I’ve tried it all, Archery, Combat, Nature, and bit of hybrid, and for my playstyle, I’ve come to a conclusion that Nature spec is the best for tough premade matches. With all builds, you’ll have to choose between more dps or survive a bit longer. Personally I choose to stay alive for longer to hold the point.

With my experience, I have been able to hold the node against 99% of the player base, the only ones that I have problems with are tough hard hitting sent GWFs (eg. Steamroller). I can even hold the point against 2 people for a while until I get some backup, and sometimes even kill both of them if I’m lucky. I think of myself as a hybrid between a DC and a dps’er.

Here’s a link to my build:

http://nwcalc.com/hr?b=oy7:4slio:a6l…u5u1&h=0&p=swd

and my character sheet:

I have spec’ed to have Max CON, all my defense slots are all radiant, currently just over 34k hp. This is important, and the key to this build. My other points are all into DEX for max damage.

You will notice my crit to be very low, yes more crit is good if you want to kill stuff, but this build is made to outlast whoever you’re fighting against, and not so much on burst damage. I’m currently using 3 Greater Tenebrous and 1 Azure in my Offense slots. You can switch them all to Azures to keep your crit up, especially if using vorpal.

[edit] – 27/02/2014, currently swapped a Radiant out for a Brutal enchantment, and also got Eye of Lathander artifact to get my defense up a bit higher. Also planning to swap some Greater Tenebrous out for Azures.

My encounters include:
Commanding Shot/Stag heart – This never leaves my bar, although I hardly ever use commanding shot due to long cast time, stag heart is just too good. I’m constantly giving myself and my team over 4k temp hp which last forever, and as long as they have that temp hp, they also get 10% extra defense. This synergies with GF’s and DC’s feats too. I always keep my eyes out and see who needs that buff to be topped up.

Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze – Time this right after a CW uses shard, and when GWFs are not in unstoppable.

Fox’s Cunning/Fox shift – I think 99% of HRs runs this, just make sure you have used a range encounter first to get 15% more damage for fox shift.

Binding Arrow/Oak Skin – Also a pretty good skill, to hold enemies off the node, and Oak skin to give everyone some regen and more defense.

Boar Hide/Boar charge – More defense for everyone, and Boar charge is fun, and crucial if you want to take a GWF down. This is a skill which is very good for combat spec HRs.

HRs have so many options to what skills we use, just need to pick some to create some good combos. I have chosen a defensive route to make sure myself and my team last a bit longer in the battlefield.

Dailies:
Disruptive Shot – Pretty obvious

Forest Ghost – Situational, as it has an animation, it’s good to sneak onto the home and enemy base if there’s enemies on them already

Class Features:
Aspect of the Lone Wolf – The less players you face, the more bonus mitigation you get

Stompstep Action – Althought Fox shift stompstep action bug is fixed, this is still great to reduce your cooldowns

Armor Set:
I’m using 4 piece Royal Guard, will I still use this when Tenacity is introduced? probably. I’ll have to see if I can stay alive better on this set vs PvP sets. The reason I choose this set is to reduce my cooldown for encounters, namely Stag Heart. But we’ll have to see how much temp hp this will give in next module with healing depression. If you’re using another set, then you’ll need to get quite a lot of recovery wherever you can.

Weapon/Armor Enchants:
I’ve been playing around with different weapon enchants. Perfect Feytouch and Greater Plague fires are good.
PF is a bit more effective if you’re using Tenebrous to help proc it, and gives everyone a 9% more damage if you can get 3 stacks on someone.
Feytouch is good to reduce your opponent’s damage while increasing your own. This is a very good enchant that most people don’t seem to know or care about. It only half about half the uptime, and only encounters can proc it. When it does, your enemy is doing 12% less damage, while you’re doing 12% more.

Otherwise Vorpal is good as long as your crit % is high enough. So for your offensive slots, you can choose between Greater Tenes, Azures, or Silvery.

For Armor Enchants, I switch between a soulforge and a perfect negation, the good thing is that you can switch between 2 armors in battle, so if 1 is on cooldown, then switch to the other. Negation is quite good when it procs and you’re tanking against 3 players. For all defensive slots, just have radiants, as high rank as you can.

Artifacts:
Emblem of the Seldarine – This is one of the best PvP artifact, and you can save your teammates when they’re low on health.

Blood Crystal Raven Skull – Great stats, and useful if you don’t have Emblem.

Waters of Elah’zad – I think all HRs should be choosing this as their starting artifact, the stats are so good.

Lantern of Revelation – good offensive stats if you’re lacking some, I usually use this instead of Blood Crystal Raven Skull as I’m lacking some crit points

Eye of Lathander – This is one of the hardest artifact to get, but if you can finally get one it can boost your Defense and Life Steal up, I swap this in if I’m fighting against a GWF 1v1, and depending on team compositions in both parties.

Original Post

StevieJee’s HR Hybrid Build

Overview & Background

With any MMO, I have always been immediately drawn to the archer/ranger-type class. With Neverwinter specifically, the Hunter Ranger is a very unique, fast-paced, and consistent class that I have learned to enjoy playing. I am going to show you how to optimize your Hunter Ranger with my Hybrid build set.

The first thing that should be notes is that, at around level 10, you again the ability to swap between ranged and melee weapons at will. The different stances each come with their own versions of your selected At-Will and Encounter powers. This class is MEANT to be played by utilizing both stances.

Of course, there are always players who prefer to stay ranged. And that’s fine, if that is how you prefer to play. However, you are not utilizing everything that is at your disposal. First off, Hunter Rangers build most of their Action Points from using encounter powers. If you stay in one stance, you are only gaining half as many Action Points. That means it will take you TWICE as long to use a Daily power as it would if you had constantly been swapping between ranged and melee.

Additionally, as with most classes, many of the Hunter Ranger’s skills have unsettlingly long cool downs. While these cause been reduced through a variety of methods, it is better to just swap to melee while your ranged attacks are on cool down, and visa versa. By doing this, the Hunter Ranger is the ONLY class in the game that can keep up consistent attacking damage. Other fighting classes in this game have very strong ‘burst’ damage. The unleash all their abilities at once, dealing massive damage in a small burst, then wait for some amount of time before they can burst again. The Hunter Ranger is able to constantly deal impressive damage by utilizing both of their stances.

If you’re a ranged-only kind of player and you still need more convincing, try using Marauder’s Rush and Fox Shift just once. You’ll fall in love. These two attacks are very vital to the following build.

Hunter Ranger Hybrid in PvP

This build, as you could imagine, is extremely effective in PvP. If used correctly, you will end up dominating most other players, even if they have higher gear scores than you. When I play PvP, I usually rank towards the top of the list with a quite large kill-to-death ratio. However, as with all pug matchups, if your team in dragging you down too much, there will be nothing you can do. This build is very efficient, but you are only one player. You cannot engage more than 2 opponents at once and expect to come out alive.

This build is most efficient at dealing with ‘squishier’ classes. However, it can handily deal with tanky classes like the GWF as well. In a 5v5 brawl, you should prioritize your targets. Single a player out, and keep up your consistent DPS until they drop. Most of the time they will not know what is happening until it is too late. Then you switch to your next target. Your priorities should be as follows:

1. Hunter Rangers: You’d think trying to fight your own class would typically be rather challenging, right? Wrong. Most Hunter Rangers try to utilize the ‘Ranged-Stance-only’ fighting style. They sit back and pew pew while all the fighters cluster up the center. They are prime targets for this build. HRs will drop almost immediately.

2. Trickster Rogues: Sometimes players are intimidated by TRs due to their very strong single-target damage and their ability to cloak. Don’t worry about all that, they are pushovers. They try to get a fighting advantage by going invisible as soon as they see you and then sneaking up behind you for a backstab. If you avoid that, then you will win the fight. This is done very easily by using Fox’s Cunning as soon as you see the TR go invisible. Then cycle through your combo, and stay with them when they try to cloak and run away. Invisible targets can be seen if you stand close enough to them.

3. Control Wizards: CWs are easily the squishiest class in the game, and can be brought down faster than other HRs and TRs. However, you have to get the drop on them first. If they get you in their burst-control cycle, you better start praying. They typically try to grab you with Force Choke, then burst you away with their single-target ice spells. If you catch them looking the other way, they won’t have the chance to set you up in their cycle.

4. Devoted Clerics: These players have access to gear and abilities that make them slightly more tanky, and therefore can take some time to kill. However, they are easy targets for this build. They scarcely have any skills that do significant damage, and you are able to catch them with abilities that will interrupt their buffs and heals. Just by keeping the DC preoccupied, you are immensely helping your team.

5. Great Weapon Fighters: When you first encounter a GWF in PvP, it seems like an awful experience. They appear unstoppable. This is ALL just an illusion. GWFs rely HEAVILY on burst damage. As soon as they see you, they try to charge in and knock you down. If they succeed, they continue to knock you back with each successive attack. It can be VERY difficult to recover from this situation, HOWEVER, if you avoid the initial burst, GWFs have nothing to fall back on. After you dodge it, keep moving around and cycling through ranged and melee stances, and the poor GWF won’t even be able to keep track of where you are. It can actually be quite amusing how lost they get when their burst fails.

6. Guardian Fighters: These buggers will give you the most issues in PvP. If you try to engage them directly, they have an arsenal of powers that can interrupt you. Additionally, they just take too long to widdle down. Try to avoid fighting a GF by yourself. If you find yourself in a situation fighting a GF and some other class, just focus down the other class. Completely ignore the Guardian, taking advantage of how slowly they move. Alternatively, if a GF is engaged with another one of your teammates, feel free to target him. His defenses will be down and he will be surprisingly easy to drop.

Hunter Ranger Hybrid in PvE

There isn’t much to say about this in particular. PvE is not difficult with almost any Hunter Ranger build, but this build specifically provide you with the same, if not better DPS output than other builds, and also offers much higher survivability. You’ll find yourself almost always at the top of the damage charts, only occasionally being outdone by a GWF that has 4,000 more gear score than you do.

THE BUILD

STORMWARDEN
Currently the only Paragon Path available (though I hear there is a new one coming out!)

Ability Scores

First off, I encourage you to pick whichever race you enjoy playing as. While some races have HR-oriented advantages, it doesn’t make a big enough different and should not influence your decision. Personally, I picked the Wood Elf. Ideally, you’ll want to be able to put your 2 extra points into either DEX or WIS, with STR as a very, very far afterthought. Simply roll your stats so that DEX and WIS are as high as they can be, and then every 10 levels dump all your Ability Points into DEX and WIS until you hit 60.

Powers

(3/3) Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike: Not as good as I’d like, but the only decent single-target At-Will power that the HR has at its disposal currently.

(3/3) Split Shot/Split Strike: This power is beautiful, and will generate most of your damage in dungeons and other PvE situations. It does notable amounts of damage to a large spread of targets.

Aimed Shot/Aimed Strike: The charge time is too long to make this At-Will useful at all.

Electric Shot/Clear the Ground: The AoE of this skill is too small, also making it useless.

(3/3) Marauder’s Escape/Marauder’s Rush: This power should be used in every build set, it is that good. Marauder’s Rush does outstanding damage, and Marauder’s Escape is great for movement as well as generating A LOT of Action Points.

(3/3) Rain of Arrows/Rain of Swords: This power is ONLY useful for boss fights where the boss is large and rather stationary. Otherwise, the AoE is too small to be useful. Additionally, Rain of Swords generates some decent DoT for longer boss fights.

(3/3) Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze: This power is especially handy in PvP. When maxed out, Constricting Arrow interrupts the target THREE TIMES. This makes it EXTREMELY annoying for enemies to try to attack you. Steel Breeze is also a nice touch if you are low on stamina.

(3/3) Split the Sky/Throw Caution: I rarely use this power. It’s moderately helpful in PvE and PvP to set up an advantageous zone for you and your allies to fight in, but the slot is typically better used if replaced with another power. Throw Caution allegedly increases your damage output, but the buff is not very noticeable and doesn’t last nearly long enough.

(3/3) Fox’s Cunning/Fox Shift: THIS SKILL. It’s literally the icing on the cake that is Hunter Ranger. The ranged and melee stance version complement each other extremely well. I will go into more detail on this later in the build.

Hindering Shot/Hindering Strike: Decent for solo PvE, but useless in all other situations. You may try to argue this instead of Constricting Arrow for PvP, but being able to interrupt the target is vital for most confrontations. Do not even try to replace the two, it is a terrible idea.

Thorn Ward/Thorn Strike: This skill is oriented towards wussy little nature-build HRs. They are all about buffing their allies and lowering their targets’ stats. I don’t know about you, but that’s just not my play style. If you want that, look for another build.

Boar Hide: Nature build, useless.

Hawk Shot/Hawkeye: Nature build, useless.

Binding Arrow/Oak Skin: Nature build, useless.

Commanding Shot/Stag Heart: Nature build, useless.

(3/3) Aspect of the Serpent: This passive feature is meant for hybrid builds. While in each stance, you buff the next 5 attacks of the other stance. Excellent if you switch between stances as often as you should be.

(3/3) Stormstep Action: Maxed out, this feature reduces all your cool downs by 3 seconds every time you use a Daily Power. At first glance, this doesn’t seem that impressive. I mean, it takes a while to gather enough Action Points to use a Daily Power, only to have them all drained away, right? Well true, but the Hunter Ranger is given a Daily Power that only uses 25% of your Action Points. With all the stance changing you’ll be doing, and thus all the encounters you will be using, you will ALWAYS have at least 25% AP by the time that Daily Power is off cool down again. This feature is a must-have.

(3/3) Twin-Blade Storm: This feature is an alternative ONLY to Aspect of the Serpent. You gain an extra 12% damage whenever you hit more than 2 enemies. In the long run, that is a TON of damage. Especially useful in dungeon runs.

Aspect of the Falcon: Only an option for ranged-only builds, and as we have already discussed, those builds are terrible.

Aspect of the Lone Wolf: Only useful for early-game solo levelling. Otherwise, not necessary.

Aspect of the Pack: As HRs, we don’t really benefit enough from Combat Advantage. This feature isn’t necessary.

Blade Storm: Seems like a good deal at first, but when you do the math, this is a waste of points. First of all, it only affects melee attacks, which is practically a deal breaker in itself. Second, it only has a 25% chance of dealing 15% extra damage around you when you’re hitting with melee? This is a deal breaker as well, because each melee attack by itself is not very strong anyway. Melee power comes from quick, successive strikes.

(3/3) Seismic Shot: This is our only ‘moderately’ strong AoE Daily Power. It can be useful in our secondary Daily slot.

(3/3) Forest Ghost: This power can be very useful to drop aggro in both PvE and PvP. In PvP, opponents will easily lose track of you in a crowded situation.

(3/3) Forest Meditation: This power can only be utilized well if you max it out to resist control powers. I rarely use it, but if you want it, max it and throw it in your secondary slot.

(3/3) Disruptive Shot: For ALL combinations, this power should always be in your primary Daily slot. This skill may not do an impressive amount of damage, but it only uses up 25% of your Action Points. This power will make it feel like your Encounter Powers don’t even have a cool down!

(3/3) Cold Steel Hurricane: This power does less-then-moderate AoE damage, but slows all enemies it hits. Useful for dungeons that have massive crowds of enemies.

Feel free to put remaining points into any powers you want to play around with.

Feats

Heroic

(3/3) Weapon Mastery: +3% critical chance.
(3/3) Toughness: +9% hit points.
(5/5) Swift Footwork: +10% stamina regeneration.
(3/3) Endless Assault: +6% Encounter Power damage.
(3/3) Lucky Skirmisher: +3% deflection chance.
(3/3) Disciple of Dexterity: DEX gives you +6% more damage.

After allocating your Heroic Feats, there are two separate Paragon Feat builds that will work well with this build. Pick whichever seems more alluring to you. If you have the means, I encourage you to test run each build personally to see which best fits your play style.

Paragon Build #1 – Archery

(5/5) Black Arrow: +10% critical severity for ranged attacks.
(5/5) Bloodthirsty: Ranged Encounter Powers make the next melee Encounter Power deal 15% more damage.
(5/5) Correcting Aim: Each non-critical hit boosts your critical chance by 5% until you crit.
(5/5) Nature’s Grasp: Ranged attacks have a 5% chance to apply grasping roots.
(5/5) Sniper’s Aim: Increases your damage by up to 20% at max distance from the target.
(5/5) Prime Critical: When you crit, Encounter cool downs are reduced by 0.5 seconds.
(1/1) Master of Archery: When you critically strike with a ranged attack, your next Encounter Power will crit.

Paragon Build #2 – Melee

(5/5) Seeker: Melee attacks generate 1% of your stamina.
(5/5) Agile Hunter: Melee Encounter Powers reduce the cool downs of ranged Encounter Powers by 1 second.
(5/5) Lethal Hunter: Melee attacks deal 15% more damage.
(5/5) Elusive Hunter: In Melee Stance, your deflection chance increases by 10%.
(5/5) Bleeding Precision: Increases critical chance for melee attacks by 10%.
(5/5) Expert Skirmisher: Increases your run speed by 10% in Melee Stance.
(1/1) Master of Combat: Melee attacks have a 17% chance to strike twice. The damage from the second attack cannot be mitigated.

The reason we do not combine these two builds for our Hybrid build is simply because we do not have enough points to get everything we’d need. We NEED to either achieve Master of Archery or Master of Combat, as these feats are too good to pass up, and that leaves us with only 10 points to allocate in another path.

Power Combinations & Cycles

PvP

At-Wills: Rapid Shot, & Split Shot
Encounters: Marauder’s Escape, Fox’s Cunning, & Constricting Arrow
Features: Stormstep Action, & Twin-Blade Storm OR Aspect of the Serpent
Dailies: Disruptive Shot, & whatever else you want

Start out each confrontation in Ranged Stance, then repeat this rotation:
Constricting Arrow -> Fox’s Cunning -> MELEE STANCE -> Marauder’s Rush -> Fox Shift -> Steel Breeze -> RANGED STANCE -> Marauder’s Escape -> Disruptive Shot -> REPEAT

Mix in your dodges and Split Shots accordingly. If for some reason your ranged powers are still on cool down at the end of this rotation, spam Split Shot from a distance.

PvE: Solo

At-Wills: Rapid Shot, & Split Shot
Encounters: Marauder’s Escape, Fox’s Cunning, & Constricting Arrow
Features: Stormstep Action, & Twin-Blade Storm
Dailies: Disruptive Shot, & whatever else you want

PvE: Dungeons

At-Wills: Rapid Shot, & Split Shot
Encounters: Marauder’s Escape, Fox’s Cunning, & Split the Sky
Features: Stormstep Action, & Twin-Blade Storm
Dailies: Disruptive Shot, & whatever else you want

PvE: Boss Fights

At-Wills: Rapid Shot, & Split Shot
Encounters: Marauder’s Escape, Fox’s Cunning, & Rain of Arrows
Features: Stormstep Action, & Twin-Blade Storm
Dailies: Disruptive Shot, & whatever else you want

Gear, Ratings, Enchantments, Companions, & Boons!

Ratings

In Neverwinter, there are what are commonly referred to as ‘soft caps’ and ‘hard caps’ for most stat ratings. These limits are derived from the fact that as you apply more points to a certain stat, its effectiveness follows a sort-of logarithmic curve. At low ratings, each stat will gain larger benefits than they would if they were already higher ratings. For example, if you have 200 critical strike, you’d get around 1.8% more critical chance if you add another 200 rating. However, if you have 4,000 critical strike, you’d only get about 0.37% critical chance for adding the very same 200.

The stats in Neverwinter that are affected by this diminishing aspect are critical strike, armor penetration, recovery, defense, deflect, regeneration, life steal, and movement. Power is a purely linear stat, and never diminishes despite how much rating you put into it. Out of the diminishing stats, movement is the only one that will never approach its ‘soft cap’ rating. I keep referring to soft caps and hard caps, but I haven’t exactly defined them yet. A soft cap is when the stat starts to make a notable decay in its effectiveness. This limit is very loosely defined, and many players push past it for stats that are more useful to their build. A hard cap is essentially a point where you get virtually no benefits from adding more rating to a stat. Hopefully you never commit enough to one stat to ever reach this limit, because that would be a waste.

Now, to make things even more confusing, each stat has a different soft cap. Luckily, I have already taken the liberty of plotting each stat rating versus its effectiveness (using the tooltips provided by Neverwinter). I have VERY roughly approximated soft caps for every stat that has one.

Critical Strike: 2,800~3,200
Armor Penetration: 2,400~2,600
Recovery: 2,600~2,800
Defense: 2,400~2,800
Deflection: 2,000~2,200
Regeneration: ~1,000
Life Steal: ~1,400

As mentioned earlier, these soft caps are not absolute limits. For example, with this build in particular, I push the boundaries of critical strike and armor penetration to about 3,600 and 2,900 respectively. I am not getting as much for each point I put into them, but they are more essential to my build and therefore benefit from a little extra attention.

For this Hunter Ranger hybrid build, I encourage you to play around with stats and ratings and see what works well for yourself. I will however make a few recommendations. You should strive to reach the soft caps for regeneration and life steal, because both of these stats are very helpful and have low caps. Additionally, critical strike and armor penetration should be your main offensive stats. These stats can be pushed a bit past their soft caps if necessary. Recovery should be ignored for the most part; this build produces a ton of cool down reduction as it is. If gear you want comes with recovery, it’s not that big of a deal. Deflection should be your main defensive stat, with defense as the secondary. This is because, especially in PvP, other players with high armor penetration essentially cut through the defense stat like butter. Getting defense to its soft cap should be sufficient.

If you have all your ratings how you like them, I suggest throwing some extra points into power and hit points. These stats are great because they never diminish. They might not be as effective early on, but once all your other stats are diminishing, power and hit points start making a much bigger impact on your performance.

Gear

From Tier 1 Dungeon Delves (for Epic dungeons only), you can get some less-than-ideal Tier 1 armor sets. Let’s skip past those and talk about the Tier 2 and Tier 2.5 armor sets.

Tier 2 Armor

Grand Warden Armor
• Power: 1,271
• Critical Strike: 1,271
• Armor Penetration: 574
• Recovery: 574
• Defense: 766
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 critical strike
• 4-Piece Bonus: When you crit with an At-Will power, there is a 20% chance that your next Encounter Power will deal 1,735 more physical damage.

Royal Guard Armor
• Power: 1,271
• Armor Penetration: 1,271
• Defense: 766
• Deflection: 574
• Regeneration: 504
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 armor penetration
• 4-Piece Bonus: When dealing damage to a foe you have a chance to reduce all your cooldowns by 30%.

Tier 2.5 Armor

Dread Legion Armor
• Power: 1,312
• Critical Strike: 637
• Armor Penetration: 1,312
• Defense: 799
• Life Steal: 637
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 critical strike
• 4-Piece Bonus: When dealing damage, you have a chance to activate Illusionist’s Grip on your target. Illusionist’s Grip roots the target for 2 seconds. When this effect expires, Illusionist’s Grip jumps to a new nearby target. It will jump twice.

