PVE A/R - Blinding Barrage

Crits -13
Marksmanship -12
Daggers -10
Shadow -6

Golden Phoenix Strike
Blinding Power
Repeating Strikes
Critical Eye
Sharpen Daggers
Way of Perfection
Shadow Refuge (pvp: viper's defense)
Barrage (E)


This is a build I'm testing for PVE (primarily with henchies because of the assassin curse) and it's quite fun.

The goal is to sit back and barrage the enemies with critical eye, and way of perfection up, and if any runners charge your backline healers you can defend them with GPS followed by blinding powder and then keep the attacks coming with repeating strikes and repeated blinding powders. Hopefully they'll be bleeding too, and you should have a nice stream of health coming in especially with vampiric daggers, to overcome the lack of defenses. This might not kill them quickly, but at least they are blinded enough so that Sister Tai can tickle them to death instead of healing me.

I've tried to take skills that work at range and distance with way of perfection, sharpen daggers, and critical eye, so to help out in both roles. I've tried also without barrage, using Palm Strike in place of GPS and it is nicer in the close combat role because I can switch to back line defender without even having to switch to my daggers.

Problem is those barrage's are great fun, so any suggestions to improve thes two functions would be greatly appreciated

right off the bat, I have to say this build has energy problems. You can't just keep barrage/repeating strike without expertise(even with the energy from crits), unless you're using a zealous mod on your dagger/bow or some other way of regaining energy.

Also, why are you switching to dagger in close ranger? Why not just keep up with barrage? Using two primary attack attributes are spreading you really thin, and rangers aren't as useless in close range as you seem to think. You have no rez, which you'll get a lot of hate for; and no solid healing skills. The latter part wouldn't be as big of a deal in pvp, since teamwork is usually better. But in pve, forcing yourself to heavily rely on a monk that may or may not be there is not very prudent. If you get focused on by more than 1 mob(which happens because of assassin armor), you'll blind one, and get killed by the other unless monk comes to the rescue.

I have no suggestions to perfect this build. A long time ago, I likewise have tried to make multi-ranged characters on several occassions and none succeeded. Since then I've been a firm believer of focusing in only 1 or 2 areas of expertise.

well if you really wanna know about energy, its called critical strikes.

and 13 pts into that attributes gives +3 energy each time you make a critical, and critical eye adds another +1, which gives a total of 4 energy gained for each critical.

Since you are barraging, you are attacking many targets at once. SO lets say you shoot 5 arrows: each arrow that you shoot has a chance of giving you 4 energy.

Energy is never a problem. This goes along with the same idea of the Critical Barrager popular in the 12v12s

yep i use a crit barrager build, and it was never a problem, I finished the game recently and got the zealous ironwing bow and i dont even have to look at energy bar.

In all honesty I don't think this build has any energy problems inherent to it that come from the build itself:

when I barrage, with the hight crits I have, I get lots of energy back as has been said, and certainly it's no different on this front than the standard barrage build

when I'm using repeating strikes, yes I'll run out of energy for a second or two, but that's the nature of the skill itself and not the rest of the build. Certainly, I have enough energy to quickly step in and blind a back-line attacker and keep up a fairly good stream of damage on him.

Basically I find it works well within the parameters I defined: PVE and above all PVE with henchies. The build is pretty nice at a distance with barrages, and can definitely help protect the healers in the back line until the tanks get in there, by using calls if necessary. Using vampiric bow strings for extra damage, and zealous daggers for good energy, and those repeating strikes can keep going for a good long time, hopefully bleeding them a lot and keeping a nice stream of health as well from way of perfection.

Anyway, ^^ my 2 cents on my build

also, unlike the dagger attribute (which says that it increases double-strike chance), points in marksmanship increases your bow crit chance (in addition to the crit chance of critical hits and critical strikes)...that's like...i don't remember the exact bonuses...a lot of crit chance.

2 crits in a barrage and you're gaining 3 energy right there.
1 crit and you're only down 1 (which would take an impossible 19 or 20 points in expertise to duplicate on us old-fashioned ranger primaries)