Curse

Kate Bloodspirit · Mar 31, 2006, 10:12 PM // 22:12

This is the build me and some friends ran over the weekend in the FPE (Special thanks to Trevor Renznik, Death Apple and Midnight), with some slight modifications. It's basically a mini ranger spike (slash) minion factory that works great either for holding or for guerrilla wars and goes as follows:

x3 Rangers/Utility secondary
14 expertise (12 + 1 + 1), 12 Marksmanship (19+3), Rest in Wilderness
Zealous Recurve Bow of Fortitude, Sundering Longbow of Fortitude.
Dual Shot
Quick Shot {E}
Read the Wind
Storm Chaser
Trolls Unguent
Whirling Defense
Ressurect/Favorable Winds/Pin down (with the appropriate secondary)
Barbed Trap

Necro/Elementalist
Grenth's Balance {E}
Animate Bone Fiends
Blood of the Master
Veratta's Sacrifice
Consume Corpse
Order of Pain
Blood Renewal
Glyph of Lesser Energy

How to play it:
The basics of combat: The basic strat of this build is to go skirmish attack points and ressurection shrines. Take your 4 man team away from the rest of the 8 people in your group and rush one of the points. Then the main ranger calls a target (if any), necro puts on the order, dual shot and quick shot at will/until it dies. Cap, raise minions and move on to the next point.

Plant a Favorable Winds when you're going to try to hold an outpost. Do it somewhat in range but don't stay next to it, chances are there's masive AoE going around.

Use your Wilderness Survival skills to "survive", snare as you retreat or adjacent to important outposts, trap lines are very usefull to scape (refer to the SoF's trapper's guide at http://sof-guild.com/index.php?Page=trapper for more info).

Remember that your mission is to gank as many outposts to your party as you can, not to have as many kills as you can.

Casting ressurect as soon as possible is essential, having your teammates rez far away from you delays your strategy as you have to regroup before being able to ninja outposts again.

Minion Masters are extremely powerfull in 12v12 matches. Have your longbows out when you see them come and snatch the minion master as quick as possible and run out. Chances are the minions (without master) will kill everything around before you can blink yer eye. Get the heck off quick. If you're having too much trouble getting to the minion master you can always put your whirlings on and run into the minions, with trolls up it will take no time for the minions to kill themselves or just run around and stab him from the back.

Capping unprotected points with this build is insanely easy, most NPC's won't get aggroed to you if you're in longbow range.

If you're totally domminating in the match, kill the defender at longbow range (he won't get aggroed), go inside their base and spawn camp everything that resses. Make sure you have a favorable out for maximum performance. As long as you run quick into the spawn before the defender pops up again, you will be out of his aggro bubble.

The spike is good enough to kill any softie no problem, however, in case of tanks and other molestors, run into your minions for a semi-cactus type of defense. It works great.

The Drawbacks:

The necro and all of his minions will lack mobility, however, if there are enough minions, this mini team can split into 3 rangers without orders and 1 minion master smashing everthing on his way.

art_ · Mar 31, 2006, 10:25 PM // 22:25

Yup my guild ran a very similar build to good effect over the fpe weekend (something like 11 out of 12 wins for the mighty kurzick

). I agree it works extremely well as a 4 man squad. Our build wasn't exactly the same but along those lines. Id definitely take pin-down on at least 2 of the rangers though, as the ability to immobilise is priceless in 12 v 12.

One thing i would say is that MM aren't at their most effective when you aren't having to skirmish too much as obviously they lack mobility (as you say.) So you are probably best taking a main capture point and drawing the enemies, or just accepting that your MM may have the odd difficulty maintaining his army.

With regards to the spike, you generally dont have to worry that your spike is perfect, because the very nature of 12 v 12 is that its fairly chaotic so heals aren't all that great. So long as your spike is fairly sound you'll be fine.

EDIT: You could use the new trap 'snare' instead of barbed trap, as you arent looking to get your damage from it.