Upirus wrote: You are frikkin' kidding me right ? You can put 10 points into those skill choices now rather than stopping at 8 ? I feel like such a noob !! I know what I'll be doing next time I log on
Ixtril wrote: There's a huge problem with your plan regarding the sta line. If you run in and go melee, just because you can AE at point blank range, once those AE's are down, you can't use your range CA's without backing out. This is the general reason rangers still have to use their bows and can't just melee auto attack, we cut off the ability to use several CAs. This is the same reason we can't just sit back at a comfortable range, cause we need to be close enough to access our melee CAs. I just don't think that it is worth the effort. Now as for your comment regarding 10% poison damage increase from toxic expertise being a joke let's consider a few things. For ease of computing, let's assume you had a poison which deals 1000 damage per proc. Now it deals 100 more. That may not be much, but considering that we sometimes are upgrading CA's that only have about a 100-150 dmg increase from what we currently use, by your same argument, we shouldn't bother doing that either. By itself it's not a lot, it's the added affect you get from grouping up all the small increases.
Seiffil@Permafrost wrote: Not Really, that 100 dmg increase on the CA is further enhanced by the multiplicative effects of potency, crit bonus, etc. Poisons are not. Poisons do NOT crit . (Something that I think is messed up, they need to bring back our poison crit) Auto Attacks do crit, and are further enhanced by future increases in agility and crit bonus. I should also clarify that your choices will depend on playstyle. If all you ever fight are single target encounters, aoe auto-attack will be of no benefit, if you do alot of group encounters in can be huge. The fact of the matter is, we are dealing with broken game mechanics as far as rangers are concerned. If you are concerned with maximizing your DPS for your AA points spent, at this point in the game it can be helpful to pick up the sword once in a while. Its a fact that you will get higher auto attack DPS against trash mobs with a sword than with your bow. Tougher mobs, the bow wins out as hit rates come into play, and the hit bonus on our ammo is huge. For max damage in groups against trash mobs, I've found it best to melee the mobs' a bit, let that aoe auto attack proc a couple times, launch your ranged aoes point blank, and as the mobs start to dwindle and your melee cas are depleted, back up two steps, hit Focus Aim and switch to the bow and your ranged arts. That SEEMS to yield higher dps zonewide than simply planting myself at range. To double check this I just went over a recent zone wide parse for myself solo in the hole. There were both lots of encounter fights on trash and single target triple ups. AOE Autoattack was worth about 170,000 more damage on my zonewide for that session. Caustic Poison was worth 550,000. Now bear in mind that my Caustic poison dmg was also boosted by the AOE procs (those can poison each mob they hit too). 10% of 550,000 is 55,000. So spending 18 points in int to get the 10% increase to poison damage would've been worth less than a 55,000 dmg zonewide boost (due to less procs) versus the 170,000 dmg boost from spending 18 points in stamina. Of course YMMV and to each their own, we are all individuals with our own playstyles and desires. Gear and other AAs spent would effect these results. Since poison damage is a relatively fixed value someone with less crit, crit bonus, dps mod etc may likely find int line yields better results than stamina. Would be a fun excercise to mentor myself down to 72, put on some MC gear and see how results play out.
Ixtril wrote: Again if you're moving to melee just so you can use the AOE auto from the sta line, you are losing the ability to cast any range attacks except AE's unless you're not using your epic anymore in which case you can use no range attacks except for point blank and sniper. I don't know about you, but I can go through my melee CA's pretty quickly, and with the longer recast on our AE's, now you're sitting waiting for your CA's to refresh. It's not as simple of a fix as you say it is to improve your dps by just reverting to melee, cause you have to look at all the CA's you lose access to when meleeing. Just like all the CA's you lose access to if you were fighting at 20m range instead of getting into that 2-5m range. Can your parse account for the loss of damage from not being able to regularly use your range CA's? No one is going to deny that melee auto attack currently outparses range auto attack by far, even if you add in makeshift arrows and offensive stance procs. But giving up a significant portion of your CA's to melee I'm tempted to think you might be losing more dps from what you're not able to use then what you're gaining. I wouldn't discount poisons since caustic poisons seem to always end up being a significant portion of my dps, usually in the top 3-5 of my parse, and anything I can do to increase their damage is worthwhile. Plus don't forget going along the int line also allows you to get intoxication, which does get effected by potency and crit bonus and can be fairly significant parsewise. I would also say, if you're so inclined to stress meleeing this much, you may as well just betray to assassin, since they can do that better then a ranger since all of their CA's will be accessible.
