Cerberus.Maeldiar said:
»As for those Anni users out there, I'd wager that because how delays work on ranged the ws frequency will be much higher than a bow, the aim speed is much quicker and the tp gained is higher. Last stand spam is definitely competitive at the least.
Here's my analysis of this, and this is pretty quick math (I can post the graph and sets if needed be. The graph is quite large)
I was interested in this as well and in reality, the spreadsheet total DPS doesn't give a clear picture of this. It only gives overall DPS but doesn't account for moments where one weapon can pull ahead of the other which does occur when comparing Anni/Last Stand vs Skirmish/JR for the first few weaponskill rounds.
I did a simple plot of both weapon based on their delay using 66% snapshot (Flurry and VS buffs + preshot snapshot). Target was Tojil with capped attack. Acc of course was capped as well.
Annihilator was an average of 1950.96 per shot every 2.43 seconds with 10,429 damage on Last Stand. Skirmish bow was an average of 1733.93 per shot every 2.81 seconds with 15,096 damage on Jishnu's Radiance. Both were set up to gain enough tp for a WS at the start after 4 shots using Reforged Relic for recycle. After the first weaponskill was used, TP to 100 was 3 shots. I inserted a 4 second delay for weaponskills due to animation (I can't remember offhand the minimum lockout during weaponskill)
What I found is that due to the lower delay, Annihilator keeps up with the Skirmish Bow very early on and surpasses it in damage for very very short periods of time. There is a back and forth between the two from 0 - 2 minutes, but after that period, the skirmish bow begins to pulls ahead and by the time 5 minutes have passed, the skirmish bow does 4% more damage. In my tally using the above numbers for damage, after 5 minutes the Skirmish bow only does 25 weaponskills plus 2 shots for 512,665 damage vs Annihilator that does 30 weaponskills plus 1 shot for 492,364 damage. On the surface, 4% doesn't seem like much until you see those numbers which is a 20k damage difference.
Of course Gun and Bow have different sweet spots and more often than not when facing mobs with AoE's, Gun is at a disadvantage and is out of the sweet spot range where bow is. At this point, the gun keeps up for a very very short period, but the bow pulls ahead by a large margin and after 5 minutes, the difference is 69k.
Right now, for Annihilator to be on equal footing with the Skirmish Bow for fights longer than 2 minutes, it would require new bullets that are at least 273 DMG (or a new ilvl bump of +20 DMG) if both are in the sweet spot.