Spotlight on Skills #11
Originally Published by Sausaletus Rex
Every so often this column will shine the spotlight on a particular skill or set of skills for an in-depth analysis of just what that skill can do for you and the best ways to make it work. Keep in mind that Guild Wars is still under development and the information in this column is subject to swift and drastic change.
Something for the gamblers today as we shine the bright and unrelenting light of the spotlight on a pair of skills that can either pay off big or cost you dear. This time it's:
Marksman's Wager and Oath Shot
Most Ranger players are no doubt familiar with the skill Marksman's Wager. It was, before being given the elite tag, the staple energy management skill of many Ranger builds. And, while it was a normal skill, it could be quite effective in that role, perhaps not the best way of spending a slot but far from the worst, too. However, now that it’s elite there is a fair comparison, even a fair argument to drop it, to be made between it and that other hit or miss elite bow attack, Oath Shot, which although risky can be just as effective in its own right.
The basics to begin with, though. Linked to Expertise, the Ranger’s primary attribute, Marksman’s varies the amount of energy you’ll gain per hit (though not the energy you’ll lose). You’ll still get five energy per hit with no Expertise and there’s no miss rate on bows due to attributes being low or high – it’s damage that depends on depends on your bow’s attribute not how easy it is to attack with it, normally, anyway - on how so it’s not unreasonable to consider it unlinked. However, tucked away in the Ranger’s primary line it can be easy to overlook and using it as a non-Ranger requires your character to devote at least one spot and one weapon slot to supporting a bow so it’s not the most elegant of solutions. Now, excuse me while I light the big warning sign because, despite all evidence to the contrary, Oath Shot is linked to Marksmanship not Expertise. Don’t pay attention to what the skill descriptiong says, if skill descriptions were perfectly clear, there wouldn’t be a need for a column like this, would there? No, where it says Expertise mentally replace that with Marksmanship. So, Oath Shot should read:
Which makes it a bit worse for the non-primary Ranger because of that “50% miss chance with Marksmanship of 8 or less”. That means that if you have Marksmanship of 7 then no matter what you do your Oath Shot can still miss half the time – not something you like when your attacks will be locked. In this case, attributes do matter for how easy the attack is to land. And Marksmanship is often not the attribute that catches your eye when considering a secondary Ranger.
Expertise, though, affects both preparations and attacks (as well as every skill that’s not a spell. Except for Signets and adrenal skills but those have no energy cost so it doesn’t matter) so both Marksman’s Wager and Oath Shot will cost less energy to use as you pump Expertise higher. Of course, only a primary Ranger can get the benefit of Expertise.
Marksman’s Wager is a preparation. If stances are primarily defensive, non-magical skills which your character will use to buff up, then preparations are primarly offensive non-magical buffs. When you use a preparation your weapon’s attacks are somehow made better for a brief duration. Most - although not all – preparations are for bows and, naturally, they’re all found in the Ranger skill line. During the brief time a preparation is active it depends just how often you can swing your weapon to get that benefit, the more normal attacks you can make the more you’ll benefit. Since preparations are non-magical they can’t be stripped or countered once in place as can the Warrior beloved Conjured Elements or Judge’s Insight although they can certainly be stacked with such skills for greater effect, they can only be countered by having their casting interrupted by a skill which will interrupt any action, not just a spell. Distracting Blow, in other words, not Power Spike. Oath Shot is a bow attack. Meaning that it requires your character to hold a bow when using it. Further, the skill is activated in the course of a normal bow attack – in effect, the casting time and range of attack skills becomes the swing speed of the weapon you use to make them. Unlike most other weapons bows vary widely in their swing rate - perhaps more accurately called rate of fire when dealing with a ranged attack – and range. Just how long it takes to use a bow attack depends on what bow your character holds as does just how far away you can make it from. And when contemplating Marksman’s Wager and Oath Shot what kind of bow you pluck is important.
