A tiny bit stuck

Hi there,

I'm up to Yak's Bend and I'm stuck

I'm playing a Ranger/Necro. I really like her, I like the odd health degeneration on the enemy before I let rip with arrows.

If you check the image you can see the quests I'm stuck on and you can see the skills I'm using. I originally played my Ranger is a mainly marksman ranger. Should I have kept this?



Some general pointers would be appreciated.

Shiverpeak Stragglers and The Road to Borlis Pass add more Stone Summit to the road. Abandon them, then complete The Way is Blocked to rid the area of Ettins. Re-take either Shiverpeak Stragglers or The Road to Borlis Pass, complete it, then do the other.

Also, your pet isn't going to be doing much with 2 Beast Mastery. Either take off Charm Animal (and the attribute points) so you don't risk the pet dying and getting a long skill blackout, or focus on using your pet.

shouldn't really have your attributes spread out like that. Pick 2-3 attributes and stick with them.

Also, Weaken Armor causes cracked armor. If you don't know what that is, see [wiki]Cracked Armor[/wiki]. Basically it lowers their armor by 20, but it will only lower their armor to a maximum of 60. Dump it for now since all the monsters you're fighting have less than 60 armor already, so Weaken Armor won't do anything.

Also as others have said, if you're not going to use your pet for damage, I would take out those points from Beast Mastery and put them into something more useful. You can keep your pet in there as a meat shield if you would like though.

Stri - I'm glad you're comfortable coming to the best place on the net for GW answers!

The thing I made a mistake on when I started is to try to allocate points to every attribute. I'm sure others will be able to give more meaty help, but I'd like to suggest that you concentrate your points in the 1 main Ranger and 1 main Necro attribute. After doing that, then put the rest in your primary attribute (if that is not already the main attribute affecting the skills on your bar.)

About your skill bar, try to use skills in the 1 or 2 attribute lines that you are putting points into.

It's not set in stone, so you can move points around if you need to; but there are never enough points to put them in everything.

So, IMHO, concentrate on Marksmanship and Curses, then go Expertise. Then you can adjust from there as the situation warrants.

Good luck! -V

Ah, that's interesting. It would explain why I'm finding it difficult.

Yeah, I kinda suspected this was the case. I noticed the pet wasn't doing much damage, I kept him in as his hit points are quite high. He doesn't attract much attention though.

Yeah, I suspected this might have been the case. Thanks for clarifying that for me.

xx

Oh I see. So I can keep the pet but don't waste points unless beast mastery is going to be specialized in.

Thanks for the welcome Vitas.

Interesting. I started by specializing the best I could. What I find most interesting of all is that you seem to be suggesting I focus on being a true Ranger/Necro whereas in the past I've been 80% ranger and 20% necro. Are you saying it should be 50/50, 60/40?

Yeah, I know about that

Yeah.

Cheers boss, thanks

xx

if ud like help ill gladly bring a lvl 20 along with u...pm me ign at Melony Songbringer. at it to friends cause more then likely i wont be on it so just pm me on w/e name im on. That is only to Stri. I dont want 500 pms from ppl Grrrrr;..;

No, that's ok mate. I appreciate the offer. It's more the method im interested rather than "cheating" by getting a more experienced player to help.

Please add me to your list though. When I'm ascended it doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to do some of the more interesting stuff together.

Cheers

xx

Well basically, it depends on the skills you have on your bar. Try moving a point from one attribute to another and then look at the skill descriptions. You will see that the effects in green type have changed.

Allocate only enough points to achieve the skill effect you need or want. It's okay to put in more points than you need, but you don't want to spread out your points so thinly that you don't have enough in the attribute that your skills depend upon.

So to answer your question specifically: Check out the effect your necro skills have now, then remove the points from everything but Marksmanship. Now one at a time, add points to Curses and check the change in the skill effects. Once you get to the minimum needed strength for the Curses skills and made sure your Marksmanship skills are up to snuff -- then you can use any extra points in Expertise (OR Wilderness if you are depending heavily on Troll Unguent.)

[There's an easier way to do this by looking up the skill at http://wiki.guildwars.com &/or http://gw.gamewikis.org and study the Attribute/Effect chart near the top of the page for each specific skill. This is a very handy guide.]

I hope this makes sense

You really shouldn't use a pet unless you're going to devote some attribute points to Beast mastery. Sure, it has the hit points, but you're using up a skill slot, and when it dies, you're going to get a skill blackout for 8 seconds (less with higher Beast Mastery). Without Comfort Animal, you can't resurrect it either. You could put in Comfort Animal, but now you're wasting two skill slots for something that really doesn't do anything for you.

At this point in time, you should focus on putting attribute points in Marksmanship for damage, Expertise to reduce your skill costs and improve your Expertise skills and put your extra points into Wilderness Survival for Troll Unguent. If you're using a Wilderness Survival preparation, you may want to put more points in Wilderness Survival

If I calculated right, you should have 75 attribute points. Place points so that both Expertise and Marksmanship are at base 7 (your screenshot shows an increase in Expertise, probably from an Expertise Mask or a minor Expertise rune), then place Wilderness Survival at 5. You can increase or decrease as you want, but that should provide a baseline from where you can experiment as you like.

Much of the advice given here is excellent. I'm a lvl 20 ranger myself, and have been playing for nearly 3 years now. There are quite a few viable ranger builds for R/N's, though at your level/game progression you're often better off focusing on your primary class. (One reason this is true is that at lower levels minor runes are particularly useful, and you can only use runes for your primary class.)

In general, the best way to go is focus on one of the things your primary class is good at, which ties back to the "Don't spread your points so thin" comment a number of people have already given. Rangers, for example, are generally used for trapping (you don't have the skills to do this well yet), beast mastery, or as a midline damage-dealer. The last is by far the simplest and easiest for a new player to work with, so I'd suggest that. Thus you want to focus primarily on Marksmanship and Expertise, the two attributes that let you deal damage and keep dealing damage, respectively.
The secondary class, unless being used for a specialized build, is generally used to fill in gaps in the skills available to your main class. For example, rangers have no easily-useable direct heals (only a healing "trap", which is easy to interrupt, a few beast skills you can't effectively incorporate into non-beast builds, and Troll Unguent, which gives you health regen, but no direct healing.) Thus you might fill in this gap with Consume Corpse, Parasitic Bond, or some similar Necro skill. Other examples - Hexes to provide debuffs, which Rangers are devoid of other than conditions, Suffering or the like to provide an AoE effect, or something that synergizes with some of your Ranger skills, like the Elite Necro skill Virulence and any of a number of Ranger skills that apply conditions.
I've found that at mid-range levels, where you have enough skills to form a working build without having to delve into both professions heavily, it's often most effective to use almost exclusively skills from your primary profession. Needless to say, if you need to cover a weakness or have a Necromancer skill that works better than a Ranger skill for something, use it. But keep in mind that the more you have to split your attribute points, the less effective your skills will be.


BTW, my IGN is Fury Incarnate - PM me in-game or on Guru if you'd like help designing a build or learning some playing tips from a pro ranger. (Or if you need mission help or a hand with gear - I have more than enough time and money, and I'm always happy to help a new player.)

PS: Don't underrate defense. The bar you're using has no defensive skills in it, but Whirling Defense is one of the best Ranger skills in the game, and the ranger has a number of other, similar skills depending on the situation.

This might also help answer some questions, if you are not familiar with GuildWiki (another very useful website):

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Effective_ranger_guide

It does make sense. My only problem at present is I'm having difficulty deciding which are the "stronger" of the skills.

Thanks for the advice everyone