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Originally Posted by KotCR
THIS.
I mean could faff around with flagging my heroes and henchies apart, carefully pulling, Prot Spirit+SoA tanking, then nuke them all. Afterall, that's what I have to do with my Warrior.
But with my Paragon, I can just throw up TNtF, charge in, kill all enemies, and the job done. Much faster, much more convinient.
Plus, there is some places there isn't actually room to effectively spread your team out (the gulley in Catacombs of Kathandrax comes to mind), and if you do screw up your pull, you'll find everybody in your team under attack, so it certainly helps there - gotta account for occasionally bad AI (or simply bad players if you are in a PuG) too afterall.
Let's not forget, it's also a mild party heal too, and a shout, so it will trigger Finales and refresh Echos. It's fairly long-lasting too, so it can be used to power "Soldier's" skills.
FYI, I'm 70% sure that aphotic was being sarcastic there...
When I play ranger I hardly do anything but run straight into enemies. My party catches up 2s later after everything wasted its initial spike on my PSed ass and then wipes the floor with them. Playing as a paragon means you have to play significantly slower and more careful because your damage output is significantly lower.
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First of all, Barrage only hits adjacent targets, so you must have balled up enemies to be sure of gaining that adrenaline during the downtime of "For Great Justice!"
To keep SY up 100% of the time in a fight, the Paragon must hit 4 times within 6 seconds throughout the fight, which can be done without IAS (4 x 1.33 = 5.32 seconds). This allows a margin of safety if you don't happen to hit SY the exact millisecond that it recharges and even allows for a miss now and again should you throw in some IAS.
For the Ranger, for 20 seconds out of every 45, you would also need to hit 4 times within the same 6 seconds (which is easy enough to do with either Barrage or, heck, normal attack with enough IAS). For the other 25 seconds, however, you must hit 8 times within those 6 seconds. That requires hitting about 3 enemies each time you press the Barrage key (remember the 1 second recharge on Barrage). Doable, but it allows no room for overlap unless you help things along with an IAS or more enemies ball up, requiring fewer than 3 Barrages.
Balling enemies is hard? I can't go into a battle without at least 2 or 3 enemies standing next to each other by pure luck. BTW, the fact that your ranger actually outputs damage rather then pew pew spears means that enemies die quicker which makes you safer. Also, 100% FGJ is hardly needed it all, if any battles are taking more than 20s then its a failure of your team to kill them, not of yourself protting them. For most PvE battles you don't even need SY, its just wasted space on the bar.
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Secondly, TNtF is not the showstopper that SY is, but an additional 35% damage reduction for the whole team (including the Paragon), 50% of the time, plus a party-wide heal every 20 seconds is a nice add-on that the Ranger just couldn't provide.
Problem is that 90% of PvE damage is armor affected, and reducing an extra 6% damage is laughable. The only time armor ignoring damage is actually dangerous is the initial spike when you aggro ES mesmers or the like, and there other prot is far more effective.
Rangers protect the party by actually dealing damage. Its pretty much standard PvE doctrine that killing things faster is the best defense. Granted rangers are far from the height of PvE damage output, but on any physical build Splinter Weapon and/or Mark of Pain are what deals 90% of the damage anyways, and paragons can't abuse those.
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Finally, energy. Almost no energy must be expended to keep everyone safe as a Paragon, beyond the 2 adrenaline-gaining skills. For the extra IAS of Aggressive Refrain and a margin of error, a shout affecting the Paragon ending once every 20 seconds or so is also needed, which TNtF can also fill the role of. In the meanwhile, the Paragon should be gaining 6 energy every 4 seconds by spamming SY. This allows for extra energy for whatever additional support/damage skills you want to take along.
For the Ranger, 2 energy per Barrage plus the occational 5 energy for FGJ pretty much uses up the Ranger's energy regeneration. If you throw in an IAS available to you, you must expend more energy. Expertise only reduces energy amounts spent, it doesn't provide any net gain like Leadership does with many shouts and chants. So unelss you have a Zealous bow (another conditional, which also means you must not miss/be blocked too many times to make up for the -1 energy regeneration) or a party member with some sort of energy gain skill for you, you end up with a net loss. Over a few cycles, things start to slow down while you try to maintain energy, and you begin to lose ground.
lolwut? Needing to use a zealous bow to regain energy is somehow a bad thing? Look, if enemies are spamming block prots then Rangers and Paragons fail horribly at SY no matter what. Otherwise, rangers can easily pump out Barrage/FGJ and have more than enough energy left over for other expensive skills like EBSoH.
Certainly, everything is a tradeoff. But R/W pumps out 200-300% of the damage P/W does while protting 90-95% as well, depending on the area. Obviously better build is obvious. | |