That’s because both skills give you a nice benefit when you hit and a harsh penalty when you miss. For Marksman’s Wager for the twelve seconds you have that preparation up and running you’ll either gain a bunch of energy each time you land an arrow attack or you’ll lose a bunch. One other thing to note about preparations here is that you cannot cancel them yourself, they remain active for their full duration unless you cast another preparation which, like a stance, will overwrite your old preparation, so for a full twelve seconds you’re stuck with bow shots that will sap your energy when you miss or might gain you more energy than you actually need. For Oath Shot the gambling aspect is even more cleear, you’ll either instantly recharge all your skills or instantly lock them for an achingly long ten seconds. Therfore, it’s in your best interests to make sure that your arrows hit their targets.
Of course, the seasoned Ranger player knows that there are several ways of making sure their shots land and not the least of which is selecting the right bow. Because arrows are projectiles in addition to swing speed and range they also have what’s known as flight time. That arrow takes a bit of time to travel from your character to its target which, of course, varies by bow. In shooting an arrow, there’s two distinct parts – the swing speed and the flight time. The first determines just how quickly you can launch arrows at a target or just how many arrows you can get off during the duration of a preparation. While the second determines just how much time a target has to dodge that arrow. And dodging arrows is something you don’t want to happen when it’s going to come back to haunt you. Arrow shots can be dodged but by selecting the right bow, one with a short flight time, you can make it a much more difficult proposition. But you can also lower your flight time by swapping out to a different bow. Experienced, dedicated bowmen are going to have a range of bows to pick between. Bows that have long ranges but long swing rates and bows that have short rang and low flight times, for example, that they can select from as the circumstances warrant.
For that matter, skills like Favorable Winds and Read the Wind will also shorten your flight time, (though not both at once) no matter the bow you use. You can also shorten flight time by getting closer to your target. Maximum flight times are measured at maximum range. Halve your range, halve the time it takes for your arrows to hit. For a skill like Oath Shot it might pay to make sure you’re in close. However your target can just as easily manage to stay out of range, dodging that shot as you chase after them. Beyond doding, an arrow can also be blocked by any number of skills that block physical attacks such as Deflect Arrows. Any such deflection also counts as a miss for the purposes of Marksman’s Wager or Oath Shots’ penalties. And, of course, although it’s difficult to counter a preparation while its in place, the effects of a preparation can be neutralized by skills which slow or prevent you from attacking, such as Faintheartedness or Pacifism. And while slowing your attack rate won’t affect Oath Shot much blocking or interrupting your attacks certainly will.
These two skills, then, are easily circumventable, if your opponents are out to prevent you from using bow attacks. And they’re risky enough even if things do go well. And only a primary Ranger is ever going to look at them seriously. And then only if they have a spare elite slot. The question, then, is whether or not they’re actually worth spending an elite slot to deal with a skill as potentially harmful as it is beneficial. In other words, are they really worth it?
A lot of Rangers thought so about Marksman’s Wager when it was a normal skill, of course. Rangers, after all, are used to dealing with making sure their arrows don’t miss so they don’t necessarily concern themselves with what happens when they miss but what happens when they actually hit. If it doesn’t work, Marksman’s Wager will force your character to rely on normal attacks for a short while – not a big deal when your character’s set up to sling a bow or if you’re already boosting your damage on attack. And when it works, Marksman’s Wager makes for a skill that can regain energy in an effective manner. Like any skill that will net your character energy for using it, it’s best to use it when you actually have energy you need to gain. Using Marksman’s Wager on a full energy bar or when you’ve just cast a Dodge isn’t optimal at all. Using it when you’re nearly out of energy is best because you’ll stand to gain more. And when you use your last energy to cast it you stand to lose a lot less – Swapping foci or using skills that cause Exhaustion can drop your character below zero energy while others like Energy Tap won’t go past that zero point, it’s not clear whether or not this can happen with Marksman’s Wager although it seems as though missing with Marksman’s Wager cannot drop your character below zero energy.