Fabled Iliyanbruen Armor
• Critical Strike: 1,293
• Armor Penetration: 1,293
• Recovery: 606
• Defense: 772
• Deflection: 606
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 critical strike
• 4-Piece Bonus: Your direct damage Encounter Powers apply Strong Grasping Roots to their target. This may only occur once every 40 seconds.

Tier 2.5 armor is labelled as Tier 2 by the game, but has notably higher total stats than typical Tier 2. Thus, the community has labelled them Tier 2.5. The Dread Legion and Fabled Iliyanbruen armors can only be obtained through a lot of time dedicated to the Dread Ring and Sharandar campaigns, respectively. Do not expect to acquire these pieces quickly or easily. Focus on obtaining Tier 2 armor pieces first. Any of the sets mentioned above can work just fine with this build, as long as you accommodate for the missing stats with other equipment.

As far as weapons go, we’ll ideally want to acquire a bow and some blades that are part of a weapon set. Tier 2 weapon sets that can work with this build are listed below.

Tier 2 Weapons

Fallen Dragon Weapons
• Power: 1,872
• Critical Strike: 232
• Recovery: 232
• Life Steal: 434
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 armor penetration

Fomorian Weapons
• Power: 1,888
• Critical Strike: 328
• Armor Penetration: 103
• Recovery: 103
• Life Steal: 328
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 armor penetration

Ancient Trapper’s Weapons
• Power: 1,848
• Critical Strike: 442
• Armor Penetration: 206
• Deflection: 206
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 armor penetration

Dread Legions Weapons
• Power: 1,866
• Critical Strike: 218
• Armor Penetration: 448
• Life Steal: 218
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 armor penetration

PvP Gear

With the introduction of Tenacity in PvP, we are given limited options as far as PvP gear goes. We cannot wear our typical gear in PvP and expect to be an even match for all players. Look at the different armor and weapon sets, and trinkets, under the ‘Grim’ tab at the PvP vendors. Do not even give a second glance at the ‘Profound’ tab. That gear is a waste of your hard-earned Glory and Seals of Triumph. There will be 3 different kind of sets for weapons and armor, and 6 different kinds of each neck, waist, and ring pieces. Pick whichever ones give you desirable ratings.

Enchantments

When you first hit level 60, do not expect to reach highly-ranked enchantment for quite some time. Additionally, do not try to refine any enchantments past rank 5 unless you somehow got ahold of a coalescent ward. At level 60, equip yourself with the rank 5 versions of whatever enchantments you decided would help fill in your ratings, and then save up for higher ranks later down the road.

As for weapon in armor enchantments, Vorpal and Soulforged enchantments are ideal. The extra critical severity from Vorpal is really hard to pass up, and Soulforged adds that extra bit of survivability that we’ve been longing for. Plague Fire is also another decent weapon enchantment that you could look at, as well as anything that adds or deals necrotic damage. Necrotic damage is damage that cannot be mitigated by neither defense, deflection, nor any other means.

Companions

In your companion tab, you’ll notice you have 5 ‘Active Companion Slots’ at level 60. However, you can only have one companion summoned at a time. Each companion has what is called an ‘Active Bonus’ that applies to you even when they are not summoned. As long as they are placed into one of your 5 active companion slots, you will receive the active bonus. You will want to pick companions that give you desirable active bonuses for these 5 slots.

Additionally, the companion that you have summoned should be an Augment-type companion. When an Augment is summoned, you gain all of the stats that the Augment has. For example, if you equipped your Augment with a Profane Runestone, Rank 10 in its offense slot, you would receive the 300 critical strike that your Augment receives. This is an excellent way of filling in any ratings that are lacking a little. Keep in mind, however, that companions and their effects are not available in PvP.

Boons

From progressing in the Dread Ring and Sharandar campaigns, you get to choose from a handful of juicy boons. I’ll spend some time here talking about those. For the most part, you can feel free to choose whatever boons you want, though. For each tier of boons, you can only choose ONE.

Sharandar Boons
• Tier 1
o +250 Defense
o +250 Power
• Tier 2
o +250 Deflect
o +250 Critical Strike
• Tier 3
o +700 Max HP
o +2% Action Point Gain
• Tier 4
o When being struck by a foe you have a chance to heal yourself for 400 HP.
o When striking a foe you have a chance to deal 400 Arcane damage.
• Tier 5
o Your Stamina or Guard Meter regenerate 10% faster in Combat.
o When you Deflect an attack you deal 400 damage to your attacker.
o When you kill a foe you gain 20 Power for 45 seconds. This buff stacks up to 30 times.
o Potions now heal you for 10% more.

For Tier 3, you will want to go with the HP boost because our AP gain is already efficient enough. For Tier 5, you will want the bonus to deflection, because we’ll be deflecting a lot of attacks and therefore dishing out a lot of extra damage.

Dread Ring Boons
• Tier 1
o +125 Power and +125 Movement
o +125 Critical Strike and +125 Movement
• Tier 2
o +250 Life Steal
o +250 Regeneration
• Tier 3
o +3% Deflection Severity
o +250 Armor Penetration
• Tier 4
o When taking damage you have a chance to heal 1000 Hit Points over a few seconds. After this effect ends you have 250 more Defense for 10 seconds.
o When dealing damage you have a chance to deal 1000 Necrotic damage over a few seconds. After this effect ends the target receives 25% less healing from spells for 10 seconds.
• Tier 5
o When taking damage you have a chance to generate a shield that absorbs 500 incoming damage and redirects that damage to a nearby foe. This shield lasts 6 seconds.
o When you deal damage you gain a stack of “Madness”. When you reach 50 stacks of “Madness” you gain 600 Power, 300 Life Steal, and 300 Regeneration. 10 seconds after gaining this bonus your stacks are reset. You may only gain on stack of “Madness” per second.
o When you steal health from your Life Steal stat, it has a chance to steal 3 times as much.
o Your healing spells have a chance to burn enemies near the target for 120 Radiant damage.

There is only one boon from Dread Ring that is entirely useless to our build. Otherwise, pick whichever boons sound more helpful to you and your current stat layout.

THE END

That concludes the basic overview of my Hunter Ranger Hybrid build! I hope this build has at least helped you out in one way or another. If I have offended anyone by my brief PvP analysis, it was unintentional. Every class in Neverwinter has an equal opportunity to be ‘overpowered’ if they are played correctly, and likewise any play style has an equal opportunity to be effective.

That’s all guys! Thanks for reading. If you liked this build, that’s awesome! If you didn’t like it, that’s okay too. This is what worked for me, and it has worked extremely well so far.

See you guys around Neverwinter!

Hunter Ranger PvP 50/50 Ranged-Melee Hybrid Build for Neverwinter Mod 4
Race: Wood Elf
Ability Scores: DEX to max/1st highest, WIS to 2nd highest, STR to 3rd highest, Con to 4th highest, Int & Cha at base min.
Primay Focus/Spec: PVP
PATH: STORMWARDEN
Powers:
(3/3) Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike: Not as good as I’d like, but the only decent single-target At-Will power that the HR has at its disposal currently.
(3/3) Split Shot/Split Strike: This power is beautiful, and will generate most of your damage in dungeons and other PvE situations. It does notable amounts of damage to a large spread of targets.
(3/3) Marauder’s Escape/Marauder’s Rush: This power should be used in every build set, it is that good. Marauder’s Rush does outstanding damage, and Marauder’s Escape is great for movement as well as generating A LOT of Action Points.
(3/3) Rain of Arrows/Rain of Swords: This power is ONLY useful for boss fights where the boss is large and rather stationary. Otherwise, the AoE is too small to be useful. Additionally, Rain of Swords generates some decent DoT for longer boss fights.
(3/3) Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze: This power is especially handy in PvP. When maxed out, Constricting Arrow interrupts the target THREE TIMES. This makes it EXTREMELY annoying for enemies to try to attack you. Steel Breeze is also a nice touch if you are low on stamina.
(3/3) Split the Sky/Throw Caution: I rarely use this power. It’s moderately helpful in PvE and PvP to set up an advantageous zone for you and your allies to fight in, but the slot is typically better used if replaced with another power. Throw Caution allegedly increases your damage output, but the buff is not very noticeable and doesn’t last nearly long enough.
(3/3) Fox’s Cunning/Fox Shift: THIS SKILL. It’s literally the icing on the cake that is Hunter Ranger. The ranged and melee stance version complement each other extremely well. I will go into more detail on this later in the build.
(3/3) Aspect of the Serpent: This passive feature is meant for hybrid builds. While in each stance, you buff the next 5 attacks of the other stance. Excellent if you switch between stances as often as you should be.
(3/3) Stormstep Action: Maxed out, this feature reduces all your cool downs by 3 seconds every time you use a Daily Power. At first glance, this doesn’t seem that impressive. I mean, it takes a while to gather enough Action Points to use a Daily Power, only to have them all drained away, right? Well true, but the Hunter Ranger is given a Daily Power that only uses 25% of your Action Points. With all the stance changing you’ll be doing, and thus all the encounters you will be using, you will ALWAYS have at least 25% AP by the time that Daily Power is off cool down again. This feature is a must-have.
(3/3) Twin-Blade Storm: This feature is an alternative ONLY to Aspect of the Serpent. You gain an extra 12% damage whenever you hit more than 2 enemies. In the long run, that is a TON of damage. Especially useful in dungeon runs.
(3/3) Seismic Shot: This is our only ‘moderately’ strong AoE Daily Power. It can be useful in our secondary Daily slot.
(3/3) Forest Ghost: This power can be very useful to drop aggro in both PvE and PvP. In PvP, opponents will easily lose track of you in a crowded situation.
(3/3) Forest Meditation: This power can only be utilized well if you max it out to resist control powers. I rarely use it, but if you want it, max it and throw it in your secondary slot.
(3/3) Disruptive Shot: For ALL combinations, this power should always be in your primary Daily slot. This skill may not do an impressive amount of damage, but it only uses up 25% of your Action Points. This power will make it feel like your Encounter Powers don’t even have a cool down!
(3/3) Cold Steel Hurricane: This power does less-then-moderate AoE damage, but slows all enemies it hits. Useful for dungeons that have massive crowds of enemies.
Feats:Heroic
(3/3) Weapon Mastery: +3% critical chance.
(3/3) Toughness: +9% hit points.
(5/5) Swift Footwork: +10% stamina regeneration.
(3/3) Endless Assault: +6% Encounter Power damage.
(3/3) Lucky Skirmisher: +3% deflection chance.
(3/3) Disciple of Dexterity: DEX gives you +6% more damage.
Feats:Paragon
Archery
(5/5) Black Arrow: +10% critical severity for ranged attacks.
(5/5) Bloodthirsty: Ranged Encounter Powers make the next melee Encounter Power deal 15% more damage.
(5/5) Correcting Aim: Each non-critical hit boosts your critical chance by 5% until you crit.
(5/5) Nature’s Grasp: Ranged attacks have a 5% chance to apply grasping roots.
(5/5) Sniper’s Aim: Increases your damage by up to 20% at max distance from the target.
(5/5) Prime Critical: When you crit, Encounter cool downs are reduced by 0.5 seconds.
(1/1) Master of Archery: When you critically strike with a ranged attack, your next Encounter Power will crit.
Paragon Build #2 – Melee
(5/5) Seeker: Melee attacks generate 1% of your stamina.
(5/5) Agile Hunter: Melee Encounter Powers reduce the cool downs of ranged Encounter Powers by 1 second.
(5/5) Lethal Hunter: Melee attacks deal 15% more damage.
(5/5) Elusive Hunter: In Melee Stance, your deflection chance increases by 10%.
(5/5) Bleeding Precision: Increases critical chance for melee attacks by 10%.
(5/5) Expert Skirmisher: Increases your run speed by 10% in Melee Stance.
(1/1) Master of Combat: Melee attacks have a 17% chance to strike twice. The damage from the second attack cannot be mitigated.

Power Combinations & Cycles: PvP Combat:
At-Wills: Rapid Shot, & Split Shot
Encounters: Marauder’s Escape, Fox’s Cunning, & Constricting Arrow
Features: Stormstep Action, & Twin-Blade Storm OR Aspect of the Serpent
Dailies: Disruptive Shot, & whatever else you want

Start out each confrontation in Ranged Stance, then repeat this rotation:
RANGED STANCE: Constricting Arrow -> Fox’s Cunning ->
MELEE STANCE -> Marauder’s Rush -> Fox Shift -> Steel Breeze ->
RANGED STANCE -> Marauder’s Escape -> Disruptive Shot ->
REPEAT:
*Mix in your dodges and Split Shots accordingly.
If for some reason your ranged powers are still on cool down at the end of this rotation, spam Split Shot from a distance.
Ratings: Soft Caps’ and Hard Caps’
These limits are derived from the fact that as you apply more points to a certain stat, its effectiveness follows a sort-of logarithmic curve.
At low ratings, each stat will gain larger benefits than they would if they were already higher ratings.
For example, if you have 200 critical strike, you’d get around 1.8% more critical chance if you add another 200 rating.
However, if you have 4,000 critical strike, you’d only get about 0.37% critical chance for adding the very same 200.
The stats affected by diminishing returns:
critical strike,
armor penetration,
recovery,
defense,
deflect,
regeneration,
life steal,
and
movement.
*Special Note:
Power: *is a purely linear stat, and never diminishes despite how much rating you put into it. Out of the diminishing stats, movement is the only one that will never approach its ‘soft cap’ rating. I keep referring to soft caps and hard caps, but I haven’t exactly defined them yet.
soft cap:
is when the stat starts to make a notable decay in its effectiveness.
This limit is very loosely defined, and many players push past it for stats that are more useful to their build.
hard cap:
is essentially a point where you get virtually no benefits from adding more rating to a stat. Hopefully you never commit enough to one stat to ever reach this limit, because that would be a waste.
Each stat has a different soft cap (using the tooltips provided by Neverwinter) roughly approximated soft caps for every stat that has one.
Critical Strike: 2,800~3,200
Armor Penetration: 2,400~2,600
Recovery: 2,600~2,800
Defense: 2,400~2,800
Deflection: 2,000~2,200
Regeneration: ~1,000
Life Steal: ~1,400
As mentioned earlier, these soft caps are not absolute limits.
For example, with this build in particular, I push the boundaries of critical strike and armor penetration to about 3,600 and 2,900 respectively.
I am not getting as much for each point I put into them, but they are more essential to my build and therefore benefit from a little extra attention.
Recommendations.
Regeneration and Life Steal,
You should strive to reach the soft caps for because both of these stats are very helpful and have low caps.
Critical strike and armor penetration
should be your main offensive stats. These stats can be pushed a bit past their soft caps if necessary.
Recovery
should be ignored for the most part; this build produces a ton of cool down reduction as it is. If the gear you want comes withRecovery, it’s not that big of a deal.
Deflection should be your main defensive stat, with Defense as the secondary.
*This is because, especially in PvP, other players with high armor penetration essentially cut through the defense stat like butter. Getting defense to its soft cap should be sufficient.
Power and Max Hit Points.
These stats are great because they never diminish. They might not be as effective early on, but once all your other stats are at soft cap diminishing return limit-
Power and Hit Points
start making a much bigger impact on your performance.
PvP Gear
With the introduction of Tenacity in PvP, we are given limited options as far as PvP gear goes.
We cannot wear our typical gear in PvP and expect to be an even match for all players. Look at the different armor and weapon sets, and trinkets, under the ‘Grim’ tab at the PvP vendors.
Do not even give a second glance at the ‘Profound’ tab.
That gear is a waste of your hard-earned Glory and Seals of Triumph.
There will be 3 different kind of sets for weapons and armor, and 6 different kinds of each neck, waist, and ring pieces.
Pick whichever ones give you desirable ratings.
Enchantments:
At level 60, equip yourself with the rank 7 versions of whatever enchantments you decided would help fill in your ratings, and then save up for higher ranks later down the road.
Weapons and Armor Enchantments
#1 Vorpal are ideal.
*The extra critical severity from Vorpal is really hard to pass up.
#1 Soulforged adds that extra bit of survivability that we’ve been longing for.
*Optional
#2 Plague Fire is also another decent weapon enchantment that you could look at.
#3 Or anything that deals Necrotic Damage!
is damage that cannot be mitigated by neither defense, deflection, nor any other means.
Companions: Keep in mind, however, that companions and their effects are not available in PvP.In your companion tab, you’ll notice you have 5 ‘Active Companion Slots’ at level 60. However, you can only have one companion summoned at a time.
Each companion has what is called an ‘Active Bonus’ that applies to you even when they are not summoned.
As long as they are placed into one of your 5 active companion slots, you will receive the active bonus.
You will want to pick companions that give you desirable active bonuses for these 5 slots.
Additionally, the companion that you have summoned should be an Augment-type companion.
When an Augment is summoned, you gain all of the stats that the Augment has.
For example, if you equipped your Augment with a Profane Runestone, Rank 10 in its offense slot, you would receive the 300 critical strike that your Augment receives.
This is an excellent way of filling in any ratings that are lacking a little.
Boons
From progressing in the Dread Ring and Sharandar campaigns, you get to choose from each tier of boons, can only choose ONE.
Sharandar Boons
• Tier 1
o +250 Defense
o +250 Power
• Tier 2
o +250 Deflect
o +250 Critical Strike
• Tier 3
o +700 Max HP
o +2% Action Point Gain
• Tier 4
o When being struck by a foe you have a chance to heal yourself for 400 HP.
o When striking a foe you have a chance to deal 400 Arcane damage.
• Tier 5
o Your Stamina or Guard Meter regenerate 10% faster in Combat.
o When you Deflect an attack you deal 400 damage to your attacker.
o When you kill a foe you gain 20 Power for 45 seconds. This buff stacks up to 30 times.
o Potions now heal you for 10% more.
*For Tier 3, you will want to go with the HP boost because our AP gain is already efficient enough. For Tier 5, you will want the bonus to deflection, because we’ll be deflecting a lot of attacks and therefore dishing out a lot of extra damage.
Dread Ring Boons
• Tier 1
o +125 Power and +125 Movement
o +125 Critical Strike and +125 Movement
• Tier 2
o +250 Life Steal
o +250 Regeneration
• Tier 3
o +3% Deflection Severity
o +250 Armor Penetration
• Tier 4
o When taking damage you have a chance to heal 1000 Hit Points over a few seconds. After this effect ends you have 250 more Defense for 10 seconds.
o When dealing damage you have a chance to deal 1000 Necrotic damage over a few seconds. After this effect ends the target receives 25% less healing from spells for 10 seconds.
• Tier 5
o When taking damage you have a chance to generate a shield that absorbs 500 incoming damage and redirects that damage to a nearby foe. This shield lasts 6 seconds.
o When you deal damage you gain a stack of “Madness”. When you reach 50 stacks of “Madness” you gain 600 Power, 300 Life Steal, and 300 Regeneration. 10 seconds after gaining this bonus your stacks are reset. You may only gain on stack of “Madness” per second.
o When you steal health from your Life Steal stat, it has a chance to steal 3 times as much.

Overview:

Since the changes made to HR in Mod 4 I haven’t seen any decent up-to-date build guides, so I decided I’ll make one for my current HR build, this build focuses mainly on the melee aspect of the HR build and also has a pretty nice amount of survivability due to the huge amounts of Life Steal given by the Combat Paragon tree.

Link to build: 

– *Non-human Races*

– *Humans (+3 feat points)*

Ability Scores:

You want to try and roll DEX quite high with WIS coming shortly after, as we’ll be using DEX for Bonus Damage, and WIS for Crit Chance (among other things).

A good starter roll would be something like:

STR: 13

CON: 10

DEX: 17 (+2)

INT: 11

WIS: 13 (+2)

CHA: 10

Every 10 levels, you’ll want to upgrade WIS and DEX.

Race:

Any Race in which you can upgrade DEX is a pretty solid choice.

Dragonborns are really quite good as they can roll 2 into any 2 stats, and they also have 3% Power and Crit which can help your DPS a fair amount, however it is a paid class, therefore not available to everyone.

Wood Elfs are quite good as they allow you to put bonus points into both DEX and WIS, which are they primary points we’ll be upgrading, they also have additional 1% Crit Chance which isn’t too great but it’s fairly useful.

Drows also allow you to put points into DEX and WIS and their Darkfire ability ( Has a chance to lower enemy defense ) can also help your DPS a bit. However, Trance is essentially useless, so it’s a bit of a waste.

Humans are a decent choice as you can put +2 into any ability score, however this can only be put into 1 stat, which isn’t all too great, however their bonus defense and additional Feat Points are somewhat useful.

TL;DR:

1. Dragonborn ( Only if you are willing to pay. )

2. Drow/Wood Elf

3. Human

Feats:

Heroic Feats:

T1:

Weapon Mastery 3/3: Increase your Critical Chance by 1/2/3%.

Crit Chance is always nice, helpful for DPS. 

Toughness 3/3: Increase your Maximum Hit Points by 3/6/9%.

Will help your survivability somewhat, plus points need to go somewhere.

T2:

Swift Footwork 5/5: Your stamina regenerates 2/4/6/8/10% faster.

More Stamina Regen = More Dodges, can prove useful when dodging attacks or AoEs in boss battles.

For Humans:

Agile Combatant 3/3: After switching Stances, deal 1/2/3% more damage.

Not the best damage buff, but you’ll be switching stances a fair amount and the points have to go somewhere. If you aren’t Human but want this in your spec feel free to replace something with this.

T3:

Endless Assault 3/3: Your Encounter powers deal 2/4/6% more damage.

More DPS, pretty damn useful.

Lucky Skirmisher 3/3: Increases your Deflection Chance by 1/2/3%.

Means you’ll be deflecting more attacks, therefore you take less damage, simple.

T4:

Disciple of Dexterity 3/3: Increase the amount of bonus damage Dexterity gives you by 2/4/6%.

Since we rolled high Dexterity for it’s bonus damage, this is a good choice if you want to increase DPS.

Paragon Feats:

Since this is in fact a melee build, we’ll be going for the combat paragon tree, this part is pretty self explanatory.

T1:

Bloodletting 5/5: While in Melee Stance you gain 1/2/3/4/5% more Life Steal.

A great stat to have, this build is very heavy on Life Steal, this forms the basis of it and helps out our survivability a huge amount.

T2:

Fluid Hunter 5/5: While in Melee Stance, increase your Deflect Chance by .5/1/1.5/2/2.5%.

Pretty useful, more Deflect means less damage taken.

T3:

Piercing Blade 5/5: Melee attacks deal an additional 8/16/24/32/40% damage as Piercing damage. Piercing damage is Physical damage that cannot be resisted or deflected.

Very useful, will increase your DPS by a large amount.

Wilds Medicine 5/5: Deflecting attacks cause the Hunter to be healed for 1/2/3/4/5% of their HP over 15 seconds. This effect can stack up to 10 times. You can only gain one stack of Wilds Medicine every second.

This is really quite a good Feat, if you get your Deflect stat high enough, and if you use this in conjunction with Aspect of the Lone Wolf ( More Deflect Chance and Bonus Damage for each Foe within 15′ of you ) then this can proc quite a lot, meaning you can heal for up to 50% of your HP over 15 seconds.

T4:

Scything Blades 5/5: The Ranger deals 1/2/3/4/5% more Melee Damage for each foe within 25 feet.

