Following the recommendations of our alphas, we’ll drop some of the more marginal skills from Weezer’s build and replace them with others that better serve the purpose of things. While we’ll sacrifice our ability to simply devastate Warriors it was never all that impressive in the first place and other characters on the field of battle are much more important. What works to kill a caster will kill a Warrior or another Ranger just as well so we’ll concentrate not on punching a hole in the armored behemoths running around trying to sink their weapons into people and worry about interring the much more vulnerable spells casters such as the healers and disrupters. That, in turn, will make our other targets that much easier to slaughter. So, in that light, gone are the inferior skills of Power Shot, Hunter’s Shot, and Enervating Charge. But the real question is just how to fill those empty slots. Debilitating Shot is a given but that still leaves two slots to play around with and that opens up several possibilities.
Firstly, we’ll cleave closest to the eventual consensus of those at the table with this:
Furious Bowman
The point here would be to attack as many people as fast as possible with as much damage as you can possibly have. If you can get another teammate to run something like Order of Pain or Winnowing you’ll be cranking out even more DPS but what’s here already is considerable. As mentioned earlier, Conjure and Barrage work beautifully together. Favorable Winds shortens the flight path of an arrow by flattening it out and speeding it up so the quicker firing rate of the bow here has little drawback. With that any large pack of enemies is just asking for it with rapidly alternating Barrage and Dual Shot salvos. Even against a single target it’s gong to be effective and efficient damage. And when disruption not damage is called for this Ranger can sprinkle in Debilitating and Distracting Shots. Tiger’s Fury makes things even better by increasing the attack rate. It, too, is capable of being recast quickly and even at this low level of Beastmastery it’s infinitely sustainable in terms of recycle time versus duration. Thanks to the change to Expertise, it’s also affected by Expertise but casting it and the attack skills as rapidly as possible could cause a bit of an energy crunch. It calls for some testing to determine just what the sweetest spot is and that spot’s probably going to depend on the individual’s preference but if energy becomes an issue dropping a few points from Air Magic (Or whatever elemental attribute you favor. Air, Fire, and Water work equally well here as all you want is just a Conjured elemental damage. Take the one that works best against your expected opponents) to move Beastmastery is certainly a good move. You can go from a base 11/10/10/1 build to 11/10/8/6 without sacrificing too much damage from your Conjure nor anything from your 13 Expertise/12 Marksmanship. You’ll do a bit less damage overall but you’ll have the energy to do that damage a lot faster for longer.
Next, inspired by Sausaletus Rex’s near fanatical insistence on the viability of switching to Water Magic we’ll look at a build where we replace Conjure Lightning with Conjure Frost.
Snare Sniper
As you might guess from the title this is a character built around the idea of snaring or slowing its targets. At the same time we’ve lost very little offensive capability. All we’ve done is swap elemental damage and replace Tiger’s Fury with Ice Spikes so most of what was said for the Furious Bowman holds true here, as well. Ice Spikes is expensive, true, but not much else here is. It’s not going to get cast very often but with some careful targeting it can be put to excellent use by keeping a few targets close enough together for several Barrage bursts. The sad fact is that a competent team is going to learn quickly that massing together is bad thing once you let lose with a few Barrage’s. They’re going to spread out and split up. So, a way of keeping them together, if only for a brief time, will give this Ranger an edge. Using a combination of Pin Down and Ice Spikes – which might stack their slowing effects given that one’s a condition and one’s a hex – this character will be herding the opponent’s together, keeping them from staying too far, and then slamming them with a hail of arrows. This also helps the rest of the team. If there are Warriors on your side they’ll benefit from those gimpy targets and if there are Monks they’ll appreciate being able to run from the people trying to kill them. It opens up a few more tactical options for this Ranger, giving them a shot at the important role of snaring the opposition, in case the central strategy of dealing damage with their bow is somehow negated.
