Curse

mikey · Aug 16, 2005, 07:06 AM // 07:06

Well I can't argue with that testing

, it is very thorough I must admit. That means Tiger's Fury and all other increase attack speed descriptions are incorrect. Something has gone wrong on ANet's side, with either calculations (they did it wrong too?) or with the skill description (should be 50% not 33%). I think this will need to be presented to the attention of the devs...

And yeah I am mikey from TGH forums, I actually tried a Quick Shot build in tombs (I revived the thread a while back), and it proved rather successful. Problems that arose were... Fertile Season, that was mainly it, but if one were to try it out now you would face "Shields Up!" or Aegis or other forms of evasion/blocking/damage-reduction.

I also concluded that energy was not a big problem, unless you faced consistent enchantments and stances/shouts which made our arrows miss. An arrow which misses does not get that 1 precious energy back from zealous.

With 3-4 Quick Shot Rangers, your target will fall very fast, you will need no more than 4-5 arrows each and an increase of attack speed stance is not required. In the 4 seconds it takes to get a Healing Seed up, the target was usually already dead, if for some reason the target was still alive, we'd have to change.

QS has a net cost of 2 energy if your arrow strikes, combine that with regen and you can last for quite a while, especially if you have breaks in between. The benefit of having several QS Rangers is evident with energy management. A single QS ranger won't go very far in tombs, with 2-4 they are powerful and can essentially 'spike' people. The more QS Rangers you have the more energy efficient you are, you should also have a Frozen Soil or two down to keep your targets dead. You should be able to decimate an enemy team in no time.

However, you will only destroy teams who aren't ready for a volley of arrows, which are becoming less and less common as Ranger builds become even more popular.

Quick Shot Rangers are basically Air Ele spikers which can bypass Protective Spirit and have better armour. But Quick Shot Rangers are very easy to disable, they are the same as smiters, spamming a single skill. Diversion, Distracting Shot, the warrior 20sec interupt, Signet of Humility, blindness, empathy, spirit shackles, spirit of failure, price of failure and the list goes on. The most deadly would have to be diversion, the interupts, and spirit shackles.

The damage potential is huge, but the counters list only keeps growing

.

And if you want to beef up your damage more, here are some skills I considered using. Order of Pain/Vampire, Judge's Insight and Winnowing (that 4dmg helps when you are spamming it). Single target spells like Weaken Armour and Barbs would only be useful for toppling Ghostly Heroes off the altar.

And ICURADik, this was the first time on any board I've seen it to be concluded as 1 shot per 1.33 through proper testing, and I've been on GW boards since E34E. So either you are right and I missed all the threads which had the info, or there are many out there like me who calculated it the wrong way. Yep that's right, I use to work it out the wrong way, until I realised that 1.5 shots per second is not 33% faster than 1 shot per second (during my Quick Shot obsession) and worked out the proper maths way.

Syno Nym · Aug 16, 2005, 10:01 AM // 10:01

Hmm good point Mickey, I forgot that Signet of humility is quite a pain in the *** for this build... Distracting shot on the Signet could resolve the problem though ^^

AtomicMew · Aug 17, 2005, 12:01 AM // 00:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mind Wallaby

Actually traversc is correct because the Tiger's Fury description (and presumably Frenzy and Flurry) is wrong. The skill increases your speed by 50%, not 33%. I consistently time TF + shorbow at 1.333s (+- 0.033s) between shots, not 1.5s as you would expect if the skill description were correct.

Yeah, I realized the description was wrong. Mikey, I based the .66 RoF off of tests from gwonline ranger forum. And basically, empirical testing is the only way to go. There are MANY many discrepancies between what one might think intuitively, and what actually happens.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make in my post is that the damage is not too far off: given about +14 or so dmg from kindle instead of RtW and hornbow's innate 10% penetration (which the JI build does not get). Which is true. I still maintain that QZ/kindle is the way to go.

ICURADik · Aug 17, 2005, 12:38 AM // 00:38

I would use Ignite, so if you have a second QS ranger he can bring winnowing instead of favorable and it will still affect your arrows.

Ender Ward · Aug 17, 2005, 12:50 AM // 00:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by traversc

hornbow's innate 10% penetration (which the JI build does not get).

Pages back me and another poster talked about the pros and cons of using a Horn Bow in the Judge's Insight build instead of a Flatbow. We talked about what was more valuable when doing shot/QS, the higher speed on the Flatbow or the innate armor penetration of the Horn Bow (that stacks for 30% total with JI).

Result was that it's about even, and is more about personal preference than anything else.

So ofcourse that innate 10% AP is available to the JI build, by simply switching to a horn bow and taking a slight hit to one's rate of fire.

