Pew Pew Pew

[Cecily]

So lately I've been pretty mean to Rosen (Ivory) for saying archery is practical to level up / dps with. My reason for that is I sincerely didn't want to see someone waste their time on a build which experience has taught me is bad. But I also don't like giving an uninformed opinion, so I needed to go out and see if anything had changed. And after grouping with Rosen in TT on the forager cycle for the better part of an evening, I'd like to offer her an apology and give some thoughts on why archery might be alot... better now than it was in the past.

There's 2 reasons why archery was bad in Kunark:

Itemization - This the vast majority of the bows available to anyone during our 10 trip year trip to Kunark. Raincaller is probably what most rangers used during this time. It's a great pulling bow, but the DPS is seriously lacking. For damage, there's 2 good bows in the entire expansion... Bow of the Underfoot and Windstriker. Both were extremely difficult to obtain and both featured a brutally slow 6 second base refresh timer. If you missed a few shots in a row, you probably forgot about archery for awhile. It just wasn't fun to use.

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Haste - Worn haste was not effecting bow shots or skills timers during all or most of Kunark*. And also pre-patch fleeting quivers were nothing but an annoying bag to carry (which I did anyway). Spell haste was the only way to increase your firing speed. So if you were solo and not lucky enough to own a sky cloak, you were stuck with, depending on your bow, a base 4 to 6 second firing speed (10 to 15 shots per minute) which missed quite often. Better than nothing, but not by much.

So in summary, good bows in Kunark were rare, slow, and suffered severely from a lack of item-based haste. I would guess most people took a Raincaller they dropped 6k on out, excited to bow kite, and were pissed off 10 - 15 mins later. Raincallers probably formed most of the negative opinions people have on archery. Those 350 range pulls are incredible though.

*I put in a bug report about this issue a long, long time ago. We suggested that the removal of haste % from item tags broken something and was the reason for the bug.
Whether or not that was the case, the haste % is shown now and, barring epics, worn haste is speeding up timers like it should.

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Why Archery maybe might not be so horrible:

Itemization - Bow of the Huntsman / Velium bows. Nice ratios are MUCH easier to quest / purchase now.

Haste - Worn item (besides Swiftwind) / fleeting quiver haste functioning. This is absolutely huge for soloers.

Put those together and it's pretty ok.

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Zalea: 60 ranger. Earthcaller / Swiftblade of Zek Main & Swiftwind offhand. Sky cloak. 90% hasted. 26 DS.
Rosen: 55 ranger. 36% worn haste (velium swiftblade) + fleeting quiver. Various bows (Skydarkener, Ex Velium Bow, Bow of the Huntsman)

This about 2 hours worth of hunting foragers together in TT with almost zero downtime. I was tanking and Rosen was sniping 2x hits. Rosen was mainly using Skydarkener, so there's of bunch of procs not being shown. Parser counted "has been struck by lightning" 56 times so add another 14k damage to her total. Quite honestly, I'm impressed to see that much damage. Regardless of the bow we chose to test, the damage always ended up being around 25% of my melee damage. I had her test her melee once (mid range ratio dd proc weapons) and funny enough was also 25% of the kill.

So anyways.. this enough to make me stop dismissing archery completely. Considering that I was using much better haste, Rosen put out a ton damage.
Very curious how a level 60 w/ a nicer bow would do.