Rift Rogue 61 Ranger DPS Guide

Rift Rogue 61 Ranger DPS Guide by Gery

This guide assumes basic knowledge of rogue class and the ranger soul. The goal is to guide into the little things you can do to get the last bits of performance out of it.

Spec: http://rift.magelo.com/en/soultree#zkllaGGlaB4/yr8/ws
Selfbuffs: Virulent Poison, Leeching Poison, Feral Instincts, Ravenous Instincts, Spirit of the Wilderness, Blood Raptor
Gear: The pet’s crit power caps at 500, after that you are getting diminished returns for investment for it since pet stops scaling with it. Crit Power is clear winner until you have 500 of it, after that you get about similar returns for both CP and AP gear. Crit rating gear is always the worst choice. Ravenous Instincts stacks with crit power even above the cap.

There are a couple of spec variations which you may find worth it especially for progression. They sacrifice dps for mobility and are made by replacing the 3 NB with either RS or MM. RS is a dps loss of about 150 and gives you a tiny bit of more health and a blink. MM is a loss of about 250 dps and gives you 3 meters extra range and a runspeed buff.
RS: http://rift.magelo.com/en/soultree#zkllaGGlaB4/yr8/te
MM: http://rift.magelo.com/en/soultree#zkllaGGlaB4/yr8/Ae

Stat weight estimates, I haven’t done too much math on them but I don’t think it’s too far off.
Under 500 CP; 1 AP : 0.8-0.85 CP : 0.3-0.35 Crit
Above 500 CP; 1 AP : 0.6-0.65 CP : 0.3-0.35 Crit

For maximum dps the rotation must follow a few rules:

Feral Aggression and Animalism.
These are your dps cooldown abilities and they need to be used in sync since they improve each other and they have the same timers. The right time to use them is just before Twin Shot. I find it’s fastest to use the abilities in a row if they are in one macro.

#show animalism
suppressmacrofailures
cast feral aggression
cast animalism
cast twin shot

It is important that Feral Aggression and Animalism are in this order in the macro so you won’t lose the fraction of a second of Animalism uptime on casting Feral Aggression. Do not regularly delay using the cooldowns and wait for raid dps cooldowns to align with them. If you have chloros or tacticians who put up their Wild Growth/Power Core without delays whenever they are available then you can do so now that the cooldown is 30 seconds and can be synced.

Ace Shot
A debuff ability which must be maintained on the target at all times, refresh it before it runs out. Sometimes this means refreshing it quite a few seconds before it runs out since you don’t want it to drop right when you’d need to use Twin Shot, Shadow Fire or Splinter Shot. It’s better to be safe than sorry with Ace Shot.

Splinter Shot
Splinter Shot ticks for a total of 6 times; at 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 seconds. 2 ticks is slightly less damage than one Quick Shot but 3 ticks is substantially more. This is valuable information when you decide whether you should do Splinter Shot right before the dps cooldowns. All the ticks get the damage bonuses you had when you used the ability so you always want to fit in 2 Splinter Shots during the cooldowns.
You are operating on a 30 second cycle so you use 3 Splinter Shots per cycle. The easiest way to time Splinter Shot is to always use it as the first or the second builder after you have used Animalism/Feral Aggression. This allows you to fit two of them inside the cooldown period which then leaves one outside of them. If you manage to always refresh Splinter Shot when it drops then you never have to clip it at all. More often than not you are going to have some delays and end up clipping the unbuffed Splinter Shot by a couple of seconds.

Shadow Fire
Use Shadow Fire on cooldown as long as you don’t waste the second combo point. The ability has a 20 second cooldown but it often gets pushed a bit further since you should never use it at 4 or 5 combo points. If you macro Shadow Fire with other abilities then you also need a separate key for Quick Shot or a macro without it.
Let’s say you use Animalism/Feral Aggression at 0 seconds and it lasts until 15 and then again at 30 second mark and lasting all the way to 45 seconds. First Shadow fire would be used at the 1-2 second area, then the second one at 21-22 and the third one at 41-42. So the first and third Shadow Fires are buffed while the second one isn’t. After that the loop begins again. If you delay at all, even by just a couple of seconds then you can end up pushing the third one to the 45+ second mark and it will fall outside of the cooldowns and it will mess up your timings. When done correctly 2 out of 3 Shadow Fires are buffed by the cooldowns.

Head Shot
Use Head Shot once per minute to get Bestial. Since Animalism and Feral Aggression are now on 30 second cooldowns this easy to sync and you never have to make decisions whether to redo Head Shot during Animalism or not as long as the first one was done outside of them.

