The Cult Of Barrage

I never said interrupts are useless. I said 1/ in most of the areas a pure interrupter (a player with only interrupt skills, PS/CG for exmple) is a waste of a slot in the team, and 2/ (since most of the rangers have at least one interrupt in their build) an occasional interrupt is a nice addition, but most of the time it's not needed, as in "it makes it a bit easier but it wouldn't have been a pain without".

Concretely, as we're talking about PvE, what do you interrupt when you go with the sole Savage Shot? Monks spells, ele spells, eventually, troll (when the ranger don't use WD or LR) and heal sig, or you just spam it for a mini-spike. When you use it on a monk, you're likely to catch something despite the short casting time of most of the spells because they spam it. It also means non-instant interrupts of other professions are almost as likely to catch something (I'm refering to knockdowns, or attacks like disrupting chop or dirupting dagger). In the case of ele spells, most of the time they'll use either spammable spells like Stone Daggers (in this case, some comments than for monks spells) or a combinaison of fast casted spells and some devastating spells, that takes ages to cast, and therefore can also be interrupted by a melee class. Yes, rangers are better at that. But no, most of the time, they're not needed - notice the [i] tag - I just mean the mission/quest/whatever won't be harder without them. Again, interrupts are a nice addition to a team, but other classes have other skills that would also benefit the team.

These 2 paragraphs just mean if you go as a PURE interrupter then you gotta show how the team will be better with you than, for example, with an additional damage dealer (after all, often, offense is the best defense), an additional prot or a warder or a rit, etc, who can protect your team against all the attacks of the foes when an interrupter generally shuts down only one foe at a time. I'd bring a CG ranger over all those in Gates of Pain for example, or a BHA ranger to kill the Drought. I wouldn't in most of the other missions.

It also means that if you go as a damage dealer with one interrupt, the interrupt you carry being NOT necessary for your team, you gotta show what you can do better than another class for the team. And you generally can with Barrage. Take off the AoE from Barrage builds, and comapre the DPS of a warrior on a single target and the ranger's. Often the warrior will outdamge him. Or will do as well, with a better armor (and on a side note warriors in PvE rarely bring a hammer so they don't have 80 AL vs elemental attacks but at least 96). And again, I think I'm everything but biaised as I truely hate warriors - that's not my thing. I went through all NF with my ranger with at most one warrior, and most of the time 3 rangers (me + 2 heroes), but that was not a PuG made of random people with random builds - there was a team build.

EDIT - Don't think I'm bashing rangers - I play a ranger since the beta, I have 3 of them at the moment, and this is my favourite class. But you gotta know what rangers can do, and what they can't. And I actually find really sad people throw away a skill that often give a nice advantage in PvE compared to other classes because it's a popular skill, and because some players can't use any other build. I mean... MM is a popular build for necromancers. But does the fact every PuG expect the necro to be a MM make the build inefficient? No. It's sad you can hardly PuG with another build as a necro but still the build is effective. I wasn't talking about being a pure interrupter, I realize that that would be completely idiotic, but the fact that I've become good at it is often disregarded by those who are under the "spell" of the B/P build. I'm not going to say it's an unviable build, because it's obviously effective, but a BHA with interrupts is as well.