Anyone want to take a crack at a spreadsheet that shows how much precision the next point of CD is worth? I’ve started one, but if what I’ve done is correct, CD is almost always better if you have to choose between precision and CD.
So, in layman’s terms, the extra damage provided by 1% CD is equal to CC/100. The extra damage provided by 1% CC is equal to (.5+CD)/100.
There’s another layer to this when you start looking at gear though. 1% CD always has less cost than 1% CC. You need 21 precision to boost CC by 1%. The trade off between CD and primary stats is between 16:1 and 5:1.
Well, none of it was ever documented. It just worked the way it should for a few days and then another patch changed it back. Does anyone else remember that or am I losing it?
You seem to be losing it as this never happened post release.
Note: While rangers kitten about the longbow attack being terribly slow, note that ALL autoattacks (or all that I’ve used) have a much slower actual cast time than listed in the tooltip. For instance, guardian scepter says 1/4s. So you should be able to output 4 orbs a second, but you can put out almost 2 in a second instead.
That’s the thing though. They aren’t all a lot slower than the tooltip. There was a thread on this a while back. The weapons that are generally perceived as being weak are the ones that have a large variance. The rifle, for instance, is ~0.1 seconds slower than the tooltip.
I could have sworn the longbow was faster for a like a day. I wasn’t 80 yet, so it would have been really early. Oh well.
Well, none of it was ever documented. It just worked the way it should for a few days and then another patch changed it back. Does anyone else remember that or am I losing it?
Early on, there was a brief period when they made the auto attack on the longbow faster. I think it was as fast as the tooltip stated. For those few days, the longbow was worth using while 2-5 were on cooldown. I think they decided it was a bug and fixed it.
I think he altered the value of his power. That allows you to make a system of equations and solve for both unknowns. Once you have the weapon damage, which should be constant, you can find the other coefficients easily.
If you really want to cut down on the computing and have everyone’s damage count in PVE, just apply condition ticks on a first come first served basis. Then, once the cap is reached, new condition stacks deal all of their damage upfront. You could do this with burning and poison as well once the cap on their duration is reached.
GS on ranger is decent. A blast finisher on maul would give us the group utility we currently lack. Also, maul shouldn’t reset the auto attack chain. I should be able to interrupt my chain with maul so that I can move that evade window around.
Longbow and sword could be our high direct damage weapons, but longbow is too weak and sword has that annoying root. Sure, you could take it off of auto attack, but that lowers damage output and gets tiring pretty quick (for me at least).
Those one second boon/condition traits are terrible. The might should apply to both ranger and pet and last for 5 seconds. The bleed could use the same duration.
What if the auto attack did everything it currently does, but you could dodge at any time and break out of the animation. Are you guys really saying you don’t want that capability?
I am not sure why everyone says that 40% of the damage for a ranger comes from the pet, but I am kinda new to the class. Does damage scale differently with attack power for rangers? Rangers can get some really good armor and power, or spec for conditions relatively well, works great as a bunker with high healing, has great mobility, and has a lot of interesting ways to build other than focusing on pets. Are these stats that I have been playing around with in the build editor scale differently than other classes?
If you don’t like the pet attacking, can’t you just pick pets that buff you, soak conditions, or remove conditions to be your support in the background (and not trait into Beastmaster at all)? If that is the case, its not big deal if they die, you just get fewer boons, but can keep playing regardless. Also, in WvW, can’t you use one of the devourers to attack people on a wall with their ranged attacks, or is the range too low?
You can reach the same overall stats, but the skill coefficients on our weapons are lower, presumably because we have the pet supplementing our damage. That means our attacks do less damage per point of power.
If they could figure out a way to do it, I would love to have preparations built into the longbow auto attack. Augmenting the auto attack with read the wind, kindle arrows, ignite arrows, or something else would be pretty cool.
Wow, why all the hate? If you don’t think he’s being honest, go run a dungeon or two with him. But until you know one way or another, give him the benefit of the doubt.
I’m not sure if you were being sarcastic or not in that reply, Durz.
