Range upgrades

[still ermine]

Me and my GIM partner have both recently just started playing again after roughly a year out. We're firmly in the midgame with a few decent items but feel our range gear is lacking a lot. We've done some ToA and would like to do some CoX at some point but we're still using rune crossbows.

For reference we have 1 fang between us + tridents for mage and melee which I feel is fine to do some raids but id really like to upgrade the rcbs. Should mention that neither of us really have any interest in gauntlet, it's too sweaty and long for my liking, plus I much prefer doing group content over solo content.

It seems a few new range weapons have come out but struggling to understand where they fit in the meta, especially as the DPS calcs I've used don't take into account the Atlatls set effect. So was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for range weapon/gear improvements that don't include bowfa. Is the hunters crossbow or Atlatl an option for high level bosses, do we just stick to rcbs and rubies?

[hearty maple]

its very simple: rush bowfa. Getting bowfa from corrupted gauntlet requires no gear whatsoever, just stats, and gives you an insanely good range weapon for the stage of your account while also giving you a bunch of gp in alchs

[spiral summit]

red prison inc

[hearty maple]

it's usually also people's first introduction to serious pvming which makes it a great learning environment that will give you skills which make raiding later easier

[native siren]

if for whatever reason, you dont want to get a bowfa(which you really really really really should), you'd just be stuck with rcb and rubies in raids

cg is extremely fun imo, and very rewarding with gp, makes you a better player, and gives bowfa (which is enough of a reason to go for it alone)

[subtle elbow]

just tried doing a calc to see if i could give a cheeky recommendation of "do CG until just crystal armour, it's worse than bowfa but still solid" to make the cg grind for the real thing seem shallower but turns out that's still worse than rcb lmao. sorry, i think you're basically stuck with rcb for bosses until you make up your mind to do CG. i think you should probably get atlatl anyway if you insist on cg skipping because burn's okay in places and you can use both to some extent but trying to calc it is hell

[mellow escarp]

If you absolutely don't want to get a bowfa the main route id recommend is to do rcb toa (aim for 400rl with your fang) to get a shadow. It will likely take hundreds of hours, but its better to skip ranged entirely than to use a different weapon.

For non-bosses, ie stuff not weak to ruby or diamond bolts, msb, atlatl and sunlight crossbow are all typically better than an rcb. Of the three I would consider the msb and atlatl, though in practice it's almost always going to be better for you to not range if your target is not weak to bolts