However, Marksman’s Wager is not the single, best skill at energy management, and not only because of its miss penalty. At best, with Expertise 12 and a shortbow with fires once every two seconds with arrows that take about .65 seconds to reach a target, you’ll spend three energy to have each of your arrows – which will repeatedly hit a target in about 2.65 seconds depnding on where you stand – gain nine energy per hit. If each of the roughly four arrows you can crank out lands over the twelve second duration of Marksman’s Wager you stand to gain roughly thirty-six energy. That’s at maximum range, of course, at point blank range where only the swing rate matters you can deal out about six arrows for fifty-four energy. Thirty-six energy is quite a lot, the equivalent of gaining about three energy per second or nine pips. However, the maximum energy that a Ranger can have is either twenty-five or wearing, say, Druid's armor twenty-nine – there’s no focus to consider because a bow is two handed. There’s energy you’re gaining that’s going to be wasted even if you start from zero. And for that matter, there’s not much you can do with that energy, not right away, because Marksman’s Wager requires that you pluck that bow each and every time you can to get the full benefit out of it. If you pause to rip off a spell you’re defeating the purpose of taking the time to buff up with a preparation to regain energy in the first place. It’s at once a bit too good yet is still very time intensive in order to get to work. True, you can use your attack skills while you’re prepped and you can use Marksman’s Wager to offset the cost of those skills. But, if you’re using a lot of attack skills you’ll probably want to have a lot of Expertise and that’s already reducing the cost of your attack skills to the point where you’re unlikely to run out of energy just by stringing together attack skills. And, if you’re stringing together bow attacks using Markman’s Wager is subpar because as a short-lived preparation you’ll need to spend a few crucial seconds every so often in order to renew its benefit – once every twenty four seconds with Marksman’s Wager – and that’s time you don’t spend attacking and that hurts your ability to deal damage or disruption. You’d be better off finiding a Zealous String, a bow modifier that gains you energy when it hits, and taking Barrage if you’re trying to find a way to use attack skills indefinintely. Marksman’s Wager is, then, best used to give your energy regeneration a quick boost when needed. You spend a lot of energy and as you get low you cast Marksman’s Wager and get off a few shots in order to regain it as your skills recharge. Use it in spurts recognizing that every hit that lands is a relative boost of +2 to +4 to your regeneration over the span of your bow shots rather than trying to squeeze every last drop of energy out of it, in so many words. It’s not so much a skill for the primary bow-slinging Ranger, who have better energy management built-in just with Expertise and their cheap, sustainable attacks, as it is a skill for the Ranger that’s planning to spend a lot of energy to support their bow.
Oath Shot is much more insidious, both in effect as well as benefit. It’s one shot to instantly recharge your skills so rather than managing energy what you’re managing with Oath Shot is time. Cooldown, specifically, which is just as important to the proper casting of skills as energy. A skillful player is one that will find a way to make sure they can reliably have the energy and time to cast the skills they need to be effective. Managing energy is important because you’ll need energy to cast most skills – signets being the exception, of course – but you’ll also want to manage your cooldown. Just as when managing energy you’ll find skills that won’t cost too much energy to cast, when managing time you’ll find skills that have the best casting times and you’ll fit them together in such a way so that their cooldowns make for combinations you can use again and again. Slotting them together so that you can string those skill combinations out as long as possible with as little wasted time in between casting skills. That’s the basic, rudimentary step in time management, just as not blowing your energy pool is the first step to energy management. Oath Shot is, then, a more advanced step because when it works, it will instantly recharge any skill you had uncharged letting you use those skills much more rapidly than you otherwise could. Skills like Oath Shot or Mantra of Recovery or Flourish can be as powerful in their own way as the best of skills that manage your energy, such as Blood is Power, because they allow your character to alter the normal patterns of chaining skills together.
