Stopping power vs rate of fireFollow

At early levels, out of PvP, it doesn't matter all that much. Unless you're broke a lot.. arrows aren't that expensive, but certain weapons blow right through them.

In PvP, I'd say you want an extreme weapon. Either very fast with a nice scope and all the haste effects you can toss on to machinegun stuff down; or very slow, for big hits whenever you have the chance to stand still. I don't know much about PvP, outside BGs though.

At 62, you gain Steady Shot. This is where it all goes stupid, because at this point, your DPS correlates *VERY* strongly to your modified weapon speed. It comes down the the point that, if you're BM, the first epic level 70 gun you'll get in the lowest 70 raid is better than *all* other guns game-wide.. for PvE anyway.

BM stick with the higher delay weapons because your talents will drop your actual Ranged Attack Speed by 1-1.2 seconds or more if IAotH procs.

Reason this is, is because one you start getting below 2.0 (1.7 is really the limit IMO, but 2.0 is a turning point) you really need to start concentrating more on weaving steady shots in, and anything lower than 1.7 makes practically impossible to weave steady shots indefinitely without clipping into your auto-shots and dropping your DPS by a fair margin.

I was going to do a bunch of math but instead i'll just say this.... using Steady Shot perfectly can effectively double your DPS. If your RAS cuts into your Steady Shot casting time, therefore clipping auto shots, you can cut your potential DPS by almost 1/3, meaning 1 auto-shot clip every other or even every 3rd shot can drop your DPS from 1000 to 667, making the difference from 1337 DPS and leading the meters to sitting outside the raid instance waiting to see if one of the people who can out DPS you needs to leave early.

The global cooldown is 1.5 seconds. Steady Shot has a 1.5 second casting time. For BM perfection would be to have a 1.55 Attackspeed after all your hasty stuff (because autoshot has a .5 second casting time that you'll never see). In reality that speed is too fast. You'll never be able to fit steady shot in between your auto shots perfectly due to human error, latency, etc). You want to go as fast as possible without ever causing your autoshot to be delayed by the casting time of Steady Shot.

tl;dr version: Shoot as fast as possible without firing so fast that you cause your auto shot to be delayed and go auto, steady, auto, steady, auto, steady

Edited, Jan 24th 2008 9:44pm by Ieatrocks