Barrage Test

While they may be faster based on your evidence, there are other factors to consider. Horn bow types, shadow, ivory, mursaat, various horn skins all match the barrage recharge perfectly. Other bows cuase jerky interrupt to cast versus natural refire rate of their bows on attack. Despite matching the barrage perfectly, they were still slower, that's the point of the experiment. The 'jerky' interrupt that I and many others thought was slowing down the bps (barrage per second) wasn't in fact slowing anything down. The Barrage's continued as if uninterrupted. And I also noticed that it WAS possible to get a barrage off without the jerky animation (timing has to be perfect), but that's unimportant, because it had no impact on refire rate of barrage for short/flat bows.

Now all that said. You are right saying it is important to consider other things. There was not a huge difference between short/flat and long/composite. So the weaknesses of the bows come in to play. The refire rate is out of consideration cause they're fairly close, so you have to look at arc, range, accuracy, Armor penetration. I don't think the 10% is gonna make up for the refire rate on a horn bow, but the difference isn't huge. Short bows put you in a position to aggro other groups (big no no) and leave you open to melee creatures. Flatbow (without benefit of FW) is horribly inaccurate and arrows take longest to land. So I'd still take a longbow over either of them. Range, and decent flight time. I still would not use a flat/short bow for a barrage build, because the refire times are close enought that the negitives outweigh any gains.

*disclaimer* Personal opinion.

Flatbow lacks accuracy? Isn't that was Favorable Winds/Read the Wind is for (to increase arrow speed making it harder to dodge)? Hmm, I don't see any mention of those two in his original post

True you have skills to increase accuracy, but that is beside the point. I am just pointing out that there is more to consider than just speed when dealing with barrage in relation to the bow types. To me, the most important in regards to tombs is the distance from the targets and the recharge rate of barrage in relation to your normal refire rate.

Edit: Thank you to those on the corrections on the storm and eternal classes.

To the OP: Did you literally just do ten single barrages then add the times up or did you do a few sets of ten barrages (per bow) then add these up?

I should've explained the test more clearly.

For each bow, I ran several sets of 10 consecutive barrages without stopping or pausing.

So I would get in the predetermined spot (I did all the bows at the same range). Target the 100 armor dummy, and then did a run of barrage's like you'd do in any situation in PvE. I would record the time it took to complete ten barrages and then after several runs I averaged the time per run, then divided by ten to get the numbers I posted. So even with the jerky animation, Flat/Short bows were faster than the others. To see whether the interruption was enough to slow the barrager down was the point of the experiment, and so it was neccesary to do the barrages in runs.

And I can't really explain why it turned out that flat/short are faster. To me, i just appeared that it didn't take Flat/Short as long to get "set up" to do the barrage. While it did have to interrupt the regular attack animation, the process of stopping normal attack and drawing to fire barrage took no more time then starting a barrage standing still, and that's why its faster. The 'draw' time was less. I'm not sure if its supposed to be like that...but it is.

The following is VERY long, sorry about ahead of time.

In the following, I am grouping bows based on refiring times for convenience. So if you see Flatbow/Shortbow, I know that they're entirely different bow types, but they share the same refiring rate classification

All bows have the same "draw" time, which is roughly 1.2 seconds. The difference between the refiring rate between each bow comes from the delay between each draw. What I mean by draw, is the time between STARTING from pulling an arrow out of thin air (I want a quiver) until releasing that arrow from your bow.

So for example, a flatbow/shortbow has a refiring rate of 2 seconds. With a 1.2 second drawtime that is universal, the delay between each draw is 0.8 seconds. Basically, with 1.2 second draw, the delay between each draw for the bow types is basically like this

Delay Between The END of a Draw and the START of the NEXT Draw:
Flatbow/Shortbow - 0.8 seconds (assume 2.0 second total refiring time)
Longbow/Recurve - 1.2 seconds (assume 2.4 second total refiring time)
Horn Bow - 1.5 seconds (assume 2.7 second total refiring time)

Now, that's just for attacking without using any skills. When you use skills, it gets a little more complicated.

When you use an attack skill, one of two things happen. Either you just completed firing an arrow, and thus your attack skill will be queued into your next attack. That's simple. The other case is when you're in the middle of the animation for doing a regular attack. When you use your skill, your regular attack animation will be interrupted, and your attack skill will then replace that regular attack.

Now then, onto the mystery of Barrage and Quickshot, which have 1 second recharge times. You would intiuitively think that 1 second will recharge in time for the 2 second refiring rate of a Flatbow/Shortbow. Meaning that you would think that there "shouldn't" be any breaks in the animation. Unfortunately, reality doesn't match our intiution.

If you want smooth animation (no break) when you use a bow attack skill, you must use that attack skill before you start drawing your arrow, so that it is queued in time. Now then... your attack skill does not recharge UNTIL your arrow is released from your bow. That means that the queuing and the instance when your attack skill starts recharging do not occur at the same time.