More DPS when near foes, and since this is a DPS build we’ll definitely be going for it.

Battle Crazed 5/5: Melee Attacks grant .6/1.2/1.8/2.4/3% more Life Steal. This effect can stack up to 5 times. Last 3 seconds.

This can grant us up to 15% more Life Steal, great source of healing through damage.

T5:

Blade Hurricane 1/1: Usinge a Melee Encounter Power grants Flurry. Flurry causes your next Melee At-Will to strike two additional times for 65% more damage.

Flurry procs a hell of a lot, so this is going to increase your DPS greatly, a fairly large source of our damage will come from this.

Powers:

This is my usual setup of powers:

At-wills:

Hunter’s Teamwork/Careful Attack 3/3:

I keep this on at ALL times, it’s a must-have at-will, it’s really useful and I open up with it almost all the time, and since the marks last quite a while, I don’t have to spam it constantly which is nice. When the melee version is used with something like Rain of Arrows or Marauder’s Rush, it procs some amazing bleeds.

Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike 3/3:

Nice and quick damage dealer, I use it after I have marked enemies and gone through my Enounter rotation.

Encounters:

*Before I use any of my encounters I will always mark the target with Careful Attack as when used in conjunction with the Encounters it procs some really great bleed.*

Marauder’s Escape/Marauder’s Rush 3/3:

The ranged version of this is fairly useful if you are in a troublesome situation, but I honestly don’t use it too often, however the melee version is a really nice little damage-dealer so I keep it on. You can replace this with another encounter if you wish, it’s not vital to the build/rotation.

Rain of Arrows/Rain of Swords 3/3:

This Encounter should always be kept on, use the melee version with Careful Attack and you’ve got yourself some major damage bleeds, a really great ability.

Fox’s Cunning/Fox’s Shift 3/3:

The ranged version of this is really useful for you and your team-mates because it can save you in certain situations if a heavy attack is incoming and you have no stamina to dodge, the melee version is also a very nice damage dealer, not compulsory but very useful.

Class Features:

Aspect of the Lone Wolf 3/3:

Je3ydar’s Hunter Ranger Pathfinder Trapper Build Mod 5 (Outdated but viable for xBox)

I’ve searched for HR builds and so far haven’t seen any good HR trapper builds so I decided to share my build. This is mainly for PvE. This build works really well with the Pathfinder Paragon path.

My Character  Sheet:

Ability Scores:

You want to try and roll DEX quite high with WIS coming shortly after, as we’ll be using DEX for Bonus Damage and Deflection Chance  , and WIS for Crit Chance (among other things).

A good starter roll would be something like:

STR: 12

CON: 10

DEX: 18 (+2)

INT: 10

WIS: 15 (+2)

CHA: 10

Every 10 levels, you’ll want to upgrade WIS and DEX.

Race

Personally I prefer Human because of the extra 3 feats but Dragonborn and Drow/Elf would be better

• Dragonborn – +3% Power and Crit, 5% more healing from all spells/abilities +2 To any 2 ability scores
• Elf – +1% crit chance, Very good starting ability roll (+2 WIS/+2 DEX) 10% resistance to effects that slow your movement – Perfect for an HR; a class which relies on speed and dodging in PvE/PvP.
• Drow – Darkfire Debuff (With every attack you have a 5% chance when attacking a foe to apply Darkfire for 4 seconds, reducing its defense by 10%.), +2 DEX, +2 STR/+2 WIS
• Human – You can never go wrong with 3 extra feat points. +2 to any 1 ability score ,
• Half-Orc+5% Crit Severity, +2 DEX/+2 STR, Gain 10% bonus to run speed when you enter combat.

Feats 

*For Human (+3 feat points)

*For Non-Human 

Predatory Action 5/5: Increases damage done by daily powers by 5%

Weapon Mastery 3/3: Increase your Critical Chance by 1/2/3%.

Crit Chance is always nice, helpful for DPS. 

Toughness 3/3: Increase your Maximum Hit Points by 3/6/9%.

Will help your survivability somewhat, plus points need to go somewhere.

Agile Combatant 3/3: After switching Stances, deal 1/2/3% more damage.

Will be switching stances a lot so we will almost always have this damage buff

Endless Assault 3/3: Your Encounter powers deal 2/4/6% more damage.

Means we’ll be deflecting more attacks, therefore we take less damage and we can deal damage back to attacker with Fey Thistle Boon

T4:

Disciple of Dexterity 3/3: Increase the amount of bonus damage Dexterity gives you by 2/4/6%.

Since we rolled high Dexterity for it’s bonus damage, this is a good choice if you want to increase DPS.

Boons :

Sharandar Boons

• Tier 1
o +250 Power
• Tier 2
o +250 Deflect
• Tier 3
o +700 Max HP
• Tier 4
o When being struck by a foe you have a chance to heal yourself for 400 HP.
o When striking a foe you have a chance to deal 400 Arcane damage.
Either of these will do.
• Tier 5
o Your Stamina or Guard Meter regenerate 10% faster in Combat.
o When you Deflect an attack you deal 400 damage to your attacker.

For Tier 3, you will want to go with the HP boost because our AP gain is already efficient enough. For Tier 5, you will want the bonus to deflection, because we’ll be deflecting a lot of attacks and therefore dishing out a lot of extra damage.

Dread Ring Boons

• Tier 1
o +125 Critical Strike and +125 Movement
• Tier 2
o +250 Life Steal
• Tier 3
o +250 Armor Penetration
• Tier 4
o When taking damage you have a chance to heal 1000 Hit Points over a few seconds. After this effect ends you have 250 more Defense for 10 seconds.
• Tier 5
o When you steal health from your Life Steal stat, it has a chance to steal 3 times as much.

For Tier 5 Endless Consumption over Rampaging Madness because it helps us stay alive longer

Icewindale Boons

• Tier 1
o +250 Combat Advantage Bonus
• Tier 2
o +250 Stamina/Guard Gain
• Tier 3
o +250 Recovery
• Tier 4
o Gain up +500 power based upon how much stamina missing
• Tier 5
o When damaged by a Foe chance to gain a stack of Avalanche. At 20 stacks, taking damage will clear the stacks and deal 200 damage to nearby targets

Tyranny of Dragons Boons

• Tier 1
o +200 Power
• Tier 2
o +200 Deflect
• Tier 3
o +200 Armor Penetration
• Tier 4
o +200 Regeneration

So far  I haven’t got the last 3 boons of ToD campaign but I would probably go for +5% Critical Severity, +3% Increased Lifesteal and 10% Increased Control Strength because the first of these last 3 gives the most stats 

Gears

The best T2 armor set for a Trapper HR is the Royal Guard Set
Royal Guard Armor
• Power: 1,271
• Armor Penetration: 1,271
• Defense: 766
• Deflection: 574
• Regeneration: 504
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 armor penetration
• 4-Piece Bonus: When dealing damage to a foe you have a chance to reduce all your cooldowns by 30%. This 4 piece bonus combined with the trapper tree feats means infinite encounters.

For T3.5 nothing beats the Draconic Templar Set+ Personalized Archmage Rings as these would balance almost all your stats and you can start capping more Power in your offense slots

Artifacts

As for Artifacts I would suggest getting the Sigil of The Devoted , Sigil of The Great Weapon and Vanguard’s Banner. Lantern of Revelation and Waters of Elah’zad is also a good option.

Artifact Equipment

For Artifact Belt Twined Rope of Dexterity and Artifact Cloak I would suggest getting the Cloak of Seldarine as it gives more deflection. I am using the full Lathandar Set only because I got the Eye of Lathandar. If you want to get a full Artifact Equipment Set for DPS then I would suggest getting the full Imperial Set

Weapon

For a new toon getting the Golden Dragon Weapon Set is gonna be a hard grind. Any of these two will be good enough. The Fomorian and Fallen Dragon Weapon Set is mainly for collectors and it takes a lot of time and AD to craft the mainhand so kinda of uselss

Ancient Trapper’s Weapons
• Power: 1,848
• Critical Strike: 442
• Armor Penetration: 206
• Deflection: 206
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 armor penetration

Dread Legions Weapons
• Power: 1,866
• Critical Strike: 218
• Armor Penetration: 448
• Life Steal: 218
• 2-Piece Bonus: +450 armor penetration

If you can get the Golden Dragon mainhand try to get the Pathfinder of the Golden Dragon ( Increases damage done by Careful Attack/Hunter’s Teamwork) or Golden Dragon’s Tooth ( Increases damage done by Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike). We will not be using any other at-wills other than these two. So any other Golden Dragon Weapon is not gonna be useful

Companions

An augment companion is a must.

The best one for HR is the Ioun Stone of Radiance/ Black Dragon Ioun Stone/Ioun Stone of Might as these have three offense slots.

Wild Hunt Rider – 2% chance to increase damage by 10% for 5 seconds (at Epic 5% chance)

Fire Archon – Increase damage against targets with less than 30% health by 5%

Galeb Dhahur – Deal up to 10% more damage based on damage you have taken

Dancing Blade – +3% Critical Severity (at Epic +5% Severity)

Eriynes of Belial – +5% Critical Severity (at Epic +10% Severity)

These are the best DPS companions that I know of

Stats

Critical Strike: 2,000~3,200
Armor Penetration: 2,200-2400
Recovery: 2,200~2600
Defense: 1600~2500
Deflection: 2,000~2,200
Regeneration: ~1,000
Life Steal: 1000~1400

If you have all your ratings how you like them, I suggest throwing some extra points into power and hit points. These stats are great because they never diminish. They might not be as effective early on, but once all your other stats are diminishing, power and hit points start making a much bigger impact on your performance. I’ve equipped all my offense and defense slots with Radiants for Power and Hit-Points

Weapon/Armor Enchantments

For weapon enchantment : Perfect Vorpal, Greater Plaguefire, Perfect Flaming, Perfect Lightning these are these best. Greater Plague Fire and Perfect Flaming also helps to proc the attacks done by Careful Attack

For armor enchantment : L.Soulforge , Perfect Negation , Perfect Barkshield

Powers:

This is my usual setup of powers:

At-wills:

Hunter’s Teamwork/Careful Attack 3/3:

I keep this on at ALL times, it’s a must-have at-will, it’s really useful and I open up with it almost all the time, and since the marks last quite a while, I don’t have to spam it constantly which is nice. 

Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike 3/3:

Nice and quick damage dealer, I use it after I have marked enemies and gone through my Encounter rotation.

Encounters:

 I will always mark the most annoying target with Careful Attack after I get close enough. Then spam encounters and kill it

Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze 3/3:

Fire into mob group and constrict them with roots trapping them and dealing insane damage works as an AoE. The melee is good  AoE as it deals damage and gains stamina based upon enemies hit.

Hindering Shot/Hindering Strike 3/3:

Ranged Attack has 3 charges and applies weak grasping roots. The melee applies strong grasping and deals a lot of damage trapping them

Fox’s Cunning/Fox’s Shift 3/3:

The ranged version of this is really useful for you and your team-mates because it can save you in certain situations if a heavy attack is incoming and you have no stamina to dodge, the melee version is also a very nice damage dealer and some times help you get out of sticky situations.

Class Features:

No other passives works well with this build beside these two

Aspect of the Lone Wolf – Gain 5% deflect chance and bonus of 2% deflect chance for each enemy within 15′ of you.Maximum bonus is 10%. So a total of 15% deflection chance if you are surrounded by mobs.

Aspect of the Serpent – With the feat from the trapper tree this is a must

Daily Powers:

Seismic Shot

Slasher’s Mark

For PvP

For PvP i use full Purified Black Ice Set

The only change to my power rotation is Slasher’s Mark. I replace it with disruptive shot

Thank you. Hope you enjoy playing my build

PVP Basic Tactics For All!

http://mmominds.com/2014/05/28/pvp-basic-tactics-for-all/

*Updated* 5/24/2015

Howdy,

So first things first … stop spec’ing your Hunter for only range or only melee right now; trapper is the only way we are going to start earning respect in epic dungeons. Help me, help you, which will then help me. My max damage in a dungeon is 53 million in Castle Never (had a Wizard and Rogue with us that had higher gear scores but did less damage). I just recently did the Spellplagued dungeon with 4 DPS characters and 1 Tank and topped the damage charts there despite having the lowest gear score in the group. But this build offers support in addition to it’s insane damage output and excellent survivability. It can also be used in PvP, usually with great success.

Everyone’s ideal group (on Xbox) seems to be GF, DC, TR, CWx2 … and everyone is wrong. I guarantee you will out DPS any Rogue or Wizard and also rival the control abilities of Wizards by using this trapper build. We are calling this the “Steph Curry Hunter Ranger” build because we will constantly be crossing up monsters and players just before we step back for the thr—I mean kill. Put your at-will powers away because we are spamming encounters until the drakes come home. So let’s begin …

I chose Stormwarden (at level 30) because of the Twin-Blade Storm power. You could go Pathfinder if you think the Hunters Teamwork at-will power provides more utility in boss fights and PvP.

Powers:

Encounters:
Hindering Shot / Hindering Strike
Constricting Arrow / Steel Breeze
Fox’s Cunning / Fox Shift (I use Binding Arrow / Oak Skin during some boss fights because Shift’s teleporting can get you into trouble at times)
Daily:
Seismic Shot (I am playing around with Forest Ghost but still prefer Seismic Shot in most situations.)
Class Features:
Aspect of the Serpent
Twin-Blade Storm (Aspect of the Pack is an alternative that helps the entire team. I still plan on using TBS in PvP and in dungeons while not in a boss fight. If you prefer AotP over TBS, then you should go Pathfinder and use Hunters Teamwork … still recommend Stormwarden for PvPers but I am tempted to go Pathfinder now)
***you can use the other power points for whatever else you want because it won’t matter***

Feats:

(http://mmominds.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/1d4654cc691fa4161001e86e498e58d1.png)
***if you prefer more action points, feel free to move around any feats that affect your movement***

Overview (Rotation, Stats, Class):

You are constantly rooting enemies, very briefly going invincible with the Fox powers, and have almost unlimited stamina with Steel Breeze. You will need to get used to a rotation that works for you but that takes maybe half a dungeon. For a suggested rotation, I seem to always use Constricting Arrow first in order to keep a group of mobs together and Fox Shift is usually the first melee power used after switching stances. But again I suggest playing around with the powers and be willing to adapt to different situations. Also, with this build we are moving around a lot and it can be hard to heal us at times, but that is fine because we rarely get hit.

In regards to stats, DEX and WIS are the two you will put points into. You can play around with power, crit, armor pen, defense, etc. to see what fits you best. At first I focused on power and crit, but I have since began upping my defense and deflection since our damage output is already so freaking high.

And as for which class you should select, I went with Wood Elf for the extra Dex, WIS, and crit … but I suggest picking whatever you like best because I don’t think it will make a huge difference. Have fun with it!

Important Notes:

Try to hit at least 2 enemies with each attacking power so that you don’t have to wait on encounter cooldowns and so that you maximize Twin-Blade Storm.
Enemies can still attack while rooted.
Fox Shift seems to make you immune during its animation, but BE WARNED, you could fall to your death by teleporting to a monster that your teammates are pushing off the map.
Be smart about where and when to use your powers if you have someone else in your party doing the kiting; these powers deal mostly AoE damage.

Let me know if you have any questions. TWITCH LINK HERE so you can see the build in action when I am online … I won’t start streaming a lot until early June (moving soon).

Best,

Duq Seaplus

Greetings ranger,

My GT is KatoZee and I offer little apology for the text wall I am about to unleash upon your eyes. This guide is long overdue in the eyes of many and will hopefully encompass a great deal of information that I have gathered throughout my travels. Unlike the vast majority of guides out there what I hope to offer you is one that will allow you to utilise it as a base ingredient so that you may add your own tastes to the final product. Should you wish to further consolidate your knowledge then please do contact me and I will be happy to assist you further. The aim is to offer a setup that will make you a deadly addition to any party as soon as you hit 60 without the need for expensive items. This guide is primarily aimed towards the Xbox generation though I have built it to cause minimal disruption for when they receive Mod 6, to which I am pleased to say a good number of PC players are utilising the setup to great success. To become a great HR or any class requires dedication so don’t expect a TL:DR version, “Wisdom is only possessed by the learned”.

Character Creation

Unless you harbour some burning desire to make PvP your sole aim for your ventures across Neverwinter then racial selection will make very little difference in the grand scheme of things. PvE content is very forgiving towards racial selection and even picking the optimum powers/feats, the “pug” community on the other hand not so much. So if want to play as a halfing using feats from all three trees then make sure you are in a guild to run dungeons with, failing that the advisable selections would be the following in order of viability:

Dragonborn*

• Ability Scores: Grants you +2 to any two stats.
• Dragonborn Fury: Your Power and Critical Strike are increased by 3%.
• Draconic Heritage: You receive 5% more healing from all spells and abilities.

Wood Elf

• +2 Dexterity
• +2 Intelligence or +2 Wisdom
• Elven Accuracy: Increases your chance to Critically Strike by 1%.
• Wild Step: You have a 10% resistance to effects that Slow your movement.

Drow**

• +2 Dexterity
• +2 Charisma or +2 Wisdom
• Darkfire: You have 5% chance when attacking a foe to apply Darkfire for 4 seconds, reducing its Defense by 10%. This debuff does not stack, so if there are multiple Drow in a party, only one debuff is applied to any given foe; however, more than one foe can be affected by Darkfire.
• Trance: You recover at campfires twice as quickly.

Menzoberranzan Renegade ***

• +2 Dexterity
• +2 Charisma or +2 Wisdom
• Faerie Fire: You have 5% chance when attacking a foe to apply Faerie Fire for 4 seconds, reducing its Power and Defense by 6%. This debuff does not stack, so if there are multiple Drow in a party, only one debuff is applied to any given foe; however, more than one foe can be affected by Faerie Fire.
• Trance: You recover at campfires twice as quickly.

*It is not necessary to purchase the expensive dragonborn pack, the 2,500 race reroll is sufficient. Eventually there will be lockboxes where you can get different dragon breaths (I personally want the lightning one).

**My initial guide written a while ago was entitled Drisdhaun AoE build (still on the main cryptic forums), my decision to go Dragonborn was purely cosmetic, my Drow was perfectly suitable for all areas.

***I rate the actual Drow over the renegade since I would prefer to reduce the defense fully rather than worry about reducing its power. Kill them quicker than they can kill you mentality.

Ability Points

Characters receive bonuses from each ability score for each point over 10. The bonuses gained are class dependant and for the HR it translates as the following:

Strength

1% Resistance Ignored
1% Stamina Regeneration
1% DoT Damage Resist

Constitution

2% Maximum Hit Points

Dexterity

1% Damage Bonus
1% AoE Damage Resist
0.5% Deflection Chance

Intelligence

1% Recharge Speed Increase

Wisdom

1% Critical Chance
1% Control Bonus
1% Control Resist

Charisma

1% Companion Stat Bonus
1% Combat Advantage Damage

Now I ellected to roll my character where both the Dexterity and the Wisdom had the same value and my reasons are highlighted in red from the above information. Whilst having just dex as the main high score the main question is where does our damage come from as a trapper? Its our roots, plus helping our crit chance and further increasing control bonuses create possibilities where so long as you crit with the rooting encounter each second that root applies another crit dot. The longer you can keep that going the better plus there is always the dex artifact belt to help increase the dex cap later on in game.

Leveling and Playstyle

Unfortunately you will not be able to reap the benefits of this build below levels 44/45 where you will pretty much need to play the same way an archery path does (expect a good cardio workout for your character). When you start to unlock the required stuff then you will start to feel overall more powerful.

At this point I encourage you to no longer view your bow as a long-range weapon of destruction and mass aggro generation. Instead always think you are a speedy ninja with a shotgun, the furthest away you should be from a mob is just out of swords reach. This is your sweet spot for optimum damage output, since the power of the HR is in the fact that we have 6x encounters all unique and with their own individual cooldown and not because we have a bow. At this optimum range you lose no time in using either stances encounters and can unleash a constant rotation.

I also please ask, if you are about to say something along the lines of “legolas stayed at range”, I would suggest you watch the films again because in all combat he is close enough to provide combat advantage to the rest of his party and was mostly likely using Aspect of the Pack.

Pathfinder vs Stormwarden

Here is a pivitol moment where you will choose which style of ranger you want to be, it matters very little in terms of end gameplay from my experiences in playing both styles throughout the availible content. If pressed to make any recommendations I would suggest the PvP focussed would find more benefit from Pathfinder whilst the PvE would gain greater bonus from Stormwarden. Each of the paths are equally viable in either content, it is just from my opinion that those recommendations offer more towards those fields than the other. For the encounters part of the guide, it will be written for neutral sake, please substitute the following for the path you have chosen:

Pathfinder:

Replace Aimed Shot with Hunters Teamwork, rapid fire ability that will help heal the team during PvP, effects not that noticable during PvE as there is usually a cleric. Be warned that Careful Attack can depleat your serpent stacks though applying careful attack with aimed strike is pretty nifty as the bleed triggers the attack.

Stormwarden:

Replace Rapid Shot for Electric Shot, nice AoE from both stances and will not move you forward in melee stance like Rapid Strike does. For lazy bosses like Spider Queen hold down that trigger and just use encounters over the top to further increase your damage output (against the mobs that gather around her).

Replace Aspect of the Pack/Lone Wolf with Twin Blade Storm, this drops combat advantage for the group in favour of you buffing yourself whilst you can still get combat advantage thus increasing your damage output.

Powers Setup

Generic but from Stormwarden viewpoint

Through numerous respecs I have tried all of the encounters/features in various rotations/combinations on training dummies and general PvE/P combat. Rather than go through all of them I will explain the setup I have found to yield the best results in terms of “sustained” DPS and survivability.

Controller Layout

[Left Trigger] Aimed Shot/Aimed Strike

[Right Trigger] Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike

[X] Fox’s Cunning/Fox Shift*

[Y] Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze

[B] Hindering Shot/Hindering Strike

[LB+X] Seismic Shot**

[LB+Y] Disruptive Shot

Aspect of the Serpent

Aspect of the Pack***

* Warning this encounter can lead to a number of novelty deaths, use cautiously when around other characters that like to push things in any direction.

** The PvP genre may find some benefit with using Forest Ghost Instead, helps get the jump on things and can be used very tactically eg. stealth then use Aimed Shot on something squishy.

*** Again for the PvP genre you may wish to replace with Aspect of the Lone Wolf to assist with survival, since you can’t be certain you will have a team mate around to proc the effects of pack.

Rotations

Shorthand I have found this to be the optimum rotation in terms of stacking buffs for better damage output. So in true console fashion much like a fighting game here is your combo and note that RB indicates the use of Right Bumber:

Ranged Stance
[Y] > [B] > [X] > [RB] > [X] > [Y] > [B] > [RB] > REPEAT x3 (is possible to go through 18 encounters before hitting a cooldown.)
If we say each encounter takes one second, you will be able to spam an encounter every second for the duration of the combat, so long as you ensure to hit targets with the offensive encounters, have not been stunned or dazed and haven’t messed up on the your buttons (I do from time to time).

