I’ve posted information regarding this so many times, I’m just gonna copy and paste my previous posts.
sudonim7
11h
For ranger3, None of its skills scale well to warrant additional ranks, because of the nature of how scaling damage works in this game, it’s always better to invest into more additional hits (multiplicative scale)than it is to increase skill damage (additive scaling)
Increasing barrage to 15 from level 5 only gives you a +300 damage on your 3 barrage casts which equates to +1500 damage per cast and 4500 damage overall. When you have 1000 physical damage from stats, that 300 extra damage doesn’t look to fancy.
However, increasing multishot to level 10 from level 5 gives you 5 extra hits, going from 6 hits to 11 hits. This translates into 10 extra hits that all get added with damage from weapons, strengths, and buffs. So if you’re in your late game and have 1000 damage from gear and stats, those extra 20 hits translate into +10000 damage vs +4500 damage from barrage.
So when you math out how much potential ticks damage you can do in a 15 second window, people have found that if you go A2 for 11 hits on multishot x2, R1 for 5 hits with barrage x3, and flare shot for 30 hits in a 15 second duration, this translates into about an increase of 67 total hits that all get individually buffed by elemental damage, blessing, weapon damage, STR, physical damage, and crit attack. if you only went a1 ranger3, you only get 15 hits from barrage, 12 from multishot, and 12 from spiral arrow (39 hits vs 67 hits)
Tl;dr getting additional ranks in ranger is a waste because the skills have poor scaling past rank1