2011-05-20, 12:30 AM
I'm surprised no one has mentioned how badly Bow Masters rape Marksmen in single target DPS.
Bow Masters rape Marksmen in single target DPS.
Bow Master: 220% Hurricane + 250% * 0.6 Advanced Final Attack @ 120ms: 4085.4%/s with Criticals (overall damage is 4902.48%/s with Spirit Link)
Marksmen: 230%x6 Ultimate Strafe + 150% * 0.4 Final Attack + 900%x4 Snipe every 6 Ultimate Strafes @ 720ms: 3358.6%/s with Criticals (overall damage is 4030.32%/s with Spirit Link)
Snipe's 100% critical, ignoring defense, and the multiplier difference for Crossbows (which if I recall correctly is smaller after Chaos than Big Bang) isn't big enough to make up for 1.21x more damage. (Also note that Bow Masters get 30 more attack from AFA, Phoenix does a small amount more damage than Frostprey, and Snipe may have the tendency to hit the damage cap still?)
The trade off is multi-target superiority; let's examine that:
Ultimate Inferno does 6625%/s to 6 targets with critical (1104.2%/s per target), and then 140%/s DoT on each monster which ignores defense
Add in Advanced Final Attack (which actually should not be impactful in a multi-target scenario) 6901%/s
Pierce does 9699%/s to 6 targets with critical, and 16115%/s to 8 targets with critical, considering the damage increase formula, and an insignificant increase of 38.5%/s with Final Attack
Despite doing more DPS on 2+ monsters (i.e. it is a better mob skill despite taking more theoretical time to kill the first monster, every other monster takes less theoretical time), the fact that you require more than double the time to use Pierce optimally compared to Inferno shows a larger difficulty in achieving an optimal time to kill a certain amount of monsters in a certain amount of hits.
tl;dr: Pierce gives a significant amount of overkill, which is one of the leading reasons why Hurricane is such a good skill compared to Ultimate Strafe and Triple Throw. It partitions its damage into smaller controlled hits, and less damage is wasted on a monster that is already dead; i.e. you could need one Arrow to kill something, but Ultimate Strafe and Triple Throw will always use six. Hurricane will only spend the one, given that you don't have a horrible connection, and contribute the rest of its DPS on something else that is actually alive. The same issue exists in Pierce but even more heavily since its damage gets to remarkably high; you may not need to fully charge to kill monsters in the back, but you're required to do so to kill the ones in front, or given the case to even deal any substantial damage because of the way it scales. Uncharged Pierce only does 10~15% of its maximum damage, and you would be better off with Blizzard in that case.
On the other hand, it does provide a significantly greater ability to OHKO groups by pre-charging and doing a large amount of burst DPS that Inferno has more difficulty matching, so this effect is only seen on monsters that take significant amount of hits to kill (read: Monster Park/Cygnus boss?)
There is also the case of advantage as well as disadvantage that may exist, but also consider the fact that Hurricane is already almost as strong as hitting 4 monsters with Ultimate Inferno, that there's a large disparity to using Ultimate Inferno as a Bow Master.
Pierce is undoubtedly a "stronger" mobbing skill, but its efficiency is questionable and the case of this ridiculously back-loaded damage can debate its ultimate usefulness.
Also, before anyone asks, it would not be beneficial to use Ultimate Inferno to DPS a boss with DoT.
I was hoping they would address Pierce to be more consistent (maybe make it the opposite of Aran's and Paralyze damage decrease), as well as actually giving Marksmen some improvement to their single target DPS instead of buffing both Bow Master's single target and multi-target DPS. The 8 mob Pierce was a nice addition though. I expect that either AFA or Hurricane gets nerfed, because they're already significantly stronger than what I've calculated Warriors to be from their patch, and Marksmen are much closer to that regard.
Bow Masters rape Marksmen in single target DPS.
Bow Master: 220% Hurricane + 250% * 0.6 Advanced Final Attack @ 120ms: 4085.4%/s with Criticals (overall damage is 4902.48%/s with Spirit Link)
Marksmen: 230%x6 Ultimate Strafe + 150% * 0.4 Final Attack + 900%x4 Snipe every 6 Ultimate Strafes @ 720ms: 3358.6%/s with Criticals (overall damage is 4030.32%/s with Spirit Link)
Snipe's 100% critical, ignoring defense, and the multiplier difference for Crossbows (which if I recall correctly is smaller after Chaos than Big Bang) isn't big enough to make up for 1.21x more damage. (Also note that Bow Masters get 30 more attack from AFA, Phoenix does a small amount more damage than Frostprey, and Snipe may have the tendency to hit the damage cap still?)
The trade off is multi-target superiority; let's examine that:
Ultimate Inferno does 6625%/s to 6 targets with critical (1104.2%/s per target), and then 140%/s DoT on each monster which ignores defense
Add in Advanced Final Attack (which actually should not be impactful in a multi-target scenario) 6901%/s
Pierce does 9699%/s to 6 targets with critical, and 16115%/s to 8 targets with critical, considering the damage increase formula, and an insignificant increase of 38.5%/s with Final Attack
Code:
1: 976.8%/s
2: 1172.1%/s
3: 1406.5%/s
4: 1687.8%/s
5: 2025.4%/s
6: 2430.5%/s
7: 2916.6%/s
8: 3499.9%/stl;dr: Pierce gives a significant amount of overkill, which is one of the leading reasons why Hurricane is such a good skill compared to Ultimate Strafe and Triple Throw. It partitions its damage into smaller controlled hits, and less damage is wasted on a monster that is already dead; i.e. you could need one Arrow to kill something, but Ultimate Strafe and Triple Throw will always use six. Hurricane will only spend the one, given that you don't have a horrible connection, and contribute the rest of its DPS on something else that is actually alive. The same issue exists in Pierce but even more heavily since its damage gets to remarkably high; you may not need to fully charge to kill monsters in the back, but you're required to do so to kill the ones in front, or given the case to even deal any substantial damage because of the way it scales. Uncharged Pierce only does 10~15% of its maximum damage, and you would be better off with Blizzard in that case.
On the other hand, it does provide a significantly greater ability to OHKO groups by pre-charging and doing a large amount of burst DPS that Inferno has more difficulty matching, so this effect is only seen on monsters that take significant amount of hits to kill (read: Monster Park/Cygnus boss?)
There is also the case of advantage as well as disadvantage that may exist, but also consider the fact that Hurricane is already almost as strong as hitting 4 monsters with Ultimate Inferno, that there's a large disparity to using Ultimate Inferno as a Bow Master.
Pierce is undoubtedly a "stronger" mobbing skill, but its efficiency is questionable and the case of this ridiculously back-loaded damage can debate its ultimate usefulness.
Also, before anyone asks, it would not be beneficial to use Ultimate Inferno to DPS a boss with DoT.
I was hoping they would address Pierce to be more consistent (maybe make it the opposite of Aran's and Paralyze damage decrease), as well as actually giving Marksmen some improvement to their single target DPS instead of buffing both Bow Master's single target and multi-target DPS. The 8 mob Pierce was a nice addition though. I expect that either AFA or Hurricane gets nerfed, because they're already significantly stronger than what I've calculated Warriors to be from their patch, and Marksmen are much closer to that regard.