If our damage is split and we have two health bars to manage, why shouldn’t 30 points in marksmanship add 300 power to the ranger and the pet? That way when I trait my ranger for the damage/survivability I want, my pet is similarly built. The main drawback is that you won’t have bunker rangers that have good condition damage and power/precision pets that eat people’s faces.
Actually, if you want a replacement for BM passive bonuses, why not lower the recharge and let your old pet persist for x amount of time after the swap? Then you have two pets mauling things for a few seconds. Actually, that two pet thing would probably fit better as a grandmaster trait. But, I think 5 out of the 8 classes have a recharge built into the mechanic specific trait line. Warrior gets bonus burst damage, and necro gets the increased life force.
One of the ranger’s big problems, to me, is that they have 4 trait lines that boost stats on one part of the character, 1 trait line that boosts stats on the other part of the character, and no trait lines that boost stats for the entire character.
Why couldn’t the first 4 trait lines have effected the stats on both ranger and pet while beast mastery lowered the pet swap and pet skill cooldowns?
A 30/20/20 build might work well. I’ve used it with both bows, but not together. It still gives you the option of pulling out a greatsword and fighting in melee too.
You run a BM build. That’s part of the reason you aren’t having any trouble. I think fractals are the hardest ones personally.
I ran the svanir fractal yesterday with a bear and a jaguar. The bear somehow got aggro on the boss in spite of everyone else attacking. He lasted about 5 seconds before I had to switch pets. As soon as I switched pets the boss teleported up to the ledge and dropped AOE everywhere and killed the jaguar because it insisted on standing in circles 15 feet away from me. Scenarios like this are a common occurrence when you don’t run BM builds.
You should have used pets with toughness. And/or micro’d the pet away from the attacks. Also, if not running BM, you should be running guard or SoS to keep the pets up. SotW is good in non BM builds, in fact, it has more mileage there. In a dungeon I would avoid things that aren’t helping you, such as lightning reflexes, which you can almost always do without in dungeons.
Yeah, I’m actually running SoS, SotW, and SotH. SoS was on cooldown from an earlier batch of AoE. I ran Devourers on the subsequent grawl fractal and it didn’t fare too much better. It seems like it only takes a little bad luck with aggro after a pet swap to put you into minute long cooldowns for the rest of the fight. I’m really not big on micromanaging the pet, and that could be the reason I’m having trouble. It probably doesn’t help that I run a lot of this stuff with a staff ele that rains so much fire down that you can’t see boss windups or red rings sometimes.
You run a BM build. That’s part of the reason you aren’t having any trouble. I think fractals are the hardest ones personally.
I ran the svanir fractal yesterday with a bear and a jaguar. The bear somehow got aggro on the boss in spite of everyone else attacking. He lasted about 5 seconds before I had to switch pets. As soon as I switched pets the boss teleported up to the ledge and dropped AOE everywhere and killed the jaguar because it insisted on standing in circles 15 feet away from me. Scenarios like this are a common occurrence when you don’t run BM builds.
There’s not much advice I can give on a BM build, but one thing to be aware of is that companion’s might applies one stack of might for one second.
Carnivorous appetite will help you keep the jaguar alive while you build stacks on master’s bond since every attack it makes from stealth will be a crit, so you might want to go with that instead.
Changing to ruby orbs and knight’s earrings with berserker jewels should let you squeeze out a little more damage and more stat points overall.
I think your reasoning is good on what it should do. However, I think the damage on long range shot is currently calculated for each target based on distance. There’s no way to do something similar with attack speed because you’re affecting the ranger instead of his targets.
I think basing it on your current target might work the best since arrows usually don’t go very far past the enemy you target, but that would only be with piercing arrows. Otherwise it would need to be based on what enemy you actually hit.
The interaction with piercing arrows I was referring to is how it would determine the attack speed while you have this trait active. You’re hitting multiple targets, so how do you decide the attack speed when you’re hitting enemies in every range category with the same attacks?
1.2k to 1.6k every 1.25 seconds is not what I would call good damage, not in PVE at least. How much damage trade off should there be for dealing ranged damage? How many unanswered attacks can you fire off before they close the gap? You can reach 5k dps? (not sure, I’m no expert) with melee builds using various classes, and probably quite a bit more than that with a few of the warrior builds.
