First, credit to @ryusacerdos for helping to make a Google Sheets to compare damage values at modifiable values. Link next to the sheet
Well, I keep seeing people asking every day about how to build their auto attack archer. I figured I’ve done a good amount of research and will try to compile the information I’ve found in a guide.
Take note that a lot of the things going forward is based on information I’ve parsed from the wiki, other players, and my opinions. Hopefully they are accurate…and if nothing else, maybe we as a group can gather what we know and optimize the build together.
Let’s get started. I’m going to base the build around A2/QS3. The last 2 circles can be swapped to spice up the build for Falconer for Circling, Archer 3 for Kneeling/Swift/Multishot/Twin Arrow, or Scout for Cloaking/Flareshot, but I believe A2/QS3 is the core of the build for PvE. Choosing circle 6 and 7 deserve their own sections.
PROS/ CONS of the build
PROS:
-Very high single target damage
-High sustained damage
-Swift Step critical passive scales well into end game
-Highest attack speed in the game
-Very few mana problems after you obtain Running Shot (lower potion costs)
-Capable of soloing up to 200 pretty well (not a support class)
CONS:
-Auto attacks don’t scale as well as skills due to the attribute for Kneeling Shot having flat scaling and Running Shot having no attribute scaling
-Lack of ANY real AoE until circle 6 or 7
-Horrible leveling experience until you get Running Shot at either level 80ish or 120ish
-Slightly ping dependent for auto attacks to register
-Running Shot doesn’t have 100% uptime
-End game weapon (Didel Grand Cross) is untradable and comes from a RNG box in the level 240 daily (twice a day limit)
-Not a world boss class due to lack of burst damage
The machine gun archer doesn’t deal the most damage per second, it doesn’t have the best AoE, and it doesn’t level the fastest. You probably won’t be winning world boss races due to lag and lack of real burst.
I believe that this build really shines at doing one thing: farming field mobs for low rate drops. Rare drops in this game are noted in the English wiki at 0.3% and some of the rarest drops probably have an even lower rate. Combined with the shitty respawn rates currently in the game, and you will need to grind a lot in the field for rare drops to craft some 1337 items. You really might be farming low level mobs for a while though to get monster gems for collection/ use.
This is where the machine gun archer (shortening to AA archer) shines. Running Shot allows you to attack and move at full running speed and Kneeling Shot allows you to turret in the middle of a pack of mobs and let auto aim take over. If you went Archer 3, Kneeling Shot level 10 allows you to hit almost everything on your screen by just holding attack and letting the in game auto aim hit the enemies for you.
The lack of AoE from the AA archer doesn’t harm it as much in the field as the mobs generally don’t mob together as well. Running Shot also provides high single target damage to kill field elites who have significantly more HP while also not overkilling normal mobs due to auto attacks being many small segments of damage over time.
One of the main negatives of the build though is that it is slightly ping dependent. It seems that ToS makes you confirm your actions on their servers before they allow the action to complete. This means that each of your auto attacks must register as a hit on the enemy before you can attack and hit the mob again.
Most people recommend that you have under 100 ping to play this auto attack build. I personally live within 150 miles of the server and still have between 20 and 100 ping. The netcode of this game seems awful and I hope they improve it. I would say that anything under 200 ping is within 85-90% of optimal compared to someone with 50 ping. The max attack speed you can obtain in this game is around 3 attacks per second which means you theoretically only need 333 ping to do.
STATS: How to fail at scaling in ToS
This is a topic I keep seeing in the class sub-forums. Let me say this right now.
SCALING IN TREE OF SAVIOR IS AWFUL.
SCALING IN TREE OF SAVIOR IS AWFUL.
SCALING IN TREE OF SAVIOR IS AWFUL.
Everything scales linearly. See this wiki page to see how each stat scales.
http://wiki.tosbase.com/wiki/Stats
Let’s go through each stat.
