Last but not least, everyone’s favorite class to love and hate, the Ranger.
The graph of the ranger:
Talents
The ranger talents are more complicated than the other classes. Each talent seems to have a viable option on both sides, but in reality only one is the best:
- Lvl 5: Precision VS Rapidity. Well if it was easy I could give an easy answer. But I can’t here. I long ago took every variable into account to calculate the dps difference between Precision and Rapidity. I had to stretch alot of assumptions like 4 hits per second (while 3 should be max) to barely make Rapidity still the lower dps. Now weakspots are added and those get extra dps boost from bigger charged shots. Sadly Rapidity charged shots are weaker than Precision charged shots, so automatically we can already say Precision is the way to go based on that. So we don’t need the details anymore here.
- Lvl 10: Improved Charge VS Rapid Charge. This is an easy choice. Rapid charge makes you shoot your charged shots 1 second earlier and thus do more dps. The other talent does not add anything of value to the dps.
- Lvl 15: Arrow Sight VS Multishot. This is another difficult one on the surface. Arrow Sight will be a default 10% dps boost if you stand 30 meters away. So Multishot needs to beat that dps boost.10% of your attack are doubled in damage by Multishot. This sounds promising to be also a 10% boost. But there are a few flaws lowering this 10%. For one, the charged arrow part and piercing arrow do not benefit from this doubling in damage. Secondly poison does not benefit from it. Because these are a big part of the dps of the ranger Multishot’s dps boost is already way below 10%. So the winner is Arrow Sight. (edit: the doubling of Mutishot only works if no talents selected, it is only a small damage boost of a static number when lvl5 talent precision is selected. That static number only gets boosted from weakspots, not charges, piercing or poison. So even worse than initially thought.)
- Lvl 20: Globe Master VS Overcharge. This seemed like a hard one on the surface to decide and it is. Globe master gives you one extra globe the whole fight. A beautiful 8.8% dps boost. And Overcharge makes that arrow that does maximum dps, yes charged piercing on a weakspot do more damage. But wait how much more damage?
So normally you have 6 globes x 8.8% = 52.8% dps boost from globes with Globe Master. And with Overcharge every globe is 11.3% on the charged shot. So 5 x 11.3 = 56.5%. But you will lose all your globes and have to rebuild them with the following arrows… So is that 56.5% - 52.8% = 3.7% dps boost on the charged piercing worth losing the globes? I can show more calculations, but to not keep on going with calculation I just cut to the chase and say no. The conclusion I came to was: if a charged piercing arrow on a weakspot with 30 meter talent did about 6x more damage than it is doing now Overcharge would equal the dps of Globe Master. But currently that is not the case. Globe Master is the winner. - Lvl 30: Critical Aim VS Needler. Critical aim is the winner because the weaspots that spawn will spawn every 5 seconds. Critical aim adds 50% dps when hitting a weakspot. And 100% when hit with a charged piercing arrow. Only on 30 meters away though. Needler on the other hand is only 35% with normal arrows and 70% on a weakspot charged shot. Luckily needler spawns a new weakspot every 3 seconds instead of every 5 seconds. But without boring everyone to death with another 20 lines of text with numbers, basically the fact that the charged piercing arrow is only getting 70% boost instead of the 100% boost, Needler loses. So Critical Aim is the winner.
Ring affixes
Same as all classes +35 crit chance both rings and Empowered affix + Elite Hunter affix.
Armour affixes
If you read the chapter about armour affixes of the mage, it is exactly the same. Basically:
- Projectile damage as first option.
- Crit damage increase for second option.
Weapon affixes
The weapon affixes of the ranger is a bit strange. If the bug got fixed where DoT’s steal charged strikes, in that case selecting Charged Strikes would be a good option. Currently though, poison arrow in the rotation lowers the dps increase to 1.9%. The two options left again are:
- And Bleed 5.35% boost (bit lower than shaman because more DoT damage involved in the class reducing bleed usefulness)
- Iceheart 5% boost, realistically 3% because of other classes (mages -_-) needed which isn’t the case often enough.
So Bleed + Iceheart is best Ranger weapon.
I do want to note though when Charged Strikes gets fixed it will open the option of rangers manipulating their arrows to crit on the charged shot. Which grants an insane dps boost (the god_ranger @roadkilz xD ) but is almost impossible for a human to keep track of though. So it was dropped from any discussion for now.
The rotation 1
Again calling out what all characters mean:
- X = Start of class dps boosts (so not an attack itself.
- e = zero globes normal arrow.