Yeah I didn’t look at the breakdown on the power. I saw 2190 and *239% base damage and figured it was total since that’s about what I have without might stacks.
What I was doing with the criticals was breaking it out into % of non criticals times damage plus % of criticals times critical damage. The result with your updated numbers would be [.12 + .88(2.64)] which comes out to 2.4432.
Here are my numbers for calculations, as promised:
Power = 1095 from gear + 120 from ruby orbs + 100 from traits + 875 from might = 2190 power = *239% base damage*
Precision = 728 from gear + 300 + traits + 84 from orbs + 70 from food = +1182 precision = +56% crit chance
Crit chance = 4% base + 56% from precision + 5% from Sigil of Accuracy 20% from fury = 85% crit chance
Crit damage = 50% base + 62% from gear + 12% from orbs + 30% from traits + 10% from food = +154%
Crit modifier = [crit chance] x [crit damage] = *140%*
Other boosts = 10% from Steady Focus + 10% from Hunter’s Tacts + 5% from Bountiful Hunting + 5% from Sigil of Force + 10% from mob-specific potion + 25% from vulnerability = *58.4%*
Damage: 202, 202, 235 over 1.8s = 355 base damage per second, multiply by all of the above and you get 5296 total.
I haven’t been able to come up with your final damage number.
On my guardian and ele, yes. On my ranger, no. I felt much more powerful in GW1 because I could come up with builds that can solo farm just about anything and hardly ever take damage.
I’m running mostly knight’s gear with something like 3.2k attack, 42% crit damage, and 57% crit chance in PVE. I think mine tops out at around 6k using signet of the hunt and signet of the wild. Switching to berserker’s gear could get you to 10k, but only when you use those signets.
The only things I don’t like about our melee options is that the 1H sword animation, while cool looking, locks you in place. The other thing is that I would love to go 1H sword and dagger, but the two poison skills seem redundant.
Agreed. You would think they could make dodge rolls and/or movement cancel those skills. Then you could have some control without punishing your keyboard.
Longbow would be just about right if it was as fast as the tool tip shows. The only other thing I would do is change the #4 skill so that if your target is outside of the knockback range it becomes crippling shot.
The signet changes look pretty good. The state of the passive on SoS hasn’t changed any though. It’s great for your pet, but sub par for you.
Spirit changes are what I was expecting, but not what I was hoping for. It seems like you’ll still have to make a heavy investment in them to get any use out of them.
I’ll take whatever I can get on pets. I would have liked more armor increases than health increases though.
The QZ change is an improvement. I still think LR needs to break immobilize though.
I guess I wasn’t clear enough. Whether you have quickness or not, you still do that base dps, so it shouldn’t be considered when you want to find the change in contribution from quickness. Your math is showing the damage during QZ, not the damage from QZ.
Let’s assume you do 100 damage per second.
With +100% attack speed, you’ll do 200 damage per second.
So, for 4 seconds of old_quickness, you’ll do 200 * 4 = 800 damage.
We need a 5th second though, so you’ll do another 100 damage at the 5th second so 800 + 100 = 900 damage.
With +50% attack speed, you’ll do 150 damage per second.
So, for 5 seconds of new_quickness, you’ll do 150 * 5 = 750 damage
(900 – 750) / 900 = 16.6…% So you experience a 16.6…% decrease in dps. This is vastly different than the math given before. This is why some people are complaining like it’s the end of the world for Rangers’ burst and others are looking at them quite quizzically.
“Learn to math” or don’t try to explain things with math, people
I’d just like to point out that this isn’t accurate if you’re looking for the dps increase provided by QZ.
The reason? You’re factoring in damage you would be doing without the quickness. Quickness is only responsible for the additional attacks you make. Before the change, QZ gave you 100% more attacks for 4 seconds. After, QZ gives you 50% more attacks for 5 seconds. Using your 100 dps number, that’s 400 extra damage from old QZ vs. 250 extra damage from new QZ. That’s a 37.5% reduction.