STR scales at a rate of 1 + ((class rank - 1) x 0.1). Essentially, you gain 1.6 damage per point of STR when you are at the current max class rank of 7. In general, each point of base damage you get from your weapon/body/equipment/collections/skills makes your STR less of total damage. At end game your body and equipment equals about 1100-1300 damage depending on your equips. STR generally matters more if you are using skills with low base damage or hit multiple times. Even at near full STR though, when using skills that have high base damage, a majority of your damage will come from your body and skill damage.
In the end though, for optimal damage, STR is needed since everything else scales badly.
INT is worthless to Archers, so it doesn’t even need to be thought of. I really think INT is the weakest stat in the whole game. A lot of Wizard damage comes from base damage and Wizards are squishy as hell.
SPR scales horribly in the same way that STR and INT scale horribly: it scales linearly and in very small amounts. The most interesting thing about SPR is that it scales Mdef (also at a horrible .2/SPR rate), which might of been useful if Mdef scaled better and if it wasn’t such a low rate.
DEX, and therefore crit, is one of the very few things in this game that scale multiplicity (+50% damage and your crit attack) instead of linearly. So, any crit gained that doesn’t put you over 100% crit scales the damage you have better.
kToS actually published the crit rate as ((crit rate - crit resist) x 42) / (your level). This means that every time you level up, your effective crit rate lowers due. If we had 200 crit at level 100, our crit rate against a 0 crit resist monster, we would have ((200 - 0) x 42) / 100 = 84%. Pretty nice rate there. Now, if we had 200 crit at level 200 against the same monster, then we have ((200 - 0) x 42) / 200 = 42%. Not so nice anymore.
This basically means we need to continually increase our crit rate to maintain your crit rate at higher levels. Auto attack archers get a bit of scaling though with Kneeling Shot and DEX. If you use Kneeling Shot a lot, you will benefit more from DEX due to the damage scaling and the critical scaling attribute of Kneeling Shot.
CON is the final stat. I am here to argue that CON is very important. People die when they are killed. If you are dead, you deal 0 damage. I am here to argue that base scaling with equipment is OK enough in this game without STR/DEX scaling (since damage scaling is bad).
I believe a 0 STR/ 0 DEX build still deals around 65-70% of the damage of a high STR/DEX build. The conclusion really is that this game’s damage mostly comes from base damage + equipment instead of stat scaling.
Thus, CON enters the game. At end game (Earth Tower currently) mobs deal MASSIVE damage. Most of the videos I see from Earth Tower has everyone at 14000 HP or above. I highly recommend at least 11000 HP from CON and hope to make up the rest through equips.
I see a lot of people recommend around 30-40 CON. I would highly suggest 60-75 actual points in CON for PvE. This build is going to focus on PvE so I won’t make recommendations for PvP. Hell even full CON is viable, but I would recommend against it since you will never be as tanky as a warrior nor have as much utility as a full CON Cryo/Linker.
The TL; DR section here for stats. I’ll list 2 example builds below.
3 STR: 2 DEX: 1 CON
-Basically, this is the spread sheet way to maximize damage. What you should be doing is calculating your crit rate each level (or at max level) and how much each point of DEX gives you versus how much each point of STR gives you.
Each point of crit makes your damage worth more while each point of damage scales your crit to be worth more. Break out your Excel sheet and plot it out Diablo 3 style. Refer to the link above for a small example of scaling.
The smart people who are actually do the Excel sheet and maximize damage will also need to put some CON in there. If they are doing Excel sheets on the matter, I figure they will min max and find a suitable amount of CON for themselves. Again, I recommend around 14000 hp. Example build below with 150 STR, 100 DEX, and 50 CON:
4 DEX: 1 CON
-With around 300 stat points and level 280, you would have around 13000 hp. Less than that before then. A few collections and 2 hp armor pieces/head accessory will get you around the 14000 hp mark.
Comparing the 2 builds, the STR/DEX build has around 300 more damage and 1000 less HP. The DEX build has 200 more critical, 200 more evasion, and better scaling on Swift Step (both evasion and critical) and 1000 more HP.
