Rangerway and Spiritnuke

The price drop of many superior runes suggests they are becoming less popular in favour of high health and armor setups.

Here are two very different builds that largely utilize the goodness of not one, but two superior (-75 health) runes per character. As heroes are great at maintaining vital weapon, the -150 health loss is effectively negated.



Rangerway is probably one of the highest damage builds possible utilizing heroes. The hail of arrows provided by the hero's chain casting of expert's dexterity (even out of combat) with a flatbow is pretty devastating.

The damage over 180seconds with the master of damage in GTB has been over 100,000dmg points, with peaks of more than 800 damage in one second.

Equipment:

Vampiric Flatbow for all rangers.
Bip Healer: Blood staff with 40% HCT and 20% longer enchantment mods.
MM: 40/40 Death weaponset
Soul Twister: +20 energy staff with 20% longer enchantment duration or +1 communing (20%)

Everything has radiant insignias and attunement runes where possible.

Notes:

* Build can easily complete UW and DOA in NM, FOW in HM, without consets.
* Human needs to call (frantically) to encourage the ranger heroes to spike with him/her.
* Build focuses on quick kills rather than drawing out engagements.
* 15 Expertise makes expert's dexterity chainable, for a constant 18 marks and 33% attack speed bonus.
* 'Pre-spiriting' by dropping Shelter, Union and Displacement before an engagement helps a lot for survivability when facing harder mobs.
* Pets and minions soak up most damage, and are also shielded by union, shelter and displacement.
* The presence of so many rangers in itself is effective damage mitigation given their armor vs ele dmg, the most dangerous dmg type for heroes with their tendency to ball up.
* Hex removal has proven not to be needed with pets and minions also soaking most hexes up. Should it be needed for a certain area, there are always free slots on the rangers.
* If needed, for harder groups you can pop down fav winds to counter the travel speed of flatbow arrows and add more dmg.
* The rangers purposely do not have a preparation, not only because of volley being present, but the time lost activating a prep (and aftercast) will add little or no overall damage.
* There is probably no build that benefits more from the honor ward when placed around your ranger heroes. The range of flatbows more or less ensures the rangers stay inside the ward during the entire engagement.
* Bone fiends benefit greatly from honor ward (+15dmg) and fav winds (+6dmg).
* When possible, seek the high ground as the damage from bows is exponentially increased.
* The sole-purpose of BiP is providing the Soul Twister with unlimited energy.
* When choosing skills to fill the empty ranger slots with, bear in mind that adding more attack skills will affect the frequency of use of existing ones. Fore example, having another spammable attack skill alongside volley will reduce its effectiveness as heroes more-or-less randomly spam attack skills.

Human Ranger: OwgS0YITxV+OeEfE2k+gpivT
Ranger/Paragons: OgkjcxZs5Q8aVgghOGAAAA0GWYA
Ranger/Rits: OggTYnLnZiXrCEM0xAAAAg2I5CA
Necro/Rit (bareback healer): OAhjUwGc4QLVHVUBKgoB4BbhJXA
Minion Master: OAhjQwGYoSGC3BTONbSTDTjTJgA
Soul Twister: OACjAyhDJPYTrX48xNPhmOzkLA



Spiritnuke is basically a holding build that also outputs a lot of damage.
Two copies of shelter on separate soul twisters ensure constant coverage. Union and displacement on different soul twisters also ensures they are maintained much more reliably than if they were on one Soul Twister.

The PI nuker mesmers are born from replacing the standard dominaton skills of a PI mesmer with fire nukes. Given the large amount of KD on their bars, DoT nukes, which pump out a lot of damage even for an ele secondary, become feasible as mobs can be pinned down for long periods.

Equipment:

Soul twisters: +20 energy staff with 20% longer enchantment duration or +1 communing (20%)
SoS: +20 energy staff with +1 channeling (20%)
BiP Healer: Resto staff including 20% longer echantments mod
MM: 40/40 Death weaponset
PI Nukers: 40/40 Fire weaponset

Because of the reliable coverage of shelter, union and displacement it is safe to fully equip heroes with radiant insignias and attunement runes.