Any cooldown management skill, though, works best when the recharge times you’re attempting to quickly recharge are longer. Shortening a skill that takes thirty seconds to recharge is likely going to benefit you a lot more than a skill that takes only two. Instant recharge skills like Oath Shot are further best the more skills you can recharge all at once. The more skills you can start to use again the more better. Note that Oath Shot will recharge any skill more quickly not just attacks or Ranger skills. The only skill it won’t recharge is Oath Shot itself. Just make sure that your character doesn’t miss.
Although, don’t overly worry about it. Ten seconds is a long time to go without skills in the midst of a battle but, just as with Marksman’s Wager, a primary Ranger is a character that can function without skills – your character won’t be at their best, to be sure, but they won’t be made completely useless as long as you can use your bow to get in some damage and you’ll have a decent bow because you’ll have spent some points on Marksmanship – and it’s a small price to pay for instantaneously recharging up to seven skills. Oath Shot has a relatively long cooldown itself so you can’t use it all that often, perhaps once per battle, but since it allows you to use your skills more than you normally would it can be extremely advantageous. What’s more of a concern is how it will impact your energy management. You can up to double the amount of energy you’ll be spending on skills over the same amount of time as another character and you’ll be adding the cost of Oath Shot to that as well. Having your skills recharged doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the energy to use them. So, you need to be careful when setting things up that you’re not overly taxing yourself. Even if your energy management is fine normally, adding Oath Shot to things can foul you up. That’s if, of course, you’re planning on keeping to cast if you’re looking to have a burst of casting then it’s all about putting that energy to the best effect. However, with proper care and attention to things you can keep casting and casting a lot more frequently.
Both these skills are wagers, they carry a steep penalty if the coin flips wrong but the benefit outweighs that penalty. Especially as you can exercise a large amount of control over the circumstances that would lead to you incurring the penalty.
Something for the gamblers today as we shine the bright and unrelenting light of the spotlight on a pair of skills that can either pay off big or cost you dear. This time it's:
Marksman's Wager and Oath Shot
“For 12 seconds, you gain 5-9 Energy whenever your arrows hit, but lose 10 Energy whenever your arrows fail to strike.” –Marksman’s Wager. Preparation. 5 energy, 2 seconds casting time, 24 seconds recharge time.
“If Oath Shot hits, all your other skills are recharged. If it misses, all your skills are disabled for 10 seconds. (50% miss chance with expertise less than 8.)” –Oath Shot. Bow Attack. 10 energy, next attack casting time, 20 seconds.
Most Ranger players are no doubt familiar with the skill Marksman's Wager. It was, before being given the elite tag, the staple energy management skill of many Ranger builds. And, while it was a normal skill, it could be quite effective in that role, perhaps not the best way of spending a slot but far from the worst, too. However, now that it’s elite there is a fair comparison, even a fair argument to drop it, to be made between it and that other hit or miss elite bow attack, Oath Shot, which although risky can be just as effective in its own right.
The basics to begin with, though. Linked to Expertise, the Ranger’s primary attribute, Marksman’s varies the amount of energy you’ll gain per hit (though not the energy you’ll lose). You’ll still get five energy per hit with no Expertise and there’s no miss rate on bows due to attributes being low or high – it’s damage that depends on depends on your bow’s attribute not how easy it is to attack with it, normally, anyway - on how so it’s not unreasonable to consider it unlinked. However, tucked away in the Ranger’s primary line it can be easy to overlook and using it as a non-Ranger requires your character to devote at least one spot and one weapon slot to supporting a bow so it’s not the most elegant of solutions. Now, excuse me while I light the big warning sign because, despite all evidence to the contrary, Oath Shot is linked to Marksmanship not Expertise. Don’t pay attention to what the skill descriptiong says, if skill descriptions were perfectly clear, there wouldn’t be a need for a column like this, would there? No, where it says Expertise mentally replace that with Marksmanship. So, Oath Shot should read:
“If Oath Shot hits, all your other skills are recharged. If it misses, all your skills are disabled for 10 seconds. (50% miss chance with marksmanship less than 8).”