For both builds, I recommend putting any points over the 300 I have listed into the lowest stat in the build. For the STR/DEX/CON build, put the remaining points into CON. For the DEX/CON build, I would recommend excess points into STR. I believe you get at least 30 to 40 extra stat points (I might be completely wrong here), so you would have about 20 more points to allocate during your leveling process.
You have to make sure you don’t go over 100 crit in the DEX build though. At 667 crit, you will have 100.2% crit. A lot of mobs at level 285 have around 100 crit resist, so I would say anything over 770 crit might be too much. With the DEX build you might skirt the barrier with going over 100% crit.
SKILLS:
I’ll do an overview of what I think of each skill assuming we go A2/QS3. Rank 6 and 7 need their own section.
Archer skills (up to A2):
Mulitshot (lvl 10):
One of the strongest scaling skills in the game. At level 10, Multishot hits 11 times. With A2, we get the attribute to reduce its cast time by half. I would estimate the charge time of lvl 10 MS to be around 1 second. Actually casting MS though takes around 2 seconds; this feels like eternity when you include the cast time of 1 second. You are actually able to move about half way through the cast, but you can’t do much during this time. All casts of other skills and attacks fail…except MS itself again. So the game encourages you to cast MS twice in a row as the optimal strategy by allowing you to buffer the next cast of MS during the recovery time of the first MS. Standing still for 5-6 seconds is generally not advised for your health.
MS is probably also your only form of burst damage for the first 220 levels of your life. This mostly refers to attacking linked targets. Just note that MS is best used vs single targets and not groups (unless linked) due to how MS hits random targets in its small AoE.
Anyway, MS is a very strong and will carry you through a large part of the game. It is one of the skills you use during the downtime of Running Shot. I believe MS is also one of the skills with the lowest attribute costs making it relevant well into late game.
Instant 10/10 in the build, no questions.
Swift Step (lvl 10):
One of the biggest reason people take A2 is to get the Swift Step critical attribute to gain the 25% critical buff and have it have a 100% uptime. Take note that the critical buff only applies to yourself. One of the things that annoys me the most is having other Archers overriding my Swift Step with theirs and me losing my crit buff. If you are an Archer, please turn off the party sharing part of the buff. As you get higher level, amount of buffs you get from the party increases. So this helps everyone if you turn off the party share attribute.
Anyway, this skill is a no brainer for anyone going A2. Get 10/10 and try to keep it up as much as possible.
Kneeling Shot (lvl 5):
This skill seems to polarize people. I use it all the time. If you have high DEX, this skill actually scales extremely well. Especially when you consider the attribute that gives 10% more critical when you use KS. The damage from KS is also directly applied to your body so it is fully scaled by critical (can be seen by opening your character menu and turning KS on and off).
Anyway, one of the benefits to this skill is that you gain auto aim when it is on. You can turn this on in the middle of a map and just hold attack. The game will aim for you within a certain range. Very useful if people bring their shitty pets with them who obscure targetting.
This whole guide is assuming you are going to be playing an AA archer. I think you should automatically take this skill to 5 if you are playing this (maybe SR people excluded). I would recommend people that don’t use this skill much to try to use it more.
Full Draw (lvl 1):
I’ll be using this excuse later, but I believe that not taking skills to be almost always the wrong choice. You won’t really use this at all in PvE. I find that the attribute doesn’t seem to work vs bosses. So why take this skill? Well it is utility for when you want an enemy pushed away and pinned down (doesn’t work vs bosses). Maybe use this to knock + pin down an elite archer enemy chasing you down to cast Spiral Arrow on you while you run across the map.
Also, this skill is useful in PvP as minor crowd control. CC always rules PvP. Even though this guide is assuming you are purely doing PvE, you still might find yourself in a random GvG and should always have as much utility as possible. Thus, you take 1 point here. Nothing better to use it on anyway.
Heavy Shot (lvl 1):
Basically take everything I said about Full Draw and apply it here. Pretty boring skill, but again - don’t skip skills as the utility in PvE and PvP is more useful than getting like 20 more damage on another skill.
