My idea for a new build

This is an idea for a build that I have been thinking about for a while, please tell me what you think:

The idea revolves around the concept that if you use the Ranger Spirit Greater Conflaguration along with the Ranger Spirit Winter, then all damage should be cold damage. Greater Conglaguration (Elite, Wilderness survival)
turns all physical Damage to fire damage. Then the skill Winter (Also Wilderness Survival) turns all Elemental damage into Cold damage. So that means that the fire damage from greater conflaguration should turn to cold damage too.

How can we capitalize on this? By using a combination of the following build:

Rangers naturally have a high resistance to elements, even more to Cold damage when wearing their Frost armor. Rangers can use Mesmer skills to not only increase defense, but increase offense too. Mantra of Frost is a great damage reducer for cold damage, as is elemental resistance. All of our players on the team must have some sort of elemental resistance to make the build work. Mesmers also have Illusionary Weaponry. Since this is chaos damage, it is unaffected by the Greater conflaguration and Winter combination. As a ranger we can use Tigers fury to increase amount of damage. While we are using mesmer skills, we can also use blackout. If most of our damage is from Illusionary Weaponry, the our attackers can use Blackout, after first using their buffs(Illusionry weaponry, flurry, etc...) to prevent their opponent from doing anything in retaliation.
If we have four Mesmer attackers, all attacking a different opponent, using blackout, those opponents can not heal themselves. By attacking
all monks at the same time, and continually using blackout, the opposing team would never be able to heal their teammates.

A possible team setup:

4 R/Me attackers: Mantra of frost, Illusionary Weaponry, Tigers Fury(?), Blackout, Rez signet, then some open slots. These can be open for suggestions.

1 R/Me: Mantra of frost, Greater conflaguration, Winter, Traps, etc...

3 Mo/?: Any combination of prot and heal. A Mesmer secondary is good for Mantra of frost or elemental resistance, or earth secondary for Ward Against Elements.

not a bad idea on turning everything to cold damage and loading up on armor vs. cold. however, once your IW is removed via shatter, rend, etc., your whole offense is gone.

Yes, having IW removed is one of the weaknesses. To get around it, have one of the monks cast cheap enchants to cover it. Or bring Illusion of Weakness. That is an enchantment that can cover it well.

Since this is an 8 man team for gvg or tombs, you'll likely run into rend or possibly well of profane, which will remove you covering enchantment, plus all those it was covering

Just so as you don't think the combination of Winter and Greater Conflag is a new idea, it has been used in Ranger builds since Beta. At one time it was a key component to a good UW Trapping group...

That being said, I love the idea of combining that with a /Mesmer team. I haven't seen this before, and I think it could work... If I'm reading this correctly, the people who would normally be rending these enchantments are blacked out at the time. The weakness is that unless you use Arcane Echo, you will spend 4 seconds without Blackout. That and the fact that you have to get into touch range for this to work. Hmm... How about the Mo/ using SpellBreaker on the IWs instead of worrying about cover enchantments? That's still 30 unprotected seconds and an Elite used up... Damn. I wish I knew Mesmers better. Only... 4... Slots!!!

This would work for a little bit until you run into a mod build runnign natures renewal......

Quote:

Actually I don't think you'll be having problems with enchantments - but with spirits. Once spirits are down (and against a good team it will take around 30 secs) - your team is defenseless.

And btw, Mantra is a stance... can't use mantras and tiger's fury in same time.

About damage... I'd recommend go with smiting (judge's insight on rangers). IW with ranger primary isn't the best option.

Yes this is meant for 8 on 8 GvG or Tombs. I remember when spirit spammers used to use this in spirit builds, thats where I got the idea from. As far as ranger primaries, why shouldn't they be able to use IW? The damage will not be as great as a mesmer primaries, but the defense tradeoff, for a few extra points on offense seems like a worthy investment.

Yes, rend and well of the profane will be a problem, as will natures renewal, and killing the spirits prematurely. To fix this, we can assign 2 of these rangers as spirits to help a little, as well as trap the spirits. By the time the spirits are killed, half of the other team will be dead. As far as the rend and well go, every build has a weakness. I haven't really though of a good counter to that, other than its not something regularly brought into HoH. (As far as I know) This is still experimental. The idea of arcane echo has occured to me many times. Either an additional IW,if the first is removed, or add an interupt in there, like Leech Sig, or Cry of Frustration, and you can arcane echo it many of the skills, adjusting your enchantments as they will get interupted or removed.

I think that in the current metagame in HoH right now, this could be pretty effective against the other builds that some teams are running these days. But its just an idea, and I haven't been able to muster people together to experiment with it at all.

I also apologize for the TF and Mantra of Frost issue, I forgot that they couldn't stack.

i, personally don't like the idea of IW in tombs or gvg.

im going to repeat some stuff, but i dont think it has been stressed enough.

1. rend/well of profane is used soooo much in tombs... all iway tainted necros get profane, and all spike groups get a necro with lingering curse or rend.
those IW won't last for too long.
2. if an enemy team sees a winter-conf combo, they will understand you are beung proteced by it, and will take the spirits down rather quickly...
3. IW damage is weak enough with a mes primary... you shouldn't get it dropped further with a ranger primary...
4. you don't have a skill to speed up your attack rate, making the IW damage even smaller.
5. normal warriors can defeat an IW ranger, meaning you are weak to iway, and you will run up to those. where you do X damage in Y seconds, constantly, a warrior would do small damage for a while, then do X damage in a second of spiking...

i'm not saying IW can't be done in 8v8... i'm just not convinced...

Although I agree with the issue that IW kinda sucks in 8v8, I might suggest that your Greater Conflag. R/Me bring Arcane Mimicry. (so he or she can join in the IW fun) I don't think people understand the value that mimicry can have when builds require more than one person using a specific elite. (E.G. Unyielding Aura in a minion factory build on a resbot...) If enough people on a team use the same classes (primary or secondary) then Arcane Mimicry can be a second elite for that person.

Hehe brings back some memories from spirit spam, unfortunately you cannot spam so efficiently anymore, therefore unless you have spirits on every single ranger your opposition are likely to kill them more efficiently than you can keep them up, if you take one oath spammer it just take a mesmer or interruption and gg.

If you somehow managed to hold halls with this, being doubled or even one vs one, im pretty sure at some stage the spirits would be killed, or with some mistakes, if you put winter and conflag up in the wrong order, one becomes ineffective with the way you propose to use it. Its just so easily conutered with the main focus of the build spirits which can't be spammed.