ranged vs melee dps?

[Spogg]

question for end game
which is better a melee focused dps or a ranged.

cus i have all my builders set up and geared but i have not made a dedicated dps yet

as a side question for each of these which character is best for each.

[Xengre]

Jester ranged for safe handling of bosses (and most of all upgrading, towers do the real work in higher difficulties outside bosses and honestly even then often do). Reason is they have by far the most HP, the fastest cast rate (upgrade/repair/build speeds, mainly for fast upgrading with Genie pet which can get tons of mana fast). This makes them safe for some challenge maps or for certain bosses but not so much outside that for actual fighting. Their actual DPS is very inferior to other options but they are safe. This is further bolstered by their Wheel of Fortuna which can help speed run (50% dmg max to all mobs on map, great with 2+ jesters spamming) and ability to heal every player and tower by up to 75% on map while slowly whittling down bosses from safey and tons of HP.

Monk is the overall best DPS hero all around and the easiest, by far, to get performing well. This is because of his already ludicrous pet scaling. Pets scale differently depending on the hero using them and the hero's attack stat. Monk's is nearly twice the second highest... However, it is further boosted by Hero boost which can boost DPS by somewhere in the ballpark of 1-4x so potentially 8x the pet dps of the second best hero pet scaling. In nightmare difficulty, the hardest difficulty, hero dmg goes down... a LOT while pet damage goes up a lot. In fact, to give an example a Monk might do 4m DPS with their weapon while using hero boost while a pet might do 15-40m DPS. The monk's actual weapon DPS makes up a very tiny portion of overall DPS. You can have the monk use a ranged weapon to assist with flying mobs and stuff or go for a melee weapon as some have some solid damage (tho nothing compared to a good pet but it does add up with the best a bit).

EV has her beam attack. That is honestly all that matters for her regarding DPS. She is solely for boss killing really. Huntress/Hunter would be better off if you want to deal with trash mobs. However, EV is by far the best boss killer because of her insane beam damage but it is only viable specifically with the Ember staff equipped from Embermount. Unfortunately, this is a very late game map... so a good EV is not really setup until you are really ready to prep for true end game content/grind. Her boss dps is very broken, though, but it doesn't work on all bosses so she is not a one fits all solution.

Huntress/Hunter are okay DPS and can help clear trash mobs and do stealth things with their abilities (solo stealth for huntress, AoE group stealth for hunter) which does work for some bosses and most mobs (not all mobs tho like Dark Elf and IIRC spiders). Okay but honestly kinda subpar and not worth it other than for fun. Btw for them and Jester there are guns that penetrate multiple mobs like Blaster, but overall the DPS is a joke compared to Monk's.

Barbarian can kill trash mobs fairly safely for quite some time due to the Turtle and healing stance. The DPS is acceptable for melee, though still usually better with a pet for normal mobs. For bosses he is okay with Hawk stance and with very good setups can 1-shot bosses, but not typically at content levels you are trying to actively progress through because it really needs very good weapons and stats to be worth it over other options. The main benefit here is the ability to one-shot some bosses skipping several phases because of the high hawk damage if you got a truly beast setup, however, this trick has been changed to not work on several of the bosses it used to as hard caps on the damage in a single attack possible were placed on some of them. In addition to how well EV does even with less stellar Ember staff compared to Barb he is just very very rarely seen.

Honestly, apprentice towers are very good for killing bosses with decent enough stats and the right setup/trick or for bursting bosses down instantly (DST + boosting spam on Embermount boss for instance is the best method for beating it, but requires very high stats). This has varying levels of success depending on your app's stats and the boss involved as well as how well you boost it (Monk tower boost, summoner boost, app active hero boost, etc. depending on what is necessary).

tl;dr, Monk is best overall DPS to work on just get a good pet. Seahorse and Megachicken are pretty reasonable to get for solid DPS until you can get a few of the harder better ones (tho those two are definitely up near the top already). Each has various benefits over each other pets. Towers kill everything else that isn't a boss and often even bosses.