If you’re doing the math right, it should hold true for all scenarios. Consider a bugged QZ that doesn’t provide any benefit. If you include the base attack speed, you end up with results that say QZ deals more damage after the change to 5 seconds, which clearly wouldn’t be right in this scenario.
It depends on who is doing this. If this isn’t taking resources from the balance team, then I don’t care. If it’s a form vs. function issue, I’ll take function every time.
There’s also the crit on weapon swap sigils and the opening strike trait that guarantees critical. It might be worthwhile to see if those can fumble as well.
Weakness is a 50% chance to do 50% less damage on non critical hits.
It might be good in PVE, but if you’re fighting a person, you’re really only going to get close to that 25% damage reduction against a bunker using soldier’s gear.
If they’re using a power/crit build, they’re generally going to have a critical hit chance that’s 50% or higher. If they have 50% critical damage as well, it’s only an 8.3% damage reduction.
[…]but Ranger to me isn’t a burst class – it’s a sustain and survive class.
You can’t really avoid a ranger’s sustained damage, but you can mitigate nearly all of a thief’s burst with really fast reaction and smart play.
Maybe you guys should prioritize LB’s sustained dps then. As it stands, after you’ve blown the 2-5, every second you spend using your 1 a kitten dies.
As much as I like Rob as a dev, I think I would love nothing more than to seek him out repeatedly in WvW on every class I have and rip him apart just to showcase how far that ‘sustained dps’ is getting the class.
Actually, I think LB will need a buff before the #1 causes a kitten to die every second.
That doesn’t look right. Based on your own spreadsheet, you’ve got the auto attack dealing 1594 damage over 1.71 seconds. That’s 927 dps. Maul is dealing 1366 in .825 seconds. That’s 1655 dps.
The guardian’s hammer is probably the closest weapon to the ranger’s greatsword.
I don’t see why maul can’t be a blast finisher. I don’t think it would make it too powerful. Being able to make use of your own combo fields would actually add some utility to the ranger.
Actually, I think my guardian still does a little bit more damage with the hammer than my ranger does with a greatsword, probably because of the damage ticks from the symbol, the burning, and the retaliation.
I wouldn’t mind a trap on dodge, but what I would really like is to get the protection on dodge to apply at the end of the roll instead of at the start.
I do miss dust trap. Maybe a dust trap on dodge would work well.
One thing to keep in mind is that the skill coefficients are better on the warrior. I just did a little testing in the heart of the mists and it looks like the greatsword has about a .7 coefficient for the warrior’s auto attack, while the ranger gets a 0.55. That means they get about 27% more damage per point of power.
Hundred blades has a power coefficient of ~.55 on each of the first 8 hits and ~1.1 on the final hit. That’s huge. Maul, on the other hand, gets a 1.5 coefficient.
So to compare, hundred blades gets 5.5 damage per point of power, maul gets 1.5. I don’t think pets are ever going to pick up that much slack.
The thing that really makes no sense to me is that a class that reduces damage by dodging a lot has a bunch of skills designed to do constant mediocre damage. You can’t do damage while dodging, so if rangers dodge more, shouldn’t the skills be a little more bursty so they don’t hurt our damage as much?
Hundred Blades is a non-mobile channeled skill with an 8 second cooldown that relies on stun/knockdown/immobilize utilities to make it connect (which in turn rely on foes not carrying stun breaks).
Maul is a mobile, standard skill with a 6 second cooldown that also applies 3 bleeds for 6 seconds, while the Ranger also has pets at his/her disposal to help make up for the damage gap and provide utility.
This is a real apples to oranges comparison, especially considering that Maul isn’t the problem of the Greatsword. The low coefficients on the auto-attack chain and/or the fact that it can’t make up for the MH Sword’s higher damage and perma cripple are the issue.
It’s absolutely a valid comparison in some parts of the game, like dungeons. The coefficient on ranger’s auto-attack is low, but the biggest gap between the ranger and warriors and guardians is the #2 skill. All of those skills are going to hit and do close to full damage in a dungeon so the fact that the other #2 skills are channels doesn’t make a huge difference there.
For PvP everything you listed is relevant and deserves consideration. However, maul is really obvious and easy to dodge, so I think it’s better, but not by a whole lot.