Here's an example with Barrage using a flatbow. You use barrage. After your arrow is released, Barrage starts its 1 second recharge. Here's the problem. A flatbow has an approximately 0.8 second delay between the draws. So before the 1 second is up for Barrage to finish recharging, you're already starting onto your regular attack. When Barrage is ready to be used again, you're already about 0.2 seconds into your draw animation. You use Barrage again, which breaks the draw animation, and then the cycle starts over.

Since the draw time is around 1.2 seconds, and Barrage recharges in 1 second, a CONTINUOUS barrage using a flatbow or shortbow can't possibly refire faster than 2.2 seconds. You need 1 second for Barrage to be ready to be queued, and you need 1.2 seconds to draw and fire once queued. Barrage doesn't recharge until you release that arrow, so you need to be continually breaking that animation.

Continuous Barrage using a bowtype with a slower refiring rate is smooth, because their delay between each draw exceeds 1 second. However, their total refiring rate is still slower than 2.2 seconds, so flatbows and shortbows still shoot out more arrows overtime.

In summary, Shortbows and Flatbows dish out the most Barrage damage overtime if you run static buffs (or no buffs) such as Favorable Winds, Vampiric Bow String, Conjure (Element), or you run physical damage with an Orders Necro and Winnowing. Flatbows/shortbows also have the highest damage per second with Judge’s Insight compared to other bow types. Longbows can sub into for a Flatbow if for some reason you're annoyed by breaking the animation or can't use Favorable Winds. And you really wouldn't want to take a Recurve Bow for Barrage anyway when there's better alternatives. Horn bows fall into the weakest bow type for Barrage DPS because of their costly refiring rate (I guess if you wanted to do some weird spike...) It gets even worse because Barrage itself adds a static buff.

And here's a little bonus info

For those that run Increased Attack Speed, such as Tiger's Fury, in their Barrage builds, you gain an increase in SINGLE target damage per second, but you sacrifice your overall AoE damage potential. With a Flatbow/Shortbow, you fire every 1.33 seconds with Increased Attack Speed (total refiring time) Unfortunately, it does nothing to help with Barrage's recharge time, so you barrage, regular attack, barrage, regular attack, etc. Essentially, you Barrage every 2.66 seconds, instead of 2.2 seconds. It could work I suppose if you're interested in added SINGLE target DPS. Though you lose out a little on the AoE damage.

It gets even worse with Longbows/Recurve and Horn Bows though. Longbows and Recurve would fire every 1.6 seconds under Increased Attack Speed, Hornbows would be 1.8. In an alternating Barraging sequence with Increased Attack Speed, you would barrage every 3.2 seconds with Long/Recurve, and every 3.6 seconds for Hornbows.

In short, I would only recommend IAS if you're using Flatbow/Short since the difference is not as noticeable. With a different bow type however, you're REALLY screwing yourself over in overall AoE damage, which was the whole point of using Barrage in your build. If you want single target damage output, change your build.

It used to be possible before the recharge time nerf where you could use Quickening Zephyr to reduce the recharge time of Barrage and Quickshot to 0 seconds (it was 0.5 second rounded down). Unfortunately, it was patched so the game now rounds UP. So it is no longer possible. Back in those days, 0 recharge time on Barrage meant Barrage every 1.33 seconds with Tiger's Fury and Quickening Zephyr, and a Zealous Flatbow to fuel the energy. Those days were great fun, but they're no more sadly. Simple question, what would the refire rate for be with Barrage using a Longbow and say, Tiger's Fury WITHOUT alternating?

Simple question, what would the refire rate for be with Barrage using a Longbow and say, Tiger's Fury WITHOUT alternating? Tiger's Fury doesn't affect barrage. TF affects attack speed, barrage is limited by its recharge speed.

O.O I expect people will be grabbing after the collector's +15% enchanted max flatbow outside Elona (for five minotaur horns, I believe)... throw in the string and grip of your choice and it sounds perfect for a JI barrager.

Thanks to the OP - I was about to follow the crowd and use my mursaat horn bow for my barrager... never would've thought a collector's flatbow would deal more damage ^_^ The same flatbow is available outside Port Sledge for 5 Intricate Grawl Necklaces, which depending on your method of farming may be easier to get.

Currently, I have 3 bows that I alternate between. My longbow of fortitude is my favorite all purpose bow.

Slot two is the collectors flatbow, which I like to use with barrage on ranged enemies. Its range and long flight time, also makes it an excellent weapon for "pulling" enemies.

Slot three is Graygore's Short Bow, "For close encounters". It has the same stats as a 5:1 vampiric bow, and when used with barrage, vigorous spirit and live vicariously can bring down Minotaurs and other melee hitters in nothing flat.

I am currently figuring out what to put in slot 4, and was thinking horn bow for its increased damage, but now I am thinking recurve bow for its improved interrupt abilities. I currently like the longbow for that, because you dont have to be very close to the target, but the accuracy and arrow speed of a recursive bow makes up for the loss of range.

Thanks for the info on bows.

...
In the time it takes to do 10 barrages with a horn bow. You can do 13 with a Flat/Short bow. That'll trump the Amor penetration.

Course all of this goes out the window when you throw in Tiger's Fury....


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