Pondering an offbeat build -- the IW Ranger

First off, hello everybody! This is my first post on GWguru. I'm also relatively new to the game, so be kind.

My two main characters are a Ranger/Monk (almost pure ranger) and a Mesmer/Warrior (front-line fighter, planning to become an I-Weaponeer). I was pondering this morning and it occurred to me that since Hundred Blades went elite, the IW build doesn't gain all that much from its Warrior side. My theory is that Ranger could work as well, possibly even better. I'm not sure whether Me/Ra or Ra/Me would work better, but for the moment I'm going with the latter.

The core skills would be Illusionary Weaponry and Tiger's Fury. We need to either limit mobility or boost speed, so Imagined Burden goes in -- I was tempted to use Stormwind Chaser instead, but this uses a skill we'll already be pumping. For defense, I like Illusion of Weakness a lot -- at high levels of Illusion it provides almost a full bar of emergency health, as long as you can find a quiet place to activate it and heal back up. I also want to put Charm Animal in -- not because it's likely to be real useful, but because if I put enough points into Beast Mastery to use TF effectively, I really want to see a beast on my screen. Finally, since this is primarily a monk/caster killer, we need ways to mess with casters -- Savage Slash and Distracting Blow are sadly unavailable, but hopefully a couple of Mesmer interrupts combined with Arcane Conundrum can do the trick. That makes eight skills -- I would've liked to have put Throw Dirt in, since for once the range wouldn't be a disadvantage, but I don't know what to swap out for it.

Pros versus the traditional Me/Wa IWer:
- Better armor. Much better once you consider that you'll mostly take non-physical damage.
- Tiger's Fury is, IMO, a big improvement over Flurry.

Cons:
- Lower energy. Could turn out to be a problem -- should I have some energy-management skills on the bar?
- Can't pump Illusion with runes, so damage per strike with IW is a bit lower.
- None of the Warrior's close-combat utility skills. Most of them wouldn't be useful anyway since IW kills your adrenaline, but the lose of Savage and Distracting might hurt.
- Not an organic build -- leveling this up in PvE before getting some of those skills would be a pain. Plentiful refund points make it not a big deal to start out as a traditional Ranger and then make the transition, though.


So what do y'all think? Decent idea with a bit more adjustment, or should I just scrap it? And if it does have some potential, what should I tweak to make it really shine?

Not to burst your bubble, but Ilusionary weaponary on works with melee attacks.

The communist is right he is also in my guild.

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Shields aren't as big of a concern, because ranger armour is better than Mesmer armour, and you have skills like Lightning Reflexes and Throw Dirt that let you get a good deal of evade without sacrificing the +33% attack rate boost. Serpent's Quickness is somewhat useful – using it before casting IW lets IW cycle a few seconds before it wears off, so you don't have that gap between it wearing off and recasting.

The problem is attribute points, though. You'll probably want the natural 12 in Illusion Magic for nice damage. That leaves three attributes that you want – Domination Magic for the Mesmer interrupts, Beast Mastery for Tiger's Fury, and Expertise for the defensive skills. Ranger armour is nicer than Mesmer armour, sure, but it's not quite nice enough that you can afford to just stand around and get hit by stuff. Frenzy/Flurry are both better DPS-wise than Tiger's Fury if you don't have enough Beast Mastery to keep it on most of the time. That left me with relatively few points left over for Domination Magic, and I end up not really being very good at shutting down casters. Beating on warriors is quite fun, though.

I had an idea back then about Ranger IW...

Use IW and maybe a heal, then everything else have your pet do it... like interrupt, condition and so on... while you use shout, your character won't stop what they are doing either... so just whack away while shout all over the place. You going to need expertise too.

Hmm. Looking at the BM list over on guild-hall, Distracting Lunge seems almost too good to be true. Works on all skills, with a five second recharge... I think that one goes in.

This build interests me for several reasons:
1) it makes use of a pet
2) it makes use of the mesmer in a non-fragility way
3) it makes use of the melee ranger's potential

Hammering out a better framework or build will be quite interesting. I'll give it a thought after I study for tomorrow's exam and post, but relying on the pet to apply conditions/interrupts etc sounds very interesting.

Also, does Apply Poison work with IW (this was asked on GH.net but no one provided a positive answer). If it does, that +bleeding from a pet attack would work nicely for DoT. If not, one can always use it in between IW enchancements (and get rid of serpent's quickness for something else).

What about any other mesmer skills in illusion magic that may also help?

EDIT:
Possible problem with tiger's fury: are pet-attacks and shouts considered as part of "your non-attack skills" ?

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Me neither. This build sounds very enticing, though. Here's another possible "flaw". Apply poison is wilderness survival.
In general, what kind of attribute distribution were you looking at?
Let's suppose a 12 in illusion magic (for IW). What else?

12 Illusion Magic
8 + 1 Beast Mastery
8 Expertise
7 Wilderness Survival

Illusionary Weaponry*
Serpent's Quickness
Tiger Fury
Lightning Reflexes
Imagined Burden
Conjure Phantasm
Flame Trap
Barbed Trap


There was mine a while back. My guildie used it during a BWE in Arena and said it owned, don't know about 8v8 though. Traps aren't essential. Serpent's Quickness worked on IW to decrease the recharge.