Kato’s Ultimate Finisher

Ranged Stance (with full AP)
[Y] > [B] > [X] > [RB] > [X] > [Y] > [B] > [RB] > [LB+X] > Then repeat previous combo.

IMPORTANT NOTE – Do not play this style looking at your cool downs. I have noticed that the CD bar struggles to keep up with the speed in which you use your encounters. Learn to recognise the animation and when it is triggered move on to the next. This is probably due to lag but sometimes I have switched stances seen them all greyed out yet upon pressing they activate anyway causing the images to update, reflecting that they are actually available.

Lets look into this with more detail now and see a step by step as to whats happening each second of this rotation.

Constricting Arrow:

AoE Root + Dot
Biting Snares (activate Master Trapper on stance change)
+1 Deft Strike (damage boost)
+1 Aspect of the Serpent (damage + crit boost)

Hindering Shot:

+1 Aspect of the Serpent

Fox’s Cunning:

+1 next hit dodge

Stance change:

Master Trapper (+30% damage boost, +60% control duration, +20% AP)
Agile Combatant (damage boost)
Fleet Stance (increased speed)

Fox Shift:

-1 Deft Strike
+1 Deft Strike (ranged damage boost)
-2 Aspect of the Serpent
+2 Aspect of the Serpent
+ Speed increase (even further)

Steel Breeze:

+ Stamina refilled

Hindering Strike:

AoE Root + Dot (the root effect isn’t refreshed but the dot appears to be refreshed – training dummies)

Stance Change

Agile Combattant (refreshed)
Fleet Stance (refreshed)

Seismic Shot:

This does use up your deft strikes and aspect of the serpent buffs from what I and other trappers have noticed, so always aim to do use it before your constricting arrow.

-1 Deft Strike
-1 Aspect of the Serpent
If you were to utilise your at wills during these rotations it would have an effect on your serpent stacks and thus be wasting them on the lower hitting at will rather than buffing your encounters. To make things simpler so that you don’t have to think to much, you could just spam X, Y, B, RB, X, Y, B etc. It would just mean that your rotation would result in the Fox’s Cunning, non offensive ability will use up your deft strike and one aspect of the serpent effectively wasting those boosts which are better served on constricting arrow.

This rotation I have refined to a point where I don’t need to think to much and can happily just press away, since having overly complicated attack patterns can lead to your own demise. There will be occasions where something will be on a cool down but in that instance its likely going to be another second wait so you could slum it like the other classes and use an at will or just add in Disruptive shot into your play in order to build that extra bit of breather, though 1x Aimed Shot and things are pretty much off cool down by the time you finish.

Feats Setup

3/3 Toughness – Increase of maximum hit points, which is nice to have for the survivability though be warned that you are still one shot by pretty much everything.

3/3 Weapon Mastery – Increase your critical chance again something nice because if you crit with your root ability it appears to make all the dots crit as well.

5/5 Predatory Action – Increase of damage for daily powers, you will use seismic shot a lot and some times can recharge it faster than its cool down. I tend to even just use it on single targets given how quickly I can refill the AP.

3/3 Agile Combatant – Increase damage after switching stances, you will be switching stances so often that this temp buff will cause screen burn on your monitor. With the play style it’s a practically a permanent buff you will have.

3/3 Endless Assault – Increase of damage for encounters, since you will be spamming an encounter every second during combat this is of course an important choice.

3/3 Disciple of Dexterity – Increase the bonus damage granted from Dexterity, your primary stat and finishes off your remaining heroic feat points.

Human Option

3/3 Lucky Skirmisher – Given the remaining options this is the more viable option to throw your points into which brings me onto the next point.

Unused Feats

Swift Footwork – you really will not need to regen stamina, hit a group with steel breeze and you are good to go.

Battlewise – reduced threat sounds like a good idea however, it will not work with the build. In fact always play in the knowledge that tanks will struggle to keep aggro from you.

Natures Enhancement – increased deflect severity in melee stance, sounds nice however it only benefits one stance and you won’t be staying in melee long enough to make use of it.
Scoundrel Training – increase at will damage for mobs not targeting you, brilliant concept however, it’s very rare that you will use an at will and even rare that you find something not targeting you.

Trapper Path Feats

5/5 Fleet Stance – Increase movement speed after stance swap and speed is vital to your survival. Having that high mobility in the battle is key to your survival.

5/5 Deft Strikes – Increase the damage of the next encounter use for the opposite stance (melee encounter applies buff to range and vice versa). This is just like a mini Aspect of the Serpent except this only stacks once, where aspect can stack twice. The good news is that they both work together to boost your next encounter in the opposite stance.

5/5 Swiftness of the Fox – Using encounters reduces the cool down of the opposite stance encounter (this is where your damage comes from, the ability to use nothing but encounters constantly on a never ending loop). Each encounter reduces the cool down of the opposite encounter by 15% x3 encounters per stance resulting in a 45% cool down. This is plenty that when you switch stances you will see them all ready to go (see notes in rotations).

5/5 Ancient Roots – Increase the duration of strong roots, from constricting arrow/hindering strike etc (7 seconds PvE, 3 Seconds PvP rough times). On its own this offers great control ability since you have the option to immobilise 10 targets in total. 5 from the ranged aoe and 5 from the melee aoe. Weak roots last 2.5 seconds longer which is nice I guess.

5/5 Thorned Roots – This is the true power of the HR in this one feat, everything you rooted will take 200% of your weapons damage per second for the duration of the root. Solo play you can shoot one constricting arrow at the Dragon Cult chaps and watch them die (its funny, try it). PvP you are rooting someone for the rest of your team to close in and you are still doing damage. TR that can break CC still receive the dots for the duration of the original dot (seen it happen a few times to believe this is the case). What’s even more hilarious is that if things are CC immune, they will receive 250% of your weapons damage instantly, that’s on top of the damage of your initial encounter.

5/5 Serpents Bite – Provides additional damage and crit chance per stack for the class feature Aspect of the Serpent, taking a good thing and making it even better by further increasing the damage and throwing on crit chance as a goody.

1/1 Master trapper – After applying a root, the next time you switch stances increase damage by 30%, control durations by 60% (root/stun) and generate 20% AP instantly. Effect last for 10 seconds and can only be triggered once every 10 seconds. This buff is something you will have almost permanently only, aside from the 1-2 seconds to reapply. This is also why you do not need the AP gain and since you will be using encounters so it recharges fast anyway.

Gear

Through extensive testing I have come to the opinion that as far as gearing goes you will want to get yourself 2x Grand Warden and 2x Royal Guard that will provide you +450 to both Crit Chance and Armour Pen. None of the T2 4 piece bonuses are of any particular use to us in this build and the Draconic set looks rather lovely but to lower your overall stats and GS just to provide teammates with +5% AP gain, don’t think they will notice or care.

Royal Guard – chance on causing damage to reduce cool downs by 30%. When I switch stances everything is already ready for my use. Possible Overkill, though in the spirit of testing I found that when you did need it to proc it wouldn’t and I would still be forced to use an at will for a second or two, even when utilised in conjunction with stormstep action you will still face cool downs eventually. Though honestly with the amount of encounters we can constantly cycle through the occasional second here and there is hardly the end of the world and not enough to justify this 4 piece.

Grand Warden – When you crit with an at will you have a chance to deal additional damage with an encounter. I have stated plenty of times you will rarely use your at wills and thus this benefit will be largely under used. Plus its only a chance, not a certainty and trhough testing it was far more frustrating to try and get it to proc as I was actively lowering my overal DPS by using at wills trying to get this to work.

Forest Lord – When you buff an ally, you have a chance to grant them +500 of their highest stat, that sounds rather lovely doesn’t it however, it only procs once every 40 seconds. This is more of a novelty than anything, yet it would be a lovely addition to an archery build that played the role of party buffer using: Comanding Shot + Binding Arrow + Hawk Shot (mod 6 replace hawk shot with Longstrider).

Weapon wise nothing will serve you better than the artifact weapon from the campaign and until then the main hand from the drake vendor is more than enough to serve you through your PvE ventures. Whilst the 2 Piece bonuses gained from either the ancient or draconic sound lovely you will need to remember that your roots deal damage based upon your weapon damage and the artifact bow will far surpass either of those choices and thus increase your roots damage.

Jewelry I recommend the “Shore” set which can be gained all through farming the campaign skirmish. Whenever you get the spare money your main purchases should be purple shirt/trousers that has an enchantment slot available. In terms long term value for money that will give you the most bang for your buck as I believe the expression goes.

Again please note this guide is primarily for the console generation and as such BiS would differ greatly from the PC varient.

Epic Enchantments

Lesser Soulforge – growing rather cheap and from my point of view very little point in upgrading further. At max level it will only give you 5k ish health on revival that will still get you killed by bosses so not really much worth. If you have a healthy wallet feel free. The reason why you will need soulforge is because its a safety measure against lag. Lag free you will hardly ever use it but as soon as it hits you are done for unless you managed to root everything out of arms reach.

Greater Plague Fire – Is my preference for PvE since it adds an extra dot to your attacks and also decreases enemies defenses so teammates will be happy especially since we are one of few classes that can get three stacks on multiple targets very quickly.

Perfect Vorpal – for PvP as the concept of kill them before they kill me is something that always stands true, so anything that ups your damage output would be more beneficial.

Enchantments/Stats

For the regular stuff build towards these stats to which I have gained through the knowledge of stats gurus far more adept at the mathematic arts than I am. I have also placed them in my preferential order.

Crit Strike – 2,000 – 3,200

Armour Pen – 2,200 – 2500*

Deflection – 2,000 – 2,200

Defense – 1,600 – 2,500

Regen – 1,000

Life Steal – 1,000 – 1,400

Recovery – 2,200 – 2,600

* if you PvP then push this higher.

Come Mod 6, the manner in which life steal and regen will work has drastically changed and should you want to survive more often I would recomend regen over life steal or else you may find a few DC’s questioning your life style choices when they try and heal you. For right now on the Xbox version life steal will mean you will rarely need to use a potion outside of a main boss fight again. That being said I do not wish to promote a stat that will become deficient and have all that read waste AD on gearing towards that stat knowing it will cost them long term to re-gear.

Companions

Augments are the ideal candidates for your main summoned companions at the moment as they lack combat presence and will not eat up beneficial AoE’s from party members, additionaly they will not go off attracting unwanted attention. That being said I will happily say that the choice of augment you use is of your own discretion, you can’t use them in PvP so the concept of Min/Max builds for PvE content is rather academic. Aside from that here are a number of other companions whose active bonuses are of particular appeal to the build.

Slyblade Kobold – Increases damage against Rooted or Stunned targets by +3/5%

Fire Archon – Increases damage against targets with less than 30% Hit Points by +5%

Galeb Dur – Deal up to 10% more damage based on the percentage of damage you have taken

Wererat Thief – On Encounter Use 3/5% chance to poison target – its cheap to get and applies another dot, consider it a seat filler.

Cantankerous Mage – +15/25% Control Bonus

Bonus to control durations is something that you should focus boons and artifacts towards aswell. It will serve you well for the future whereas the immediate future you will not notice much benefit, consider this as an investment should you continue your ventures throughout Neverwinter.

Combat Strategy

I personally tend to start my combat with the melee stance for low level stuff because I want to draw things into me and max cap with Hindering Strike and move slightly away from the rooted mass just enough for the unrooted targets to draw closer to me, then root those targets with constricting arrow. From there I will circle around to the opposite end of the original targets (via melee rotation) and root new targets on that side, this will create a “bait ball” (watch a Sir David Attenborough documentary on the ocean). Basically if done right you will have pulled all mobs and have rooted them up into an nice compact ball for when the rest of your team arrive (I tend to work ahead of party in lower dungeons, even in CN).

This way other party members can hit their AoE’s for maximum effect and or knock them off an edge (careful using fox shift at edges). The other benefit to you is because if low on health with everything grouped up means one seismic shot will fully heal you. Just to reiterate in Mod 6 life steal and regen are reworked and regen should be a higher priority than life steal should want better healing from your clerics.

Until we get mod 6 with lifesteal your roots will make you godly in terms of survivability, considering as per average we root ten targets at a time. Each root does 200% weapon damage per second and with life steal you gain a percentage of the damage every second. I’m at 924 life steal, from roots alone I get close to 1k health per second as low numbers. This is just from roots remember not using encounters or at wills so rather godly in terms of survivability. I wouldn’t recomend any costly investments into life steal otherwise you may end up needing to make costly investments to change those stats come mod 6, since the numbers correlate to a % chance for the life steal effect to proc.

PvP Observations

I have a strong dislike for PvP these days, far too many people thinking they are MLG and have an attitude ironically not found in professional MLG players. That and I can’t be bothered these days listening to the trash talk and receiving hate mail because of the relative ease it takes to defeat someone. But in the interest of testing viability of the build for PvP the setup minus the alterations I eluded to earlier are still very viable but this section is just observations I have noted from my testing and hope that will benefit your endeavours.

Hindering Shot vs Stealth Characters

Hindering shot will leave a double arrow animation on the target for roughly a few seconds, they are close together almost on top of one another. Dark in colour they will fade away after awhile. This is an important visual animation you should get used to spotting.

The reason is because if you manage to hit for example a TR with hindering shot and they stealth, those arrows are still visible and will give away the position of the character. This gives you opportunity to dash towards the arrows and hit with Hindering Strike, the free targeting melee AoE that will bring the individual out of stealth and root, or use any other free targetting ability.

Clear the Ground vs Stealth

Something that I tested recently vs three unwilling TR (thanks for the hate mail). If you believe you have a stealthed TR in the proximity switch to melee and hold down clear the ground. Its a free targeting melee decent radius AoE ability. This narrows the window of opportunity the TR’s have against you.

What I found is the majority of the time I would end up hitting the TR that was trying to use lashing blade? The high crit one, instead of a stun opener. As soon as you hear/see the connection hit fox shift. End result is you just took the chap out of stealth and then fox shift, even it does not connect has granted you immunity long enough for the panicked TR spam his encounters wasting them.

Its not a 100% security blanket but it makes it more difficult and you start to tell the difference between the smart TR and those who think they are MLG. I have no pvp gear nor do I use potions but I was able to win against the three targets regularly and with great efficiency to warrant hate mail.

Forest Ghost and off node fighting

Fighting in the nodes is rather slowly becoming the standard for all skirmishes in pvp, forest ghost and that mentality allows you to stealth when fighting team vs team over one node and move behind enemy lines. It is surprising how few people bothered to turn around but then again in doing that they would turn their back on your teammate. Either way its a strategy that helps limit incoming AoE damage by forcing opponents to decide which way is of higher priority.

PC Chaps

Mod 6, generic but from Stormwarden viewpoint

Replace Hindering shot with Cordon of Arrows to increase your cc abilities, also change out aspect of the pack for crushing roots and as far as the paragon feats, use all except the one that boosts the paragon ability and the ap gain. It does lower your overall DPS output however when compared to a CW I would quite comfortably say that you can spam more CC encounters at a higher rate to make you one of the top CC clases in the game.

Hindering Strike is still perfectly viable if you would prefer to maintain the high damage output, though from what I have gathered from the various sources is that I may CC play style is favourable considering the nature and difficulty the mobs create across all classes.

Special Mentions

For those of you who have taken the time to read and digest this, I thank you as it shows you are truly keen on pushing the boundaries of the HR class. I hope that you are able to assist me in changing the negative stigma surrounding the class and continue to show the true potential of what we can do and offer to a team dynamic in terms of CC/DPS/Survivability.

I started my research into this build roughly two months before the game was released for the Xbox and have practically digested the wiki page along with maintaining a presence across multiple social forums. In my work I would like to thank the following people who have greatly assisted me in my ventures.

Lightitup Dan, Twitch streamer and You Tube informational uploader (though he plays combat HR, the Q&A session I gave him during one stream was beneficial)

Askara1 & heethin from Reddit, there initial responses to my call for assistance prior to the Xbox Launch was greatly beneficial in terms of seeing the same picture from different viewpoints.

j0kerspsycho from cryptic official forums, responded to my initial guide version 1 I posted and helped in highlighting to versatility of Fox Shift. He has since writen a similar guide tailored towards the PvP genre. My tips regarding hindering shot have been incorporated into his guide as it helps remove stealth advantages.

Thank you to all of you that have had some part in refining this build to where it is at, hopefully in time I can continue to evolve the build even further to the point where HR’s are no longer kicked instantly from a dungeon in favour of “better dps”.

Gameclips

Rather than overload the page with constant clips, please just follow the link which will take you to the Xbox.com site where you can peruse through all my clips at your leisure.

Gameclips Section: I will try and record more interesting stuff, but its good to see combat playstyle.

No Tank/Healer – I got this setup

The versitility of a trapper is amazing when you get used to it, you often find that the notion of needing a tank or healer to keep you alive is more of a novelty than required. Tanks will struggle to keep agro from you (not their fault) and clerics will struggle to heal you (again not their fault – you try healing someone doing fox shift, I know I have). What of the rest of your party though? The other classes and indeed the players behind them may not share your confidence in them staying alive which generates the need to kick someone, mostly because they don’t want to go through a dozen potions (gets costly) or the prospect of wiping on boss fights.

Well one soloution I have found that seems to work for me is this little setup:

Commanding Shot/Stag Heart + Binding Arrow/Oak Skin + Fox’s Cunning/Fox Shift

This playstyle requires you to pick your shots more carefully, you only have the one rooting ability so make it count. The concept is to create a favourable combat scenario for the team. Have them give you a few moments to attack a room solo, thus getting all the aggro and root a few things, basically the tanking role (though don’t let stuff hit you). Then look towards the healing side of things, stag heart provides a temp HP that you can spam every 3 seconds, if you consider that your healing ability because if you can keep it permanently going during combat then its their permanent health. So you are not adding temp HP but healing their missing HP (works in my mind), next is the notion of oak skin, the increase to defense and the regen it provides (your version of a mini HoT effect). Then there is the free next hit dodge granted from Fox’s Cunning., all of these combine in a manner that will help provide a favourable scenario for your teammates:

Player gets Hit = Free dodge (no damage taken)

Player gets Hit Again = Damage deducted from temp HP, because hopefully the def boost from oak skin will reduce damage enough that it only takes from the temp (technically no loss of HP then)

Player gets Hit yet again = Now damage deducted from a player

That is the scenario that you will try and create, one where they need to be hit 3x before they potentially suffer actual HP loss. Though at the speed in which you can burn through encounters you need remember Fox’s Cunning is a free dodge on next hit that lasts several seconds before it stops. You can use that encounter every three seconds, and stag heart can be used every three seconds so if they are hit rapidly within 3 seconds its not long before you can buy them a breather with another dodge and temp hp to absorb the next hit. When they do lose aggro though the regen bonus/HoT effect will restore their HP.

Now I won’t lie to you, this build requires a hell of a lot more input from our end as you actively need to ensure that you gain the attention of all the mobs, commanding shot is slow to use and you have effectively cut your offense in half since you now only have three offensive encounters. Where can you use this build? Anywhere you feel confident you can pull it off really, I have recently done it on the Epic Lair of Lostmauth when the rest of the group did not like the notion of starting and I could feel the HR auto kick option coming out. I still topped damage/kills chart and the tank even joked that I did a better job of keeping everyone alive than some DC’s.

Why do I do this? Its all a placebo really, when people see that their is a cleric in the group they tend to play more lazy and not care so much when they get hit. No cleric means they forget that they can do it without them if they simply play more alert. You mention that you will heal them and the level of disbelief is there that they play more alert yet see the “healing” you provide and attribute that to your classes potential. That is why I do it, because I am trying to erase the bad stigma and when people who see a trapper perform those feats tend to think twice before kicking another HR instantly without at least giving them a chance.

Either way though it makes for an interesting alternative way to play trapper and can save you should you notice the group hovering over the kick HR button.

Hello all, this is Aeras Mythalbow@legion10398 here, bringing you my DPS/Survivability Combat HR build. The build is pretty simple, but works very well, especially in clearing dungeons with a lot of trash mobs. This build is mainly to give combat HRs a good way to PvE, but it is very viable in PvP, due to high hitpoints, high deflect, and good self-healing, which is rare in PvP.

Ability Scores:

So for ability scores, ideally you would role a starting score like this (not including racial modifiers); 15 Dex, 15 Wis, 13 Str, 12 Con, 11 Int, 10 Cha. Then, upgrade the scores like this:

Level 10: +1 Dex, +1 Wis

Level 20: +1 Dex, +1 Con

Level 30: +1 All

Level 40: +1 Wis, +1 Con

Level 50: +1 Dex, +1 Con

Level 60: +1 All

Level 70: +1 Dex, +1 Con

You would end up with (not including racials) 21 Dex, 19 Wis, 15 Str, 18 Con, 13 Int, 12 Cha. Ideally, you would play a wood elf, which would net you a 23 Dex, 21 Wis, 15 Str, 18 Con, 13 Int, 12 Cha. You could also play half-orc for the crit severity, in which case you would take +2 Dex, +2 Con, and put two more points into wisdom instead of constitution. Either way, you should end up with those ability scores, it just depends on whether you want +1% crit chance or +5% crit severity (and which race you think looks better!).

Feats and Powers:

I was going to post a screenshot of feats and powers, but I could not for the life of me find the Add Media button, so I am just posting the NWCalc link instead.

NWCalc Feats and Powers

The most important feats are scything blades and battle crazed. 25% more damage and 15% higher lifesteal chance are two of the best feats out there. The former is as good as having 10,000 more power, and the latter is as good as having 6,000 more lifesteal. Piercing blades appears to be slightly broken in some way, but if it gets fixed, 40% piercing damage is almost as good as shadowy opportunity. I don’t like skirmisher’s gambit, because 10% crit chance is a lot to lose. Especially when it’s only for 28.57% more damage on criticals (175% current severity, then 225%, so you do 225/175, which comes out to 1.2857, making it a 28.57% damage increase on criticals). Basically, assuming a starting chance of 40%, you go from a 40% chance to do 175% damage to a 30% chance to do 225% damage, which is actually a damage decrease. Essentially this feat is a trap, unless you have a 50% crit chance or higher (making it excellent for niche archery/combat hybrid builds with ~90% crit chance).

As far as powers go, what powers you use matters quite a bit. Here is my setup.

Class Features:

Aspect of the Lone Wolf

Aspect of the Pack/Twin-Blade Storm/Seeker’s Vengeance/Blade Storm (very interchangeable depending on gear, skill, and where you are)

Encounters:

Thorn Ward-Thorn Strike

Split the Sky-Throw Caution to the Wind/Rain of Arrows-Rain of Swords

Fox’s Cunning-Fox Shift

Dailies:

Forest Ghost

Forest Meditation/Seismic Shot

At-Wills:

Electric Shot-Clear the Ground

Aimed Shot-Aimed Strike/Rapid Shot-Rapid Strike

Why these powers? Well, for the class features, deflect is extremely important in this build for survivability, and Aspect of the Lone Wolf is the best deflect giving feature in the game (except for trappers who prefer pathfinder’s action because they can keep it up almost always with disruptive shot). As for the second slot, that is reserved for our DPS feature. I love Aspect of the Pack because it is great party DPS, and my CA Damage stat is pretty high, making this give me the biggest damage boost. Twin-blade storm is good when you first hit 70 because it takes no setup and gives good bonus damage. Seeker’s Vengeance is pretty good if you set it up or have some defender to flank with. Blade Storm seems to proc a lot, but it should only be giving me 3.75% more damage. However, according to ACT logs, I seem to be getting more like 10-15% of my damage from it, so I don’t know. I think it might be because it does the damage in an area around you, but can multi-proc on AoE attacks. Therefore, I think it’s probably proccing 2 or 3 times every swing of clear the ground, and hitting a large area, giving me a larger amount of damage than it would seem. If true, I would use Blade Storm until you get a lot of CA Damage stat, then switch it out for Aspect of the Pack for maximum party damage.