Next, let’s get a bit more radical and look at what happens when we stray from Air not to head to Water but to Fire. Fire doesn’t have much to recommend it, really, not in replacing Tiger’s Fury so we’ll have to do some more drastic things. One issue raised by the alphas was the lack of defense in Weezer’s character so let’s try and address it with this :
The Asbestos Archer
Now, although we set out to dabble in the Fire Magic line there’s still really no pressing reason for us to be there. Conjure Lightning and Frost would work equally well but we want a Conjure and Fire Magic fits the flavor of this build better so we’ll leave it. Otherwise we’ve performed some pretty drastic surgery here. Rangers have superior protection against elemental damage having 70AL +30AL vs. Elemental damage as their new baseline. So, by adding Greater Conflagration we can create a situation where a lot of damage headed our way is going to be matched up against our 100AL vs. Fire. Don a set of Drakescale armor and we’ll be at an effective AL of 115 against that fire damage. A second ritual means we’ll be running 10% DP but while that’s a hefty price to pay it’s really about 48 hp and 2.5 energy so if we’re doing something with it we’ll be alright. However, Greater Conflagration also means dipping into Wilderness Survival. As with the Furious Archer, that’s not a big deal, especially if we’re concerning ourselves with staying alive long enough to deal our massive damage. So, we’ll drop our Fire Magic a few notches and get up to Wilderness Survival 7 with a Minor rune. That lets us grab a few more skills, which will certainly aid us. It means kicking a few more skills off our build but, really, the core here is Favorable Winds + Conjure + Barrage + Dual Shot + Debilitating Shot and we’ll not have to shed a tear for losing our nice but ultimately utility skills in Pin Down and Distracting Shot as long as we can get something more in line with what we need. First, we’ll take Serpent’s Quickness which will act a lot like Tiger’s Fury and increase our offense not by increasing our firing speed but by shortening our already low recharge times meaning we’ll have fewer normal shots sprinkled in while we’re recharging. Since we’re not planning on taking a lot of damage it ending when we hit 50% health doesn’t bother us. Finally, we’ll take Storm Chaser. It’s got that long recharge time we don’t like but it serves two important purposes. Firstly, we’ve lost our snare with Pin Down so we can use the speed buff to escape danger. Secondly, there’s going to be a lot of elemental damage floating around so if we’re ever running low on energy we can use it for a quick refill. After all, we’re not going to be far less damage from the flames than anyone else will, why not make the most of it? After all that, this character is one with survivability in mind, but at the same time we’re still able to snipe away with our boosted damage.
Finally, let’s stray even further from the initial build and introduce another element brought up by our alphas. By adding Debilitating Shot we’ve already created a character that’s going to be extremely problematic for any caster. So let’s take that a few steps further with this build :
Interruptus Maximus
The concept then is to pack as many interrupts as possible and make sure that any caster in our sights is smacked down hard. A constant stream of Debilitating Shot will strip them of any energy while our interrupts will nail them if they try and cast at all. Favorable Winds means that our arrows are going to travel faster making hitting someone casting that much easier so we’ll switch to a bow with longer range so we can always reach out and stick someone. Since this is now a disrupting character not strictly a damage dealing character the focus shifts from dealing damage spread across several characters to damage to a single target. Since we’ll be using Favorable, there’s little reason to drop our Conjure as it’ll just serve to up our damage, which is never a bad idea. If you’re going to disrupt killing your target is just about the best form of disruption you can find, after all. What it does make redundant, though, is Barrage. Trading one bow elite for another gives up Punishing Shot. It’s an interrupting Power Shot that will cost us 5 energy and we can use every 5 seconds. There are better elites out there but none that are going fit our strategy as well. Similarly, we’ll dump Dual Shot for another interrupt in Savage Shot. Tactically, this Ranger will want to try and prevent a caster from using their most important skill with Distracting Shot first, then use Savage and Punishing Shots to pound them into the ground if they try and cast before swapping over to Debilitating Shots to keep them from doing anything. Once they’re out of the picture they’ll be able to switch targets for a brief moment and hopefully catch another caster or two and cost them a locked skill, 10 energy, or some hit points. Concussion Shot would seem a natural fit and perhaps we could use it and dump most of our interrupts in place of pure damage but Dazed is a condition that people are starting to figure out how to combat, likewise Concussion Shot has a large energy cost now and even with 13 in Expertise it’s going to hurt our energy flow. Even if we do tag someone with it we’re committing ourselves to sniping away at them to interrupt their casts so since we’re tied to one target anyway we can use cheaper interrupts just as well. Saving that energy from casting Concussion Shot lets us use another skill from Air with Gale. At 1 seconds casting time it’s quick and can be used either as an interrupt or with Pin Down to keep someone from running out of range. The exhaustion will hut meaning we won’t be able to cast is consistently but in an emergency it’s going to be faster than any other skill we can use and that’s worth keeping around considering how useful it could be. And we can compensate for the loss somewhat with a Ranger armor which offers more energy, the Druid sets. That'll give us the same 70AL +30AL vs. Elemental base of other armors with +9 energy and +1 regen. We'll gain 4 energy, which stretches a lot further with Expertise, for giving up the +15AL vs. Piercing of Hunter's or +15AL vs cold of Frostbound.
And there you have it. Four reworkings of an already efficient build. Even with your plain and simple bow Ranger there are a lot of avenues to explore. And it’s not at all hard to come up with a character that’s going to be capable of punishing casters as well as your average Mesmer or chopping a target up as well as your average Warrior. All from range and with what’s probably the second best armor in the game, at the moment. Considering that a pure bow-plucking Ranger is just one of the many possibilities when dealing with the Ranger skill list, the Gurus are going to have to agree with the roundtable and say that people who discount the Ranger need to reconsider.