For pure, sustained DPS, Kindle and FW is the way to go, yes. Ofcourse I would stil use a Flatbow, unless operating under Quickening Zephyr in 'burst' mode (when bow speed matters not). So good to have the ability to switch weapons

.

AtomicMew · Aug 17, 2005, 01:38 AM // 01:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ender Ward

Pages back me and another poster talked about the pros and cons of using a Horn Bow in the Judge's Insight build instead of a Flatbow. We talked about what was more valuable when doing shot/QS, the higher speed on the Flatbow or the innate armor penetration of the Horn Bow (that stacks for 30% total with JI).

Result was that it's about even, and is more about personal preference than anything else.

So ofcourse that innate 10% AP is available to the JI build, by simply switching to a horn bow and taking a slight hit to one's rate of fire.

For pure, sustained DPS, Kindle and FW is the way to go, yes. Ofcourse I would stil use a Flatbow, unless operating under Quickening Zephyr in 'burst' mode (when bow speed matters not). So good to have the ability to switch weapons

.

The attack speed with QZ is independent of bow type. The JI build doesn't use QZ, and therefore has to use the fast RoF bow (flat or short). QZ + kindle does not.

mikey · Aug 17, 2005, 03:10 AM // 03:10

It has been cleared up in the Q&A forum that it is in fact a 50% increase in attack speed not 33%. The problem is ANet calculates it as -33% refire rate which is where all the problems arose.

I'll be emailing GW Support about this... to change the wording on the skill description.

Ender Ward · Aug 17, 2005, 03:27 AM // 03:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by traversc

The attack speed with QZ is independent of bow type. The JI build doesn't use QZ, and therefore has to use the fast RoF bow (flat or short). QZ + kindle does not.

Back then we weren't talking about a QZ build, I specifically pointed that out in my post. We were talking about the shot/QS way of using Quickshot and about the JI build. One doesn't have to use a fast rate of fire bow, you can do shot/QS with the Horn Bow as well. You trade rate of fire for more damage. Again something I pointed out in my post.

If you're using QS under QZ then ofcourse you'd always be using a Horn Bow, that's quite obvious.

But again, nothing prevents the JI build from utilising a Horn Bow.

AtomicMew · Aug 17, 2005, 03:45 AM // 03:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ender Ward

Back then we weren't talking about a QZ build, I specifically pointed that out in my post. We were talking about the shot/QS way of using Quickshot and about the JI build. One doesn't have to use a fast rate of fire bow, you can do shot/QS with the Horn Bow as well. You trade rate of fire for more damage. Again something I pointed out in my post.

If you're using QS under QZ then ofcourse you'd always be using a Horn Bow, that's quite obvious.

But again, nothing prevents the JI build from utilising a Horn Bow.

Exactly, which is why a QS build utilizing QZ is superior.

Ender Ward · Aug 17, 2005, 06:08 AM // 06:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by traversc

Exactly, which is why a QS build utilizing QZ is superior.

Not necessarily.

Multiple Rangers (4, 5 if you can fight with 2 monks) using this build coordinating on the same target usually kill it in 2 arrows (from each Ranger), before Prot Spirit/S-Hands come up.
Make sure NR is down first (if you failed to kill the target before Prot Spirit/S-hands come up, you want some extra time to kill it before Healing Seed is dropped).
Buff them with an Orders Necro. Before orders are up, hit a decoy target. When up, switch to the called target. You'll be surprised at the effectiveness.

Ofcourse QS Rangers in burst mode under QZ can do this too, but they expend too much energy, and can't keep moving from target to target at the same rate.

Lastly, JI builds are better against warrior heavy teams. Coordinated fire on a warrior take him out almost as quickly as a caster, due to conversion to holy damage + armor penetration. And you'll need this, since with that many rangers you'll be very low on melee counters.

ICURADik · Aug 17, 2005, 06:31 AM // 06:31

You gotta be kidding me.

Ender Ward · Aug 17, 2005, 06:35 AM // 06:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by ICURADik

You gotta be kidding me.

Try it.

Works the same way as the now obsolete Air spike builds used to, only Prot Spirit can't save people due to the rate of fire.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention. If Fertile is up, you're gonna have to drop Zephyr, switch to Horn Bows and go into burst mode. No other way to punch through that much HP and + armor.

Neo-LD · Aug 17, 2005, 11:48 AM // 11:48

Umm yea Ill vouch for it, considering its a build my guild uses in tombs frequently

So much for being unique.

ICURADik · Aug 17, 2005, 12:09 PM // 12:09

Good Guilds don't run spikes with 3-4 identical characters anymore... They run balanced builds a with a mix of skills. They capitalize on your lack of diversity, in this case making heavy use of Aegis, Shields Up, Shieling Hands, and Healing Seed to reduce your spike to almost nothing.

