Thursday, November 20, 2008

Pew Pew!

A long time ago, I decided I wanted to roll up a Ranger and try my hand at long range engagement. Less damage than an Elementalist, but more armor, longer range, and tons of nifty little tricks. So, I rolled up a Ranger in Prophecies and dubbed her "Reya Dawnstrike." Ground her up to level 7 in pre-searing Ascalon, then let her collect dust for a year and a half. Then, two or so months ago, I decided that I wanted to play a Ranger again, but that I couldn't bear to go 90% of the game with only 170 atribute points. So, I deleted her, remade her as a Nightfall character, and within 5 days, she was level 20, with a fully runed set of Norn armor (she looks like medieval Russian special forces), plus a few sweet bows, three of which were end-game rares from Prophecies (Deldrimor bows).

Capped a few novel elites, and tooled around Eye of the North for a while. I took her to a few ABs, but I felt that she wasn't pulling her weight, and I stopped using her so much. Busted her out again, capped Glass Arrows, and had some fun running a Glass Conjure spiker, absolutely creaming foes. But that build had energy issues, and got kinda boring, as far too many people use Stoneflesh Aura and Defy Pain these days. Again, she was shelved.

Then a week or two ago, I was watching Stealing Society and Rebel Rising (two top ten guilds), duke it out in a tournament match. Each GvG team ran two rangers, and all four rangers were using Expert's Dexterity plus Read the Wind (+25% IAS, +2 Marksmanship, +10 dmg, double speed arrows). In short, they were high caliber turrets with auto-fire, smashing the opposing team. The next update after this match, Expert's Dexterity got nerfed (+15% IAS, +1 Marksmanship), and the build fell out of favor.

Kinda.

Now, rather than being interrupt heavy midliners that use degen for the bulk of their damage, the idea of a "turret" ranger is popular. Some people still run ED+RtW, some use RtW+Flail for the same rate of fire, etc. Keeping this in mind, I specced Reya into a similar build, using Burning Arrow (which I capped this morning) as my elite. I didn't have any IAS in my build, but I had a few attacks with short cast times, so I used this to compress my damage in a spike.

Goddamn.

Hot knife, and butter. We won nine battles in a row this morning, and two more when I woke up. Not only was the damage sickening, but I had far less energy issues than with my Glass Conjure build. RtW made using my longbow feasible (I normally favor Expert's Focus, as it lets me spam Needling Shot for 1 energy, with instant recharge on the attack), and on any of the cliffs and peaks of the Grenz Frontier map, having a longbow means you get to reach out and touch somebody. A lone warrior? Snared, burnt, and bled. Next? It was nice to overextend so freely, and be able to disengage a fight almost on a whim. Not nearly as brutal (or tough) as my warrior, but that's a given.

My next project is to level up a Dervish, and to find some use for my level 20 Paragon that I never seem to play...

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