Ok, that got too long to quote again, but let me break it down this way. As said before it will depend on playstyle, gear, AAs available and level. Unfortuantly, I'm approaching this from the end game angle. Best thing someone can do is run a parse to get helpful clues on where they may be lacking, and where boosts may be useful. IF poisons still account for a significant chunk of your dps, then by all means, boost them by 10%. If any end game ranger still has poisons accounting for a large chunk of his DPS he probably needs to work on some things. With all the crit chance, crit bonus, potency, dps, da, and on and on that are available now it really shifts the spectrum. Caustic poison has shrunk to 4% of my parse. 10% boost only yields me .4% more DPS. 10 Points poorly spent. That being said, it is off base for this thread, as the intention is for leveling rangers I believe, and yes in lower levels poison is probably still huge. I'm constantly resetting AAs and trying things. After looking the INT line over again because of this thread I decided to run it through the paces in the hole. The new SF aa enhancement to Intox made it look pretty powerful, and indeed it is. Enough so, that I feel I may stick with int line in exchange for STR line. With Crit being so cheap these days its only the STR endline I'll miss, but yah, I'll miss it alot. So perhaps for the leveling ranger INT 6,6,10,2, and for the end gamer 10,8,4,2,8. Really INT line and STA line complement each other very well, the int line debuffs severely cripple the mobs while in melee range. As to losing ranged CAs.... huh? Its really not hard to root, snare the mob and back up a bit to launch the ranged cas. They all still get their time in the parse. Just as when sitting in the good ol sweet spot you wind up graying out all your CAs if the fight goes long enough, so will you if you use both your sword and your bow. Its also a slightly different strat on solo versus group encounters. In single mob encounters there's really no point in hanging around long in melee range, just long enough to land the melee debuffs, bloody reminder etc, then get the heck outta striking range again and use the bow and your ranged CAs.
Fair enough, I hadn't really focused enough on my parses but you're right, poison damage isn't anywhere near as high as it used to be on the parse. I would probably say still that keep str endline, agi endline and then getting int endline are probably more worthwhile then sta endline. In which case, with getting the int endlines, the best choice to probably put the points in qualify for intox is still the poison damage increase. It's not a matter of rooting, snaring, stuning and backing up that bothers me with regards to using the sta line. I'm not bothering to refer to solo, I was more thinking with regards to groups. It's annoying enough when you get an encounter or multiple encounter pull trying to keep in that sweet spot. My issue with your suggestion for moving in to make sure you're meleeing is now your trying to squeeze in range CA's and melee CA's with your melee auto attack and considering the cast times on the several of our range CA's, do we lose more dps by moving out to cast those and losing those auto attacks, because I doubt you're going to move out, cast, and be back in before your next melee AA is ready. with the amount of jousting in and out that it seems like your method or playstyle has, I have trouble seeing how effective it really can be. You're better off just picking one method or the other, and if you're gonna choose to melee more, you're probably just better off betraying to an assassin.
Ixtril wrote: I suggest you go over to that other site and start a conversation about STA vs. INT. you will get a lot of nice insight. Check out the parse thread on the top of the forumn. These are all from end game raiders where poison still accounts for 3-4% of their parse.Accordingly, they all swear by intox as well. I am not saying you are wrong, but you might get a better discussion over there.
Seiffil@Permafrost wrote: Can we PLEEEEEASE all agree to stop with the "might as well betray to Assassin" thing. I think its fair to say those that are willing have already done so. The rest of us that remain are the stubborn few who are willing to stick it out and try to make the best of it. Its sad really the toll its taken on that "Other" Board, seems like all the top contributers have either quit or betrayed. I admit, I looked at it. While testing the BG's pre-release on Test_Copy, I rolled an assassin and buff botted him to 80. Was the DPS great?... Yes, was he fun?... Yes Was he more fun than my ranger?... No Seiffil, I think I've failed to properly communicate what I'm saying to you. Things have changed alot with SF, some good, some bad. I've tried to focus on the good and look to ways to take advantage of it in order to squeeze some untapped DPS out of my ranger. This has meant a thorough re-evaluation of the traditional approach to AAs and playstyle. So far its worked, I'm still able to provide Tier1 DPS in my raid force. (It is a casual raid force though, I'll be VERY surprised if the others don't surpass me at some point) I'm NOT suggesting any ranger should stop using their bow. I'm saying to stop avoiding the sword. Before SF, like most rangers, I had all my melee arts macro'd to autoattack with my bow afterwards and would stand in the sweetspot where all CAs were available. Even if fighting a mob toe to toe I used my bow. Those macros are gone now. I'm NOT saying to back out for ranged CAs and run back in to land a melee auto attack. You're right, that would be very counterproductive. What I'm suggesting is actually easier than maintaining the sweetspot like I used to. Get right on the mobs butt and run through the melee CAs in a logical damage maximizing order, timing them to allow your sword auto attacks to land, yes... just like an Assassin. After the melee string is complete, hit Focus Aim, back up, and run through your ranged CAs in a logical order timing them between BOW auto attacks like normal. (or the