Blowing stuff up in HM with Ignite Arrows - yay Rangerway!

I've recently used this team to do a couple of HM missions and FoW and it's been very successful. Your first volley can wipe half the health off an entire mob, and Needling Shot spam kills survivors very quickly. 4x concussion shot shuts down casters nicely, and the AoE spam makes melee enemies run around a lot and not attack. Also everything is nice and ranged.

It was hard to fit all the skills needed into a 4-hero team, but now everything works out nicely.

The build:

You (Ranger/Warrior)
Ignite Arrows
Incendiary Arrows
Concussion Shot
Distracting Shot
Needling Shot
Triple Shot or IAS
"Save Yourselves!"
Ebon Battle Standard of Honor (need a high rank on this since most of the damage comes from it)

3x Ignite Arrows Rangers
Ignite Arrows
Incendiary Arrow
Concussion Shot
Distracting Shot
Needling Shot
Dual Shot
Heart of Fury
Resurrection Signet

1x Earth Elementalist (this slot is kinda variable and maybe be swapped out for things like a ranger mercenary, an MM bomber, a rit lord, a bow paragon or elementalist (lol), etc.)
Earth Attunement
Aura of Restoration
Glowstone
Churning Earth
Unsteady Ground
Ward Against Melee
Stone Daggers
Protective was Kaolai

1x Paragon that buffs stuff
Zealous Anthem
Anthem of Envy
"The Power is Yours!" / Expel Hexes
"They're on Fire!"
Anthem of Weariness
Anthem of Disruption
Aggressive Refrain
Signet of Return / Hex Eater Signet / Hexbreaker Aria

1x orders/heal Necromancer/Ritualist
Order of Pain
Dark Fury
Xinrae's Weapon
Mend Body and Soul
Spirit Light
Weapon of Warding
Life
Ghostmirror Light

1x Ritualist
Signet of Spirits
Protective was Kaolai
Mend Body and Soul
Spirit Light
Essence Strike
Spirit Siphon
Weapon of Warding
Splinter Weapon


To initiate fights against balled mobs you'll want to queue IA and Churning Earth on all heroes. Flag the ele slightly ahead so Churning Earth starts casting before the Rangers attack and KD locks everything; this will pretty much ensure the mob is completely dead after 5 seconds.

Anthem of Envy helps drop everything to below 50%, at which Needling Shot takes over. Try to focus on things below 50% when they appear. Also as this is AoE oriented try to direct heroes at multiple targets. Incendiary Arrows and Needling Shot coupled with Ignite Arrows and the vanguard ward drops things incredibly fast.

Because of the relatively low defense you need to kill stuff quickly. Long fights usually mean death. Make sure Concussion Shot is used to neutralize dangerous casters, because there are no heavy prots in this build (unless you take a rit lord or MM bomber with prot spirit or something).

This build could probably still use some refinements. In particularly the earth elementalist feels kind of awkward. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

If you want to kill some stuff with Rangers or just take a break from running all the meta caster builds going around, give it a try. It's actually quite fun and effective

Don't try to run orders on a healer, I know from experience.... They'll be caught mid-spamming orders when someone's in trouble and heal nothing. Locating that somewhere else may help your defense.

I'm really skeptical of ranger heroes being able to use those bars to full capacity. They'll needle when they ought to incendiary, they don't even spam needling on recharge quite, you have a paragon along mainly to power concussion shot, and you apparently want an IAS but have to do with a bad one. We might actually instead want P/Rs here, substituting a maintainable IAS for attempting to get them to spam attack skills, and stick the anti-caster in technobabble or a mesmer hero. With all of them spamming GftE and a few other shouts, you can also open up some ridiculous echo interactions.

I would look at a mesmer in place of your elementalist, either shared burden or psychic instibility to mitigate kiting. (or both - illusion mesmer, and a PI resto) You can fit plenty of anti-caster or anti-melee in that same slot. A PI knockdown followed up by minions moving in can also do wonders to gum up movement.

Looks so squishy ._. I would love to throw splinter in the bar with poison sig+volley

Hmmm, originally I had all the Rangers with Flurry, and the Paragon was there to power that. But heroes refused to use Flurry, so I switched to Heart of Fury. It only lasts 2 seconds but with Dark Fury they should gain adrenaline quickly and be able to use it a lot.

Anthem of Envy also adds lots of damage with the spirits and rangers and helps get stuff below the 50% mark for needling shot. For the AI part I think I'm actually just going to disable IA and Needling on everyone, and bind all 4 IAs and Needlings to one hotkey so I can manually target everything.

What else would you put orders on? I don't like MMs with this because there's a lot of scattering and then minions go off running all over the place and make a mess. There aren't really any curses worth using with this other than generic anti-melee stuff.

If you want to micro stuff like crazy it may be a different story. I'm just lazy and like to make bars the AI can manage.

In this case dwyana derv orders spammer may be the best, as it outputs some fine party healing while doing what it does.

Quote:

Anet does NOT allow the use of autoclickers/scripts/anything that automates gameplay so discussion of those can stay out of this thread from now on.

ps:If you get caught it's entirely your own fault.

Thank you.