An unbalance overlooked for far too long: Ranged damage calulations.

[Yarly]

Good read, and seeing some of the replies... lol....

Bump for this because /ra is pretty lackluster compared to melee

[Gaspee]

Something needs to be fixed. Ranged Attack is pretty worthless at the moment, but the damage formulas are not necessarily to blame. Maybe add better Ranged Attack food or find a bard friend to come sing you Minuets?

Absolutely this^

To be clear, I meant doing /ra over and over is worthless at the moment.

That's how I understood it. DPS of /ra vs. melee classes is severely lacking and has been for some time.

[Byrth]

To be clear, I meant doing /ra over and over is worthless at the moment. The stat Ranged Attack is excellent, but hard to get a lot of without buffers. I'd be totally cool with a level 15 Ranger JA that's the Ranged Attack+ half of Berserk. They already took our Ranged Accuracy from Aggressor, who cares about Ranged Attack?

[Yarly]

That /ra update where distance affected enmity was a neat concept, shame they decided to axe it last minute. Even though that's only an indirect buff for /ra

[Dauntless]

when it is the job most needing help in the damage department.

Ehh DRK is pretty high up there.

[Rambus]

like i said before we should be able do well getting tp by range attacks, not the stance of "to be a good rng requres you to have a KC" to melee for tp and use range ws.

yeah we can do nice ws numbers, really not the point though

[Byrth]

like i said before we should be able do well getting tp by range attacks, not the stance of "to be a good rng requres you to have a KC" to melee for tp and use range ws.

yeah we can do nice ws numbers, really not the point though

Ranger DPS has the same problem that it has always had. Haste doesn't affect it and Marches/haste don't give Snapshot. There's no actual problem with the ranged damage formula and they yield a comparable pDIFs to melee weapons at most cRatios.

[noodles355]

The simple fact is that ranger and corsairs' bonus is being able to attack out of range. But it will cap enmity sooner or later and has no way to remove it's enmity other than to die, get a thf to accomplice you, or sub drg for a gimped high jump.

So their niche DD roles are irrelevant. Then you look at the actual damage output of them. The fall behind melee damage significantly. As Bryth states above, it's throught the lack of accessable Ranged Attack, and through the difference in cRatio. Not only does it fall behind melee damage, it falls behind whilst still costing an obscene amount of gil for ammunition. Antlion Arrow quiver stacks are around 220-250k a stack. Dark Adaman Bullets are 40k a stack (no one has made a stack of bullet puches). Hell, CORs on Asura are paying 30k for ONE Oberon Bullet. Not a stack of bullets, ONE SINGLE bullet. If you were to shoot for TP in an abyssean party, you'd probably need 2-3 stacks of quivers to last the duration.

The only worthwhile means I've seen for shooting for TP inside abyssea is with a MND setup, Light Damage atmas and using a Machine Crossbow with Holy Bolts. It benefits from being able to use the same atmas as you'd use to power up Trueflight, and Trueflight ignoring weapon+ammo base damage. It also benefits from holy bolt additional affect generating no enmity. It sounds great on paper.
However MaB does not affect holy bolt damage, meaning their potential is limited. The most I can get out of them on Lightsday (+Obi) is about 100ish per additional affect (With 2 Light Dmg+ Major Atmas). Adding Beyond and Holy Mountain (aforementioned 2 atmas, HM's Day/Weather bonus irrelevant as using Obi) only increases the damage from around 75ish to 100ish. The setup has potential but still lacks. If MaB affected it it would be very strong.

[Rambus]

I took out shooting rng lately and i gotta tell you... shooting a shot that put me at 100 tp, then "cannot perform that action" is really annoying.

doing ws between tp swings is a trick one can do to help solo scs -.-