Guild Wars 2

The comparison was done based on the time it took to kill a heavy armor dummy (10 times and then averaged).
I haven’t added up the amount of health a heavy armor dummy has (nor do I know his armor value) but if those two values were known a base-attack damage-per-second could be calculated.

Terkov, I’d be happy to try things with an optimal skill “Rotation”. I’m quite sure a class like the mesmer would benefit tremendously from actually shattering their clones instead of having them do their insignificant base damage.

As said in my original post the numbers are without a pet, I specifically tested without a pet because of the often heard argument such a large portion of ranger DPS comes from our pets.

But it sounds like you guys really want to see a comparison of the rangers AA skills compared to say a rangers longbow damage when using rapid fire, vulnerability, barrage etc

Hello fellow rangers,

After all the recent threads about crappy longbow damage, horrible greatswords and all-round bad performance of the ranger I felt it was time to try and get some solid numbers to either confirm (or deny) all our feelings.

As such I’ve tried to compare the auto attack DPS on (so far) four classes, the warrior, elementalist, mesmer and ranger.

The set up was as follows:
Tests were done in the Mists attacking the heavy training dummies
Every class was geared with the berserker amulet, 6 runes of the scholar and a +5% damage rune in their weapons.
Trait points were spent for maximum DPS (meaning full power / precision / crit damage traits). No traits themselves were selected and no skills were used, the only attacks done were the number 1 auto-attacks.

Positioning was done in the best way possible, meaning the shortbow for the ranger had rear positioning etc.

With every class / weapon combo I tested I killed 10 heavy training dummies and averaged the time it took for the kill.

For anyone wondering for the ranger the pet was kept on passive / not involved.

The DPS Comparison numbers can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AogEBO_JoiiBdDVyMTFGaDkzVXRhMjVRV0J3cnNPTHc&usp=sharing

The results were (to me at least) surprising.

I’d say my initial conclusion would be that the auto-attack DPS the ranger does is actually fine (with the longbow at minimum range needing work, as well as possibly the axe). So if the ranger is truly lacking so badly in DPS as we all believe they are it’s the abilities that need to be looked at more then the auto-attack of most weapons.

Comments and discussion are welcome, both about the results as as well as the method used to obtain them. If people are enthousiastic I’ll try and compare a few more weapon / class combo’s (I’m interested to see how a thief and a guardian would perform on auto-attacks).

As said, these are simply auto-attack damage comparisons on stationary targets. I realize that they’re in no way comparable to a WvW situation, but they can be food for interesting discussion.