Curse

Sunbear · Jan 08, 2007, 09:06 AM // 09:06

Here is a Ranger build that I have been using on my ranger and on my heroes.
It is an extremely deadly spike of dmg, able to kill off most "softies" in 2 attacks.

Ra/E

Armor: +Energy as this build is energy hungry.
Weapon: Hornbow with an elemental string and a grip of your choice, fortitude or enchanting.

Attributes:
Expertise - 14 (10 + 1 + 3)
Elemental of choice - 11
Marksmanship - 11 (10 + 1)

Skills:

Dual Shot
Needling Shot
Distracting Shot
Savage Shot
Lightning Reflexes
Conjure Flame/Frost/Lightning - Your choice
Glass Arrows (Elite)
Rez Signet/ or Favorable Winds

Basically, start with conjure, then prep with glass arrows, open up with dual shot, resulting in an instant spike, followed with lightning reflexes to speed up your attacks, as soon as your target is below 50% health, start tapping needling shot as fast as possible. Use the two interrupts as needed.

The main disadvantage of this is obviously, there is no healing, so you will be completely dependent on your monks.

dgb · Jan 08, 2007, 09:22 AM // 09:22

Vampiric is better for damage, stop using sundering.

Cathode_Reborn · Jan 08, 2007, 09:28 AM // 09:28

Looks pretty good, I'll try it out sometime

Sunbear · Jan 08, 2007, 09:35 AM // 09:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by dgb

Vampiric is better for damage, stop using sundering.

I'm not sure of the details but I believe that the innate 10% AP for the hornbow also applies to the elemental dmg added with conjure and that is why I recommended a sundering mod, however I will definitely try this out again and see which one is better

dgb · Jan 08, 2007, 09:50 AM // 09:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sunbear

I'm not sure of the details but I believe that the innate 10% AP for the hornbow also applies to the elemental dmg added with conjure and that is why I recommended a sundering mod, however I will definitely try this out again and see which one is better

I fail to see how that affects anything to be honest. Sundering is garbage, full stop. If you want damage use vampiric. Even if it does work for the conjure damage (which I really doubt it does), it's still not going to outdamage vampiric.

If you want any extra proof look at what all the ranger spikers use. Vampiric Hornbows.

Sunbear · Jan 08, 2007, 10:00 AM // 10:00

I just realized that you cannot have both an elemental string and vampiric mod.
I will make the changes to the original post. It should be an elemental string and a grip of your choice.

dgb · Jan 08, 2007, 10:20 AM // 10:20

Very true - didn't notice it myself.

Evilsod · Jan 08, 2007, 10:38 AM // 10:38

Did it ever occur to you that you'd probably do more damage if you took 11 points OFF your 'element of wasted attributes', brought along a Vampiric or Zealous String and upped your Marksmanship?

Better e-management or just plain more damage > Conjures.

fallot · Jan 08, 2007, 11:04 AM // 11:04

Why are you using Glass Arrows instead of the non-elite Read The Wind which is linked to Marksmanship ?

Amy Awien · Jan 08, 2007, 11:54 AM // 11:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sunbear

... but I believe that the innate 10% AP for the hornbow also applies to the elemental dmg added with conjure ...

Yes, the conjure damage is armor dependant, thus AP should affect it. But a sundering mod will only add it's bonus once every 5 hits and that is what makes it relatively weak. A vamp string adds 5 dmg on every arrow, or 25 in 5 hits and this is why, in general, vampiric > sundering.

[skill]Conflagration[/skill] Conflagration could be used to convert your arrow damage to fire for use with Conjure Flame[skill]Conjure Flame[/skill].

Sunbear · Jan 08, 2007, 01:40 PM // 13:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by fallot

Why are you using Glass Arrows instead of the non-elite Read The Wind which is linked to Marksmanship ?