- O = Only 2 globes charged piercing arrow shot on weakspot 1.817 seconds (for simplicity the arrow after acts like 6 globes, doesn’t matter much in dps)
- z = Arrow shot after 0.92 seconds.
- Z = Arrow shot after 0.92 seconds hitting weakspot 1.5x damage.
- s = Arrow shot at 0.817 seconds. (on the vibration)
- u = poison arrow shot on 0.817 seconds.
- V = Fully globed charged piercing shot on weakspot 1.817 seconds
- Y = super boosted charged piercing on weakspot
- w = super boosted normal 0.817 arrow.
- p = piercing arrow uncharged mid super.
Okay so what is this rotation? Welcome to the very unknown 30 meter ranger weakspot maintain rotation. It goes as follows:
- You start with a normal arrow, which spawns a weakspot.
- You follow this by hitting the weakspot immediately with the charged piercing arrow.
- Now it is important to shoot 7 arrows. But here is the catch, you are not allowed to shoot all 7 arrows with 0.8 second timing. Which is normally the best dps. Why not? It will barely make the charge of the next piercing not ready, so your bow does not want to charge. Add two arrows which are in the 0.9 timing to fix this. So to repeat again of the 7 normal arrow 2 of them are 0.9ish and other two are 0.8ish timing.
- In those 7 arrows on the 4th arrow a weakspot will spawn. Do not hit it. Miss that weakspot with 3 normal arrows.
- On the 5th arrow you need to do another thing, which is shoot your poison arrow. Why? because most tilesets are up at that time, and new tilesets can be triggered right before the charged arrow. Do not shoot the poison arrow on cooldown, which will make you go off rotation and boost the poison arrow less. Also shooting poison a few arrows early really adds so little dps, it is not worth the dps loss of worse tileset boosting.
- Then hit the weakspot with the charged piercing arrow. You will always be on time on this weakspot because of the 5 second expire time.
- We are halfway with the rotation. Now we have to shoot 7 normal arrows again. You will notice that the first normal arrow spawns a weakspot. Delay hitting that weakspot with a normal arrow untill you have your tilesets up. Again 2 of the normal arrows need to be 0.9 seconds.
- Now the last hard part, on the 7th normal the weakspot will spawn. But only if you stretched the time enough with the 0.9 arrows. Immediately after the 7th arrow you will charge again and hit the weakspot. Which brings you back at the start of the rotation which was “hitting a weakspot with your charged arrow right after spawning it with a normal arrow”.
This rotation is basically: “V z z s s u s s V z Z z s s s s”
I would say this is the normal dps rotation of rangers, but almost no-one is doing this trick to hit every weakspot. It is also very difficult to keep up. The normal part about this rotation that it is a charged shot followed by 7 normal arrows. Second normal part is that the tilesets that are used are copied from the community. Instead of self designed.
When the super is ready, the ranger waits with activating it until the charged arrow, to boost the charged piercing weakspot even more (although not by alot). Then 9 normal arrows are shot that make use of the super. The 5th normal arrow is a piercing arrow though. Because the super speeds up the cooldown respawn of the arrows, we make use of that. Piercing gets back right after the super is done.
Tilesets
Used tiles are:
- 6 = one hit every 1 to 1.99 seconds.
- F = piercing arrow hitting target.
- 2 = 2 hits per second.
- A = poison arrow hitting target
I don’t have to say alot of these tiles. These are the community used tilesets. I think I might have been able to make them a bit better, but it won’t beat what I am showing next, which is why my time spend optimizing this was not maximum.
The rotation 2 (manipulation ranger)
Welcome to the manipulation ranger rotation:
So tell me, what is different about the manipulation ranger? It is all about tilesets. The rotation is actually almost the same. But the tilesets used are not. What is different? Well the following:
A ranger arrow has a travel time, when you shoot the arrow more in a curve, it takes more time to hit the target. This is btw not true for Scoundrel. By making use of this fact the ranger can manipulate the timing that the arrows hit their target. The rotation points change as follows:
- a = Is a curved charged arrow causing the arrow to hit over 2 seconds later than the previous arrow. But with only 2 globes up.
- A = Is the same but with all 6 globes up.
- b = is the after effect of a curved arrow making the next arrow hit the target relatively faster. A 0.92 arrow is used to lower the accidental 3 hits per second tiles triggering. (charged piercing counting as 2 hits per second, and that extra arrow being the third)
- c = Is a curved 0.92 arrow causing it to be over 1+ second and triggering another tile on purpose.
- d = Is the after effect of the ‘c’ arrow with only 0.8 seconds (done on purpose to trigger 2 hits per second tile faster)
What basically is happening:
- The charged arrows in the rotation are curved to make them 2+ seconds triggering a different tile.
