detras

I usually use LB or Surveil to go into stealth. Debuffs would be on the mob by then. While in stealth I cast FA then Hidden or nat selection. That way I don't waste FA time going into stealth but I get the adv of the stealth attacks, with debuffs on the mob aking it easier to hit and crit

Ranx

To be honest, it depends on how long the fight is, if its a trash mob and you wont have time for it to come back up that fight, then yes, you're probably better off letting it play out...

But if its a longer fight, and you're out of ranged CAs with like 4s left on FA, there are 3 things you can do.

1) Use your melee CAs and ranged AAs with FA still up, in which case youll be gimped out on your melee CAs

2) Dont use your CAs and just autoattack until FA is over. In which case youll be doing less DPS than you would if you were casting CAs normally without focus aim

3) Cancel FA, use your melee CAs normally, and have focus aim back up sooner.

IMO, for option one, for the 4s where you have FA up but no ranged CAs to use, the bonus to your ranged AA is mitigated by the amount your melee CAs will suffer. So you're better off ending FA early.

speedycerv

Ok so say you are an average raider with 7k crit from auto attack (i'm assuming this is average crit dmg from auto). Even more, say you double attack for 7k each, doing 14k total. Your delay is 4s with fa up or maybe 4.8 w/o it up. So 14/4=3.5k a second damage during FA. Or without FA: 12k (6k ave hitw/o crit and dps mod double attacked.) over 4.8= 2.5k dps, and then add in the 3 melee cas ud be using... Would they be greater than 1k dps over those 4 sec during which ud be sitting there? I'd hope so. You said you were too lazy to do the math, so I simply am showing you how it can be to your benefit.

About the above statement of depending on the mob u dont need to end it early: the same rule applies, would you think your melee ca dmg is so low that you cant even manage to do more than 1k dps while using them? If you can examine how this might be possible, I'd like you to show me.

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Shamada

If u start the math here you shouldnt do it with damage per second but rather with total damage. This means a rats-tail full of implications and stuff that can and might go differend. Im lazy, but not that lazy that Id build an argument on a calculation that is itself just a guess.

The fight doesnt only go 4 sec in which you have to maximize your dps. Its true that this kind of miximizing is basicly what a ranger is about but its not THAT straight forward. While in practice its still easy when you pick the strongest CA out of what you got available in theory it looks alot more complex imo:

U got tons of CA to choose from each round of AA but u naturally pick the one with the highest damage ratio... thus u prioritze Bloody Reminder over Jolting, Kunark over Immobilizing, triple over snaring etc. Im not here to state the obvious, rather Id like to show what result you get from this selection: when the strong ones are gone u pick weaker ones and when those are gone you go down in your list of priorities even further. A decend ranger builds his output around what gives him the most dps, staring with AAs (timing) and then ranged CAs/bloody/kunark. But at one point when those are used you go on with what Im gona call "fillers" now in this post: stuff like jolting, bladed opening, PBS etc... shit that u press when everything else is down.

Now your theory is right if I assume that u always got some high hitting (melee) CAs up that provide some decend spike damage, but it doesnt seem right anymore when you consider that, with this list in your head i mentioned above, the CA your gona miss out on during the last 4 secs of FA wer discussing is always the weakest ones in your repertoire. Simply because you can build your output around it and therefor replace any potential loss with what youd otherwise use as fillers. Even by your math (which i dont agree with) and your own parse (http://www.eq2flames.com/rangers/265...n-zones-2.html) you would not even get those 4k damage in between AAs.

Its pretty much the same logic as with an assassin/swash/brig who hardly loses any dps when jousting, just because he knows how to efficiently "miss out" on the weak CAs and, instead, spikes his stuff in the time he has. Just in this case you replace it for an enhanced AA, get the strong stuff in a few secs later and miss out on some fillers at any time to come.

However, and ill give u that, this might not hold true anymore when your equipment is extremely good. Pre RoK (and i excuse myself for not knowing to much about the time after) the use of FA was "make or break" your dps: with little self buffed dps and a base crit rate of 30-35% FA did a shitload to our AAs that, imo, was foolish to miss out on in any possible scenario. While I think that for most rangers this rule applies even now, Im happy to go with it if high end rangers tell me its differend (for them).

Edit: tyyyppooo

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speedycerv

If you look over that parse there, it was over an hour and 14 minutes of fights. I used poison comb (which did 1k dmg) 41 times. That should show u how much I was using them. That is not that often.
Also: Sure, maybe if you have really bad gear and a really bad group, and you were using the 3 worst melee cas (which would not be ever used unless they were the only ones up); to add on that your delay would maybe go down by 1 or 2 seconds and it would increase your damage of your attack by such a much bigger amount that it would be without the dps mod (like if you have 12 dps mod even in the group, so the extra boost is used all the way); and that if you didn't crit it might lower the attack by 3.5k or rather increase your crit and used the whole way, so that the rc wouldn't push you over the cap then your situation would hold true.

In other words you are looking at a sad sad ranger here, where your RC is 70%, dps mod lower than 40, haste below 40, and for some reason u are using all your cas every fight (even the crappy ones).

And In addition to all this if you are losing focus aim sooner, you start the recast so that it will be ready sooner. Now as it is, I rarely get to end it early, or if I do it's only a second or 2. Reason why is because of lag usually. It takes me longer to use my cas on average, there is pauses between cas which can last up to 2 or 3 seconds at times. This lag I speak of is server side, so nothing I can control. In groups though, I end FA sooner much more often.

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