Notes

* Can complete UW NM without consets (easily and 100% of the time), and FoW and DoA HM without consets. UW HM should be possible if the human reskills as tank for chaos planes and frozen wastes.
* It is vital to equip the mesmers with a 20/20 fire wand and 20/20 fire focus. Meteor Shower normally casts in around 2.3 seconds, and when the fast cast of your weapon set kicks in (they stack), it will cast in about 1.15 secs. Firestorm, Searing Heat, and Meteor also benefit greatly from fast casting, and the 40/40 weaponset.
* It seems useful to disable Earthbind for manual casting as it is only needed for harder groups or mobs that ordinarily cannot be knocked down (Giants, Wurms, Dhuum). This way a charge of Soul Twisting won't be used up with every time.
* Meteor shower together with Earthbind can effectively cause a 9 second knockdown.
* 10 attack spirits are included of which all have high attributes, and can be easily maintained (even Dissonance).
* Part of the defensive capability comes from the large number of targets that are a higher priority than a player/hero. To divert the attention there are a total of 16 spirits plus the minions, the latter of which are affected by shelter, union and displacement.
* As the spirits are spread between 5 characters large ‘spirit balls’ that heroes tend to create are not produced (less worries that AoE skills wreck your spirits).
* There has yet to be justification to bring hex removal. Spirits and minions seem to absorb the bulk of the hexes, while those cast on party are not dangerous.
* You will notice that your party rarely takes damage at all, with the sacrifice from BiP often being the only source of health loss during engagements.
* Armor of Unfeeling, Essence Strike and Spirit Boon Strike on the SoS rit, Glyph of Lesser Energy on the PI Nukers, and most of the human's skills fall into the 'miscelaneous skills' category.
* Dropping Shelter, Union, Displacement and Earthbind before combat is useful against more dangerous groups.

Human Monk: OwgS0YITxV+OeEfE2k+gpivT
SoulTwister 1: OACjAyhDJPYTrX4MzNPhmOTyJA
SoulTwister 2: OACjAyhDJPYTr3j7sFthmOzLGA
SoS: OACjAyiM5MXzy5m7bWNhmLTlJA
Necro/Rit: OAhjQkGZIP3hoZzeyNMHnVvLGA
MM: OABCUsx0S1RFVgCIaQaAewWI
PI Nukers: OQZCAsyTIsYkzIG7CgByAXA

Thanks for taking the time to post this, I might well test drive it myself soon. I have to admit I didn't recognize
Sloth Hunters Shot, or Experts Dexterity; on the Hero bars from their Icons myself; is their a link to the codes for this team build available. I googled Rangerway at PvX and got a very different team in their results. Oh Well thanks again for the post; it definitely looks worth a lil homework. BB.

Looks great! I got bored of the common mesmerway stuff, this is a nice variation!

I've added template codes for you.

Will put build on pvx shortly.

I feel like splinter weapon would be well worth making room for in the first build

Thanks fr posting this

Splinter weapon has been tested for Rway but several conflicts were found.

Most importantly, Vital weapon is often maintained on every ranger. As heroes don't cast a weapon spell on something that already has one, the rangers won't recieve it. It will be cast on minions and pets though, but that is not why you would want splinter.

Besides, Barrage on the human and 4 copies of Volley buffed by so many sources provides devastating AoE damage already.

For spiritnuke, an alternative skill to consider is Anthem of Envy since it will give every spirit attack a possibly +10..25 dmg bonus.

Time to dust off them ranger heros of mine.
This looks fun to try out. ^^
Thanks for posting.

Just wondering if maybe an OoV in there somewhere would increase sustainability?

Anthem of Envy is nice in that the effect does not get expended when a spirit hits a target below 50% health, remaining until a target above 50% is hit or it runs out (10 seconds).

In the big picture though, for just that one skill you need to drop a character (likely a PI nuker) to bring a paragon.

Paragons have no particularly useful elites for the build and there are no useful Command skills other than Anthem of Envy. (Stand Your Ground! is even rather pointless with the level of defense the build possesses)

Order of the Vampire was also considered for Rway.

As it doesn't stack with Order of Pain yet it provides the same damage output (in the form of lifesteal though), it boils down to personal preference.

If you take OoV then you'd need to replace BiP with Blood Ritual. While hero usage of Blood Ritual is nice, it does take up a total of 3-5 seconds for a hero to reach target (touch range), to cast the spell and wait during the resulting aftercast.

With BiP the deed is done almost instantaneously, leaving more time for the Necro/Rit healer to cast other spells.

OoV does provide around the equivalent of heal party in health gain to your rangers over 5 seconds...but only if they have taken damage. Most often though, your rangers will be at full health because the minions and pets tank very well.

In the end there is not a huge difference between Bip + Order of Pain and OoV + Blood Ritual, so it boils down to what one prefers.