SwagVault MMO Blog

 

In other words, we knocked some heads together and got a few alphas to sit around and chew the fat for us so we could write this article.  We hope people find this an illuminating look at things and that we’l be able to do it again in the future.  So, without further ado, let’s get to the happenings of the very first Guru’s Alpha Roundtable.

 

For this first installment our intrepid alphas decided to take a look into one of the recurring questions that seems to crop up in the community from time to time : Just how good is the oft-reviled Ranger?  Whether or not the Ranger is any good is quickly dismissed by those who’re constantly under assault from those who pluck a bow – and there are some very good bow pluckers in the test – so the question swiftly becomes not if Rangers are worthwhile to play but just how to get the most out of them.  To that end, our alphas looked at a fine example of a bow using Ranger.

 

But, first, let’s take a look at the faces sitting around the table and introduce the variou alphas who’ll be weighing in on the subject.

A member of the Amazon Basin guild [AB] who’s been a tester ever since the WPE. He’s a pretty social gamer, so the only thing he usually needs to have fun in a game are some groovy people to play with. An excellent game like Guild Wars does help though. Deadroot enjoys PvE and PvP fairly equally since each offers different challenges, but PvP will likely have the most replay value. Right now, his favorite professions are the Necromancer and Warrior, so its hardly surprising that his favorite combo right now is a melee N/W.

 

Who entered the alpha through the Guild Referal Program at the Guild Hall and has since become a moderator at that site.  As the leader of Agony he’s sheparded his guild through the twists and turns of the alpha since December of last year.  His deep abiding hatred of all things caster led him to his favorite profession, the Mesmer, and his constant search to find the next, best anti-caster measure. 

 

Hanging around the Guild Wars community since about the time of E3 last May, Freyas finally settled down to actually contribute with the inception of GuildWarsGuru.. He primarily spends most of his time playing Monks in-game, as he hates to depend on inexperienced healers to keep him alive. He enjoys creating new builds with strange concepts and tries to come up with strategies to catch his opponents offguard in PvP. He also enjoys playing PvE, where his high priority for his builds is dealing mass destruction, most likely to compensate for always getting picked on as a Monk in PvP. When it comes to making builds, Freyas loves making strange builds based around abusing some obscure skill that others generally wouldn’t even consider using.

 

An Alpha for just over 2 months now. An addiction to game mechanics and crunching numbers makes for an unhappy girlfriend, but the rewards are, well, non-existant. It also means churning through a few dozen characters each week, making him equally lousy at playing all the classes.  A Coterie of Relios tattoo on his right calf shows where his loyalties truely lie, but he currently roams the Alpha as a lone wolf, and gun for hire.

 

The gatherer and driving force behind this roundtable and one of the founders of GW Guru. A tester since shortly before the WPE, he made it in shortly before the game moved from alpha to beta testing and constantly lords his alpha status over those who weren’t so lucky. An avid PvPer, he plays not for ranking or ladder position but to have fun. Winning, of course, is very fun. Not content to settle on one character or one strategy for very long, Saus enjoys trying out a wide variety of professions and skills and has, by this point, probably at least tried every profession combination and a healthy percent of every skill in the game at least once in a serious match although he feels most comfortable playing Warriors and Monks. Just as with his character Sausaletus tends to jump around from team to team, joining a pick-up group or filling in for a missin member with some guild as even though he’s nominally associated with the Alpha Guild within the test he has no real guild affiliation. When it comes to builds the watchword with Saus is not innovation but refinement. Rex would rather take a build that works well and make it better rather than come up with one from scratch. All the better to pick up a new character and head out for some enjoyment.

 

The players in our little drama set we swiftly move to the heart of the matter.  Since the alphas were discussing Rangers they needed something to point to and the following build by noted community member Weezer Blue proved capable of fulfilling that need.

 Professions: Ranger / Elementalist

 

An interesting take on things.  It’s not quite a “pure” Ranger as it include some good additions from the Elementalists skill list, it’s still a good example of a Ranger who’s decided to pluck a bow and pluck a bow well. 

 

High Expertise and Marksmanship make for a  character with cheap and effective attack skills while Favorable Winds makes those attacks both faster and more deadly.  The elite skill here is Barrage which can deal an excellent amount of AoE damage being both low cost and low recharge.  Unfortunately, it largely precludes using a favorite trick of many Rangers, namely, using a Preparation to increase their damage, however it stacks wonderfully with a Conjured Element as that bonus damage, just like the bonus damage from Favorable Winds, is added to each and every hit.  And using them together means that Barrage canceling preparations and Conjure canceling enchantments is a non-issue.  Conjure also stacks with any normal bow attack so with both Winds and a Conjure even a standard attack will be doing respectable damage.  And DPS will further be boosted with the few choice bow skills that Weezer’s included.  This Ranger will be attacking fast, attacking hard, and attacking for very little energy.

 

Even though it’s capable of raining pain down upon any character there’s a heavy anti-Warrior slant from the skill selection and even from conception here.  But what else would you expect from a build called “Warrior’s Bane”?  Enervating Charge’s Weakness works to neutralize the damage from Warriors while the natural armor penetration of lightning damage skills (Note that this 25% armor penetration only happens on skills that deal lightning damage not on the Conjure Lightning) counteracts the naturally high armor of Warriors just as switching to lightning damage with Conjure Lightning bypasses the Warriors increased protection against arrows with their physical AL bonuses.  Pin Down will snare a character, lowering their movement speed, a very good thing against a profession that needs to close to arm’s reach to do any damage.  And as they have to close, Hunter’s Shot will be giving them some DOT Bleeding to worry about as they’re running around.  By slowing a Warrior, this Ranger will be free to snipe away at them and should they manage to close that Weakness from Enervating Charge makes for good protection against a melee pounding.

 

The alphas sitting around the table take issue with some of those choices and even the philosophy behind them, of course, so with that in mind, let’s hear just what our alphas had to say about things.