Which makes it a bit worse for the non-primary Ranger because of that “50% miss chance with Marksmanship of 8 or less”. That means that if you have Marksmanship of 7 then no matter what you do your Oath Shot can still miss half the time – not something you like when your attacks will be locked. In this case, attributes do matter for how easy the attack is to land. And Marksmanship is often not the attribute that catches your eye when considering a secondary Ranger.
Expertise, though, affects both preparations and attacks (as well as every skill that’s not a spell. Except for Signets and adrenal skills but those have no energy cost so it doesn’t matter) so both Marksman’s Wager and Oath Shot will cost less energy to use as you pump Expertise higher. Of course, only a primary Ranger can get the benefit of Expertise.
Marksman’s Wager is a preparation. If stances are primarily defensive, non-magical skills which your character will use to buff up, then preparations are primarly offensive non-magical buffs. When you use a preparation your weapon’s attacks are somehow made better for a brief duration. Most - although not all – preparations are for bows and, naturally, they’re all found in the Ranger skill line. During the brief time a preparation is active it depends just how often you can swing your weapon to get that benefit, the more normal attacks you can make the more you’ll benefit. Since preparations are non-magical they can’t be stripped or countered once in place as can the Warrior beloved Conjured Elements or Judge’s Insight although they can certainly be stacked with such skills for greater effect, they can only be countered by having their casting interrupted by a skill which will interrupt any action, not just a spell. Distracting Blow, in other words, not Power Spike. Oath Shot is a bow attack. Meaning that it requires your character to hold a bow when using it. Further, the skill is activated in the course of a normal bow attack – in effect, the casting time and range of attack skills becomes the swing speed of the weapon you use to make them. Unlike most other weapons bows vary widely in their swing rate - perhaps more accurately called rate of fire when dealing with a ranged attack – and range. Just how long it takes to use a bow attack depends on what bow your character holds as does just how far away you can make it from. And when contemplating Marksman’s Wager and Oath Shot what kind of bow you pluck is important.
That’s because both skills give you a nice benefit when you hit and a harsh penalty when you miss. For Marksman’s Wager for the twelve seconds you have that preparation up and running you’ll either gain a bunch of energy each time you land an arrow attack or you’ll lose a bunch. One other thing to note about preparations here is that you cannot cancel them yourself, they remain active for their full duration unless you cast another preparation which, like a stance, will overwrite your old preparation, so for a full twelve seconds you’re stuck with bow shots that will sap your energy when you miss or might gain you more energy than you actually need. For Oath Shot the gambling aspect is even more cleear, you’ll either instantly recharge all your skills or instantly lock them for an achingly long ten seconds. Therfore, it’s in your best interests to make sure that your arrows hit their targets.
Of course, the seasoned Ranger player knows that there are several ways of making sure their shots land and not the least of which is selecting the right bow. Because arrows are projectiles in addition to swing speed and range they also have what’s known as flight time. That arrow takes a bit of time to travel from your character to its target which, of course, varies by bow. In shooting an arrow, there’s two distinct parts – the swing speed and the flight time. The first determines just how quickly you can launch arrows at a target or just how many arrows you can get off during the duration of a preparation. While the second determines just how much time a target has to dodge that arrow. And dodging arrows is something you don’t want to happen when it’s going to come back to haunt you. Arrow shots can be dodged but by selecting the right bow, one with a short flight time, you can make it a much more difficult proposition. But you can also lower your flight time by swapping out to a different bow. Experienced, dedicated bowmen are going to have a range of bows to pick between. Bows that have long ranges but long swing rates and bows that have short rang and low flight times, for example, that they can select from as the circumstances warrant.