Glass arrows at expertise 15 lasts 35 seconds, deals +15 damage and causes bleeding for 20 seconds. Combined with your conjure and the ranger is dealing an additional +30 dmg on each shot. Certainly, this is only my view on the build, I'd be very pleased if there were a better alternative spike to this

Sunbear · Jan 08, 2007, 01:41 PM // 13:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Evilsod

Did it ever occur to you that you'd probably do more damage if you took 11 points OFF your 'element of wasted attributes', brought along a Vampiric or Zealous String and upped your Marksmanship?

Better e-management or just plain more damage > Conjures.

Could you give an example?

Epinephrine · Jan 08, 2007, 03:07 PM // 15:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sunbear

Could you give an example?

Sure:
You have 11 marksmanship, +15 from Glass (elite) and +15 from conjure (afected by armour).

Your base damage with a bow is 15-28, or 21.5 on average. You get a 16% critical hit rate with 11 marksmanship, and deal 91.7% of listed damage.

With a 15% mod (say 15%>50) and customised, your average shot is hitting for a base of 27.2 damage, with critical hits of 50 damage, working out to 30.9 damage on average per shot, before you add your preparations etc.

With 16 Marksmanship you get a 23.3% critical hit rate, and deal 114.9% of listed damage. Your average arrow hit (before bonuses) is for 34.08, and your critical hits are for 62.8, for 40.8 damage a shot before preparations etc.

So, you gain 10 damage an arrow just by increasing your marksmanship.

Using Read the Wind adds a flat 10 damage per shot (armour ignoring), so with just a non-elite preparation (RtW) and top marksmanship you have 50.8 damage a shot, while the conjure etc... was getting 60.9 - so we need to make up 10 damage.

Well, this setup can use a vampiric bow, since it doesn't need an elemental string. That's 5, 5 more to go. Favorable Winds would be an easy fix. With FW, RtW, a vampiric bow and 16 marksmanship you already exceed the damage done by the conjure+glass arrows; granted, you don't bleed people yet, but you also have an elite skill free, and any marksmanship skills used get a bigger bonus damage. In addition, since you deal physical damage this way you can benefit from Order of Pain or Order of the Vampire, you can get bonus damage from Winnowing; since you don't have an enchantment on you you could use Forked Shot if you wanted, or could benefit from Brutal Weapon if someone had it and so on.

It's simpler and does more base damage, and has less that can go wrong; you don't lose 15 damage from a simple disenchant either.
------
When needling, the damage would drop with the above build (RtW instead of the combo) since the arrow damage is fixed; you get 16 damage with 11 marksmanship, and 21 with 16 marksmanship, only a difference of 5.

So yours would be:
16+15+15 = 46
With 16 Marks, Vamp, RtW and FW
21+5+10+6 = 42

So you do lose out on a bit of damage there - but as mentioned, you still have an elite slot.

lennymon · Jan 08, 2007, 05:29 PM // 17:29

You are absolutely right on with the numbers there, high armor will favor the single damage source of rtw/fw as well. But since I happen to like glass arrows I just want to throw one more fact out there. Glass arrows >30sec, rtw/fw 24 or less AND thats if the spirit doesn't get nuked AND the target isn't allowed to have archers. How many times have you ever had to reapply rtw in a fight? Elite spot or not Glass Arrows is a worthy prep if the surrounding build uses it well. I've never had much time for the conjures personally so why not consider adding FW to your glass cannon build, lose the element and throw in dual/forked with a higher marksmanship?

Sunbear · Jan 08, 2007, 06:09 PM // 18:09

thanks for the helpful inputs
The reason why I say fw is optional, as you pointed out, is assuming that the opposition also does not have archers.
However, now that I see the importance of marksmanship, I would say, perhaps consider switch the attributes around.
I'm going to switch out savage shot for forked and see what kind of results i get
14 Marksmanship
10 Expertise
11 Conjure

Epinephrine · Jan 08, 2007, 06:16 PM // 18:16

True enough, lennymon makes a good point.
12+3 Expertise
12+2 Marksmanship

This gets you an average non crit of 31.8 base, 58.6 on a crit for 37.3 or so average damage per arrow; the FW and Vamp add 11 per shot, the Needling Shot is up to 19 damage instead of 16, and you still have the 15 from glass arrows -

So your normal damage is ~63.3 per arrow (higher than before), your Needling Shot is hitting for 45 per arrow (1 less than before). It's a little less complex in a way, more dmage ignores armour, and you do a bit more damage excepting when spamming the needling, where you lose a damage per shot.