Apply poison doesn't work in this build, because IW hits don't count as your weapon hitting, so you can't sustain poison. Serpent's quickness is wonderful in conjunction with IW and lightning reflexes (well, more with IW... lets you start out with a full minute of IW damage, but then you're out for 10 seconds or so after that).

My build is:12 Illusion Magic
10+2 Expertise
8 Beast Mastery

Imagined Burden
Phantom Pain
Tiger's Fury
Illusionary Weaponry {E}
Serpent's Quickness
Lightning Reflexes
Whirling Defense
Throw Dirtbut I can't find room for my pet on my skill bar. Tiger's Fury doesn't disable pet attacks, so I guess I really should make room for my pet, since 3 expertise defence skills is a bit overkill. OTOH, I'm too lazy to actually get Disrupting Lunge. Still, the extra survivability comes in quite handy at times. I'll play around with a build that actually uses a pet a bit later tonight, I think.

The trouble is getting to a high enough level to actually find/capture IW.

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I'd be interested in trying to play it more beast-master like.

So I ran with a build using disrupting lunge for an hour or so in Koga, and here's the deal: Tiger's Fury actually does disable pet attacks (I thought it didn't, but I was wrong), but this isn't a huge deal because the 5sec disable meshes nicely with the 5sec cd on disrupting lunge, so you just do a pattern of lunge-fury-lunge-lunge-fury-lunge and soforth.

The bigger problem is that, unless I'm mistaken, disrupting lunge isn't actually a pure interrupt. It makes your pet's next attack be a disrupt, but pets attack slowly, and I think it resets your pet's attack the same way a bow attack resets your current attack, so the effective time between using the skill and getting the pet to hit is a second or two, judging from the graphics, so you're basically down to trying to interrupt stupidly every 5 seconds and hoping you hit something.

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Hmm. I don't get why you're a mesmer primary for your current IW build. If you take a War/Mes, you can still take everything you currently have (since you don't seem to be using Fast Casting), but your armour is a massive amount better. Is there a compelling reason to take primary Mesmer for IW?

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Arcane Conundrum is definitely a possibility. A ranger with druid's armour and some mesmerish charm offhand has plenty of energy for that sort of stuff, since your ranger skills are effectively free after expertise. Plus, unlike using the real mesmer interrupts, it doesn't force you to spread your points around in four different attributes, especially since you almost certainly should have illusion magic 12 and decent expertise and beast mastery scores. I haven't actually had a chance to test this, but I actually feel that energy won't be too severe of a problem for casting something something like power leak or power spike – I always seem to have plenty lying around, at least enough to cast imagined burden or something silly like that.

There is the consideration of where you'd play this build, though. I mean, IW builds in generally aren't too effective in either PvE or any organised PvP because your enchantment gets removed, and then you're useless. In Arenas, most people are so painfully stupid that I've had some success with the "run up to enemy healer and hit it until it dies" tactic, especially since stuff like lightning reflexes lets me ignore the hordes of useless paladins even more than I normally would, while still boosting attack speed. I don't have a very good feeling yet for what the effects of putting in a pet are. When I get a chance, I'll respec my RP ranger yet again (from Fragility to IW, not a huge change) and play around with disrupting lunge some – I may have just been wrong about how the skill works, or maybe upon inspection it will be better than I assumed it to be.

I would put my R/ME against any warrior. Poor warriors do not have a chance. I do not care how they are speced. To tell the truth 1 on 1 I do not think there is a class that can handle my guy one on one. I have not found one yet anyways.

What's your R/Me? The right Mesmer and Necromancer builds can come close to unconditionally taking out any melee fighters (IW doesn't get around Empathy, and attack speed debuffs still reduce your dps significantly). Besides, the more you optimise for 1v1, the less useful you are in group combat.

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R/Me isn't necessarily worse than W/Me for the stand-up fighting part, because the R part gives you defensive expertise stances that are, IMO, better than what warriors have available to them. Charging headlong into a group of melee fighters really isn't an incredibly huge risk, because you can essentially have 75% evade/block rate for 30 seconds or so out of every minute, which is very nice. What hurts you are stuff like empathy, health degen, and fraggers off to the side; warrior armour gives you no extra protection from the former two, and ranger armour is actually better against elemental damage.

R/Me lets you have a high expertise score, which alleviates a great many of the energy problems quite handily; you pay full price for the IW at 15, but everything else is half-price or so, and you won't be doing much other than recasting Tiger's Fury at 5–6 energy or so every 10 seconds, so the net cost of Serpent's Quickness -> IW -> Tiger's Fury x3 over the course of the span of IW being up is no more than 2–6 total points of energy; this is enough to toss in something else for fun like phantom pain, imagined burden, or whatever other 10–15 energy mesmer hex you fancy, and still be able to recast IW and sustain Tiger's Fury for another 30 seconds.

Frankly, though, you're still a melee fighter and a relatively fragile one. Short of getting a friendly monk to stack a load of enchantments on you, random shatter enchantments will neuter you; energy steal hurts slightly less because expertise lets you get by with a smaller pool; and DoT messes with just about everyone. There's nothing you can do about that, and IW in PvE is just not a winning proposition, because mobs like spamming enchantment hate, so half the time your build will gain you nothing over just a normal sword fighter.