reverse if you prefer, start ranged and run in for the melee). Rinse and repeat as long as there's still something left to kill. Its not like jousting, you dont't have to back out a mile to get to where you can switch to bow, its just at least as far as the sweetspot, and if you overrun it a bit and gray out your melee arts its not a big deal. If you land in the sweetspot and can still squeeze in the quick refresh melee arts between bow attacks great. Since our melee arts can be cast while moving, make sure to be casting one while adjusting position and no dps time is lost. Is this more work than just standing any old place like a caster and plinking off arrows? Sure. Are there times when the mobs die so fast its not better to just stick to the bow and ranged arts? Yup. A correction to myself, 10 Points in toxic expertise is worth a 16% boost to poison damage, not 10% so would yield an overall boost of .64% to my DPS. I'm still bitter over this really. Once upon a time that was 50 something spell crit for 8 AA points. Now THAT was AA well spent, as back then spell crit determined the chance for our poisons (and most other procs) to crit, and there was hardly any other way for a ranger to get spell crit. I almost quit the game after that update (52 I believe?) It seems to me that overnight my parse dropped by like 30%. Going from 52 crit to a 16% increase in a single attack type that can't crit was a VERY poor trade. If they'd just give us back poison crit I think Int line would become alot more appealing to me again. Enough of that.... I'm trying to positive... not bitter LOL Since I'd written off Int line long ago in exchange for Str line, I was still in the mindset of excluding intox when considering where best to spend points. When comparing the potential dps boost of 28% AOE auto attacks while fighting with sword, and the new found benefit to fighting with sword on occasion it seems an easy choice to pick sta over int(while excluding endlines). Yes the STA endline is junk, and the int endline is far superior. If they'd fix the sta endline to at least do what the verbage on it indicates it to do and allow you to continue to auto-attack while under impenetrable it might be very good. If they did that and gave us bow AOE STA line would be rockin. In recent testing SF boosted Intox looks to be worth 4% on my zone wide solo parse, thus in all I might consider INT line worth 5% more DPS for me. That's with 31 points in it however, (I decided to stop at 7 in the SF boost, as you can't get better than 100% improvement on reuse, and I already have the 10% reuse). That's alot of points spent for 5%. The trouble with INT line is it does little if anything to provide boosts to anything else. AGI gives us crit bonus and cast speed, helps everything. STR gives us crit chance and reuse on our highest hitting arts. These are easy, no-brainer choices. Looking for further choices that provide a "zonewide" benefit can be trickier. The much ridiculed wis line even looks decent if you think about it a bit. With wis line you can greatly increase reuse and cast speed on stealth. It can also boost our stealthed arts by 10%. Sniper Shot, Hidden Shot, Emberstrike, Ranger Blade, Fittest would all benefit from points spent here, both in damage and usage frequency. More than 5% overall boost to total DPS though? Maybe, maybe not. More than .64% if only consider poison expertise? Good chance, yes. *Dang, Further EDIT, just caught what Ranja said about the wis line, didn't realize it would not apply to sneak attack, that does **** it alot
I would agree with Ixtril. I am finding it just as easy to "joust" as to stay in the sweat spot these days. And again, I don't mean constant jousting. I mean something like: run through ranged CAs (this often includes sneak attack/rangers blade combo because of it's fairly long range), as those run out move forward and run through close range CAs, as those run out back up. A couple of points to clarify. If you are going to run up and use your close range CAs don't be shy. You have to get close enough for your melee (sword) auto attack otherwise you might as well just stay in the sweet spot. I use ACT with a sound setup to ping for me when I hit with my sword so I can tell if I'm in the right spot or not. Second, you can use arrow barrage or natural selection while running in or out without interupting them.To avoid wasting the time you spend moving. If those aren't up I manually hit range auto attack so it will at least fire while I'm moving. Finally, in reality things are a little more complicated because of cycle times and sometimes it makes more since to stay in the sweet spot if not enough of one type of CA is available (range vs. melee).
I started playing again :} I find the mini-joust best also. It provides a marginal inprovement in DPS just as it did in beta. But then I have some pretty good melee weapons. I took "/autoattack 2" off of everything. I tried this with all the combination of aa and aa lines I could think of whilst in beta. It was inevitably 500 to 1 k better over all. I start right on the mob to make sure my melee autoattack is hitting and debuff and run through melee CA's starting with Bloody Reminder. When my melee CA's run out I back out till my Ranged CA's are available and run through them. Then rinse and repeat. My Melee CA's kick off my melee autoattack so I need to make sure I am on the mob, when I back out for Ranged CA's it triggers my Ranged autoattack while I run through them. Timing is a little tougher because of the change between autoattack timing while mini-jousting, but distance is actually easier. I plan on a spec with the stamina line, my other spec right now is strictly for soloing. I think I will see a net gain over the int line but we will see.
Interesting. What added benefit do you get for doing the mini-joust vs. sitting in the sweet spot? Is it that you are doing some melee attacks and thus getting the AoE attack occationally? What would be the difference if you sat in the sweetspot and used the melee auto attack instead of ranged auto attack?
