I don't know. I can't give accurate estimates on DPS right now. For one, we don't have a memory scraper and I can't be bothered circumventing the game's anti-debugging code (it could be as simple as calling IsDebuggerPresent but I CBA to re-configure olly again to deal with that). Short of recording an encounter and adding the numbers and dividing by the length, we can't really determine it meaningfully, and even so, the presence of even 1 or 2 really nice rad or pen crits drastically changes it (unlike other games like Rift where crit damage was 1.5x base and up to 2.1x based on build, nothing close to 6x like you can achieve in Tera).

I do know that you can approximate the damage on pen arrow with RoA + another ability, but this puts a severe limitation on your mobility (and sucks if the boss moves much) and almost requires being in melee to have access to PBAoE fire trap and breakaway as a viable replacement. Salvo's anim cancel + pen speed gives you something like 2-3 seconds if done properly, which is enough to fit in a trap + volley or a volley + rest arrow if trap is on CD and still end up back at a fast poison -> rad as soon as it comes off CD. The only downside in the rotation is the stun after pen arrow. I'm not sure why people want to remove pen altogether. I'm more a fan of throwing in a breakaway bolt + pen to increase its damage well above rad arrow (for now). I'm trying to work that into a solid rotation that can be used from melee, favoring dropping rest arrow for the BB and a ranged fire trap after the pen arrow instead of a volley, throwing in a melee fire trap before rad since it has almost no cost in terms of time.

At range, I'd never remove pen as you cannot compensate the DPS loss. In melee, I'd actually take advantage of BB to increase pen arrow's damage significantly. If you drop pen arrow, you'd probably lose 15-20% of your DPS in ranged and 20-30% of your dps potential in melee. That's a huge guess, and the variance on those would be enormous because when a BB buffed pen arrow crits from behind with the right crystal build, it hits really, really hard (> 600k is easily possible right now with moderate gear).

Quote: Seyon on 05/14/2012, 12:13 PM - view

BAMs still drop items, though fewer. Regular mobs only seem to drop items if within 15 levels or so of you, with levels > 2 significantly diminishing drops (less gold, fewer items, etc).

Quote: Rarc on 05/14/2012, 01:05 PM - view

The QQ being "we do more damage at 6m from boss" is wrong, but being 6m from the boss is effectively required to do max DPS for many fights, not because our damage is higher in that zone, but because bosses tend to move forward a lot. If you're at 12m and the boss moves 1m, you'll do less damage. If the boss moves 5m, you'll do significantly less. If the boss moves 8m or more (this happens pretty often), you can't even hit the boss and eat a massive DPS loss from canceling a charge or missing entirely. If you're at 6m, the boss must move 14m for you to miss entirely. The only downside is that because we don't have significantly higher balance (like mdps), bosses tend to knock us down more easily, and because we don't have an invuln in backstep, we cannot get away from massive PBAoE abilities without knowing exactly when they'll happen and backing out early (crab boss in air -> does 40k damage, melee laugh at this, for example). In the case of being 6m from the boss, even if it moves slightly, you still hit for max damage.

Some of the same arguments are true for sorcs, yes, but the problem is that our damage diminishes after 13m, which means we want to remain within 13m at all times, even when the boss moves. So we remain a middleground between being melee and ranged if we want to do competitive DPS.

Final salvo is only worth using to cancel rad's animation and lead into a fast pen arrow. The problem with using RoA is that its ROI for the cast time animation is not comparable to a rad or pen arrow, and since it significantly delays the use of rad arrow on CD with max anim speed and a CD reduction pot, it's actually a DPS loss. Using ET instead of volley every other rotation would be a significant DPS increase, though, if you can properly hit the boss with every single one (since they explode immediately if the target is hit), substituting a volley if the boss is moving too much.

To make salvo worth more, I'd recommend a 2 or 3 point glyph that makes the last arrow in salvo increase our crit rate by 5-10% for 20s. This is something we'll need very much so when the new patch hits and other classes have their crit rates upped significantly.

As for rapid fire, I don't see why anyone would use it, ever. It should hit at minimum twice as hard as it does and have half the stun animation on the last arrow to be valuable at high attack values.

Quote: Karyudo on 05/14/2012, 09:04 AM - view

Male or female? And the empirical test would be for several people to test the same scenario, ideally no carving crystal or scroll, no crit charm, no mystic, list crit # from stats page and record the same boss fight 2 separate times doing nothing but firing arrows at the front and then the back of a boss, as well as posting every piece of gear they are wearing + their glyph loadout. A test like this from each race and gender and a wide variety of gear sets on the same boss should indicate that boss's crit resistance and also if there is any variance or bugs present with some piece of gear, a broken glyph, or if something else is causing the discrepancy.

I notice I crit far more often when hitting the front of a boss than the back, which is why I suspect the racial breaks something. With everything you mention, on a fight like the lancer boss in FoK, I have a crit rate well below 10% generally (that is with a mystic) hitting solely the back but hitting the front of the crab boss in the same dungeon it's somewhere around 30-40%. I can't really determine why this might be the case without a lot more information but it's definitely consistent, as I see the exact same thing every time I run FoK.

We're missing some vital advanced glyphs that make our DPS significantly higher. We're also dealing with a few bugs right now (lingering rest arrow doesn't work, crit rate inconsistency with other classes).

