You'll Shoot Your Eye Out! - New FFXI RNG Guide

I had one Barrage for 118k. Other were for like ~8k,~17k,~28k etc. but real damage on them was around 500k+ and some above 1M.

What buffs did you have active? :)

Ah found it. Sounds more or less confirmed assuming they didn't mess it up. Though one thing they said divert much more enmity than before but before was 80% and you could make it so the remaining didn't apply to you at all. Could just be talking it up or didn't understand how much it was before... or what if you can transfer more than 100%!?! Actually makes me curious if it might make having some +enmity useful lol

Also just noticed Hover also has a lower enmity boost... well that's going to be even extra difficult

lol that hilarious...

Buffs chaos roll, min min honors boost agi & Indi Malaise up. With Arma R15 we hit ~80kish. Gastra R15 caped the dmg for Hot Shot. Around 70k on Detonator as well on Arma.
Some interesting numbers on Refulgent Arrow almost 70k with Fail Not. Same buffs we just swapped from Malaise to Frailty depending on WS type. Kinda cool to see bow hitting high WS numbers. Jishnu's was around 55k but I forgot that I reset the Tonbery Hate for the ring to work. Probably can get it around 60k's perhaps. Apex Arrow was a complete mess. Numbers were all over...even with tons of racc and eating food & prelude + sharpshot couldn't stabilize Apex Arrow dmg. Went from 16k-34k~ depending on how many hits landed. Namas Arrow was doing pretty decent in 40k's. I need to check back with the videos to get exact numbers.

Been mentally playing with concepts of how this changes us, and a common tool used among all DD jobs in FFXI is that of "job ability stacking". Combining /ja's in groups to maximize the desired effect, be that full on damage, increased skillchains, or survivability.

And my brain was immediately drawn to two combinations for two different purposes.

1. Doubleshot/Decoy Shot. We now can stay in Decoy Shot "stance" 100% if that were desired, but it conflicts with Hover Shot. So I think frequently I'd want to now use Decoy as a way to quickly get some big hate chunks on a tank, or at least off of me, and doubleshot would be an effective way to do that, in particular with an increased amount of enmity transferred.

2. Camouflage/Hover Shot. Get AM3 up on really any of our weapons except Fomalhaut, then pop these combined /jas to boost white damage. And since Camo drops with the use of a WS, having the combined effects of AM3/Camo crit rate/natural Dead Aim/Hover Shot procs seems like a great synergy to get the most out of an ability often seen as limiting because we can't WS. Well, now that "restriction" isn't as much of a DPS loss, and could even pull ahead.

Lots to play with. And now that the mechanics of our new toys are getting nailed down, the process of maximizing their potential comes next.

3. Camouflage/HoverShot/DoubleShot/AM3 - Because 20k+ DPS with just white damage is my wet dream :D

lol I anticipate wanting my Anni for that deadly combo.....because someone's dying, either us or the mob!

Nobody ever responded to my original question lol, i quit in 2014 but curious why Hover Shot was added. Are they trying to combat against some type of exploit/cheese mechanic that they want rangers to start being mobile now (like they added Overwhelm to get SAMs to stop going /THF back in 2005)? They never cared if rangers stood still before, and I always thought RNG was intended to be a turret job

They said it was because people said ranger was weak.

"weak" in context; "not used" "archery IS weak" "ranged attack dps IS slower than zerging" "rng vs cor there's not much reason to choose rng as cor also buffs"

They probably took a bad stab at stopping automated ranged attacks.

I think the general consensus right now is this is the first job-specific adjustment aimed at combating multi-boxing by requiring more input from a job that was easily automated prior to this. The difference is that the benefits of actually playing by SE's rules and using Hover Shot to its potential seem to be worth it, unlike prior adjustments that the playerbase simply powered thru and ignored (not regarding Ranger, just the game in general).

**EDIT** The interesting thing is that if one chooses to continue to play Ranger as a stationary job, there is no penalty compared to the dynamic that existed 3 days ago. There is only benefit for adjusting to the new situation.

I think that yall would've blown a gasket if they actually nerfed it and raised power back to and slightly exceeded at cap. Assume they just didn't want to hear the bitching.

