Barbed Arrow<Apply Poison?

[skill]Apply Poison[/skill]

This skill is often a staple in the Ranger or X/Ranger skillbar. -4 degen with each attack makes it easy to spread poison among enemies.

You don't even need to have a bow to use this.

[skill]Barbed Arrows[/skill]

Um, -3 degen and it requires a bow.

They both last the same duration, but why is one easily interruptable?

And Apply Poison lasts longer... Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Melandru's Arrows is the non-easy interruptable version of Barbed Arrows (with a few tweaks). It surely has something to do with game balancing issues.

agree with drupal. apply is just better, but melandrus beats them all. downside is that its an elite. apply>barbed anyday.

I guess this apparent inferiority of badbed arrows is due to the fact you can combine it with Poison Arrow to spam around a 7 pips degen. You could do it with Apply Poison and Screaming Shot or Hunter's Shot, but the bleeding in the 2 cases is conditional and you can use those skills only every 3 or 4 shots because of the recharge time.

The only reason that barbed is so weak is because it allows quick spamming of bleeding + poison to everyone around you when you use it with Poison Arrow. However, imo, it's nerfed a bit too much for it's own good. At the preview event, the skill cost 15 energy, but even after they lowered it to 10 energy, it's still not worth it. Increasing the cost to 25 energy and not making it easily interuptable would have made more sense to me, but I don't work for A-net and it's probably best that way.

[skill]Toxicity[/skill] [skill]Lacerate[/skill]

Just have one ranger use those spirits, and another with Barbed arrows + Poison arrow.

You can spread -11degen to everyone, in a very short time, for a cheap cost.

Quote: Originally Posted by Cathode_Reborn

Barbed Arrows: unlike Apply Poison, this skill is not Apply Poison.

The irony is... now we have screaming shot, which you can combo with apply poison, and still have an elite slot left.

Quote: Originally Posted by Puebert So, a Ranger's skillbar must contain:

[skill]Barbed Arrows[/skill][skill]Poison Arrow[/skill][skill]Toxicity[/skill][skill]Lacerate[/skill]

To compete with:

[skill]Reaper's Mark[/skill][skill]Parasitic Bond[/skill][skill]Faintheartedness[/skill][skill]Suffering[/skill]

to make it balanced? A ranger can spread the degen much much faster, and easily reapply the conditions if they get removed, at the cost of needing another ranger to set down the spirits.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FoxBat The irony is... now we have screaming shot, which you can combo with apply poison, and still have an elite slot left. Let's see you spread Bleeding throughout entire team within seconds using Screaming shot.......Not only will it be heavy on the energy, but you have to wait another 8 seconds after each use.