Blue Server: Ranger casting at 60

[Snaggles]

Mana sustainability aside is there a case for casting either Call of Flame or Calefaction while meleeing?

* Self-hasted without Dark Cloak and dual wield? (Say Swifty and 18-20 delay primary)?
* Grind mobs haste capped (Swifty and 18-20 delay primary)?
* Grind mobs haste capped (Swifty and Blam)
* Any raid scenario?

The better your weapons the worse spells fare. Just curious if there is an argument for casting for sport minus necessary jolts, snares, etc as needed.

I’m considering putting in the time to get a blam to ditch the 10/18.

Thanks

[DeathsSilkyMist]

I am a little confused by what you are asking, due to the vagueness of your short hand sentences. Full disclosure, I do not have a Ranger, this is just educated guessing deduced from my experience playing a Shadowknight.

By "Swifty", do you mean https://wiki.project1999.com/Swiftwind ?

By "Self-Hasted", do you mean the 40% worn haste from Swiftwind?

By "Grind mobs haste capped", are you suggesting that you now have 100% haste, when we were considering 40% worn haste exclusively in the first asterisked sentence?

I am going to make a few assumptions when answering these questions, based on what I believe you are asking:

You are asking about the DPS benefits (if any) of casting "High DPS" Ranger Spells while auto-attacking. You are not considering mana sustainability. I put quotes around "High DPS" because the aforementioned spells are high DPS for Rangers, not necessarily high DPS for spells in general. The asterisked sentences are different scenarios you imagine for auto-attacking, in terms of dual wield weapon load-outs and haste percentages.

If that is the case, this is my take:

Rangers are designed for auto-attacking. This is why you can get 90% self haste as a melee character relatively easy. Not to say Epic or Dark Cloak is easy, but it is more attainable by small/casual guilds than Velious raid gear.

1 hand weapons generally do not have a delay greater than 40. That means even with a blam stick or wurmslayer, your weapon delay is roughly 21 at worst when using 90% haste.

Due to the amount of auto-attacks you can output in the two second cast time for Call of Flame, that spell isn't worth casting at all. You will probably be doing roughly 200 damage per 2 seconds anyway, unless you are very unlucky with your damage and misses/dodges.

Calefaction probably does more damage than you can do in 2.5 seconds of auto-attacking, on average. Not to say you can't hit that number if you get lucky, but it is much less likely. Unfortunately, Calefaction has a 45 second recast time, so you cannot chain cast it. This makes it's use cases even more limited than they normally would be. If you could chain cast it, that would at least allow you to burn down a mob slightly faster than your auto-attack DPS.

Without the ability to chain cast, the only use case I could see for Calefaction when meleeing is in this scenario:

1. You are around 30-40% HP
2. The mob is around 25% HP
3. You want to get the mob under 20% ASAP, so the mob flees. You do not want them to stand their ground under 20% HP due to your own low HP. This means every second counts, and thus you cannot risk an unlucky dip in DPS, a series of unlucky misses/dodges, etc. The 450 damage from Calefaction would put the mob under 20% in 2.5 seconds guaranteed, assuming no resists or interrupts.

In raids, I can't see any use for these spells. Auto-attacking is much more useful on most raid mobs, due to their higher average levels and resistances.

[Jimjam]

Call of flame is something to cast between bow shots of you have a slower bow and perhaps are using trueshot. It might be worth having in topslot on fights in which you might get slowed.

Calefaction I use it. It’s fun to see a big chunk of damage even if your melee figures actually work out as being similar. I think calefaction works to close the gap between a very casually geared live ranger vs a 10 years of classic geared p99 ranger.

[Snaggles]

Yea sorry, that was somewhat vague.

Basicially curious if casting makes sense killing a range of different mobs and haste situations.

High greens or low blues most rangers would solo might have around 2-3k hps. Most rangers have a Swiftwind and are not 90% total haste from a Dark Cloak so that would be the most impactful to kill speed. Throw in the scenario as a caster npc (With maybe a DS) and killing fast with a spell or two is even more ideal.

Moving up to blues (aka grind mobs in a normal group). Even hasted it seems casting would bump dps (most casuals aren’t even doing a consistent 100dps you would see from Call of Flame for those 2 or less seconds) but npcs have way more hps. A seb frog might have 8k hps so that calefaction is 5% of its hit points. Bringing the ranger dps average up but with the cool down on those spells it’s a small piece of the overall pie.

Lastly raid bosses, it’s a non-starter.

I have a 10/18 and have been working towards a Swiftblade of Zek slowly. I was just thinking how casting between swings of that would compare to a Blam Stick. Again though, even if the SBoZ is a couple percent better and way more consistent than the slower primary it’s worth getting it funds are there. Besides damage shield mobs and tanking it’s probably just better on average, especially with raid mobs and higher Velious ac in general.

I guess casting DD’s is just very niche. On pulls or as mentioned burning down a npc (a bit faster) in a group scenario.

[DeathsSilkyMist]

Thank you for clarifying!

You are correct, a casual player would probably be doing more like 100 damage per two seconds on average. However, I still think Call of Flame isn't worth the spell slot in most cases. You are spending 125 mana for 100 extra damage in those two seconds, using the aforementioned casual player. That is a terrible damage to mana ratio. After that, you still have to wait 18 seconds for the cooldown. That means the spell slot for Call of Flame is useless for a good portion of the fight.

Calefaction, as I stated before, can be useful if you need that extra burst damage to get yourself over the finish line. Due to it's recast time, however, it is only going to be usable a few times in the fight. It acts more like a Shadowknight's Harmtouch. It is useful in some situations where you need the burst damage, but it isn't really a cornerstone to build a strategy around in normal situations. You will still need to DPS the mob down using other methods for the majority of the fight, while you wait for Calefaction to recover. You are also spending 1/8 of your entire mana pool per cast, assuming you have 2000 mana. Hybrid mana pools tend to be lower. This leads me to believe Calefaction is highly inefficient for normal usage.

Now, I am not saying there are no situations where both spells may be useful. My first post was using the constraints you requested. Calefaction and Call of Flame have low casting times for damage spells. This is good. That means you could cast both at the start of a fight to get a good bit of burst damage out of the gate, and then recast them as necessary. This would bring a dangerous fight to a close faster. However, that strategy would only be useful if you are trying to kill a specific mob quickly. This is due to how much mana you are going to chew through. That initial burst of both spells is already 375 mana, which is roughly 1/5 of your 2000 mana. This strategy is not sustainable in normal situations, such as gaining experience or farming money.

[Snaggles]

Yea on a 20 second fight at a theoretical 50dps that’s 1000 melee damage.

Take 2 seconds out of the fight to cast Calefaction you trade 100 theoretical melee damage (50dps) for 450 fire damage if it lands. 1350 total damage (900 melee 450 spell). 67.5dps

Cast on the pull assuming a knight can peel you lose no melee time. 1450 total damage (1000 melee 450 spell) it’s 72.5dps.

Once a fight lasts longer than 20 seconds or your weapons are better the results diminish. Mana is a finite resource so sustainability is an issue. For solo on low hps mobs casting makes sense and starting with drones of doom wouldn’t be a bad path too.

Since jolt and snare sometimes have to be cast multiple times a fight the blam stick might make more sense for a ranger than a monk. Even if just reducing dps loss over a very quick primary. Maybe I’ll find out sometime [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.].