It doesn't help that a nice chunk of our sustained DPS in a proper rotation *was* from poison, but this damage cannot be increased by any means (+% periodic damages don't work), and the crit x multiplier modifiers (scroll + crystals) as well as damage modifiers on weapons (which don't work for poison but do for poison arrow itself) as well as power modifiers in the game tend to scale ALL of our abilities far better than periodic damage modifiers would even if they worked properly (+30% of 7k damage per 2s is far less significant than +40% damage when hitting the back of a BAM and far less than 400% more damage on crit, when poison arrow crits for 60k-80k and poison ticks 7 times, the actual initial hit is doing far more than the poison can). So as our power rises and we play properly, the poison quickly falls behind as a % of our overall damage (down from almost 80% when we first get it, remember farming Basilisks with poison because you could just lol as they died in under 1 minute).

The crit rate inconsistency is both racial and class based. I'm working on getting evidence but I think the Castanic crit-to-back modifier actually breaks the effect of crit rate significantly and that the crit rate on archers is not congruent with crit rate on other classes (even though our crit rate is significantly lower than others by default). Even with mystic buffs and all other possible means of increasing crit rate (+crit rate on rings & necklace and a fully +9 hands, and a crit crystal), we crit substantially less often on bosses than do other DPSers without those crit increases. If you have the misfortune of rolling a Castanic archer, however, it appears even with all of those things, we crit less often than 10% of the time on bosses in normal 60 dungeons. This means if you're in this situation right now, your DPS is significantly lower than any other class played correctly, as 4x-5x crit modifiers on other classes let them increase their DPS by as much as 3x, while for castanic archers it appears to do as little as 30-40%. This is *HUGE* and hopefully I can gather enough evidence to make a bug report of it.

Overall, with the presence of bugs and issues with periodic damage in the game in general, in PvE we have a lot of DPS potential but we're still held behind by the lack of proper glyphs (> 30% increase in expected DPS from rad arrow, and this is significant for PvP too) and other more substantial bugs. We're not useless if played properly, but we are at a significant risk of death due to the lack of an invulnerability frame. Melee can invuln through PBAOE boss effects, and many of these extend to over 10m around the boss. Some bosses do not give sufficient warning to clear the AoE unless you're beyond them already (lower DPS for us), and being mid-backstep you can still be knocked down AND hit with the damage (unlike melee rolls). This also means that because we need the same expensive crystals other DPS need to do max DPS, we end up breaking crystals more often, and dying in an encounter instantly ruins your DPS (no more charms) and requires you pop an arunic or have significantly less HP. Overall, this is a severe weakness that should be corrected. It also means archers cannot use these defensive means in PvP as melee DPS tend to do against lock-ons and against archer charge-shots.

In PvP, the skill level required to play competently is on par with what is required from healers to play competently, and that's on a whole different level from MDPS and sorcs. If played correctly, an archer can be one of the hardest to kill players in PvP while bringing people down incredibly quickly. This requires that no shot *EVER* miss and proper trap shots, and this reliance on the aiming of projectile shots with no dependence on lock-ons makes it significantly more difficult to DPS as an archer in PvP than it does a slayer, for eg. Players tend to move around in awkward ways at awkward intervals at inconsistent rates and perform actions that are unpredictable (leaping forward or backwards, rolling, using abilities, etc) and these tend to dramatically change their hitbox. Also, this game has terrible lag compensation (including skipping and rubber-banding) so against players who lag, it's significantly more difficult to land any shots. MDPS and sorcs may argue that being on top of a player who is always moving is also difficult, but for MDPS in this game, there are an abundance (overly so) of stuns, snares, and knockdown abilities that greatly increase the effect of impact that serve to compensate for this, and given their massive mobility due to ports and resilience in melee range due to evasive invuln frames, it's actually pretty faceroll to fight people like this. You don't even have to try. And it doesn't help that almost all of these abilities hit in a GIGANTIC [filtered] box that extends for like 9-16 m^2. And for sorcs, the only difficult shots are your GTAoE that give warning before hitting, and that may be your biggest burst, but the difficulty isn't there as far as aiming, you don't have to absolutely be aiming directly at someone and get a reticle lock to hit them, you can just toss it on the ground and get lucky. As for mass PvP, GTAoE like that are damn near impossible to see, and so you'll get free kills just for having the highest AoE DPS in the game. So no, for MDPS nor Sorcs, there is no valid argument to "skill" being involved in hitting other players because the tools are present to mitigate that requirement.

Overall, even in PvE, the difficulty of properly executing high-level archer play would be roughly 4 stars in PvE content (maintaining back-facing to most bosses at 10m while having no large ports nor immune frames and facing movement speed restrictions due to our stance mechanic) while maintaining max DPS is very difficult. In PvP, it'd be 6-7 stars out of 5, right up there with Mystics and Priests. Most others are at 2-3.

Too bad you're not on VoT, I'd fight you.

Oh, me too:

http://www.twitch.tv/just2n/b/318101335

Again, why u no 60 bro? Most of these 60 BAMs are impossible to solo, so get up here and show us how easy it is!

And now with proper front-facing damage: http://www.twitch.tv/just2n/b/318107683

There are plenty of items that you can't even search for. You have to skirt around the issue by supplying ilvl and tier as a filter.

There's also this broken issue of a 10% fee for "buy now" over doing make-offer of their asking price. It makes absolutely no sense why this exists when people are permitted to go AFK in-game. Is this some penalty fee to purchasers because the seller decides he doesn't want to negotiate (ever) or decides to go AFK?

The Broker is like an alpha version product here. Look at how difficult it is to look for crystals using it, you need to know the exact name of the crystal to find it. They don't have an ilvl so you can't just filter for the highest tier, etc.

Quote: azulvenatus on 05/11/2012, 06:16 PM - view

And all of this is because you're still low level.