Next, the encounters. Thorn Ward/Thorn Strike is absolutely mandatory. The debuff from Thorn Ward is quite impressive, though the actual damage from it isn’t as good. Thorn Strike is far more disappointing, but useful enough on mobs with low health. It does better in boss fights, but is still nothing special. Split the Sky is kinda poor for what it is, but it is very useful to set up a zone for the party to fight in. Throw Caution to the Wind just plain sucks. Rain of Arrows is actually very good damage in a boss fight or in LoL (where we tend to be weaker due to lack of trash). Rain of Swords is decent, but the animation is slow. It can hit a lot of mobs though, because of no target cap. It’s just hard to gauge and be accurate with it. As for Fox’s Cunning/Fox Shift, also mandatory. Fox’s Cunning has gotten even better this module because mobs hit so hard any way to automatically dodge an attack is awesome. Fox Shift is still pretty high damage, especially against 3 or 4 mobs. The immunity frame is also useful to avoid attacks.

For dailies, Forest Ghost is pretty much all you’ll be using. It does good damage, especially when there are a ton of mobs. The big draw is the invisibility, extremely useful to get away from a lot of mobs. As for the other slot, seismic shot is good aoe damage, but nothing really special, while forest meditation is a nice way to keep yourself alive, and the auto-deflect and CC immunity are useful.

The at-wills are simple as well. If there are two or more mobs, use clear the ground constantly. If there is one, use aimed strike. Simple. Clear the ground is still underrated, and while it will never be as good as Wicked Strike or Weapon Master’s Strike, it is still a pretty good aoe at-will.

Stats:

I will organize the stats into two categories; offensive and defensive.

Offensive:

The priorities for offensive stats are as follows:

• Armor penetration to 60%, this is the cap for the hardest content. Remember to factor in strength and any other sources when you total it.
• Critical chance to 35%, this is all you will ever need, it’s not our main focus.
• Recovery to 6k or so, we don’t really need to AP gain but the cooldown reduction is nice.
• Power as high as you want. Power is back to being the last stat to stack as it was pre-mod 4.

A quick word on the other offensive stats; CA damage is a good stat for us because of Aspect of the Pack. Stamina Gain is also good because of serpent weave to lower cooldowns. CC bonus is useless, and AP gain kinda sucks too, because we don’t need a lot of AP, and we already get 10% from lucky blades.

Defensive:

• HP is the first stat you want. You want to get HP up over 80k asap, this is pretty much how much you will need to not have mobs oneshot you all the time. After that, you can calm down and let it bring itself up. At the end, you will probably have around 100k, maybe a little less.
• Deflect comes next, and you will never stop stacking deflect really. It is actually really useful in PvE now, because of the number of monsters that can oneshot you. Even if you are great at dodging, attacks will slip through, and stacking defense will not be enough for an HR. With a 50% or higher deflect chance, oneshots become far less common and can be dealt with by your soulforged. You can only  consider stacking anything else when you have over 10k deflect.
• As for lifesteal and defense, never stack lifesteal, we get enough from feats. Defense can be stacked when you have over 10k deflect, but I would advise only switching silverys for cruel enchants, not azure. If you really have a ton of deflect, you could also go for HP instead of defense. Rangers simply can’t stack enough defense to save them.

As for other defensive stats, none are especially good, but none are especially bad. I would say Incoming Healing and Regen are probably best because they improve our lifesteal. Also regen is nice to keep you topped up out of combat while soloing.

Boons:

As I said, I can’t take screenshots, so I’ll just outline what boons I’ve taken. For the stat boons, they are pretty changeable based on what stats you personally are missing, but what I am using is what you’ll probably end up with.

Sharandar:

T1: Dark Fey Hunter

T2: Fey Elusiveness

T3: Feywild’s Fortitude

T4: Elven Ferocity

T5: Fey Thistle

Dread Ring:

T1: Conjurer’s Gambit

T2: Evoker’s Thirst

T3: Illusion Shimmer

T4: Shadowtouch

T5: Endless Consumption (doesn’t really matter, rampaging madness and augmented thayan bastion are fine as well)

Icewind Dale:

T1: Weathering the Storm

T2: Appreciation of Warmth

T3: Rapid Thaw

T4: Cool Resolve

T5: Rousing Warmth

Tyranny of Dragons:

T1: Dragon’s Claws

T2: Dragon’s Shadow

T3: Draconic Armorbreaker

T4: Dragon’s Greed

T5: 1/3 Dragon’s Thirst, 1/3 Dragon’s Revival, 1/3 Dragon’s Fury

This gives a good mix of defense and offense.

Gear and Enchantments:

So I already outlined what stats are important for this build. But what specific gear is ideal? Well, for PvE you want to stay on the assault line all the way through; alliance assault, elemental alliance assault, elven assault, elemental elven assault. You won’t want to actually get the elemental alliance assault though. Just get the normal alliance and then start farming t2s for the elven, and upgrade that. For PvP, you can honestly take either, I have a set of elemental burning duelist that I use for PvP, but if you feel you get enough deflect from everywhere else, you can use executioner. For that, follow a similar principle; get grim first, then burning, then elemental. As for jewelry, I wear a greater imperial dragon cloak all the time. The Lostmauth set is obviously BiS, but I have a feeling the nerf hammer is coming (as soon as Cryptic feels they have made enough money from it). Also, I don’t like the artifact, strength is a useless ability score right now…there are a lot of reasons not to use it. Therefore, I use a greater imperial dragon cloak and a greater twined rope of dexterity, and choose my own artifacts. As for rings, I hate the lack of deflect on the personalized rings, and I opt not to use them in favor of a pair of elemental elven ward rings. The PvP ring set works well too for PvP; the stats are decent and 650 tenacity is no joke with all that tenacity helps now. However, I still prefer the ward rings for the massive amount of HP. If the personalized adamant rings of regeneration were called rings of deflection and gave 1576 HP and 394 deflect, they would be BiS, but they don’t, and I don’t need more power, armor penetration or recovery. Clothes are really a toss-up between shirt/pants and tunic/trousers, and mixing and matching wouldn’t hurt either. Critical is nice, but so is deflect. Really just whatever you need. If you want you can also switch a boon around and take the other option if you can get them cheaper (i.e. a guildmate has an extra pair of one specific type, or there’s a steal on the AH). Really just about price there.

Now for artifacts. I currently have a Wheel of Elements in my active slot, with a Sigil of the Scourge, Sigil of the Trickster, and Lantern of Revelation in the passive slots. These are the BiS options. The Lantern is of course free, and the Sigil of the Scourge and Sigil of the Trickster just require you to level those classes and unlock 3 boons in Dread Ring with them (or Sharandar, but Dread Ring is faster). If you can’t get a wheel, I would instead get either a Vanguard’s Banner or a Sigil of the Oathbound. Vanguard’s Banner is pretty easy to get, and it has a great active effect. Sigil of the Oathbound is also easy to get, but the active effect isn’t so good. Both give exactly the same stats except for the tertiary stat, which is Stamina Gain on the Wheel, AoE Resist on the Sigil, and Lifesteal on the Vanguard’s Banner. If Wheel gets nerfed, I don’t really know what artifact I will use in the active slot. Stamina Gain is great, but I will probably just switch the Icewind Dale boon to Stamina Gain and use my Vanguard’s Banner, it’s a great debuff and buff that scales excellently. Some guides recommend getting a Waters of Elah’zad while leveling for the active, but the stats on Lantern are just too good.

Finally, enchantments. Here are the enchantments I recommend:

Weapon Enhancement:

• Plaguefire. Excellent no matter what rank, great debuff. Also, very cheap. Transcendent is really not worth it, it offers only minor improvement on Perfect. I have a Perfect, and it works great.
• Terror. Similar to Plaguefire, except it scales much better. Transcendent is actually worth it. Better for PvP, but good in PvE.
• Lightning. Slightly niche enchantment, but synergizes incredibly well with the whole Stormwarden AoE thing this build has going on. This build is one of the few that can actually perform well with a lesser. However, the scaling is extremely good here, and if you go lightning, get a transcendent. It’s just beautiful sometimes.
• Vorpal. BiS for so long. However, it has fallen off a bit, especially for this build. If you want one, or have one, you can use it, but if you don’t, don’t waste your money. If you want, you can also push critical a bit more and sacrifice some recovery, and you can probably get the 40+% critical chance required to make this optimal. I prefer Plaguefire, but it does look sick. Of course, there’s always Terror for that.

Armor Enhancement:

• Soulforged. Excellent because all you need is a lesser, making it a very cheap option. Also, in this new world of massive single hits, having a soulforged saves you a lot more than it used to. What I use, what I’ve always used, and the best option for this build.
• Negation. Best option for PvP. Not very useful in PvE, because you won’t survive the hits needed to build stacks, but its okay for solo content. Only superior to soulforged anywhere if you have a greater or better, otherwise a lesser soulforged will do you just fine.
• Elven Battle. Only really good if you get a Transcendent. If you do, however, this can sometimes beat Negation for PvP. Basically it makes you almost totally resistant to CC, which is pretty insane.

Offense Enchantments:

• This is pretty simple. Use darks until you hit 60% armor penetration. Then use azures until you hit 35% critical chance. Then use silverys pretty much the rest of the way. If you want, you can sacrifice some of that recovery for more power or critical, especially if you’re using Vorpal, but I prefer to keep it. At least stay above 5k recovery.

Defense Enchantments:

• This is even simpler. Pretty much exclusively use silverys. When you hit 10k deflect, you can start switching in radiants, but once again you will usually end up with mostly silverys. That’s okay, because with your 18 Constitution, you should have around 90k HP or more with just armor, rings, artifacts and boons. You usually don’t need much more than that.

Companions:

Ioun Stone of Might

Blink Dog

Intellect Devourer

Air Archon

Lightfoot Thief

The Ioun Stone of Might has three offense slots and the stamina regen is nice for serpent weaver. Blink Dog and Intellect Devourer give CA damage bonus, excellent if you are using Aspect of the Pack (reasons why I do). Air Archon is basically a 5% damage boost. Lightfoot Thief, while nearly impossible to get, is absolutely amazing. It is the sole reason I ever did Sword Coast Adventures. It took me at least a hundred tries to get it, probably a lot more, but from what I’ve heard, I got lucky. If you can’t get it, there are other options that are solid. I would advise Fire Archon for an average 3.5% damage boost.

Summary:

This build is not intended to bring max damage output like a proper striker such as a destroyer GWF. In the end, you will still have lower damage than other strikers. However, you will still put up respectable numbers, and you will do it while being very survivable and providing a lot of party damage bonus through debuffs and Aspect of the Pack. Most importantly, this build gives a viable alternative to trappers, and even encourages (I hope) many people to switch their build to this. I have a philosophy that the best builds are the builds that either buff the party, debuff the enemy, or provide some other way to play as a team (like AoE CC or pretty much every tank build).  To me, if every person helps the other four people, then in turn that person has four people helping them, which in my experience works a lot better than every man just DPS’ing for themselves. That is the purpose of this build, and I hope you like it!

INTRO:

          FIRST, this post is only a hypothesis, I’m only lv23 on my first hr and I’m still leveling up. If the build doesn’t fit your hr it’s not my fault. I’ll renew this post if I make any changes or just to tell you all this build is utterly useless. Also, I’m only going to talk about feats in this post.

SO:

        We know normal trappers look like this

http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/hr?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13n3i0i:1000000:1000000:1uu5zzv&h=0&p=pfr

(ahh can’t insert picture)

      And now this feat:  

           Skirmisher’s  Gambit:   Your cirt chance is decreased by 10% and crit severity is increased by 50%.

      And the archery feat tree:  

           Ghost walker,  Quarry,   Longshot,    Unflinching aim,    Rising Focus,   and Predator.

      Means when you crit a daily, you’ll get:

       1(base dmg)*1.05(Quarry)*1.1(Longshot, about that weapon dmg is done)*1.2(Unflinching aim)*1.15(Rising         focus)*1.4(Predator)*2.75(crit+verpol+Skirmisher’s Gambit)  =  6.14 times the base dmg.

If u r a trapper your full buffed crit will do about 4 times the base dmg.

We are only counting the right half of the feat tree and a vorpal, no gears.   So this feat is really doable and should have a lot of dmg once crit, and can go for pve support pathfinder and pvp crit sniper.

Finally the feat link:

http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/hr?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13n3i30:1u0uz51:150z000:1000000&h=0&p=pfr

I’ve tried it all, Archery, Combat, Nature, and bit of hybrid, and for my playstyle, I’ve come to a conclusion that Nature spec is the best for tough premade matches. With all builds, you’ll have to choose between more dps or survive a bit longer. Personally I choose to stay alive for longer to hold the point.

With my experience, I have been able to hold the node against 99% of the player base, the only ones that I have problems with are tough hard hitting sent GWFs (eg. Steamroller). I can even hold the point against 2 people for a while until I get some backup, and sometimes even kill both of them if I’m lucky. I think of myself as a hybrid between a DC and a dps’er.

Here’s a link to my build:

http://nwcalc.com/hr?b=oy7:4slio:a6l…u5u1&h=0&p=swd

and my character sheet:

I have spec’ed to have Max CON, all my defense slots are all radiant, currently just over 34k hp. This is important, and the key to this build. My other points are all into DEX for max damage.

You will notice my crit to be very low, yes more crit is good if you want to kill stuff, but this build is made to outlast whoever you’re fighting against, and not so much on burst damage. I’m currently using 3 Greater Tenebrous and 1 Azure in my Offense slots. You can switch them all to Azures to keep your crit up, especially if using vorpal.

[edit] – 27/02/2014, currently swapped a Radiant out for a Brutal enchantment, and also got Eye of Lathander artifact to get my defense up a bit higher. Also planning to swap some Greater Tenebrous out for Azures.

My encounters include:
Commanding Shot/Stag heart – This never leaves my bar, although I hardly ever use commanding shot due to long cast time, stag heart is just too good. I’m constantly giving myself and my team over 4k temp hp which last forever, and as long as they have that temp hp, they also get 10% extra defense. This synergies with GF’s and DC’s feats too. I always keep my eyes out and see who needs that buff to be topped up.

Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze – Time this right after a CW uses shard, and when GWFs are not in unstoppable.

Fox’s Cunning/Fox shift – I think 99% of HRs runs this, just make sure you have used a range encounter first to get 15% more damage for fox shift.

Binding Arrow/Oak Skin – Also a pretty good skill, to hold enemies off the node, and Oak skin to give everyone some regen and more defense.

Boar Hide/Boar charge – More defense for everyone, and Boar charge is fun, and crucial if you want to take a GWF down. This is a skill which is very good for combat spec HRs.

HRs have so many options to what skills we use, just need to pick some to create some good combos. I have chosen a defensive route to make sure myself and my team last a bit longer in the battlefield.

Dailies:
Disruptive Shot – Pretty obvious

Forest Ghost – Situational, as it has an animation, it’s good to sneak onto the home and enemy base if there’s enemies on them already

Class Features:
Aspect of the Lone Wolf – The less players you face, the more bonus mitigation you get

Stompstep Action – Althought Fox shift stompstep action bug is fixed, this is still great to reduce your cooldowns

Armor Set:
I’m using 4 piece Royal Guard, will I still use this when Tenacity is introduced? probably. I’ll have to see if I can stay alive better on this set vs PvP sets. The reason I choose this set is to reduce my cooldown for encounters, namely Stag Heart. But we’ll have to see how much temp hp this will give in next module with healing depression. If you’re using another set, then you’ll need to get quite a lot of recovery wherever you can.

Weapon/Armor Enchants:
I’ve been playing around with different weapon enchants. Perfect Feytouch and Greater Plague fires are good.
PF is a bit more effective if you’re using Tenebrous to help proc it, and gives everyone a 9% more damage if you can get 3 stacks on someone.
Feytouch is good to reduce your opponent’s damage while increasing your own. This is a very good enchant that most people don’t seem to know or care about. It only half about half the uptime, and only encounters can proc it. When it does, your enemy is doing 12% less damage, while you’re doing 12% more.

Otherwise Vorpal is good as long as your crit % is high enough. So for your offensive slots, you can choose between Greater Tenes, Azures, or Silvery.

For Armor Enchants, I switch between a soulforge and a perfect negation, the good thing is that you can switch between 2 armors in battle, so if 1 is on cooldown, then switch to the other. Negation is quite good when it procs and you’re tanking against 3 players. For all defensive slots, just have radiants, as high rank as you can.

Artifacts:
Emblem of the Seldarine – This is one of the best PvP artifact, and you can save your teammates when they’re low on health.

Blood Crystal Raven Skull – Great stats, and useful if you don’t have Emblem.

Waters of Elah’zad – I think all HRs should be choosing this as their starting artifact, the stats are so good.

Lantern of Revelation – good offensive stats if you’re lacking some, I usually use this instead of Blood Crystal Raven Skull as I’m lacking some crit points

Eye of Lathander – This is one of the hardest artifact to get, but if you can finally get one it can boost your Defense and Life Steal up, I swap this in if I’m fighting against a GWF 1v1, and depending on team compositions in both parties.

Original Post

Recently, I’ve been coming to this site often to get ideas about builds for the different classes in Neverwinter.
However, I’ve been noticing that there is a slight lack of coherent Hunter Ranger builds, especially in comparison to the material available on all the other classes.

Hunter Ranger is by far my favorite class in Neverwinter. After some time of messing around with different builds, I’ve come to one that works quite well.

Stormwarden Path (currently the only path available)

POWERS
At-Will Powers
Rapid Shot (3/3): Significantly underpowered, but this skill is more reliable than both Aimed Shot and Electric Shot.
Split Shot (3/3): For every ranged & hybrid HR, this is the go-to skill. Outstanding range, spread, and damage. Clean out clusters of mobs within seconds in PvE, or dish out punishment to grouped enemies in PvP.

Encounter Powers
Marauder’s Escape (3/3): Essential for every HR build. Useful to quickly step out of danger’s reach, and just as well to jump back into it.
Hindering Shot (3/3): Depending on what you want to accomplish, this skill or Constricting Arrow could be utilized. This skill is great if you want to create space between yourself and the enemy. It is also great if you want to keep the enemy in a specific location. The best aspect of this skill is, however, the three charges. This skill can be thrown out three times before you’ll have to wait for its cooldown.
Rain of Arrows (3/3): Only useful in PvE, and only when you are not the enemy’s target. The AoE range of this skill is very small, and it takes a few seconds to take effect after its activation. As long as someone else is holding the enemy’s attention and keeping them stationary, this skill will dish out heaps of damage.
Constricting Arrow (3/3): Unlike Hindering Shot, this skill does not contain the enemy to one area. Instead, this skill interrupts the enemy every few seconds after they are hit with it.This skill is better used in situations where you want to interrupt the enemy’s attacks, which makes it quite useful in PvP.
Split the Sky (3/3): This skill is great for setting up an advantageous fighting zone for you and your allies. It should only be used when you are in a team of five, otherwise it will not be effective enough to make up for its utilization of one of your encounter power slots.
Binding Arrow (3/3)
Fox’s Cunning (3/3)

Feature Powers
Aspect of the Lone Wolf (3/3)
Aspect of the Serpent (3/3)
Stormstep Action (3/3)
Twin-Blade Storm (3/3)

Daily Powers
Forest Ghost (3/3)
Disruptive Shot (3/3)
Cold Steel Hurricane (3/3)

HEROIC FEATS
Weapon Mastery (3/3)
Toughness (3/3)
Swift Footwork (3/3)
Battlewise (3/3)
Endless Assault (3/3)
Disciple of Dexterity (3/3)

Archery Feats
Black Arrow (5/5)
Bloodthirsty (5/5)
Correcting Aim (5/5)
Prime Critical (5/5)
Master of Archery (1/1)

Combat Feats
Seeker (5/5)

With your last five paragon points, I’d recommend either placing them into Stormcaller’s Arrow or Agile Hunter.

*work in progress*

Hi! My Ingame name is Mcklaud and im running a Hunter Ranger | Trapper on NW Xbox One. In this guide I will explain how to effectively run a Hunter Ranger in PvE and explain how to use this class in all kinds of circumstances. This is going to be quite a detailed and advanced breakdown of how to play a Hunter Ranger so get ready to re-read a few parts or ask questions incase You didnt fully understand a point. Also, since I am not from an english-speaking country, I obviously dont have any screenshots. Therefore I included some videos with gameplay and alot of links to the Neverwinter-wiki and Nwcalc which will hopefully help explaining this build.

1. Character creation

There are a few points on your character creation that are really important. You need a race that suits the Hunter Ranger and You need to properly roll your Abilities.
Races:
Dragonborn: The Dragonborn is the best choice to make for a Hunter Ranger. The benefits it grants are very useful since they boost your damage out-put significantly! On top of that You can freely choose where to put your Ability points.
Drow: If You do not have the dragonborn race unlocked i would highly recommend this race over the Wood Elf and the Menzoberranzan Renegade. This is simply because the Darkfire perk is alot better than the 1% crit chance or Fearie Fire. The Drow race will also allow You to put 2 Ability points into Dexterity and Wisdom, which is what we will be going for. Keep in mind that You can potentially run the Wood Elf or the Menzoberranzan Renegade, they simply arent as good as the Dragonborn or the Drow.
All races and their perks

Abilities:
This one is pretty easy. In order to max your damage You want 18 points on both, Dexterity and Wisdom (this includes the Ability points granted by your chosen class. Make sure You put them on Dexterity and Wisdom!). You will end up with 12 STR, 10 CON, 18 DEX, 10 INT, 18 WIS and 10 CHA. When leveling up always put your points into DEX and WIS.

Thats all You necessarily need to know about your character creation. I kept this a little shorter because You probably read all this a dozen times already. Lets move on to your charactertraits.

