Ranger Bow Craziness...

Someone's gotta help me... This stuff is quite confusing. I did some testing on charr, and it seems that my 13 req, gold hornbow is doing significantly more dmg than the 68k Drago's Flat bow!!! Now that makes Drago's Bow a JOKE!! I bought the hornbow for a measely 7k 4 months ago.
Here are the stats:

Shoking Hornbow of Marksmanship

Light Dmg: 15-28
15%^50hp
Marks +1 (15% chance)

Tested on charr stalker outside of Picken Square, the personalized hornbow does 113 dmg, and the Drago's personalized bow does 106... thats a simple shot, no skills! (now mabe you'll say that's not signifficant, but if u factor the +1 marks on skills, it can be quite significant)
Speed seems almost if not completely equal.

Can someone clarify this 4 me or prove me wrong?

I believe the horn bow has 10% armor penetration at all times. You are also using lightning damage which could do more damage than physical.

lol,hornbow does 10% armour penetration,but flatbow doesnt. flatbow have much more range and accuracy than hornbow instead.

The damage difference is only 7 against CHARR, against people in PvP or higher lvl places the differnce would be minimal...........or does armor penetration work the other way??

I tested this.. and the range is the same... i switched bows between shots and my ranger doesnt move closer. allso the drago's bow has 10% armour penetration on string, so should be same, no???


By the way guys... unless the enemy has element resist, does elemental dmg always do more dmg than physical?

This is probably because of the hornbow's innate 20% armour penetration. The difference doesn't show up much against Charr, since they're so low-level/low AL, but the hornbow should do significantly higher damage per shot than Drago's against higher-level opponents with better AL; even if the 10% chance of armour penetration on the Sundering string kicks in, it's only 10% penetration.

Just figured that out now, did you? The green bows pretty much all suck. Drago's Flat at least has +15^50, which is hard to find on a flatbow; pity about the string, though.

Unless it's bugged (like they gave it the stats of something other than a flatbow), Drago's should be almost a full second faster to shoot and have noticeably longer range than the hornbow. On the downside, absent RtW/FW, the arc is going to be really really high, compared to a nice flat arc for the hornbow.

As far as elemental damage vs. physical, it all depends, but the short answer is "no, all other things being equal elemental and physical attacks will do the same amount of damage." Monsters, same as players, seem to have different bonuses against different types of damage.

Hmmm.... overall, I suppse the Hornbow is the best bow in the game damage wise.

Against a heavily armoured target a hornbow will do the most damage per shot, yes. The advantage shrinks as the target's AL lowers, though. More importantly, though, another class bow can get off more shots in a given period of time (or get off shots at a target farther away, or get your arrow to the target in less time, or...) so you pays yer money and you makes yer choice.

> the drago's bow has 10% armour penetration on string, so should be same,
> no???

No, the AP on dragos is sundering and it's only a 10% chance of it going off. The AP on horn is inherent, it always goes off.

Different bows have different uses depending on what you want to do. You can see various bow properties here

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/content...ies-id1092.php