Oblique Shot (lvl 1 or 3):
You will be using this skill for a large part of your early game. Since we are maxing other skills, this skill only gets the excess points. Put 1 point here if you don’t plan on taking A3, or 3 points here if you only take A2. This is the skill that scales the remaining 2 points left for the people who go A2.
This skill actually still has use into late game for one stupid reason. Basically, if there are pets around it is hard to aim for mobs. Thus, I sometimes find myself casting Oblique Shot to auto aim and hit enemies even if there is only 1 enemy -_-;;
Quarrel Shooter (class rank 3)
Running Shot (RS) (lvl 5):
The bread and butter of the build. The whole build revolves around this skill and what you do when it is up or down. This skill is also the reason why you will be forced into the Grand Cross (GC) for a good part of the game (and Didel Grand Cross (DGC) in late game). Using the GC or DGC giving Running Shot 2 levels means an extra 80% damage on top of your body’s damage. No other weapon in the game will come close to matching this damage boost. Even if (and I mean IF) muskets attack faster, they will never match the extra 4 seconds of using a DGC and the extra 80% damage.
Anyway, take a look at my attack speed tests in post 2 of this guide. You attack at about 2 atks/sec under RS if you use mouse mode animation cancelling. You should learn the range that you can attack an enemy from when under RS and think about how you are moving if you have aggro of the boss. If you have boss aggro, you should try to run left and right constantly and consistently and try to keep the boss under the AoE circles of other classes. This helps people who needs to hit the back of the boss and improves the DPS of ground AoEs. I always hate it when people randomly run around when they have aggro.
Scatter Caltrops (lvl 15):
The only “AoE” you will have for a good part of the game. It isn’t even real AoE. Still, it is a very useful skill that can gather aggro and stop enemies who step on them. It seems to me that a mob can only be hit by a caltrop every x seconds. I find myself using this skill a lot and there are quite a few good use cases for it.
This skill also scales caltrops per level (to a max of 15) so we max this skill as it scales directly with skill levels.
Rapid Fire (lvl 10):
No clue how this skill actually scales. I find myself really using this skill by channeling it for a quarter of a second and releasing it on bosses. The fraction of a second charge still seems to cast 6 or 7 arrows and applies the full crit resist debuff. There are cases where you can charge the full 3 seconds like during the lvl 100 daily mission where you are drawing the bosses away. You can charge this in the passage and wait till the boss is in range then release it at full power.
Anyway, there isn’t much else to level and this skill seems to at least directly scale with level, so 10/10.
Stone picking/ Stone Shot (lvl 1):
I’ll do these together. Again, I don’t like not having the utility. Especially since we will be using a DGC which increases these skills to 3. Stone Shot will have a 5 second stun at lvl 3 which is alright I guess. These skills will probably never be used in PvE, but meh, might as well get 1 level of them.
Teardown (lvl 1):
The only true AoE you will get during A2/QS3. Slow as hell to execute due to Deploy Pavise taking half a second to cast and then having to kick the shield. I also find Teardown strange to use as you can miss the kick of Teardown and still use up a charge. Still, I’ve found myself using this from time to time when RS is down and I have a huge mob of enemies behind me. Take a point and think of this as a 1 point wonder.
Deploy Pavise (lvl 12):
I have completely come around on this skill. I used to think that this skill doesn’t have too much practical use. That was until I found some videos of Koreans using this in Earth Tower to help turtle. In these end game scenarios, you want to be as efficient as possible. Taking this skill to 12 will give it a 40 second uptime and a 35 second CD. I suggest using Teardown on the Pavise before casting the next Pavise in this Earth Tower scenario since casting Pavise over other Pavise makes them both float in the sky. That is where the extra 5 seconds comes in handy.
Example of skill points for leveling and where I’d save points for the next class rank. If you plan on going A3, don’t level Oblique/Heavy/Full Draw and leave those spare points to boost A3 skills faster.
That is enough for the skills part of the core build (A2/QS3). Next up is ranks 6 and rank 7 and the choices to be made there.