For that matter, skills like Favorable Winds and Read the Wind will also shorten your flight time, (though not both at once) no matter the bow you use. You can also shorten flight time by getting closer to your target. Maximum flight times are measured at maximum range. Halve your range, halve the time it takes for your arrows to hit. For a skill like Oath Shot it might pay to make sure you’re in close. However your target can just as easily manage to stay out of range, dodging that shot as you chase after them. Beyond doding, an arrow can also be blocked by any number of skills that block physical attacks such as Deflect Arrows. Any such deflection also counts as a miss for the purposes of Marksman’s Wager or Oath Shots’ penalties. And, of course, although it’s difficult to counter a preparation while its in place, the effects of a preparation can be neutralized by skills which slow or prevent you from attacking, such as Faintheartedness or Pacifism. And while slowing your attack rate won’t affect Oath Shot much blocking or interrupting your attacks certainly will.
These two skills, then, are easily circumventable, if your opponents are out to prevent you from using bow attacks. And they’re risky enough even if things do go well. And only a primary Ranger is ever going to look at them seriously. And then only if they have a spare elite slot. The question, then, is whether or not they’re actually worth spending an elite slot to deal with a skill as potentially harmful as it is beneficial. In other words, are they really worth it?
A lot of Rangers thought so about Marksman’s Wager when it was a normal skill, of course. Rangers, after all, are used to dealing with making sure their arrows don’t miss so they don’t necessarily concern themselves with what happens when they miss but what happens when they actually hit. If it doesn’t work, Marksman’s Wager will force your character to rely on normal attacks for a short while – not a big deal when your character’s set up to sling a bow or if you’re already boosting your damage on attack. And when it works, Marksman’s Wager makes for a skill that can regain energy in an effective manner. Like any skill that will net your character energy for using it, it’s best to use it when you actually have energy you need to gain. Using Marksman’s Wager on a full energy bar or when you’ve just cast a Dodge isn’t optimal at all. Using it when you’re nearly out of energy is best because you’ll stand to gain more. And when you use your last energy to cast it you stand to lose a lot less – Swapping foci or using skills that cause Exhaustion can drop your character below zero energy while others like Energy Tap won’t go past that zero point, it’s not clear whether or not this can happen with Marksman’s Wager although it seems as though missing with Marksman’s Wager cannot drop your character below zero energy.
However, Marksman’s Wager is not the single, best skill at energy management, and not only because of its miss penalty. At best, with Expertise 12 and a shortbow with fires once every two seconds with arrows that take about .65 seconds to reach a target, you’ll spend three energy to have each of your arrows – which will repeatedly hit a target in about 2.65 seconds depnding on where you stand – gain nine energy per hit. If each of the roughly four arrows you can crank out lands over the twelve second duration of Marksman’s Wager you stand to gain roughly thirty-six energy. That’s at maximum range, of course, at point blank range where only the swing rate matters you can deal out about six arrows for fifty-four energy. Thirty-six energy is quite a lot, the equivalent of gaining about three energy per second or nine pips. However, the maximum energy that a Ranger can have is either twenty-five or wearing, say, Druid's armor twenty-nine – there’s no focus to consider because a bow is two handed. There’s energy you’re gaining that’s going to be wasted even if you start from zero. And for that matter, there’s not much you can do with that energy, not right away, because Marksman’s Wager requires that you pluck that bow each and every time you can to get the full benefit out of it. If you pause to rip off a spell you’re defeating the purpose of taking the time to buff up with a preparation to regain energy in the first place. It’s at once a bit too good yet is still very time intensive in order to get to work. True, you can use your attack skills while you’re prepped and you can use Marksman’s Wager to offset the cost of those skills. But, if you’re using a lot of attack skills you’ll probably want to have a lot of Expertise and that’s already reducing the cost of your attack skills to the point where you’re unlikely to run out of energy just by stringing together attack skills. And, if you’re stringing together bow attacks using Markman’s Wager is subpar because as a short-lived preparation you’ll need to spend a few crucial seconds every so often in order to renew its benefit – once every twenty four seconds with Marksman’s Wager – and that’s time you don’t spend attacking and that hurts your ability to deal damage or disruption. You’d be better off finiding a Zealous String, a bow modifier that gains you energy when it hits, and taking Barrage if you’re trying to find a way to use attack skills indefinintely. Marksman’s Wager is, then, best used to give your energy regeneration a quick boost when needed. You spend a lot of energy and as you get low you cast Marksman’s Wager and get off a few shots in order to regain it as your skills recharge. Use it in spurts recognizing that every hit that lands is a relative boost of +2 to +4 to your regeneration over the span of your bow shots rather than trying to squeeze every last drop of energy out of it, in so many words. It’s not so much a skill for the primary bow-slinging Ranger, who have better energy management built-in just with Expertise and their cheap, sustainable attacks, as it is a skill for the Ranger that’s planning to spend a lot of energy to support their bow.
