Bossing potential of archers

You missed the song of heaven again, thats 20% built in hyper and 20% boss damage. I don't know what else you are going to fire on a boss, I would never think of firing vortex on something like Magnus. Most jobs only have say around 30% ignore pdr max. This job at least has 3 types of ignore pdr around.

All classes with Hyper skills will have a primary offensive skill that is Reinforced and possibly Ignore Guard/Boss Killer. That goes without saying. Yes so what I didn't mention Hypers? Yes I missed a couple of lines here and there from the skills. Does it change the argument? Do you know the implications of those numbers? You should read below, as should the OP @Hakudouchi;.

 Introduction

Some classes start off with a 30%, whether it's a passive or stuck on an active skill -- in fact that's a good number of classes. Some classes are weaker because they start off smaller (say, Shadowers), and then have to make up with either Boss Killer or Ignore Guard, or they Ignore Elemental Resistance, or simply have larger numbers.

For WA, with Albatross Maximum only because mobile bosses like Hilla can simply move away (or you can summon again, but that's a tit-for-tat), you're standing at 15% base before Hypers only, and after Hypers it is 15%+20%. That leaves them about the same as standard classes with a solid 30%PDR. If you now compare them against classes with multiple sources of PDRIgnore (Demon Slayers, Marksmen etc.), then they do suck in comparision.

The point is: if you want to boss, being below average/normal is not enough. You want a summed PDRignore of at least 50% to boss somewhat decently -- throw yourself against Hilla, with a PDR of 50% and check the numbers, and you'll find that the difference is big between classes that are below average (~20-25%), normal (~30-35%), better (40-45%), and excellent (>=50%). Now look at how many classes are "excellent".

Let's answer OP's question: compare WA with other bow-type classes, so let's use Hilla (50%) as a normal Boss. No other potential lines.

 Analysis

MMs have 25% (Marksmenship) + 50% (Weakness finding) + 20% (Snipe), and 1/3 of the time you have an additional 20% from Bullseye.
BMs have 25% (Marksmenship) + 50% (Armour Piercing), although the latter is luck-dependent and the numbers are a little tricky to crunch, suffice to say that when it sort of activates half the time.
WH have 30% (Wild Instinct) + 20% (Wild Arrow Blast, Hyper). I don't think I missed anything else...?
Mercedes used to ignore all def 40% of the time. Now they have 25% (Guardbreak) + 20% (Spikes Royale) + 20% (Spikes Royale Hyper) + 20% (Ishtar's Ring Hyper)
WA stands at 20% + 15% + (10%).

It's a little difficult to do the math for BMs, so I cheated and used JoeTang's numbers from his DPS table to find the PDR reduction factor, which stands at about 0.54-0.55 (let's use the smaller side, the smaller the number, the more effective it is). Calculating simlarly,
MMs have a PRF of 0.75*0.5*0.8 = 0.3 for 60 seconds, and 0.3*0.8 = 0.24 for 30 seconds with Bullseye on.
WHs have 0.7*0.8 = 0.56.
Mercs have 0.75*0.8*0.8*0.8 = 0.384
WAs have 0.8*0.85*0.9 = 0.612 with everything in.

Crunching it out with Hilla's 50%PDR, the above classes do the following percentage of their full DPS (formula being DPS = 1 - PDR*PRF):

MMs: 1 - 0.5*0.3 = 0.85 => 85% for 60 seconds, and 1 - 0.5*0.24 = 0.88 for 30 seconds (about the same generally but still significant in the long run).
BMs: 1 - 0.5*0.54 = 0.73 => 73%
WHs: 1 - 0.5*0.56 = 0.72 => 72%
Mercs: 1 - 0.5*0.384 = 0.808 => 80.8%
WA: 1 - 0.5*0.612 = 0.694 => 69.4%

In short, WAs are crap compared to other archers. Don't believe me? Go see JoeTang's thread here: http://www.southperry.net/showthread.php...ost1079761 Look at how much damage you lose by the time you hit 100%PDR. BMs lose about 2/3, MMs about 2/5, Mercs about 2/5, WHs about 3/5, and WA about 3/4.

Survivability, ask someone else. @Marksman Bryan; @DavyJonesx;.

Hadriel