I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but has anyone actually parsed the difference between Sky Darkeners and 8+4 bane arrows on applicable targets? A ranger I talked to swore up and down that the bane arrows significantly outdid Sky Darkeners. He was pretty unhappy when he discovered that because he loved being able to proc a stack of those things instead of buying quivers. By the numbers one would assume they'd do the same damage against the proper bane NPCs, and I haven't parsed it myself, but it's plausible the bane damage is being apply funkily. It's also plausible that the guy is mistaken.
Anyway, just food for thought.
They don't proc a stack despite what the spell info says, it's one at a time with a 13%~ proc rate.
In my experience they're about the same, the difference is one can be used on more than one monster and rangers NEED an alternative to fletching or buying quivers.
I had GoE the other night for the first time since the first night I came back and was mass killing light blues, I burnt through over 10-14 stacks of arrows in 3.75 hours easy if not more (I'm pretty sure it was closer to 20).
For anyone not counting it's very easy to burn a full quiver in 1 day. Name one other class that has to either go through trade skills wasting a ton of plat on skill up's, then go farm the parts, pay 200pp~ to the vendor at a min (it may be a bit more I haven't made them in a while), and then spend at min 307 clicks for 8 hours worth of play time or spend 500pp to the only person selling them on listsold per quiver so 500pp per 8 hours of game time on a slow delay bow in order to do the classes main job.
Name one other class in SoD that has to do that.
Ranger's NEED either endless quiver or real viable alternatives to fletching. There is no market or economy on fletching, theres one person selling quivers that makes very little profit per quiver and very few people that play rangers to buy them. I was hoping shadow storm could be changed since that at least would give upper end folks an alternative but Marza already said that all the alternatives were nerfed so there wouldn't be any real alternatives.
Let that sink in, the only real option for just one class to do it's main function is either pay out regularly or sink a ton of time, payout plat regularly, and tedious clicking through trade skills, further the recipe book was taken out of the game to keep the manual tedious way.
I can't be the only person that puts all of that together and goes WTF.