which do benefit from increasing accuracy modifier values. Assumption 2: Archery PPM increased moving from 0 hDEX at 1.5 PPM to 39 hDEX (100 Combat Effects Modifier) at 2.5 PPM. An additional parse was run at 0 hDEX with below maximum basic heroic dexterity (280 of 355) and 0 hDEX and the PPM decreased back to 1.5. Confirmed that hDEX and the Combat Effects Modifier do NOT improve Archery Weapon Procs at the same rate as it does for Standard Melee. This contrasts the interaction for other melee methods which do benefit from increasing combat effect modifier values, scaling up to almost 5 PPM at the maximum hDEX / Combat Effect value. Assumption 3: Archery Critical Hit rates remained constant at approximately a 70% non-critical and a 30% critical distribution. Specifically these were at 68/69 vs 31, but for simplification purposes, it remained constant across every parse at the 70/30 split. Confirmed that hDEX does not affect critical hit rates with Archery - which has been a historical and generally held misconception. Assumption 4: Archery normal damage and critical damage are affected by hDEX values. Specifically, for every 10 hDEX at values 10+ and 20+ the non-critical damage increases by +1 and the critical damage increases by +2. The specific observation from the parses with the 65 PoP/LDoN era ranger noted non-critical values of 807, 808 and 809 at 0, 11 and 22 hDEX. Critical Hit values of 1378, 1380 and 1382 at 0, 11 and 22 hdEX. This impact follows the same framework as Heroic Strength (hSTR). However, given delays associated with Bows in this era compared a dual wield and triple attack rogue, the comparative volume of hits between the methods suggests that the impact for hDEX and Archery should be at least twice, possibly three times that of hSTR at +2 or +3 for non-critical and +4 or +6 for critical per stack of 10 hDEX obtained. Regarding Assumption 2, which is the purpose of this bug concern: Archery proc rates have been subject to previous refinements to address balance issues related to Headshot. It is my contention that there were unintended consequences related to archery procs as a result of that balancing that have limited archery procs in the following fashion: 1. The minimized proc rates provide limited to negligible benefits from archery weapon procs. Current era parses identify archery procs contributing 2-4 damage per second where as melee procs with elevated hDEX values, such as the ranger timespinner sword from Plane of Time in primary will produce 18-20 DPS at elevated hDEX values. With Ranger archery parses scaling up to and beyond 400 DPS, procs resulting from Ranger Archery appears underscaled compared to the other melee variants. 2. Available augments (Type 4 or Type 8) for bows in this era are of a LDON merchant variant (150 DD) and raid obtained bow damage augments are completely omitted form this era. All other melee classes have access to raid obtained variants of augmentation (weapon damage and/or procs) for their weapon of choice from LDoN raids - except ranger bows. 3. For a very long time, combat innate buff procs such as Cry of Thunder (65) or Nature's Rebuke (64) which offer 150-170 DD procs do not operate when Archery is used. Their current contribution is limited to melee only rangers - which is not the ideal operating model for the Ranger class in this and prior golden archery eras.
At this point on Agnarr - just give me GoD/OoW so I can do more work on archery and the AA we get in those expansions. I've played a Ranger through VoA I think it was and really enjoyed the content across all those expansions; although boxing across them becomes more and more cumbersome.
Thank your for your feedback and observations while I was conducting this analysis. Hopefully this gets some traction to address Archery in this era.
first thing I did when i got my first hdex items as a ranger was to parse the impact of my new gear on the test server. I was very disappointed to see that even with bis time gear (+20 hdex) the impact on my dps was negligible (+4dmg on every double shot). I decided to parse melee with timespinner, hoping this would scale better and take over archery, but melee dps in time is far behind archery. In short, my current ranger with 20hdex and bow of tempest (time bow), does the same dps as an elemental geared ranger with max attack and featherwood bow, this is not good design. I started level a rogue as soon as I understood gearing no longer matter for ranger dps wise.
To be clarify some of your understanding: Archery Damage gets +1 / +2 (crit) damager per 10 Heroic Strength and/or 10 Heroic Dexterity. So if you ran +40 hSTR, you'd get +4 / +8 on each archery hit. If you also had +20 hDEX, you'd get another +2 / +4 on each hit hits or +6 / +12 max damage in total. To be fair, that isn't a lot of damage in a zonewide... but it does add up. If you broke that into 30 hSTR / 30 hDEX, you'd get the same result as +40 / +20: +6 / +12. I've parsed and confirmed both of these impacts in isolation. Rangers can improve parses in the PoP Era in other non-melee ways, but effectively once you max ATK, Haste and obtain a Time Bow which is the best ratio in PoP (there is a better via LDoN, ~10 DPS more), your melee from archery will only improve from obtaining x10 factors of the above listed heroic stats. To get into spell damage, there are up to 4 0.5s nukes you can rotate on cooldown once LoY is available. You can improve the DD from LDoN augments that improve fire/cold damage (1-40%). You can also improve damage with your magic dot and the magic dot focus aug. The final key focus for ranger dps in PoP era is a detrimental mana preservation item. There are limited options for rangers. Depending on how you approach plane of time, you can also plan to apply trueshot on a P3 boss and again on quarm. I play on Agnarr which has LoY/LDoN available, and I've capped my near BiS Ranger parses in the 440+ dps range, topping out at 474: I am hopeful that proc damage from archery gets addressed given the above research I shared, but it probably won't change significantly, maybe another ~5 to ~7 DPS more than is currently observed.
Thanks, for the answer. I ve found that spell focus for ranger provide very little dps. Around 4dps for a 40% dot focus (more in multi target), and less than 10dps for 40% nuke focus. We need to scale with bow dmg, that is our main source of dps. I ll look up the ldon bow.
Perhaps. Note my best parses show around 40-50 dps from each nukes and dots (90-100 total). I never tested without focus versus with, but I expect they would each be at 35 or so DPS without them (assuming a 20% average increase). Obviously melee is a bigger contribution, so scaling that will have a larger measurable impact DPS wise. Procs to date are immaterial from bows, as noted above.