Oath Shot is much more insidious, both in effect as well as benefit. It’s one shot to instantly recharge your skills so rather than managing energy what you’re managing with Oath Shot is time. Cooldown, specifically, which is just as important to the proper casting of skills as energy. A skillful player is one that will find a way to make sure they can reliably have the energy and time to cast the skills they need to be effective. Managing energy is important because you’ll need energy to cast most skills – signets being the exception, of course – but you’ll also want to manage your cooldown. Just as when managing energy you’ll find skills that won’t cost too much energy to cast, when managing time you’ll find skills that have the best casting times and you’ll fit them together in such a way so that their cooldowns make for combinations you can use again and again. Slotting them together so that you can string those skill combinations out as long as possible with as little wasted time in between casting skills. That’s the basic, rudimentary step in time management, just as not blowing your energy pool is the first step to energy management. Oath Shot is, then, a more advanced step because when it works, it will instantly recharge any skill you had uncharged letting you use those skills much more rapidly than you otherwise could. Skills like Oath Shot or Mantra of Recovery or Flourish can be as powerful in their own way as the best of skills that manage your energy, such as Blood is Power, because they allow your character to alter the normal patterns of chaining skills together.
Any cooldown management skill, though, works best when the recharge times you’re attempting to quickly recharge are longer. Shortening a skill that takes thirty seconds to recharge is likely going to benefit you a lot more than a skill that takes only two. Instant recharge skills like Oath Shot are further best the more skills you can recharge all at once. The more skills you can start to use again the more better. Note that Oath Shot will recharge any skill more quickly not just attacks or Ranger skills. The only skill it won’t recharge is Oath Shot itself. Just make sure that your character doesn’t miss.
Although, don’t overly worry about it. Ten seconds is a long time to go without skills in the midst of a battle but, just as with Marksman’s Wager, a primary Ranger is a character that can function without skills – your character won’t be at their best, to be sure, but they won’t be made completely useless as long as you can use your bow to get in some damage and you’ll have a decent bow because you’ll have spent some points on Marksmanship – and it’s a small price to pay for instantaneously recharging up to seven skills. Oath Shot has a relatively long cooldown itself so you can’t use it all that often, perhaps once per battle, but since it allows you to use your skills more than you normally would it can be extremely advantageous. What’s more of a concern is how it will impact your energy management. You can up to double the amount of energy you’ll be spending on skills over the same amount of time as another character and you’ll be adding the cost of Oath Shot to that as well. Having your skills recharged doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the energy to use them. So, you need to be careful when setting things up that you’re not overly taxing yourself. Even if your energy management is fine normally, adding Oath Shot to things can foul you up. That’s if, of course, you’re planning on keeping to cast if you’re looking to have a burst of casting then it’s all about putting that energy to the best effect. However, with proper care and attention to things you can keep casting and casting a lot more frequently.
Both these skills are wagers, they carry a steep penalty if the coin flips wrong but the benefit outweighs that penalty. Especially as you can exercise a large amount of control over the circumstances that would lead to you incurring the penalty.