DPS wise, every step being 1 second and doubling damage (in theory) comes out close to net neutral, for a vanilla player.
(addons, gearswap, ja0, clipping etc not being accounted for)

Edit; there's also some aspect of ranger not being "engaging" at all. As much as melee is "literally just mash cntl 1" ranger is that, but worse. This keeps a ranger "less bored". I would really like to see something very similar added to BLM.

Idk ja0wait would push your DPS way more than autora before. If whole move to new position takes like 1-1.5sec to execute and ja0wait user will be able to move 0.5+ sec faster (during shooting animation), then it's a huge gain. Same with movement speed hacking. Autora was nothing compered to this.

I mean, i multiboxed and used software back in the day to automate (think it was called Myproject back then) but it wasn't something that repeated the same /ra but you could code if-then statements to cast spells/ws/heal at predefined thresholds. Guess other plugins have come out since then and are used a lot more widely. Back then ppl just used it to solo/duo job points in Razkanar out of sight from people.

... and then you forget to move
because it happens
and it will happen

Now I might actually have a reason to prefer flurry over haste.

It wouldnt come out net neutral because the WS generally makes the bulk of the damage increase, and is a lengthy animation in itself. Doubling its damage is too massive to ignore for the minor increase in time, especially if you close a SC with it.

99k x200% is still 99k

ehhh....sorta true. The WS/TP damage split on Ranger is very dependent on the weapon used. Prior to Hover shot, typical splits looked like this (of course dependent on play style, this isn't set in stone):

Gastraphetes- 90% WS, 10% TP
Fomalhaut- 75% WS, 25% TP
Annihilator- 50% WS, 50% TP
Armageddon- 40% WS, 60% TP
Gandiva- 30% WS, 70% TP

This assumes using the attached WS 100%. Using Last Stand on Annihilator occasionally will increase the WS portion of its damage- same with Armageddon. Using Trueflight with Fomalhaut also increases the WS share of its damage.

The real takeaway from those observations over time that I take is that one should gear for white damage more than WSs for the Relic and Empyrean Weapons, as their WS's don't scale with TP and their TP phase is greatly improved once AM3 is up and the math gets expanded by those double/triple damage hits.

In addition, closing a SC these days for capped damage is honestly quite easy for a Ranger given the right buffs and in the right fights (we're not suited for everything, and that's ok^^). So Hover Shot certainly will increase the WS damage of the closer, and thus the resultant SCdmg, but if that damage was already capped before this job adjustment, it doesn't have anywhere to grow to. So increasing one's white damage is a guarantee, and for physical WSs that increase is also incredibly predictable against all except enemies with unique properties (think Qutrub). But increasing Trueflight damage and the skillchain off of it....I don't expect many situations where TF honestly benefits from a full 25 stacked Hover Shot as it was already well over 50k dmg, and closing for capped damage.

Yes, in the rare situation you are closing for capped damage on a SC. Thats not generally the case outside of mobs that are expressly weak to light damage, or have damage taken+ mechanics. We have other weapons too, and other mobs we fight.

Part 2 of the Hover Shot with weaponskills at +25 stack.

Not important to the discussion at all but:
What macro did/do rangers use for /ra? I always used ALT+3 which I found least uncomfortable considering I had to always rest my fingers in that position.

I use Ctrl+F shortcut. used to be Ctrl+D until auto-ra mess it up so I use ctrl+F normally and Ctrl+D for auto-ra

I don't really see a point in making a macro for something you can make with a shortcut.

I simply use Num0. Without any second key.

Plenty of improvements to be made but, here's the first iteration of the hovershot addon.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CFdYz9ibP3K9XMzK-dKOoLqTsfxwvbkq/view?usp=sharing

Shows current stacks, and distance from last location shot, and if that location is far enough away.

This will definitely be a great help thank you!

Thank you, Rubenator.

I'm not the best at figuring out why but right now this addon UI just goes away and stop working after a while.

Unloading and reloading does not resolve the issue.


Actually I did fix it.

Clearing Hover Shot and re-applying resolved my issue