Curse

Neo-LD · May 13, 2005, 12:37 AM // 00:37

Like everyone has been infatuated by the dang thing.

You take 2 seconds to cast it, every 12 seconds. That means that 1/7 (one seventh) of your entire battle time is spent getting ready to fire. Its bonus (arrows travel twice as fast and do extra damage) is good, in fact, I'd say its the best preperation effect the ranger has, but it only lasts a lousy 12 seconds.

Now, there are two alternatives:

1) dont use it. Not all rangers need it, some can make do perfectly well without souped up shots. (Trappers, Barrage Bots)

2) Use Favorable Wids. It lasts more than a minute. It gives nearly the same effect. It gives the same bonus to rangers on your team. The only downsides is that it can be killed (unlikly and laughable that they would attack it) and that an enemy ranger could take advantage of it.

Well, if you need double speed arrows that bad, favorable winds looks 10x better to me.

Dreamsmith · May 13, 2005, 01:12 AM // 01:12

RtW was barely worth it before they nerfed it around the time of the final BWE. Unless you were combining it will a speed booster and Dual Shot, it wasn't worth taking the two seconds to activate when you could get a whole other attack in the same amount of time.

Then they nerfed the damage of it along with a number of other ranger skills. Now, I'm not sure how you can even get enough damage out of it to make up for the lost attack. It seems like it's just a losing proposition now -- lose an attack to get a little extra damage on each attack for the next 12 seconds, which is now such a tiny amount that it's unlikely it'll add up to how much damage you would have gotten if you'd just used another bow attack in those two seconds it took to activate.

Several preparations in Wilderness Survival now last 24 seconds, and add more damage than RtW does. I'd say just ignore it and go for some other preparation. The nice thing about RtW was that you didn't have to invest in WS for it, but you don't really need to invest in WS for Apply Poison, either -- even at zero, its duration is longer than the duration between your attacks. Alas, it doesn't benefit any from speed boosts or Dual Shot. For something that does, you'll need to sink some points in WS.