Can anyone tell me what xpacs use bow, and what ones use melee? Im thinking of starting a ranger on ragefire or lockjaw. Thanks
I want to say Rangers use their bows (in a raid) primarily in Luclin, PoP, and maybe GoD. Ragefire/Lockjaw are in Omens already which I believe is past the point where a rangers autofire is better than just regular autoattacking (unless they have really bad weapons or Trueshot is up?).
also really depends on the fight at well, some raid mobs wild rampage, have nasty short range AE's, etc you may want to avoid and you are less of the strain on the healers if you stand back and plink away. If you want to appear on the DPS parse at the end of the fight go in and melee though, most of the time Melee is far superior to archery unless trueshot is up. the only expansions where archery is superior almost all the time are Luclin, PoP, and LDON, well and LoY but no one counts that one.
I doubt many people on the TLP section have gone to level 95 or beyond. You'd be better off asking the live forums if you are concerned with those levels.
really do not know about higher level stuff myself, Phinny is the first time I've played a ranger beyond level 30 or so. I wanted to try something different here and have been quite enjoying the class so far!
It's just Luclin and most of PoP. I believe if you have BiS melee weapons in PoP (timespinner and quarm hammer) and all your melee AAs they will out parse your bow. After PoP/LDoN though it's all melee at least for the foreseeable future. I play on Phinny, so that would be through PoR at least. You can always pop out and use the bow for trueshot until DoDh when you get warder's wrath and then you stop using trueshot for the most part. You can also use the bow on fights with a lot of wild ramp or AE damage or fear or anything else that you want to range. But it doesn't really happen that often any more, mostly just use melee.
Once you get PoTime weapons, melee will out dps archery unless Trueshot is up. But, like others have said, archery is good for fights when you don't want to take wild rampage because you probably have about a billion monks all soaking healing and it will help your healers out if you aren't taking wild rampage.
In my experience the transition from bow to Melee occurs in GoD. By OoW, a raid geared ranger is almost entirely melee unless there’s a particularly nasty AE to avoid or you have a suboptimal group where the heals and cures are holding back your ability to DPS and you can range The nastiness with a bow. Even in the transition phase, rangers aren’t topping parses unless your guild sucks at coordinating burns. Note, the best played rangers aren’t always measured by their parses. Much like SK and Paladins, their hybrid nature gets called on to handle adds and trash while the rest of the raid burns the encounter down. The really good rangers know when to start building aggro if you’re chewing through tanks where a weaponshield ranger (or two) can stabilize the event to steal a victory from certain defeat. RZ in PoTime is a good example where even in-era BIS tanks can drop quickly in succession. If you want to stand back and autofire, that REALLY ends in PoP; that or play a wizard chaining the correct nukes/rains.
They will still use it when Trueshot is up, yeah. Great rangers can top parses with bow dps using trueshot on into SoF and SOD. Or could, on the last round of tlp's, who knows now. Trueshot is about an hour refresh,but the events don't come all that fast in those expansions, so crushing it on every 2nd or 3rd event isn't too bad, and they do alright with melee on the in between events. After SoD they seemed to drop off a bit, except on events where they can really take advantage of the hail of arrows line.
The only issue is that trueshot is now 1/4 of what it used to be. It's so short now with the AA nerf awhile back that its hardly worth it (it still is, just much less so). Yes use bow up to PoP, but after PoP, you'll be going melee if you want to be maximizing your dps. When bow picks back up is a guess for me, I've never played past 70.
This is correct, give or take 5 levels. Also, about the same time range dps surpasses regular melee a 2 hander also surpasses two 1 handers. Oddly enough, in the last 2 expacs a 2 handed piercer is the best dps there is other than bow. *CoV - https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=165963;source=lucy *ToV - https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=164163;source=lucy
On live at 115 a ranger is required to stand about 40 feet away. They do range attacks and spells, and then they must run in and kick because kick procs their synergy aa's that buff the melee in their group. Then they back up and continue to shoot. People hate this game style tho, cause you have to keep running up to kick it
This is incorrect. Melee surpasses ranged DPS from whichever point it stops around the level 65 era ALL the way through till Empires of Kunark expansion. There may be a few variable points where it skips an expansion, however the general run is Melee > Archery 70-105. At which point you are back to Archery until Torment of Velious. 2Handers only start to surpass 1Handers in Torment of Velious, there is a potential lean during The Burning Lands as well but the line is very clear in Torment of Velious and super fine/worse during The Burning Lands. Also, the 2HB for CoV is the weapon of choice not the 2HP. "They do range attacks and spells" was the only correct thing in your post.
I don't know if you understand how melee range when using a bow works. I've never had to "run up and kick" while using a bow. Maybe on some raids or mobs with really wacky melee mechanics, but in group content you can use a bow and still be in melee range for all the melee abilities (like kick).
I only helped some rangers on FV set up their hot buttons, I did not play one. From what I can recall yeah they needed to stay at about 40 feet away to do both range+kick. And if they backed up too much they had to come in some. I was helping people set up alts and they didn't want to have to move them alot. And yes kick procs some group buff for the rangers. Also we had (in tov expac) some rangers using bows mostly and some using staffs. The DPS seemed pretty close but we were not a hardcore min max guild like say Valhalla is.
