Here are a few restrictions.

Cannot be tier 3

Critieria for best:
charge and maintain are liabilities that factor into usefulness (taking pvp into account partially)

greatest damage per second

I think, at this point, people are too scared for a nerf to post that kind of information. :o

From what testing I did in beta, it seemed Haymaker was far and away the highest. Things most certainly could have changed, but tap-spamming that I was doing over 950dps at 40. For ranged, I recall thinking it was Conflag, but I most certainly could be wrong there, as I believe I was taking into account it's aoe capability.

In full disclosure, I didn't test most of the... Sorc/Darkeness/Tele-type abilities as they alll seemed more support oriented and less pure damage so it's possible I could have missed something there.

Cheers

Thanks, btw I love deadlands.

I did forget to stipulate single target. Conflag also is a maintain. But I'm not sure if it stays the same with each pulse, and it has no cooldown, so it may not matter if it's a maintain under those conditions.

The only downside to tapping Conflag is it takes ~50% more energy, but otherwise there is no downside, it also ticks every .5s so it's very easy to tap/mini-charge it and still keep moving. As an added bonus, the aoe follows the target. That being said, for single target-ranged most things were remotely equal, as the 'taps' do really very little damage. All the damage on the ranged single target nukes comes from charging them. It's possible that Assault Rifle, advantaged for no cooldown, might fit the bill.

As for Deadlands, yeah, best PnP material I've ever encountered. :D

Cheers!