Well, that’s the thing, for group fights where you can safely stand back, there’s no theory crafting to do. You just spam the arrows and the DPS variation in using the special arrows or not is pretty small, since like the others have said, grabbing an arrow might disrupt your rhythm and you build ult so fast with the spam anyway.
I think the changes with the shot rating system and basic arrow nerf are great, but they only really affected solo play. I’m really enjoying the game and ranger in particular, but with the way the class is set up for group play now, it seems like there’s very little skill that could possibly be involved, from either a strategy or execution standpoint. You just have to shoot as fast as you can from a spot that gives even 30 shot rating and you’ll do just as much DPS as any other ranger.
It’s certainly fun to shoot quickly, but with such a low skill ceiling, I can’t imagine being all that engaged in the combat at endgame.
As for theorycrafting, I’ve done some testing. It seems like the default loadout of Poison/Power is the best setup unless you’re going to have a lot of recurring adds about 30 seconds apart. In that case you’d take fire arrow over poison.
A charged shot takes 2 seconds to charge. I have about 80ms ping, tested it by pulling an arrow back fully while the charge shot was on cd. Once the skill was available, it took about a second for the animation to kick in and another second to complete the charge. This was consistent with timings from using it more generally as an opener.
The damage on a charged shot scales to being a little less than 8 basic shots. It stacks with the power arrow to deal over 11 basic shots worth of damage. So, including the grab, you have to shoot about 5 arrows/second before it outweighs doing charged power shots. I shoot 3-4 a second and look a lot slower than the endgame rangers I’ve seen, so it may not even be worth it for them.
The charged shot does not affect the poison damage or fire rain damage, but the shot rating globes do. So starting with a charged poison arrow into a power shot is a waste of DPS. Your poison/fire damage is capped by your level and then adds whatever stats might modify it on top of that. It’s very strong and quite worth grabbing the poison once you fill up your globe, since (at least at my level) it ticks for 1.5x the basic shot damage.
The Charge shot does not affect the split arrows, which seem to be the weakest arrow, even in solo. The split has 2 middle arrows visually, but only one will do damage.
From what I can tell with attack power/defense, all of the ratios stay exactly the same. So a higher defense monster taking maybe 10% less damage from a basic shot will also take 10% less damage from a charged power shot. Perhaps it would be nice if there was some sort of defense curve, where hitting with hard hitting attacks penetrates more of the defense than basic hits, but you’d still be left with a very simple rotation in party play.