The honestly obvious guide to doing damage in PvE (DPS only)

If you are a DPS and you find yourself consistently taking long amounts of time (upwards of 10 minutes) per boss in dungeons, this guide is for you! Most people will find this guide pointless, but if you find it useful, please give a like to show your support.

Lesson 1. Gear Rolls and crystals

Unlike most other games out there, gear is extremely streamlined here. You can't go wrong with the standard progression most of the time. However, precisely because of that, we emphasize that it is very important to know that your gear should be properly rerolled to do the damage you want. To elaborate on that fact, a low tier weapon with proper roll will very easily outdps one high tier weapon with very bad rolls. As such, knowing the lines you should have is essential to maximising your damage.

We will first look at the standard rolls for a DPS class weapon: Archer for example:

Top roll: Enraged Damage 9.3%

Bottom Roll:
Enraged Damage 9.3%
Damage 6%
Damage from behind 6.9% AND/OR Cooldown Reduction 7.2% (depending on VM)

Notice the fine emphasis on Enraged damage? You may ask, what is enrage? Well, outside of the obvious point of it going into rage mode, bosses will occasionally do different skills or mechanics. Typically, most bosses go into enrage after losing 10% HP when unenraged, or enraged by a tank skill. Boss will stay in this mode for about 30ish seconds before being unenraged. Most good parties will have a very high enrage time, because they do a huge amount of damage each enrage. And because you do more damage while the boss is being enraged, your runs will be faster, meaning you will have a higher overall DPS.

Let's also look at the recommended weapon crystals for Archer:

Fine Focused: Increase Crit Power when hitting enraged monsters
Fine Savage: Increase Crit Power when attacking from the rear
Fine Pounding: Increase Damage
Fine Spiteful: Increase Crit Power when using ranged attacks to monsters from the side or the rear

Increasing Crit Power gives you a huge multiplier when you crit on those conditions. If you are a melee class, there is a Fine Bitter crystal you can use instead (works for melee).

In this guide I won't talk about jewelry and the rest of the gear; these can be easily searched up in class guides and most of them are self explanatory. The reason why I wrote about weapon is that I learnt that some people are confused about why rolls are more important than the gear's tier itself.

With this in mind we can simply move to the next lesson to understand why we follow Lesson 1 strictly.

Lesson 2: Positioning.

If you have realised about our gear, you will realise that the bulk of our damage is amplified when attacking from the back, and you are right to think that you should be at the back of the boss.

All bosses have a crit resist modifier dependent on the angle the attack is from. Crit resist is lowest on the back, followed by the sides, then the front. Of course, with these crystals in mind it is obvious that you should be attacking from the back even if I didn't mention about the boss's weak spots.

The general guideline is to have a short distance behind the boss if possible. Melee dps shouldn't find this a problem, because they will be sticking close to the boss anyway, however for ranged DPS, it is easy to think that you can stay far out of reach. This is a bad idea. Bosses do turn and have secondary aggro too. As such, it is highly recommended to stay close enough, without you being too uncomfortable with having to dodge alot. 5-12m is the recommended range for most of the classes, if not all.

Some bosses (eg. Mephisis from Bathysmal Rise) turn a whole lot, and you will be tempted to stay at that position and front-crit because it feels like you are wasting mobility skills for unneeded mechanics. In some cases, that is okay. It is fine to lose damage for a tiny little bit. However, it is better to chase the back of the boss to maintain the damage especially when you are good enough with your class. Nothing beats a huge boost of 300-400% from hitting the back. Good tanks will chase the front to prevent the boss from turning too much too, so chase the back to show the tank that you respect his decision too.

Lesson 3: Knowing your skill priorities and skills not to use.

To some of the people who know me personally, I hate "fireballers". DPS is the easiest class to pick up no matter how you look at it, however knowing how to DPS is still a skill most gearing people suffer from.

Most of these are covered in their class guides, but in case you are lazy to check:

1) Most stuns and other crowd control with little or no damage, unless required for cancelling important animations. (Such as Sorcerer's Mindblast)
2) Low damage fillers with better alternatives
3) Auto attacks outside from Animation cancellers (Gunner's Blast is a canceller, Ninja's Combo attack reduce core skill cooldowns, Sorcerer's Fireball? Does nothing)

Lesson 4: Learning "Burn" phases

Burn phases are phases where the bosses tend to do nothing for a brief period of time, giving you a window to unleash your full dps. This is the time where the boss is enraged, people use all their steroids and nukes and brooches start being toggled.

The first three lessons will get you from a lousy DPS to a decent one, and this one is the difference between decent and great dps players.