Neo-LD · Aug 17, 2005, 12:43 PM // 12:43

While balance is good, teams made up a large contingent of nearly identical characters still have their place (indeed, look at the spirit group) The reason they are sucessful is because they are so similar, they can capitalize on each others strengths, andhave only 1 or 2 collective weaknesses.

For example, a ranger group capitalizes on its collective strngth with favorable winds for bonus damage, and uses quickening zephyr and natures renewal because the entire group is numb to it. They are all powered up by the same stuff, so it is easy to lay fav winds or get an orders necro to power up your entire party- an orders necro woud not be so effective if there was only one ranger and a bunch of eles...

ALso, if everyone is the same, you have only one collective weakness. This makes it very easy to plan to deal with your expected counter. For example, rangers normally lose to teams that have enchantments and hexes flying everywhere.- their damage isnt enough to punch through. But with a couple NR spammers, the weakness of every member in the group is solved at once.

However, while the specialized group can stack things against their collective weakness, no team can afford to stack as many things to take advantage of it. This is because if you waste so many characters and skill slots planning to exploit the weakness of a ranger group, you are quite dead against any other group. Thus they can only take a moderate amount to counter rangers, a moderate amount to counter warriors, moderate to counter eles, etc.

Now persoannly I love balanced groups, I think its the way the game was meant to be played. But theme groups are fun to play sometimes.

AtomicMew · Aug 17, 2005, 11:39 PM // 23:39

Quote:

Ofcourse QS Rangers in burst mode under QZ can do this too, but they expend too much energy, and can't keep moving from target to target at the same rate.

I disagree. We agreed that QS+QZ can sustain about 12 seconds of continuous fire. You also said somewhere that it takes about 4~ seconds for a coordinated team to take down a target. So QS+QZ could potentially take down 3 targets with zero down time.

In practice though, you're team would probably have a pause between targets. But considering you would have to spend 6 seconds under NR to buff yourself again, a QS+QZ could use that time to recharge energy.

mikey · Aug 18, 2005, 10:18 AM // 10:18

If you don't get drained, I'm pretty sure you can last longer than 12 seconds, with 3-4 Quick Shot Rangers you don't need an attack speed increase.

Let's see how far you can get with 32 energy. Assume Quick Shot costs 2 energy (3-1).

At 1 shot per second, you are using 2 energy per second, and regening 2 energy every 3 seconds.

In 3 seconds you will spend 6 and regen 2. That's a net loss of 4 energy every 3 seconds, you have 32 energy, so that will take 24 seconds to deplete your energy.

In an optimum situation you will fire 24 Quick Shots in 24 seconds.

Neo-LD · Aug 18, 2005, 11:45 AM // 11:45

Whree as a ranger going Normal -> Quick -> Normal -> Quick, spending 2 energy per shot, will spend 1 and then gain 1 (no QZ) or spend 2 and gain nothing (QZ)

mikey · Aug 19, 2005, 11:50 AM // 11:50

In tombs you will almost always face a QZ, so factoring it out isn't really an option.

Arathorn5000 · Sep 03, 2005, 11:21 PM // 23:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neo-LD

Frenzy is 10x worse than TF. If you want to use it, go ahead. I saw a war use that on while beating me while I ws monking the other day. Know what? He died in less than a second as soon as I let my buddies know. Dont use frenzy. Especially not when there are necros or smiters around. People who deal shadow or holy damage can attack whoever the heck they want.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neo-LD

1. TF costs 10. Frenzy costs 5. Warriros have little energy.

2. TF needs attribute points. Frenzy doesnt. Warriors deal more damage with their weapon and strength pumped up.

3. TF has no defensive penelty. Frenzy causes you to take double damage. But that doesnt matter because:

1. There is a good chance they wont notice.
2. If they do, they must lose all their monk targets to switch to you in order to try to gank you.
3. You can hit sprint to cancel frenzy, in which case their attempt to gank you has been brutally denied, and they have wasted a huge amount of time for maybe 2 hits before you switched. Not to mention it gave your monks a breather.
4. Even if you stay in frenzy, as ensign posted in his numbers, you are only taking a small amount of extra damage compared to what a typical caster would take.

Given this, the fact that frenzy may produce the effect of drawing enemy fire is practically an ADVANTAGE.

Honestly, W/R is a VERY sketchy combo for a reason. TF on a war sucks. Really bad. Indisputably bad. TF wars just suck. Period. I would *maybe* rather have a paladin.

Change yer mind much?

(not that I really care, but you have to admit I BURNED you on this one)