I attached a little weapon file I use; it's in excel format if you have excel. Really simple, allows computing damage per hit and DPS for the weapons, taking dagger dual attack rate, critical strikes attribute, attribute in the weapon, critical hit rate and so on into account.

Evilsod · Jan 08, 2007, 08:22 PM // 20:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sunbear

Glass arrows at expertise 15 lasts 35 seconds, deals +15 damage and causes bleeding for 20 seconds. Combined with your conjure and the ranger is dealing an additional +30 dmg on each shot. Certainly, this is only my view on the build, I'd be very pleased if there were a better alternative spike to this

Erm... Glass Arrows specifically says bleeding if the arrows are BLOCKED. Blocked is not a common thing in PvE, barely anything carries Whirling Defences, Guardian, Aegis, etc. Shields Up is only common in a few places.

Its also a 30 second recharge at 10e (which i guess doesn't matter since you need high exp to run it). If it is interrupted then your waiting a hell of a lot longer to get it back up than you would be for RtW.

It just doesn't seem potent enough imo. At 15 Expertise you get +15 damage. 15 Expertise been a stupidly large amount if you don't intend to be spamming skills with a decent E-cost. If your blasting Needling Shot at them your working in 15 damage a second (just using the prep here) and thats only if they're below 50% health. What if say you brought Kindle Arrows and ran 9/12/15? And used maybe Prep Shot as your elite energy management to counter the lower expertise.
On a basic 60AL target you'd be doing 20 extra a hit (which ok in PvE is almost never the case).
Or if you used Apply Poison (not the best of choices for needling shot but bear with me), if you hit every second you'd be doing 8 damage a second, half that of Glass Arrows but using less expertise to make it useful and with the added bonus of been able to spread the condition around till a foe appears with less than 50% health.
Then theres the golden oldy... Melandrus Arrows. Obviously for places you know your gonna be finding enchantments. You always get 6 damage a second, with a reasonable chance of hitting for an extra 24. Giving you 30 damage a second and the option of running a self heal.
Plenty of enemies use enchantments, especially the ones your most likely to be targetting first as a ranger. Giving you twice the damage output of Glass Arrows and alot more options available to you stat wise. It may have around half the duration but it shouldn't take you longer than 18seconds to kill a single target so recasting it while choosing another is hardly a huge loss.

Glass Arrow may be a worthy prep, but it just doesn't seem powerful enough compared to its non-elite counterparts, the bonus additional bonus just isn't easy enough to activate. If we're talking about shields up then the chances are that bleeding is all your gonna be hitting the foe with without Seeking Arrows or Crossfire.

It seems much more logical to leave your elite open for a bow attack than it does for a prep though.

lennymon · Jan 08, 2007, 09:15 PM // 21:15

I agree entirely that glass arrows is situational, and good point about the getting interrupted, I forgot about that little problem. Since I generally tend to preload the prep and then aggro its usually not an issue as 30 secs into aggro usually is 'mop up' phase unless you are in a more elite area, and typically in cases like those you wont want to waste the time to reload a prep anyways. Its fine for a general pve spiker build though, since basically you can run any build and do fine if you have enough experience to run it well. I admit I run RTW about 10-50 times more often than Glass Arrows, but it's still good for the extra few points of spike damage if you are going all out that way as there are plenty of very high damage non-elite bow attacks. Especially now with both dual shot and forked arrow which I'd take both of were I running Glass.

Lately I have to admit my favorite elite for pve (now don't snicker) is prepared shot. good damage and nice return especially with rtw

and like the energizer bunny, you can keep shooting pretty much forever except in the +40% energy cost zone of torment.