Sounds like a scientific deduction. I'd agree you are correct and were able to compensate for sub-par rangers and still succeed!
I'm glad they moved us back to archery dps, any moron can melee dps. At least with archery there is some finesse to maximizing your dps with our synergy, and once you get the raid bow Archery shoots even farther ahead of melee 0.o As for burn setup, Pureshot will last 6 mins with new aa's. Keep Guardian, group guardian and accuracy cycled, cast alot and use a good spell lineup.
So Paladins are just Helmets? Enchanters are but illusions? Class icon is meaningless. Everyone can get the bow haste just by carrying a quiver, that is not Ranger-specific. Double damage on non-moving, non-rooted targets was our original Jolt. The idea was that we could step back from melee and stil do respectable DPS, without generating quite so much aggro, to allow the tank to rebuild his aggro lead. Archery Mastery is something that is just a band aid. Did you realize that the hit damage to weapon damage ratio on archery is half that of melee? Without any bonuses or modifiers (which includes AA's) a 100 damage sword will hit roughly twice as hard as a 100 damage archery attack, with twice the total damage potential. EQ is simply something that makes archery economically viable. While SoE had lamented adding it for a very long time, I personally wish they would bring it to the other bow-using classes. They lack our other advantages with a bow, so all it would do is drive magicians out of the arrow market and bump others' archery dps a small amount. Archery is but one tool among the ranger's toolkit. It is a potent one, and this expansion appears to bring it back (yes, back, there was a period during PoP after EP crafted bows became available to the masses where Archery was the primary tool, both before and after that, it was a secondary tool) into the forefront. Arguing that one is, or should be, better than another is both useless and a waste of time; far better to deal with things as they are rather than as one would wish them to be.
Pretty sure bow DPS became a thing worth pursuing in Luclin. It wasn't until PoP, however, when raid quality bows became droppable via tradeskill that Rangers, and even casual ones with the right AA were all of a sudden excellent DPS. Many Rangers simply didn't have access to the excellent bows from AOW, Seru, ST and VT in Luclin for the population in general to become aware that Rangers were excellent from a distance. The outcry from the realization you just needed X AA and a Elemental bow and you couple top DPS parses is most likely what stopped the archery AA from becoming a thing in future expansions. One could also suggest that they simply gave Rangers too much at once and future AA was designed to force Rangers back into AE and melee range.
One could suggest that, if one weren't aware of the actual numbers through those times. "Best at it" and "not an utter waste of time" aren't the same as "actual best damage". Outside the two minutes of Trueshot, melee has always been better than archery, even for rangers, pre-EOK. I acknowledge that there was an itemization issue, not a class balance one, when Elemental bows were available by sale to players that couldn't access equivalent melee weapons. For the characters that could actually get the materials for those bows, the weapons they could also get were the better choice, just like with Primal bows and Storms
EoK is the only expansion where ranged dps is on par with melee with no disc running. Anyone saying otherwise just did not have access to the top tier gear. I only equipped elemental bow for about 6 weeks in PoP maybe less. Once I have PoTime weapons, there was not reason to use bow unless trueshot was running.
exactly, but for the other 80% of the rangers playing this game, we had to use bows assuming we wanted to do the best dps we could