Twin Shot
All the timing of Shadow Fires and using the cooldowns right before Twin Shot has one aim. It is to fit in 4 Twin Shots during each cooldown. How you do this is dependent on server lag. In my experience network lag is meaningless here, only thing that matters is how lagged the actual server is.

a) No lag environment; it is just barely possible to do 4 Twin Shots with 5 combo points each if there is no lag. If you have more than 0.1-0.2 seconds of extra ability lag in total on top of the default server response time then you can’t do it. Normally in a raid I’d say this is wishful thinking.

b) Low lag environment; You can quite comfortably get to 4 combo points at the end of the cooldowns if you queue abilities properly. The trick here is to use Twin Shot at 4 combo points, it does more damage than a 5 combo point Twin Shot without the cooldowns and you have an 80% chance to gain a combo point. If you get this combo point it also means your major rotation will be done in 44 seconds instead of 45. To extend the rotation by a second you would need to either wait or use a filler ability to pass the time. Best way to spend this extra combo point is to do a 1 cp Concussive Blast right after the 4 cp Twin Shot before Animalism ends. This rotation will slowly drain you of energy unless raid hast Verse of Joy. If you run low on energy then you still use 4 cp Twin Shot but don’t use Concussive Blast anymore. Instead you can wait for energy for a second since you need to wait for the cooldowns anyway.

c) High lag environment; If you play on a high population server then you may not even be able to get to 4 combo points. If this is the case then you should not do any low combo point Twin Shots but instead always go normally to 5. In this case it is also not that important to use your cooldowns right before Twin Shot, you can use them when you are at 3 or 4 combo points too since it should still be enough to fit 3 Twin Shots and delaying the cooldowns is a big dps loss.

Other Abilities
For utility you have Piercing Shot which is the normal single target armor debuff. The personal dps loss of using it rather than having someone else do it is extremely small. Much smaller than MM gets for doing it with Lightning Fury. If you don’t want to worry about it manually then you can macro it together with Quick Shot at a cost of about 60-70 extra dps loss compared to managing it manually. Better option is to macro Shadow Fire, Piercing Shot and Quick Shot all together. Then normally use a separate Quick Shot key and only use the macro when you either want Shadow Fire or Piercing Shot.

You also have an aoe interrupt in Concussive Blast but it will really mess with your timing, energy and dps if you use it. It’s more of a last resort type of interrupt. Never accept main interrupt duties as a ranger.

For AoE you have Rain of Arrows and Trick Shot. Both of them are low damage and just about not worth using for actual AoE. However you can use Trick Shot to gain extra combo points which lets you do more Twin Shots. Trick Shot itself is very low damage so you need an average of about 0.75 combo points per Trick Shot to break even on the main target. So you need 5 other targets around your main target so you can cleave without single target dps loss. The combo points come with a delay so you are best off using Trick Shot only when you have 1 combo point and also do not let using it mess up your Splinter Shot/Shadow Fire/Ace Shot timing since those are still more important.

Also remember to turn all the pet’s abilities to autocast by right-clicking them on the pet control bar. The new charge ability autocast is by default off so it must be turned on. As far as I know there is no need to add petcasts to macros anymore.

Opening Rotation
I am still a bit torn on the optimal opening rotation. There are basically two options; either do Head Shot before the cooldowns or not.

Option A (starting from 0 combo points)
Ace Shot, Shadow Fire, Piercing Shot/Quick Shot, Splinter Shot , Head Shot
4*Quick Shot, Feral Aggression/Animalism+Twin Shot
Quick Shot, Splinter Shot, Quick Shot…

Option B (starting from 0 combo points)
Ace Shot, Piercing Shot/Quick Shot, Splinter Shot, 2*Quick Shot, Feral Aggression/Animalism+Head Shot
Shadow Fire, Quick Shot, Splinter Shot, Quick Shot, Twin Shot

Option C (starting from 5 combo points, use sab, tactician or dueling to build up if necessary)
Head Shot, Ace Shot, Splinter Shot, Piercing Shot, Quick Shot, Feral Aggression/Animalism+Twin Shot
Shadow Fire, Splinter Shot, Quick Shot, Twin Shot

With option A you start a bit slower but it also delays your first cooldown burst to a time when raid cooldowns are usually used. The dps will catch up since option B does not use the first cooldowns optimally. Option C ramps up your dps the fastest and it’s worth it if you have the time.

If you have existing combo points with option A type opener then you have to be careful when you modify the rotation. If you have more than 2 existing combo points when you use Shadow Fire at the start then it will not get out of cooldown in time to be used during Animalism. Both opening rotations clip Splinter Shot, for optimal dps this should be done at the latest tick that will still allow you to cast a new one during Animalism without clipping.