2. Charactertraits

I will only highlight stats that are important to push. Everything im not talking about is not worth any points at all so try to avoid running equipment that boosts those stats.
Power: 400 Power = 1% bonus-damage. This is very nice to have but if You can choose between Power and Critical Strike go for Critical Strike.
Critical Strike: 400 Critical Strike = 1% crit chance. All your offensive slots should be slotted with Azure enchantments (or brutal enchantments) until You hit about 16k Critical Strike. Having 16k in here will let You sit around on something between 60% and 70% crit chance which is enough! In combination with potions, feats and buffs from your teammates in dungeons You will usually be critting your big powers non stop.
Armor Penetration: Armor Penetration does not statically increase like Power or Crit. This is one of the few stats that still have Diminishing Returns. I cant tell You an exact number of how many points You will need to put into Armor Penetration but make sure the resistance ignored is between 59% and 60%. This is currently the maximum of damage resistance enemies can have so you dont need to go any higher. Keep in mind that your resistance ignored will be put together by the percentages of resistance ignored by Armor Penetration and STR. STR will most likely boost Your resistance ignored by 4-7%.
Recovery: Recovery has never been that important to a Hunter Ranger in PvE because your cooldowns will be decreased by Your feats. If You are sometimes getting stuck on Single-target rotations You can try to get it up to 2k-2.5k which will decrease your cooldowns by 10%. Usually You dont need any points in here though.
Actionpoint gain: Actionpoint gain is alot more irrelevant this module than it used to be in mod 4 and 5. If you want to you can get up to 1.2k points inhere however i wouldnt recommend it. The only time you need to activate your daily should be at the start of the fight. Apart from that you dont really need them. On top of that you regenerate Actionpoints pretty quickly anyways since you attack with so many Enocunter powers.
Combat Advantge Bonus: 1k-1.2k points would be ideal for this since they will boost your Combat Advantage Bonus by 9%. Dont go any higher because the Diminishing Returns are brutal. It literally wont get You anywhere.
Controlbonus: Same as Combat Advantage Bonus. 1-1.2k is very important to get for a nice boost to Your Crowd-Control abilities. This is the key to pulling off perma-stuns in PvE.
Defense: You will get a few points of Defense here and there. It doesnt do much though so dont slot it or go for it equipment wise.
Deflection: If You arent inside an Invincibility-frame Deflection is your only way to take a big hit. We will stack up Deflection whenever we can! 400 points = 1% chance to deflect. You can even slot silvery enchantments for defensive slots but i would rather recommend dark emblems for lifesteal.
Lifesteal: There are alot of reasons why You definitely need to get 3000-4000 points in here. I will break down the Feats and Combat-mechanics later and explain why Lifesteal is that important. For now all You need to know is that this is what You should mainly put into your defensive slots. 400 points = 1% chance to proc Lifesteal.
Stamina gain: Stamina is very important to the Hunter Ranger but Stamina gain takes way too long to properly charge up the staminabar. You can get this through the second Icewind Dale boon. Go for it but dont expect much, You probably wont even notice it. This caps on 1k-1.2k points.
Movement: Aside from looting enchantments this is the only thing You should put into Utility slots. 400 points = 1% Movementspeed.
Critical Severity: This isnt a normal stat You can put points into but I wanted to mention this here because it is a crucial part of how You deal damage. Since I was aiming for a very high critical chance with this build You kinda wanna increase your critical Severity as much as You can.

3. Boons

There isnt much to explain on this part so i will quickly tell You what boons You should go for without going into too much detail.
List of all Boons

Sharandar:
Dark Fey Hunter
Fey Precision
Elven Haste
Elven Ferocity
Elvish Fury

Dread Ring:
Conjurer’s Gambit
Evoker’s Thrist
Illusion Shimmer
Shadowtouch
Endless Consumption

Icewind Dale:
Encroaching Tactics OR Wheatering the Storm (this depends on how much Combat Advantage Bonus You already have. Like i said, You shouldnt go over 1.2k)
Refreshing Chill
Sleet Skills
Cool Resolve
Rousing Warmth (procs on Lifesteal)

Tyranny of Dragons:
Dragon’s Claw
Dragon’s Gaze
Will of the Dragon
Dragon’s Greed
Dragon’s Thirst
Dragon’s Fury
Dragon’s Grip

4. Feats

This is what Im currently running (open the link and click on “Feats”)
Let me explain why I am using those feats and what they are good for:

Heroic Feats:
Predatory Action 2/5: This one wasnt my first choice. However I had a few points left and needed to decide whether to put them in here or into Stamina/Less Threat/Actionpoint gain. Since they modified Threat-generation a Hunter would always end up building up alot of threat. -4% threat wouldnt make any difference though. Actionpoint gain is not as important since You will get your Action Points really fast anyways. Stamina is a key part for Your survival and I will explain this more in depth later on. For now: this feat lets You REGENERATE stamina faster which is not what we will use for Stamina recovery.
Weapon Mastery 3/3: Like i mentioned before, crit is very important. Theres no way around 3/3 on this one.
Thoughness 3/3: This one is a must in this module since 9% max HP will end up being around 6-9k HP.
Agile Combat 3/3: 3% damage after switching the stance for 5 seconds. You switch stances every 2 – 5 seconds –> 3% raw damage increase.
Endless Assault 3/3: You only deal damage with enounter powers –> 6% raw damage increase.
Lucky Skirmisher 3/3: 3% Deflection. Like i said, if You lose control of the fight only Deflection will allow you to take a hit or two.
Disciple of Dexterity 3/3: Even more damage…

Trapper feats:
Fleet Stance 5/5: The 10% movement speed is better than 5% Action Point gain. It doesnt make a huge difference though.
Deft Strike 5/5: This increases your big hit’s damage by 10%.
Forestbond 5/5: Small cooldown reduction.
Ancient Roots 5/5: This increases the time enemies are immobilized by your roots. Three points in here are usually enough, but it doesnt hurt to max it out. Your base duration of Strong Grasping Roots (SGR) is 2 seconds. Three points would make it 5 seconds. If You decide to put three points only into this feat You might want to put the remaining two points into Fluid Hunter which is a feat in the Combat-path that grants You 1% deflect chance while in Melee stance.
Swiftness of the Fox 5/5:  Whenever You use an Enounter power the cooldowns of the different stance’s Encounter powers will be reduced by 15%. This feat is totally broken since it procs on hit and not on use meaning it procs five times if you hit five enemies! On top of that Encounters like Fox’s Cunning will reduce the cooldown by 15% per player buffed as well. This means, the more targets You hit the shorter your cooldowns are going to be. This feat is the engine to any Trapper-build.
Thorned Roots 5/5: This simply adds a DoT effect on enemies hit by SGRs. The efffect applies to control-immune targets aswell dealing an additional 250% of your Weapon damage. This makes SGRs insanely good against bosses.
Serpent’s Bite 5/5: Since You will be running Aspect of the Serpent almost all the time this is a huge booster to both damage and crit chance for those encounter powers that seriously need to hurt your enemy.
Biting Snares 1/1: Biting Snares simply buffs everything You have. Actionpoints, damage and control-bonus. As long as You arent very experienced with your rotations this should simply be a passive booster for your damage. As you become more familiar with your Hunter try to have it proc’d whenever you use your daily.

Combat feats:
Bloodletting 5/5: Almost every Hunter runs Trapper’s cunning instead of this. Why? I dont know.  Bloodletting is incredible and it will get You alot closer to being invincible than any other feat. Bloodletting only increases your Lifesteal while in Melee stance but this is when You need it most. If You get your Lifesteal up to 10% (which is the minimum of what You will want to have) it will be 15% while in Melee stance. The chance for Lifesteal to proc will be calculated for every target individually. This means You have that 15% chance to proc Lifesteal five times if there are 5 targets. On top of that damage over time will be calculated individually aswell so that gives you even more small heals that can proc Rousing Warmth or Endless Consumption. I hope You understand the potential that comes with this feat. If you happen to get lucky a single Lifesteal proc can heal you all the way up if Enless Consumption procs on it.
The alternative to this would be Trapper’s cunning. Trapper’s cunning will give u a 25% chance to apply Weak Grasping Roots (WGR) on a critical hit which will immobilize the target for 3.5 seconds (incase You have 5/5 on Ancient Roots) and apply a very short daze that wont do much but cancel the enemy’s attack. This might sound good right now but it is completely redundant. Imagine You had a crit chance of 50%. Every eighth attack will proc Trapper’s Cunning’s WGRs. The only powers You will be running that dont immobilize your enemies are Steel Breeze and Fox Shift. You usually use Steel Breeze right after applying roots of some sort so if Trapper’s Cunning would proc it wouldnt help You at all. Every hit of Fox Shift will be calculated individually in terms of Lifesteal, crit chance, damage and also effects like Trapper’s Cunning. Since You are invincible using Fox Shift canceling the enemies attacks wont help you at all since they cant harm you at that point anyway. I hope You understand what i am trying to explain right here

(Instead of Ancient Roots and Sepent’s Bite you could technically run Skirmisher’s Gambit or Longshot as well. However they will limit your abilities to control your enemies for a slight damage boost. I would not recommend running this if you arent experienced with this class though!)

5. Powers

Now we are slowly getting into the more interesting part of this guide. The first thing You want to figure out is whether You want to run Stormwarden or Pathfinder. I would highly recommend Stormwarden for PvE because it will give You access to Cold Steel Hurricane which deals insane damage. It really doesnt matter too much though since the core rotations will stay the same anyways. If You wanna see what all the powers do You can go to Nwcalc aswell.

At-wills:

Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike: This is the only at-will You will usually use. It is less for the damage its dealing but more for applying an aspect of the serpent stack. Aspect of the serpent is the main class-feature You will end up using.

Electric Shot/Clear the Ground: Already talked about this. Nothing too special.

Encounter powers:

Hindering Shot/Hindering Strike: There is three charges on Hindering Shot. After using it once You will have to wait three seconds to use it again. Hindering Shot applies WGRS which arent really that great. You rarely use it to actually combo/rotate with it since You will eventually run out of charges. However it can be quite useful if You screw up your rotation because u will be able to quickly kill the cooldowns of your Melee powers if You spam Hindering Shot a few times. Regenerating a charge takes 15 seconds. Hindering Strike however is a really strong power. It is an 360° attack, applies SGRs, deals alot of damage and caps at five enemies. Its is the only Melee Encounter that lets You apply SGRs which makes it really valuable.

Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze: This Encounter is by far my most favourite one and i would never run any dungeon without it. Some people say that they’d run Hindering Shot instead of this but i would never recommend that. In my book Constricting Arrow and Steel Breeze are just as important as Fox’s Cunning! Constricting Arrow hits a target and applies SGRs to enemies nearby. This is capped to five enemies. The damage it deals is insane, especially on control immune targets. Thats because You will proc Thorned Roots’ DoT and instantly deal 250% of your weapon damage. Keep in mind that if your Constricting Arrow crits the Weapon damage and DoT will keep on critting as well. This alone would make this Encounter power totally worth it but to top it off the Melee power Steel Breeze that comes along with it is a very important part of your rotation as well. It might not deal too much damage but u can kill your cooldowns with it in combination with Plant Growth/Hindering Strike. Steel Breeze also is a five target 360° attack. Whats really good about it though is that it will fill up your Staminabar. Using Steel Breeze is your main way of recharging your Stamina. Never cut Steel Breeze out of your rotation because Stamina is more valuable than HP or damage. You wont be able to hold aggro and stay alive without it. The more enemies You hit the more Stamina You are going to refill.

Fox’s Cunning/Fox Shift: Fox’s Cunning gives everyone in your group a free dodge next time they are getting hit. This is really useful and you can even time it to catch attacks like Lostmauth’ Laser-eyes. Fox Shift will make you Invincible and immune to control effects as long as you use it. On top of that it’s damage output is really nice and as far as i know You can get up to ten hits with Fox Shift.

Cordon of Arrows/Plant Growth: When I first played with this power I hated it. It is very slow and somewhat cheap. You deal alot of damage with Cordon of Arrows and u even have three charges which generate after 20 seconds each. And as if that wasnt enough it can be placed on the ground and function as a trap similar to the cleric‘s Chains of Blazing Light. When using this you might want to Dodge-cancel after your character raises their arms up. This will turn Immobility-frames into Invincibility frames. Plant growth is just as powerful. All targets inside of Plant growth will take very high damage over time and cant move for 4 seconds. The immobility will wear off if You deal to much damage to your target, the DoT will stay active though. Cordon of Arrows caps at five enemies. Plant Growth doesnt have an actual target cap.

Daylies:

Seismic Shot: Seismic shot is a strong five target attack that pushes the enemy away and deals alot of damage. I tend to use it quite alot when running Cordon of Arrows because You will run out of charges. In that situation u can still put one or two Seismic Shots out instead of Cordon of Arrows and keep your damage up and running.

Forest Ghost: Whenever a fight against a group of enemies starts i tend to pop this. It will turn You invisible for roughly 6 seconds and has a cooldown of 30 seconds. Using it will take almost an entire second which is quite alot for a Hunter Ranger. This makes it very hard to use mid-fight. Keep in mind that You cant dodge-cancel Forest Ghost’s animation. It will simply cancel its activation.

Cold Steel Hurricane: This power is totally underrated! Nothing deals as much damage to either enemies with a big hitbox or a very big amount of enemies! It is hard to explain so I will leave a clip to showcase it’s strength. Since its cast-time is really long its not always as useful though

Cold Steel Hurricane unbuffed (160k no boon damage)

Seismic Shot unbuffed (40k no boon damage)

Class Features:

Aspect of the Serpent: Aspect of the Serpent (AotS), Biting Snares and Deft Strike are what qualify the Hunter Ranger to be a top-tier damage dealer. Its effect is quite hard to explain. I will link nwcalc so You can check it out yourself http://nwcalc.com/#/. Basically what it does is boost your Melee powers through using Ranged powers and vice versa. You will run this 99% of the time.

Aspect of the Lone Wolf: This is what You will run alongside Aspect of the Serpent in dungeons/ fights that dont require You to stun enemies with Crushing Roots. This will boost your Deflection chance by 22%-30%. 22% is quite alot and You will almost be able to Deflect every second hit if You add up all your other buffs on Deflection.

Crushing Roots: Crushing Roots is a new class feature that was introduced with this module. It will make You daze the enemies when You apply roots. Since this perk only lasts for a very short time You really want to push your Control bonus up to 40% to significantly increase its effectivity. If there are enemies You have to control You always want to run this instead of Aspect of the Lone Wolf. Keep in mind that switching those perks mid-dungeon is nothing unusual. I always use this perk for Lostmauth all the way up to the Scorpion boss and then switch to Aspect of the Lone Wolf. This is because there wont be enemies to daze for the rest of the dungeon.

Aspect of the Pack: Aspect of the Pack is something I rarely run. It does however grant Combat Advantage to your whole team which is alot more significant than You might think it is. Combat Advantage grants crazy buffs to your entire team and it isnt active as often as You might think it is. Dont run this though if You need Crushing Roots or Aspect of the Lone Wolf – Keeping yourself alive is more important than to grant extra damage to your team. Also, dont run this if there is a GWF running daring shout or a Renagade-CW. They will make Aspect of the Pack unnecessary since they grant Combat Advantage aswell.

Thats about it. Those powers are what You will end up using the most. Dont forget that there are alot of other decent powers I wont be able to explain in detail.

6. Combat Mechanics

This is probably the most crucial part to becoming a helpful addition to any dungeon running group. . Since this isnt a simple showcase of what powers Im running but rather a guide on how to perform well, I will try to explain two main rotations I highly recommend You to run. I will split this into two parts each: Stacking damage and Survivability.
Two more things before we start; both rotations will run Rapid Shot, Electric Shot, Forest Ghost, Seismic Shot/ Cold Steel Hurricane, Aspect of the Serpent and Crushing Roots as their standard. Since i already explained situations in which You will want to switch your Class features I wont go into any further detail here. I set Crushing Roots as the standard because You will use it more often and You will rely on it whilst rotating. Aspect of the Lone Wolf is more like an passive feature. Lastly, keep in mind that this is very detailed and might be hard for some people to do without practice. If You dont understand some parts of those rotations do not hesitate to ask or watch the videos Im linking. Lets get to it!

Max-damage-rotation:
This rotation will have You run Constricting Arrow (X), Cordon of Arrows(Y) and Fox’s cunning (B). It doesnt matter what button You use for each power, however I really like it this way because for me it saves the most time I can possibly save inbetween attacks.
Stacking damage:
The first thing I am going to explain is the begining of a fight. Keep in mind that your goal is still controlling the crowd, thats why i like to go in first – even before the tanks enter the fight.
The first thing You should do is hit Fox’s Cunning, Forest Ghost and Constricting Arrow in this order. Firing the Constricting Arrow off is really important because You need to have roots applied to proc your initial Biting Snares. As You switch stances Biting Snares will proc granting You a 30% damage boost for the next ten seconds (By the time You are actually rotating You will have this 30% + 10% on Deft Strike + 34% through your AotS on your big powers). The first Melee power you should use is Plant Growth. After that you should use Fox Shift and Steel Breeze in what ever order You like. This is pretty situational and doesnt really do too much to your damage-output. At this point Biting Snares will most likely be active for another 8-6 seconds + all AotS buffs are now applied! Now You start your Ranged roatation: Usually You will want to drop Cordon of Arrows first and then use Constricting Arrow in order to get the maximum damage out of it. After You fired of the Constricting. Go ahead and pop your Fox’s Cunning and switch Stances to finish off your rotation and start the next one just like this. Keep in mind that You might want to use your daily instead of Cordon of Arrows sometimes because the cooldown of Cordon of Arrows is very long. This will let You optimize your damage in longer fights.
Survivability:
As You may have noticed this rotation is quite time consuming and it will usually take 4-6 seconds. This leaves alot of frames where You actually are quite vulnerable. If you need to stop rotating for maximum damage to pop a Fox Shift or Fox’s Cunning you shouldnt hesitate to do so. Staying alive is always the most important thing.

Lostmauth fight with the above rotation

Crowd-control rotation:
This rotation is used in order to control 3-5 enemies (Every enemy above 5 will be hard to handle and only possible after alot of practice). You will run Constricting Arrow(X), Hindering Shot(Y) and Fox’s Cunning(B). Im using this rotation in order to permanently stun (immobilize+daze) a number of enemies. This works through applying SGRs constantly while having the Crushing Roots perk on. Keep in mind that this works less well on control resistant enemies and enemies less than 3 since You wont be able to proc Swiftness of the Fox often enough. Running this rotation your main goal is to constantly stun enemies rather than dealing as much damage as possible. This rotation’s damage is still very high though, so dont underestimate it and make sure You ALMOST ALWAYS use it in T2 dungeons. This will take the pressure off your entire team if You do it correctly.
Stacking damage/Crowd-controls:
I personally like to start this rotation the same way I do using the Max-damage rotation. The invisibility from Forest Ghost and initial rooting from Constricting Arrow are always good to have. This rotation seriously is simple. Use Hinderring Strike, Steel Breeze right after, switch stances, Constricting Arrow and lastly Fox’s Cunning. This might sound crazy since You wont be moving at all but it works wonders! A full rotation should only take about 2-2.5 seconds. You will just repeat this until the enemy counter drops below three. At that point You will have to use Fox Shift as well in order to proc Swiftness of the Fox often enough. It is a little harder to properly run this if your enemies are all spread out. If this is the case You might wanna consider using Fox Shift to jump around until You see an opportunity to start your rotation. If You want to make sure to get the most damage out of this rotation make sure You have two melee stacks applied when using the rotation‘s first Hindering Strike. This will make Hindering Strike hit 44% harder.
Survivability:
There really isnt much to say. If You manage to properly rotate u wont have any problems unless there are control resistant/control immune enemies. If You have problems starting your rotation make sure You use Fox Shift, Forest Ghost and your dodges the way I explained earlier this guide so You can make use of as many Invincibility-frames as possible until You find a good time to start your rotation.

Perma-stunning the second boss on ECC using this rotation

Thats about it. If You understand and learn to use those rotations properly You will become a truly effective addition to your team and You will be able to keep your team alive alot better than GFs or DCs could ever do!

7. Gear and Companion choice

Equipment:
Equipment wise You dont have alot of choice if You are going for a maxed build. Like i alrady explained above You kinda wanna push crit and lifesteal to support damage and survivability as much as possible. One of the few questions You kinda wanna ask yourself is: Do You want to run the Lostmauth set or a wisdom belt? A wisdom belt will let You push your crit chance and it also is very cheap. The Lostmauth-set however is more expensive. Therefore it will push your “Crit-per-second effectivity”*. The Lostmauth set definitely is the better option if You have enough AD to afford it. The rest of your equipment should be chosen in terms of what stats You still need. I explained this above in the “2. Charactertraits” chapter.

Enchantments:

For your Weapon Enchantment you should use a Vorpal. A Perfect one will already be enough. Since you will be critting most of the time this will significantly increase your overall damage. There is no other Weapon Enchantment that comes close to the Vorpal.

Your Armor Enchantment should be either a Soulforge or a Negation. I would highly recommend a Soulforge though because it actually is alot better and alot cheaper at the same time. Hunters dont have the problem of getting killed two times in a row after their soulforge pops because they can dodge away or use Fox Shift. In the end its up to you though and if you feel like a Negation can do a better job of keeping you alive you can go for it.

Artifacts:
List of viable artifacts:
-Lantern of Revelation
-Lostmauth’s Horn of Blasting
-Sigil of the Trickster
-Sigil of the Controller
-Thayan Book of the Dead
-Shard of Valindras Crown
-Wheel of Elements
-Tactician’s Banner
-Belial’s Portal Stone
Possible choices for your active Artifact in order of usefulness:
-Wheel of Elements
-Lantern of Revelation
-Tactician’s Banner
-Shard of Valindra’s Crown
DO NOT RUN THE SIGIL OF THE DEVOTED! YOU DONT NEED MORE ACTION POINTS!
Link to all Artifacts

Companions:
Current BiS:
-Summoned: Yeti
-Active: Erinyes of Belial, Air Archon, Earth Archon, Cantankerous Mage
Alternatives:
-Summoned: Any Augement
-Active: Intellect Devourer, Blink Dog, Slyblade Kobold, Fire Archon, Tomb Spider, Skeletal Dog, Dancing Blade, Wererat Thief
Link to all Companions

*Dont mistake “Crit-per-second effectivity” with Critical Severity. The Lostmauth set becomes more viable the more orange numbers You see. The actual height or chance of critical strikes doesnt matter.

8. The End

If You still have questions feel free to ask. I know that this was a VERY long guide and I hope You were able to learn something. If one of the things I stated was wrong please let me know so I can check and eventually edit it. Thanks for your attention and for making it to the very end of the guide without giving up

Recently, I’ve been coming to this site often to get ideas about builds for the different classes in Neverwinter.
However, I’ve been noticing that there is a slight lack of coherent Hunter Ranger builds, especially in comparison to the material available on all the other classes.

Hunter Ranger is by far my favorite class in Neverwinter. After some time of messing around with different builds, I’ve come to one that works quite well.

Stormwarden Path (currently the only path available)

POWERS
At-Will Powers
Rapid Shot (3/3): Significantly underpowered, but this skill is more reliable than both Aimed Shot and Electric Shot.
Split Shot (3/3): For every ranged & hybrid HR, this is the go-to skill. Outstanding range, spread, and damage. Clean out clusters of mobs within seconds in PvE, or dish out punishment to grouped enemies in PvP.