- The arrow after this is not curved, so hits the target relatively faster.
- The next arrow is just a normal arrow.
- Then another curve is done on a normal arrow to make the time go above 1+ second to trigger another tile that otherwise doesn’t reliably trigger.
- The arrow after is hitting the target also relatively faster but this is desired to trigger the 2 hits per second tile earlier.
- Then we continue with the normal arrows.
- But we did move the poison to the 7th normal arrow right before piercing which is better for the tilesets dps boosting.
Tilesets 2
Okay so this is where the fuzz is all about:
These are the tiles used:
- 6 = One hit between every 1 and 1.99 seconds.
- 7 = One hit between every 2 and 2.99 seconds.
- F = Piercing hitting target.
- 2 = 2 hits per second.
- A = Poison hitting target.
The tilesets are focused on 1 thing and 1 thing only, trying to be still up when the charged piercing is hitting the enemy. The main tilesets are:
- 7F62 triggering finally after the curved normal arrow + 2 hits per second being hit. Always up before the charged shot.
- 7F26 triggering after the curved normal arrow. Because the curved arrow was delayed a few arrows after the charge, the tileset is still up on the new charged piercing arrow.
Then we have the filler tile 7F2 just boosting some of the normal arrows dps.
And lastly to fill the 3th tileset spot for being still up on the charged piercing arrow, we have two ends of the poison arrow:
- 6A2 This tileset procs right after poison was shot. Luckily the arrow after poison will be the charged piercing. But in half of the charged shots, poison is not up yet.
- A7F26 Welcome to our first 5 tile long tileset. After the poison and charged shot this tileset triggers and stays up before the next poison arrow is shot. The ‘2’ in the tileset can sometimes not trigger and completely ruin the tileset, but my dps program shows that losing out on the tileset is less punishing than having a shorter tileset. (longer tilesets boost the dps for a longer timeframe. 3 tile = 4 seconds, 4 tile = 6 seconds, 5 tile = 8 seconds.)
So if you are able to still play the class straight and hit the weakspots with a curved charged piercing arrow, this method will boost your dps by about 9% for the ranger. Which is def something very cool. But also this rotation is hard to do… so not something to just switch to.
Extra
Now there is another flaw of ranger that does not come above the surface with this dps program on a single run. Ranger has spike damage with the charged piercing arrow. Spike damage will cause RNG to act as follows:
- Most of the time the ranger will do below average dps because the charged shots do not crit.
- Sometimes the ranger does more above average dps in a bigger jump than any other class. As long as the crits are happening on the charged piercing damage spike.
The ranger has a big range of possible dps (as extreme as shaman with the RNG of lightning). The below graph illustrates that. The ranger dps will be more often on the lower part of the graph than the higher part. So more often then not the ranger will be below the average max dps. This is in my opinion a flaw in the thought process of the class. Which is why I will already give my first opinion of: do NOT raise the reward from hitting a weakspot with a charged arrow in comparison to the normal arrows.
Opinion
Currently the ranger is the lowest dps class, which came as a shock to me. Because basically everything in the game screams that the ranger does not have the high ground. 30 meters away? Okay welp no easy heals. You can’t stand 30 meters in this area? Too bad. You can’t see weakspots on the Dovre boss? Welp too bad. You can’t get 30 meters on sewer slime. You know what… you don’t need meters on sewer slime :P, dps isn’t important, right? How you mean if I keep the boss stationary but still turn it, the weakspots just move around, making it impossible to hit? Too bad, I already keep it stationary, I am already an above average tank doing such a thing… Wild Creatures, byyyye ranger dps. The list goes on and on.
So I would have expected to see at-least in a perfect undisturbed scenario like Mutated rat the Ranger shine to be one of the best potential dps classes. But in practice and in theory this has been proven to not be true. It is the lowest instead… That is why I advocate for the ranger dps to be boosted by ALOT. To the point it has potential to be the second best dps. I don’t believe in those problems being fixed which currently cripple the ranger, but I do believe in giving them a higher dps to counter balance these problems.
That is why I want to see the ranger get something like a 43% dps boost. Increasing the max potential from 64.7k to 92.5k dps if we are talking about normal arrow shooting rangers. And 69.8k to 99.8k dps for the crazy manip rangers.
If mechanics change, I can not stress enough that the current charged piercing spike should NOT be more encouraged. To prevent RNG of dps causing many below average dps numbers. I would almost advocate for a slight decrease in reward, or add a second spike damage action so less normal arrows are between damage spikes.
Link to main post: Max dps of all 4 classes