Encounter Powers
Marauder’s Escape (3/3): Essential for every HR build. Useful to quickly step out of danger’s reach, and just as well to jump back into it.
Hindering Shot (3/3): Depending on what you want to accomplish, this skill or Constricting Arrow could be utilized. This skill is great if you want to create space between yourself and the enemy. It is also great if you want to keep the enemy in a specific location. The best aspect of this skill is, however, the three charges. This skill can be thrown out three times before you’ll have to wait for its cooldown.
Rain of Arrows (3/3): Only useful in PvE, and only when you are not the enemy’s target. The AoE range of this skill is very small, and it takes a few seconds to take effect after its activation. As long as someone else is holding the enemy’s attention and keeping them stationary, this skill will dish out heaps of damage.
Constricting Arrow (3/3): Unlike Hindering Shot, this skill does not contain the enemy to one area. Instead, this skill interrupts the enemy every few seconds after they are hit with it.This skill is better used in situations where you want to interrupt the enemy’s attacks, which makes it quite useful in PvP.
Split the Sky (3/3): This skill is great for setting up an advantageous fighting zone for you and your allies. It should only be used when you are in a team of five, otherwise it will not be effective enough to make up for its utilization of one of your encounter power slots.
Binding Arrow (3/3)
Fox’s Cunning (3/3)

Feature Powers
Aspect of the Lone Wolf (3/3)
Aspect of the Serpent (3/3)
Stormstep Action (3/3)
Twin-Blade Storm (3/3)

Daily Powers
Forest Ghost (3/3)
Disruptive Shot (3/3)
Cold Steel Hurricane (3/3)

HEROIC FEATS
Weapon Mastery (3/3)
Toughness (3/3)
Swift Footwork (3/3)
Battlewise (3/3)
Endless Assault (3/3)
Disciple of Dexterity (3/3)

Archery Feats
Black Arrow (5/5)
Bloodthirsty (5/5)
Correcting Aim (5/5)
Prime Critical (5/5)
Master of Archery (1/1)

Combat Feats
Seeker (5/5)

With your last five paragon points, I’d recommend either placing them into Stormcaller’s Arrow or Agile Hunter.

*work in progress*

DISCLAIMER: MUST BE OVER 3k IL TO RIDE THIS RIDE

I will update this guide periodically as it isn’t entirely complete. I originally posted it over on the arc site and the formatting didn’t transfer over very well.

The HR is an overwhelmingly underrated class. Many consider the HR a little brother to the CW – unable to CC as well and doesn’t do as much DPS. I’d like to shed a little light on a different (and potentially better) way to build a ranger.

Before I get ahead of myself and dive into the details of this build, I need to clarify a few things:

First off, I play on XBOX. Because of some differences between the two systems, I will detail my opinion for the best set-up as it relates to XBOX. Throughout the guide, I will note some differences I’ve heard from PC players where it’s applicable.

Secondly, this build is primarily focused on dealing a ton of DPS. Everything else comes second, but don’t worry he’s no glass cannon. Also, this is a PVE build. The HR is great for PVP and I might make a PVP guide in the future but this build is strictly intended for PVE.

Lastly, everything in this guide is a reflection of a build I came up with. I’m not saying it’s the best, but I sure do enjoy the DPS I can do. Use my guide as a foundation and feel free to experiment. I make only suggestions based on the path I took with my ranger. I am always open to new ideas so any thoughts or questions are always welcome.

Anyone looking for a guild, I’m a member of The Legendary Outlaws and we’re always looking for great players to join us.

Preface

This build is essentially a Trapper that capitalizes on Critical Chance/Severity and bonus damage from Combat Advantage. I recommend you have an Item Level of at least 3,000 before you go respeccing just be on the safe side. A “traditional” trapper would be considered mature into his build with an item level of 3000. That is not the case with this one. At 3000 you will just barely be learning to crawl. Patience will pay off as this is an end game build. The result of this build is a ranger that has about 192% critical severity and is an overall DPS machine.

Sneak Peek

Add a Perfect Vorpal and you’re at 192% (ignore the 10% buff from a potion)

Race

I went with Dragonborn for the 3% increase in Power and Critical Strike. If your only options are the default races then I would recommend going with either the Drow or Wood Elf so you can put the +2 into DEX and WIS.

Initial Stat Roll

Dexterity and Wisdom are your best friend. Dexterity gives you a damage bonus while Wisdom gives you an increase in crit chance (which we are going to need later on).

12 – STR
10 – CON
18 – DEX (16 + 2)
10 – INT
18 – WIS (16 + 2)
10 – CHA

Powers

I have a decent amount of roll-over points from Mod 5, and if you don’t have as many as me, then I would put the 4th points into Aspect of The Serpent, Cordon of Arrows/Plant Growth, Hindering Shot/Hindering Strike, and Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze, in that order.

Power Rotations

I’ll sometimes change my rotation in certain situations but my general purpose rotation for DPS in dungeons is Hindering Shot/Hindering Strike, Cordon of Arrows/Plant Growth, and Constricting arrow/Steel Breeze. As for the passives I slot Aspect of the Serpent and Aspect of the Pack while I have Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike and Hunter’s Teamwork/Careful Attack for my at-wills. Finally, I use Seismic Shot and Forest Ghost for my dailies.

AotS is a great buff and can be very powerful if you know how the stacks work. AotP is something we can take advantage of and it adds an excellent boost in DPS for the rest of the party. A nifty quark to AotP is that you can even use it when you are soloing content because as long as your companion is within 25 feet of you, you’ll have permanent combat advantage regardless of placement (so long as you companion is not an augment).

If you’re feeling squishy or having a hard time soloing stuff, I would swap out Cordon of Arrows/Plant Growth for Fox’s Cunning/Fox’s Shift and switch AotP for Crushing Roots. This way, you get a free dodge from Cunning, you can’t get hit wile in Shift’s animation, and your Crushing Roots will prevent you from being hit as often. Also, we’re going to get a nice benefit to our survivability from lifesteal once we do our feats.

For those interested in exactly how I have my powers mapped: (X) Hindering Shot/Hindering Strike, (Y) Cordon of Arrows/Plant Growth, (B) Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze, (LT) Hunter’s Teamwork/Careful Attack, (RT) Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike
How I order my powers is similar to katozee’s, only I have Cordon and Plant Growth in the place of Fox’s Cunning and Shift.

Starting with Ranged Stance: (Y) -> (B) -> (X) -> (RT/LT) -> (RB) -> (Y) -> (X) -> (B) -> (RT) -> (RB) and repeat

The above rotation allows the largest damage buff from AotS to apply to Cordon and Plant Growth (our hardest hitting powers). The second largest damage buff from AotS applies to our powers that apply Strong Grasping Roots.

For boss fights and single target DPS while in a group, your at-will has the power to do more damage than any other attack you have. Careful Attack allows you to mark an enemy and it is a DOT that procs every 1.5 seconds. The amount of damage that it deals depends on the amount of damage that has been done to the marked enemy in each of the 1.5 second intervals. So, in places like Tiamat and epic Demagorgon you’ll see that bad boy go off for 1 to 2 million every second and a half. Something to keep in mind with Careful Attack is that it is affected by Aspect of the Serpent. You can take advantage of this and just hit the boss with Rapid Shot to quickly stack up AotS from ranged stance and let Careful Attack get a nice damage buff. But it is a game of tug o’ war. Also, if you notice that it didn’t crit, just reapply it until it does and all DOTs will tick as well.

Feats

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This is the bread and butter of this build. Skirmisher’s Gambit from the Combat Paragon increases your critical severity by 50% but your critical chance is reduced by 10%. The Hunter Ranger is the only class with a feat like this and it is extremely powerful. Combine this feat with a Perfect Vorpal and you will be at about 192% critical severity. Since we lost 10% crit chance, we’re going to need to make up for that, but it’s very easily doable.

Heroic Feats

Paragon Feats

Trapper Feats

For the many players who haven’t deviated at all from the Trapper tree, I’ll offer a bit of reasoning behind abandoning a few beloved feats. First off, Ancient Roots: why would we need the longer duration for roots? We don’t have cooldowns to begin with so we are constantly reapplying the roots.

Secondly, let’s go over Serpent’s Bite. The biggest argument you will hear in opposition to this build is Serpent’s Bite vs Skirmisher’s Gambit. To shorten my point I’ll just go ahead and say it: Skirmisher’s Gambit yields more damage than Serpent’s Bite. Below is a link to a spreadsheet my buddy Ney made comparing Serpent’s Bite and Skirmisher’s Gambit.

Click Here to check out the spreadsheet

Combat Feats

Boons

Sharandar

Dread Ring

Icewind Dale

Underdark

Tyranny of Dragons

I dont have the last two boons for Tyranny of Dragons, but when (more like if) I get them, I’ll put them into Dragon’s Thirst for the increased lifesteal. The 3% lifesteal we’re missing out on won’t make a noticeable difference in the long run. On top of that, the Earth Archon gives us a damage boost when we’re at full health so that life steal will help us stay at full life.

The only boon I can’t suggest with certainty is the Guild Boon. You might be in a guild that has different boons than me and that could be a good or a bad thing. I have my offense boon set to Power while my defense boon is set to defense. I’d say power is better than armor penetration if you have it available and are already at 60% resistance ignored. For those interested, I use the XP boon from utility and my guild doesn’t have any PVP boon unlocked.

Enchantments

Weapon Enchantment – Perfect Vorpal (this is what brings you up to 192% crit severity)
Armor Enchantment – Trans Elven or Negation (personally I like the Elven)
Offense Slots – Azure or Brutal enchantments
Defense Slots – Dark enchantments
Utility – your preference (I use Fey Blessings)

Summoned Companion

Augments are ancient news. High ranking bonding runestones and a fast proccing companion is the way to go for all DPS classes. I use the mercenary, which can be obtained from the Heirloom pack in the ZEN market. Also, once you get the Heirloom pack, all of your characters can pick it up from the Reward Claims Agent in the enclave. Why the Mercenary? He has 3 offense slots you can slot all rank 12 Bondings into.

You might wonder why I would upgrade the bondings past Perfect (rank 10) since the percent of companion stats you receive remains the same. My answer plain and simply is that the game is wrong. After rank 10, the percentage goes up but the tooltip doesn’t update with the higher levels. Rank 11 Bonding Stones give you 80% of your companion’s stats while a rank 12 gives you a whopping 95% of your companion’s stats. So, when the mercenary procs three companions gift (which he does all the damn time) it’s like you running around with 3 Ioun Stones.

Honorable mentions for the summoned companion go to the Young Yeti, Air Archon, and Zhentarim Warlock.

But Taco, the Zhentarim Warlock is so much better!

Possibly, but only if you play on PC. PC has the Sword Coast and with it all of the cool companion only equipment pieces that would give that Warlock everything it needs to be a great buddy. However, on XBOX we don’t have the shiny and sparkly companion talismans that PC does. As a result, the rings and belts available to our Mercenary are far superior to the lacklustre talismans in the AH.

For those who need to see to believe, I have a little before and after for the companions gifts from my Mercenary with two Rank 12 Bonding and one rank 11 Bonding. Keep in mind, my Mercenary is only rare. I’ll get him legendary one day.

Before:

After:

Active Companions

Fire Archon for 7% increased damage (at epic) against targets with less than 50% health. This is going to really be evident at major boss fights where they’re dbelow half health for a bit of time and their health accounts for a lot of damage in dungeons
Earth Archon for 6% increased damage against targets while you’re at full health. There are alternatives and feel free to swap this one out, but whenever you’re running in a group you’re usually going to be at full health thanks to a paladin, healer, and even your lifesteal
Erinyes of Belial for 10% increase in crit severity
Air Archon for the increased damage against enemies not at full health (5% at epic)

You might wonder why I;m going with the Erinyes of Belial. So without it, we’re at 182% crit severity. Increasing that by 10% to bring it up to 192% will actually yield us a 3.6% increase in damage (when our crit chance is at 90%).

AotP gives us permanent combat advantage. Because of this, we can get a consistent damage increase from running the Blink Dog and Intellect Devourer which give you 5% combat advantage damage each at epic. So, feel free to experiment. At the moment, My setup is what I’ve listed.

Artifacts

Lantern of Revelation

+1,000 Critical Strike
+1,000 Armor Penetration
+600 Combat Advantage

Thayan Book of the Dead

+1,000 Critical Strike
+1,000 Armor Penetration
+600 Action Point Gain

Sigil of the Controller

+1,000 Power
+1,000 Critical Strike
+600 Control Resist

Lostmauth’s Horn of Blasting

+1,000 Power
+1,000 Armor Penetration
+600 Control Bonus

Another artifact worth mentioning is the wheel of elements. It’s good to use in the active artifact slot so you can pop it, get the fire buff, and deal an additional 30% damage. Personally, I prefer the Lantern as it’s a damage buff for the entire party.

Gear

I’m currently using the Dragonflight Raid Hood, Dragonflight Raid Gaiters, Elven Assault Coat, and Elven Assault Bracers. Get the Lostmauth set for the neck and belt (extra damage every time you crit). I’ll probably switch some stuff out for the Umbral gear once my guild unlocks it. As for the rings I’m currently wearing the Ring of Rising Precision +4 and Ring of Brutality +4. My companion is wearing the Ring of Rising Power +4, Ring of Brutality +4, and the Dragonflight Assault Belt. For my artifact main and off hand I have the Twisted set.

Artifact Main Hand/Off Hand Powers

For the main hand use Hunter’s Teamwork/Careful Attack or Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike. I use Careful Attack because that does an insane amount of damage on boss fights. My off hand has Aspect of the Pack and Combat Advantage Bonus.

Intro

Hello everyone! My ingame name is Sylvanas Windrunner some of you may know me as the guild leader of Death To The Unsuspecting and my main character is a Trapper Hunter Ranger. I’ve recently had a lot of people asking me for my build so i decided I’d make a guide for everyone! Not to mention I haven’t seen a lot of guides/builds for the HR recently. Now please keep in mind I’m only 3k Item level so the guide is a work in progress and I will update as i go. But I can guarantee you’ll be pushing a lot of dps. Alright with all that said let’s get down to it!

Race

• Being that the HR’s core abilities are DEX and WIS, the best choice for race would be a Dragonborn for the +2 in any base roll stat which you would put into DEX and WIS. You’ll also get +3% to your power and critical strike, and 5% more healing from all spells and abilities.
• If you cant afford the Dragonborn race the Wood Elf would be a close second in my opinion, which is what I chose being I prefer the appearance of the Wood Elf over the Dragonborn. As a Wood Elf you get a +2 to DEX and WIS. Along with a 1% higher crit.
• You could also choose Drow for the Dark Fire ability which will give you a 5% chance to reduce the the target’s Defense by 10%, along with +2 DEX/WIS

Base Stat Rolls

In my opinion DEX and WIS are important to the PvE HR so i rolled a 18 DEX and 18 WIS which of course is after you add your +2 to each. Add +1 to DEX and WIS every 10 levels.

Powers

• At wills: Hunter’s Teamwork/Rapid Shot
• Encounters: Constricting Arrow/Cordon of Arrows/Fox’s Cunning
• Dailies: Seismic Shot/Forest Ghost
• Personal’s: Aspect of the Serpent/Aspect of the Lone Wolf (You could also use Crushing Roots Instead of Lone wolf for a little more crowd control)

Rotation

The rotation for the build is very important for max dps. So you’ll want to open with Fox’s Cunning, then hit them with a Hunter’s Team work for the damage debuff, then Constricting Arrow. Now here’s where it can get a little complicated, you’ll want to tap right bumper twice to switch to melee stance then back to ranged so your Biting Snares feat will proc and youll get a 30% damage increase. After that you hit Cordon of Arrows then switch back to melee with RB then before you start with melee you use Careful Attack(Hunter’s Teamwork in melee stance) for the debuff which makes you and your teammates do more damage to the target. After that you’ll come in close and use Plant Growth, Steel Breeze, and then Fox Shift. Rinse and repeat.

Feats

Gear

A lot of people like the dragonflight gear but being this is a crit build I prefer not to use it being you’ll lose a lot of crit so I personally went with 2/4 Dusk and 2/4 Elven(T2 gear that you buy with the Seals of the Protector). Go with the pieces that have the most crit.I chose the dusk set 2/4 due to the set bonus you gain while in a group. You’ll get an extra 1k Power, 1k Defense and 5k HP. In the pic you will see that I did transmute for appearance but the items I use are as follows.

• Dusk Raid Hood
• Elven Assault Coat
• Elven Assault Bracers
• Dusk Raid Gaiter

Rings

For the rings I’d say its really personal preference but make sure they are double slot rings for more enchants. You could go with a +5 ring from Underdark/Maze Engine that has crit or power (like the ring of Brutality +5) which I am currently farming for. I’ll update this guide with my final decision on the rings later. If you don’t want to farm for the +4/+5 double slot rings you could get your Jewel crafting to level 25 and make the Personalized Adamant Ring of Piercing. I’m currently using that and the Ring of Ambush +4 (so i don’t agro mobs during dailies)

Artifact Set

For the HR you’ll want to go with the Lostmauth Set for the extra hit of damage every time you crit. This set can be obtained through farming ELOL or buying the pieces from the trade house. The set consists of the following:

• Lostmauth’s Hoard Necklace
• Golden Belt of Puissance
• Lostmauth’s Horn of Blasting

Shirt/Pants

Get your leather working up to 25 to make the gemmed leather shirt and pants the set consists of the following:

• Gemmed Exquisite Elemental Shirt
• Gemmed Exquisite Elemental Pants

Weapons

I really like the twisted set for the HR for the amazing set bonus.(Gain Paranoia:gain 160 Defense when struck, lose a stack of bloodlust. Bloodlust: gain 160 power when you strike an enemy, lose a stack when struck. Can stack 24 times.) With my boons, Dusk set, group buffs from DC/OP, and the set bonus from the Twisted set I can get my Power over 24k. Keep in mind that the Twisted set is a pain to grind for but i promise the reward is well worth it!

• Twisted Toxo
• Twisted Xiphoi

Artifacts

• Lantern of Revelation – Crit/Armpen/CA
• Sigil of the controller – Power/Crit/Control Resist
• Sigil of the Trickster – Crit/Deflect/CA

Keep in mind you could switch the Sigils out with the Symbol of Water or Thayan Book of the Dead. I chose the sigils as a time consuming cheap alternative.

Enchantments

For the enchantments you want to focus on crit and lifesteal

• Offense: Azure Enchantment for crit
• Defense: Dark Enchantment for lifesteal
• Utility: 2 Dragon Hoard Enchantments and 3 Fey Blessing Enchantments
• Weapon: Dread Enchantment for crit severity and a nice debuff
• Armour: Shadowclad Enchantment for some deflect or Soul Forged Enchantment for a revive

Stats

These are my stats as of now. I’m working for more Life Steal.

Boons

The boons that I have chosen are mostly crit/lifesteal based. I’m currently working on the Maze Engine campaign and will post an image of the boons i have chosen when I’m done.

Companions

• Legendary Black Dragon Ioun Stone: Increases Critical Chance by 10% when you are below 50% HP. Now with the BDIS you’ll want to put Profane Runestones in the offense slots for more crit. You’ll also want to put some personalized rings on it with Azures in offense and Darks in the defense slots for extra stats. Also try to get it to legendary for the legendary bonus.
• Epic Fire Archon: Increases damage against targets with less than 50% HP by +7%
• Epic Air Archon: Increases damage against targets not at full HP by +5%. Each additional active archon increases this bonus by .5%.
• Epic Earth Archon: Increases damage against targets by 6% when you are at full HP. Each additional active archon increases this bonus by .5%.
• Epic Skeleton Dog: +300 Life Steal

Mounts

I’m currently working on getting testing different insignia combos and will update this post when I find the mounts and combos I like. As of now I’m switching between the Heavy Howler for +2k Crit and the Dusk Unicorn for the +2k Life Steal depending on the situation I’m in.

NOTE: This build is a work in progress and will be updated as I go.

And that just about sums it up guys. I hope you learned something from this build. If you have any questions or constructive criticism please leave a comment below or shoot me an email. I’d like to give a big thanks to my guild ◊Death To The Unsuspecting◊ for being there for me! If you’d like to run with me or my guild sometime please feel free to contact me in game! (Xbox Only)

Sylvanas Windrunner@wafflecrisp9692

Introduction

Hello! My name is Arsenal and I’ve played a Hunter Ranger almost exclusively for close to a year now. If you’ve PUG’d Lostmauth anytime in the past year, chances are we’ve run into each other. The Hunter Ranger is a special class in that there are many varied and acceptable build paths depending on your play style but limited in that the Trapper is the only viable paragon path. My hope with this build is to show off some of the options that you have when playing a Hunter Ranger and that you use it as a tool, where appropriate, to modify your build. In order to achieve 100% Crit, I think you will need to be at least 3.5k IL. However, lower IL players can easily reach 80-90% by following this guide.

Character Race

You have three options: Dragonborn, Wood Elf, or Drow. With all three options, you are going to want to choose +2 Dexterity and +2 Wisdom. Your Dexterity will contribute to Damage Bonus and Wisdom will contribute to your Crit, Control Bonus, and Control Resist.

• Dragonborn – This is the best option because your Power and Crit are both increased by 3% and you receive 5% more healing from all spells and abilities.
• Wood Elf – Poor man’s Dragonborn. Additional 1% Crit and resistance to slows.
• Drow – The racial traits are borderline awful but you still get your +2 Dexterity and +2 Wisdom.

Stat Rolls

This is simple enough right here. Roll to max out on both Dexterity and Wisdom. Add +1 to Dexterity and Wisdom every ten levels.

Powers

Pathfinder or Stormwarden? To be fair, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference so going one or the other isn’t game-changing by any means. Whereas Stormwarden doesn’t give you any useful powers, going Pathfinder gives you the At-Will power Hunter’s Teamwork/Careful Attack which will apply a small debuff on a single enemy. As Hunter Rangers, we rely almost exclusively on Encounter powers so having this one At-Will available to us is only marginally better than not having it at all. For this reason, I recommend Pathfinder.

TLDR:

• At-Wills: Hunter’s Teamwork/Careful Attack (LT) and Rapid Shot/Rapid Strike (RT)
• Encounters: Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze (X), Cordon of Arrows/Plant Growth (Y), and Fox’s Cunning/Fox Shift (B)
• Dailies: Seismic Shot (LB + X) and Forest Ghost (LB + Y)
• Class Features: Aspect of the Serpent and Crushing Roots

Some of the goals of this build are to have high frame invulnerability, be untargetable, and have high stamina gain. This is mainly accomplished through the powers Fox’s Cunning/Fox Shift, Forest Ghost, Steel Breeze, and by shifting as much as reasonable to dodge incoming attacks.

For your At-Will and Daily powers, the only viable powers are the ones listed above. The At-Wills are borderline useless so I won’t go into detail on those. Seismic Shot will knock back and group up enemies. Use it on multiple enemies for maximum effect. The closer that enemies can be grouped together, the more damage that you can do. Forest Ghost has two main positives and negatives: it only costs 50% of your Action Points and grants you invisibility and movement speed for a short duration but it has a somewhat lengthy cast animation that can be easily cancelled and it targets and damages enemies that you run by. It’s not exactly ideal for slipping past a group of enemies unseen.

For your Encounter powers, Constricting Arrow/Steel Breeze is the best Encounter in the game. Constricting Arrow roots your enemies dealing tons of damage and Steel Breeze, which doesn’t deal too much damage, gives you a 400% stamina gain bonus. Cordon of Arrows has a small cast animation but will target an area on the ground and pull all enemies within its range to the middle of the target area. As stated with Seismic Shot above, grouping up your enemies is one of the best ways to do massive damage. Use the two powers in combination for even better results. Plant Growth also has a small cast animation but is the single highest damaging power in your kit. It has the ability to root an enemy for up to 20 seconds, though this is rarely achieved because the root will break after a certain amount of damage is dealt. Fox’s Cunning/Fox Shift is probably the one Encounter that everyone knows. Triggering Fox’s Cunning will give everyone in your party a free dodge. They can still have a status effect applied to them, e.g. you can still be proned by an attack, but you will negate all incoming damage once. Fox Shift is especially useful as a repositioning tool. Using this deals adequate damage to enemies, causes you to be momentarily invulnerable, and can free you from being rooted yourself.

Some alternate Encounters that you might consider are Hindering Shot/Hindering Strike and Longstrider’s Shot/Gushing Wound. Hindering Shot/Hindering Strike is especially useful when leveling and in PvP. People often use this power interchangeably with Cordon of Arrows/Plant Growth, but in my opinion the grouping utility of Cordon of Arrows is far superior than any additional roots being applied to a target. Longstrider’s Shot grants a 20% damage buff to all nearby allies, irrespective of whether they’re in your group or not. Gushing Wound applies a damage over time effect that is amplified when your allies strike the same target. I strongly recommend using this ability when running Tiamat, Demogorgon, and Well of Dragons and Stronghold Dragons.

For your Class Features, you are going to want to run Aspect of the Serpent and Crushing Roots. Aspect of the Serpent uses a stacking mechanism to give you a percent damage buff per stack. When you have the Serpent’s Bite feat applied, each stack will provide more damage and give you 2.5% Crit. This is important in trying to reach our 100% Crit goal. I recommend using Crushing Roots as this will apply a daze to all enemies that you root. If you do not daze your enemies, they can still attack you when rooted.

Some alternate Class Features that you might consider are Aspect of the Lone Wolf and Aspect of the Pack. Aspect of the Lone Wolf gives you a 20% Deflection chance and is great for PvP and inexperienced PvE Hunter Rangers. Assuming you can use your other powers appropriately to dodge incoming attacks and “stay out of the red”, there isn’t a great need for higher Deflection chance. Aspect of the Pack just ensures that you and your nearby allies always have combat advantage regardless of your positioning.

Rotation

One of the toughest things you’ll have to do is commit your rotation to muscle memory. There are many different interpretations of the rotation across Hunter Rangers and It’s important that you find one that works for you. For me, I like to start in ranged stance. Use Fox’s Cunning (B) before entering the fight so you already have a dodge prepared. Then use Constricting Arrow (X) to root and daze all enemies followed by Cordon of Arrows (Y) to group them all together. Switch to melee stance. Use Fox Shift (B) to close the gap between you and your target. Use Steel Breeze (X) to regain some lost stamina and finally Plant Growth (Y) to finish your rotation. Use Seismic Shot (LB + X) when you are nearest your enemies as it does more damage the closer you are to them. Dodge using your Shift as needed. If you are fighting a boss, I recommend applying Careful Attack (LT) during any time while in melee stance. Otherwise, it’s not worth the cast animation.

Feats

For your feats, there are two paths that you can take, both in the Trapper tree. You can focus on the more Control-Focused build, which is what I have done, or you can opt for the Crit Severity build which I’ll explain below. I would recommend my build for lesser geared Hunter Rangers and those who play both PvE and PvP.

Control-Focused

For your Heroic feats, it’s pretty straightforward. Focus on Encounter damage, survivability, and stamina gain. Do not put any points into Battlewise (reduced threat), Scoundrel Training (At-Will damage), or Extra Action (AP gain) as those stats they give are completely worthless on Hunter Rangers. Apart from that, you can move around a few points from what I’ve done to fit your play style.

For your Paragon feats, I recommend using my allocated points exactly. The key to the Trapper build is in the two feats Forestbond and Swiftness Of The Fox. This is what allows the Hunter Ranger to have virtually no cooldowns on their Encounter powers when used appropriately in the rotation that I described above. Another vital part of the build is Serpent’s Bite which I detailed when going over the Class Features. Serpent’s Bite and Aspect of the Serpent work together to massively increase your damage and Crit.

Crit Severity

Under the Combat tree, there is an excellent feat called Skirmisher’s Gambit. When applied, you increase your Crit Severity by 50% but you also lose 10% Crit Chance. Choosing this option has three major drawbacks.

• It’s 15 points into the Combat tree which would force you to remove 10 points from the Trapper tree.
• If you aren’t geared well enough, losing Crit Chance could be mathematically worse than the added Crit Severity.
• Crit Severity is additive, not multiplicative.

The third point is very relevant because of the addition of the Dread Enchantment which adds 75% Crit Severity on Encounter powers at Perfect and higher. Because of this, many Hunter Rangers can easily stack 160% Crit Severity before the addition of Skirmisher’s Gambit.

If you do go this route, I recommend removing all points from Ancient Roots and Serpent’s Bite and adding them into Fluid Hunter and Skirmisher’s Gambit. If you are geared well enough and play exclusively PvE, this path can deal tons of damage and is a solid option.

Equipment

To preface my gear a bit, I do use quite a bit of the Masterwork armor. If you can afford it, it has some of the best stats in the game. However, not all of it is best in slot for our high Crit build. I recommend the following items.

• Elemental Dragonflight Raid Hood
• Umbral Assault Coat OR Elemental Elven Assault Coat
• Umbral Assault Bracers OR Elemental Elven Assault Bracers
• Elemental Dragonflight Raid Gaiters

Dragonflight gear can be obtained by having a rank four Marketplace from within your guild. To purchase it, you will need Guild Marks, Seals of the Protector, and Fangs of the Dragonflight. Elven gear can be obtained from the Seal Vendor. To make these items Elemental, you will need considerable investment into both your Icewind Dale campaign and your Black Ice Shaping profession.

Artifact Weapons

• Stronghold Longbow with Class Feature Hunter’s Teamwork/Careful Attack
• Stronghold Tabars with Class Feature Crushing Roots

The Stronghold Unity set bonus that you get from these weapons is far better than every other set out there. Per set of Stronghold weapons in your party, every person in your party, whether they own the weapons or not, receives a 2% increase to damage and outgoing healing and a -2% decrease to incoming damage. When you play with other people who also have these weapons you can have a huge bonus of 10% to all of the aforementioned stats for everyone in your party.

If you can’t afford the Stronghold weapons, the Twisted set from Mantol-Derith is your next best bet. It’ll give you a pretty decent boost to your power and defense.

Artifact Set

• Lostmauth’s Horn of Blasting
• Lostmauth’s Hoard Necklace
• Golden Belt of Puissance

As a DPS class, the Lostmauth set’s bonus is far better than any other’s. And as this is a 100% Crit build, with every single strike we are doing an additional hit for weapon damage.

When the Lostmauth set gets nerfed, some people might consider switching to the Orcus set for its bonus of adding up to 20% damage. I feel that this set might be decent for some classes but has its drawbacks for the Hunter Ranger. Just looking at the base stats it gives, we would lose 2060 Armor Pen and 600 Control Bonus (key stats for our class) in exchange for 1060 Deflection, 1000 Movement, and 600 AoE Resist. That’s a lot of stats that we’d have to make up for through other means. Losing all of that for the potential to do up to 20% damage isn’t something that I can recommend.

Rings

• Ring of Sudden Precision +4/5 (From Castle Never)
• Ring of Brutality +4/5 (From Demogorgon)

If you play either of the two raids often enough it should be pretty easy to obtain the +4 version of each of the rings. If you’re lucky enough to land a +5 you’ll be able to have two offense slots instead of one offense and one defense slot. In my opinion, you should never equip any of the Rising rings. You’re better off just popping a potion at that point.

Shirt and Pants

• Gemmed Exquisite Elemental Shirt
• Gemmed Exquisite Elemental Pants

Can be obtained through the Leatherworking profession at rank 25 or can be bought off of the Auction House.

Artifacts

• Primary Lantern of Revelation (Crit, Armor Pen, Combat Advantage)
• Sigil of the Controller (Power, Crit, Control Resist)
• Belial’s Portal Stone (Power, Life Steal, Control Bonus)
• Lostmauth’s Horn of Blasting (Power Armor Pen, Control Bonus)

Lostmauth’s Horn of Blasting is the only artifact that is required for this build. There are many good alternatives out there and you will have to see how they fit into your build. Here are some other options that you might use.

• Primary Wheel of Elements (Maximum Hit Points, Power, Stamina/Guard Gain)
• Shard of Valindra’s Crown (Power, Life Steal, Control Bonus)
• Horn of Valhalla (Maximum Hit Points, Crit, Combat Advantage)
• Sigil of the Trickster (Crit, Deflection, Combat Advantage)

Enchantments

• Weapon: Transcendent Dread
• Armor: Transcendent Soulforged
• Offense: Full Brutal Rank 12s but you could also use Azures for your Crit
• Defense: Full Savage Rank 12s but you could also use a mix of Radiants for HP and Darks for Life Steal
• Utility: 3 Fey Blessing Rank 12s and 2 Dragon’s Hoard Rank 12s

Here’s some quick notes if you can’t afford the Rank 12 variants of these enchantments. The Dread maxes its Crit Severity when it is Perfect: you don’t have to take it to Transcendent if you can’t. The Transcendent Soulforged is nice because it gives you crowd control immunity for three seconds upon resurrection. Other than that, there’s not a noticeable difference between Lesser and Pure; just stick with the Lesser. For my Utility enchantments, I prefer Dragon’s Hoards. However, Dragon’s Hoards have a limit on how much refinement drops per day whereas the Fey Blessings will continually drop refinement all day long. Because of this, I recommend getting your Dragon’s Hoard percent drop chance to 10% first and if you have additional utility slots remaining after you achieve your 10% to then start adding Fey Blessings.

Reinforcement Kits

Many people are unaware of this, but adding reinforcement kits to your armor will increase your Item Level by 35 per reinforcement kit. You can add up to eight of them onto your character: four for your head, armor, arms, and feet; and four for your neck, rings, and waist. I recommend applying the Major Critical Strike Armor Kit, obtained through your Leatherworking profession or the Auction House, to your head, armor, arms, and feet. Then apply the Major Stamina Regeneration Jewel, obtained through your Jewelcrafting profession or the Auction House, to your neck, rings, and waist. Together, this will add +800 Crit, +400 Stamina Gain, and +280 Item Level.

Stats

These are just the raw, standing still, out-of-combat and group stats that I have. It doesn’t factor in the stats that I receive from rings, companions, or in-combat boons. We need all of those additional stats to achieve our 100% Crit for this build.

Mounts

 For your mounts you have the following three options.

• Imperial Rage Drake (+4,000 Crit)
• Rage Drake (+2000 Crit)
• Heavy Howler (+2000 Crit)

Unless you have a Tenser’s Floating Disk, the Combat Power is almost completely negligible. And then of course you’ll want the fastest movement speed that you’ve unlocked.

Stable

For your stable, you’ll have to see what mounts you have at your disposal. Mounts are the most expensive thing in the game so you might have to settle for something other than what I’m using. I believe these five bonuses are the best that you can get on the Hunter Ranger.

• Barbarian’s Revelry: Free Life Steal on every hit
• Shepherd’s Devotion: Increases team’s Defense, Deflect, and Movement by 5% of your Power. Great with Into The Fray from a Guardian Fighter
• Protector’s Camaraderie: Gain up to 12% of your Power when your summoned Companion attacks
• Wanderer’s Fortune: Drops refinement in addition to your Dragon’s Hoards but its effects are exhausted quickly.
• Gladiator’s Guile: Additional 15% movement speed and Stamina Gain equal to 15% of your Power

While it would be ideal to have all epic Insignias, it’s not very important. Uncommon Insignias work just fine. You should focus primarily on being able to complete a set bonus before trying to obtain an epic Insignia.

Boons

IMPORTANT READ THIS A little note before we begin. With the addition of the Stable from Mod 9, it is entirely likely that you might start to over-cap on a particular stat. For example, anything beyond 60% Resistance Ignored for PvE is considered wasted. For stats like Control Bonus and Combat Advantage, you start seeing very hard diminishing returns after allocating about 1100-1200 points. You can read more about the math behind this here. Because of this, I have chosen to take some boons that might not be ideal for your build. While in general you will want to go for strictly offensive boons, you will have to evaluate your build to make sure that you do not over-cap on certain stats and change it accordingly. I will notate my differences below.

Tyranny of Dragons

For the final three boons, you may choose to put all three points into one boon, but it is more cost effective to allocate one point each into Dragon’s Thirst, Dragon’s Fury, and Dragon’s Grip.

Sharandar

Very straightforward here. For the last boon, you do have the option of going Elven Resolve for Stamina Gain or Elvish Fury for additional Power. I recommend going for Power but the added Stamina Gain isn’t bad either.

Dread Ring

For your final boon, you have the option of going for Rampaging Madness, which will give +4000 of three different stats or you can go for Endless Consumption which gives the chance at tripling your Life Steal Severity. The problem with Rampaging Madness is that it takes a while to build up before you achieve the bonus and then only lasts for 10 seconds thereafter. As Hunter Rangers, we can fire off multiple attacks from our Encounter powers in rapid succession which increases our ability to proc Endless Consumption. For that reason, I recommend taking Endless Consumption.

Icewind Dale

Here is where I differentiate. For the first boon, I choose Weathering the Storm for the sole reason being that I am over-capped on Combat Advantage. Choose your boon based on what your character needs. For the final boon, I recommend Rousing Warmth. This boon procs when you life steal in addition to when you are healed by standard means. 

Underdark

The only thing you have to decide on is the 4th boon. I do play PvP a bit so I opted to go for Dwarven Footing. Crowd control effects are not that big of a deal for PvE so you might want to take Dwarven Stamina for the additional Stamina Gain.

The Maze Engine

Here is where I differentiate. For the first boon here, I choose to go for the added Incoming Healing Bonus instead of the Life Steal Severity. My character is at the point where I feel like I have sufficient life steal such that any more would be a waste. For that reason, I chose Abyssal Regeneration.

Elemental Evil

Here is where I differentiate. Just as I did with the Maze Engine boons, I feel like I already have enough Life Steal so I decided to go with Earth’s Renewal for the Regeneration.

Guild Stronghold

The Guild Stronghold boons are the best boons in the game. Because of this, I recommend that you try your best to join an established guild with at least a Rank 10 Guild Hall. The boons that you are able to choose from vary depending on how your Guild has chosen to progress their Stronghold. I have chosen the following boons.

• Power Bonus (+8000 Power)
• Defense Bonus (+8000 Defense)
• Mount Speed Bonus (+20% faster mounts)
• Enhance Overload: Stamina Drain Ward (Decreases effects of Stamina Drain Wards)

Companions

For my summoned companion, I can only recommend getting the Mercenary from the Heirloom Pack in the Zen Store. It has the following benefits: three offense slots, active bonus stats that are relevant to our class, and two additional ring slots. The Adorable companion gear would be best in slot, but short of that I recommend the following.

• Band of Loathing (No Sympathy Heroic Encounter in your Stronghold) or Ring of Sudden Precision +4/5 (Castle Never)
• Ring of Brutality +4/5 (Demogorgon)
• Gemmed Exquisite Aberrant Belt of Recovery (Jewelcrafting Rank 25 or the Auction House)

Ideally you will want at least one of your companions to be legendary so you can achieve the legendary bonus and acquire an additional 15% of your companion’s stats as your own.

Note: Bonding Stones are currently bugged to where having Rank 10, 11, and 12 Bonding Stones will proc more often and give you better stats than having three Rank 12 Bonding Stones. A fix is in the works that would fix the multi-proccing bug. When this is released, having three Rank 12 Bonding Stones will be the best option.

Active Companions

Once you reach a certain point in the game you need to start using companions that give percentage stat increases instead of flat stat increases. I use the following.

• Earth Archon (Additional 6.5% damage against all targets when you are at full health)
• Air Archon (Additional 5.5.% damage against targets who are not at full health)
• Young Yeti (10% chance when you take damage to also deal 10% more damage)
• Erinyes of Belial (Additional 10% Crit Severity)

Here are some other options that you might use.

• Blink Dog (Additional 5% Combat Advantage damage)
• Fire Archon (Additional 7% damage against targets at less than 50% health.)

Conclusion

When in combat with all of the boons, Sudden rings, and Bonding Stones proccing, this build tops out at about 115% Crit Chance for me. You might think that it’s excessive but when in combat for long periods of time and your Sudden Ring of Precision +4/5 wears off, you’re still Critting 100% of the time. Even if you don’t have a maxed character like I do, you should be able to achieve about 80-85% Crit chance with this build.

I like to keep an open mind about my build so if you think it could be improved on or if you spot any mistakes, leave a comment and I’ll try to get to it. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this guide updated as future modules are released but I feel like it should hold for quite some time. Thanks for reading!

Hi my name is Jamezbonz. And i am going to post my hunter ranger trapper pve build. I am new to this so please bare with me.

Character Creation.

[Dragonborn] I personally choose this race for the reason is you get a extra +3 power and +3 critical strike increase. and you get to freely chose where you put your ability points

[Drow] if you do not have the dragonborn race unlocked i highly recommend this race over the wood elf and the menzoberranzan renegade. this is simply because the darkfire perk is a lot better then the 1% crit chance or fearie fire. the drow race will also allow you to put 2 ability points into dexterity and wisdom, which is what we will be going for.

Ability’s

this one is pretty easy. in order to max your damage you want 18 points on both, Dexterity and Wisdom (this includes the ability points granted by your chosen class. Make sure you put them on Dexterity and wisdom!) you will end up with 12 STR, 10 CON, 18 DEX, 10 INT, 18 WIS, and 10 CHA. When leveling up always put your points into DEX and WIS

PATHFINDER

Feats

Heroic feats

1. toughness 3/3
2. weapon mastery 3/3
3. predatory action 2/5
4. agile combatant 3/3
5. lucky skirmisher 3/3
6. endless assault 3/3
7. disciple of dexterity 3/3

Combat paragon

1. bloodletting 5/5

Trapper paragon

1. fleet stance 5/5
2. deft strike 5/5
3. forestbond 5/5
4. swiftness of the fox 5/5
5. ancient roots 5/5
6. thorned roots 5/5
7. serpent’s bite 5/5
8. biting snares 1/1

Powers

At-Wills

1. Rapid shot
2. hunters teamwork

Encounters

1. cordon of arrows
2. constricting arrow
3. fox cunning

Daily’s

1. seismic shot
2. forest ghost

Class features

1. aspect of the lone wolf
2. aspect of the serpent

Charactertraits

Power: 400 power = 1% bonus damage. this is very nice to have but if you can choose power or critical strike go for critical strike.

Critical strike: 400 critical strike = 1% crit chance.

Armor penetration: you should get Resistance ignored to 59% – 60%

Combat advantage bonus: 1k- 1.2k

Control bonus: 1k- 1.2k

Deflection: we will stack up on this whenever we can 400 points = 1% chance to deflect.

Life steal: we will want 3000-4000 points in here minimum

Stamina gain: 1k – 1.2k

Boons

sharandar:

1. dark fey hunter
2. fey precision
3. elven haste
4. elven ferocity
5. elven fury

Dread ring

1. conjure’s gambit
2. evoker’s thirst
3. illusion shimmer
4. shadowtouch
5. endless consumption

icewind dale

1. encroaching tactics OR wheatering the storm (depending how much combat advantage bonus you have you shouldn’t go over 1,2k)
2. refreshing chill
3. sleet skills
4. cool resolve
5. rousing warmth

tyranny of dragons

1. dragon’s claw
2. dragon’s gaze
3. will of the dragon
4. dragon’s greed
5. dragon’s thirst
6. dragon’s fury
7. dragon’s grip

underdark

1. primordial might
2. primordial focus
3. drow ambush tactics
4. dwarven footing
5. abyssal strikes

maze engine

1. abyssal siphoning
2. demonic influence
3. demonic endurance
4. baphomet’s might

elemental evil

1. wave of force
2. heart of stone
3. searing aggression
4. furious whirlwind

Guild stronghold (depends on what your guild has available and what your character needs)

1. Power bonus
2. critical severity bonus
3. armor penetration bonus
4. defense bonus
5. life steal bonus
6. mount speed bonus
7. enhance overload: slayer

Enchantments

Offense slots: Azure enchantments (Brutal enchantments but i only suggest this if you have rank 12’s and go all across the board)

Defense slot: Dark enchantments

Utility slot: Fey blessing, Dragon’s hoard enchantments (i suggest 3 fey – 2 dragon’s)

Armor enchantment slot: Negation enchantment

Weapon enchantment slot: Dread enchantment

Gear

Weapons: Twisted artifact weapon set

Rings: Ring of rising power, and Ring of rising precision

Shirt & Pants: Gemmed exquisite elemental SHIRT & PANTS

Armor: If you have access to Dragon flight gear.

1. Dragon flight assault coat
2. Dragon flight raid hood
3. Dragon flight raid bracers- or assault depending on your Armor pent
4. Dragon flight raid gaiters

if you do not have access to the DF gear you can go with dusk armor variant of whats listed above also the drowcraft as long as you have your black ice shaping lvl 5 and can infuse it to the assault or raid variants. due to the fact the dusk arms are not available atm the drowcraft bracers non infused are the same stats.

Neck and Waist: at the moment i am on the fence on this i am using the Lostmauth’s hoard set due to the fact you get +2 STR and +2 DEX also it gives power, crit, armor pent. but i am looking into the Demon lords’ immortality set and if i go to that i will update the build.

Artifacts

1. Lantern of revelation (main)
2. Lostmauth’s horn of blasting
3. Sigil of the controller
4. Thayan book of the dead

Companions

there are a lot of choices on comps ion stones are helpful as you are leveling to rank 12’s but i will list the companions i use

Erinyes of belial (more crit severity)

Dancing blade (more crit severity)

owl bear cub

Air or Fire arcon both have advantages and disadvantages

Mercenary

and a secret little guy Bear cub at epic state he gives you the same buff as a transcendent life drinker

that wraps things up i do not know how to post photos at this time but as soon as i learn i will. If you have any questions you can message me and i will get back to you asap thank’s

Hello! My name is Senpai Andrew, I’ve been maining the Hunter Ranger since last December. Mostly dedicated to the Trapper Paragon. With the recent Balance Changes on the Hunter ranger a lot of players have considered switching towards other paragon since they are now able to compete with the Trapper paragon. Personally I prefer the more fast paced play style the Trapper Paragon has to offer. This build if primarily going to be a High DPS build, with the ability to swap out certain encounters when needing to play more supportive roles. (Xbox Game Clip of a 5 HR CN run. EST 15 min full run)  I will be posting alternatives to the gear that I have slotted as well as my reasoning behind my loadout, feats, powers, etc

Edits

I worked on this until late at night, but I forgot an important portion. the BOONs! I’ve added the boons into the guide. I apologize for overlooking such an important aspect.

Starting Race / Stats

Races: Wood elf (+2 Dex/Wis, +1% Crit Strike)

Drow (+2 Dex/Wis, 5% chance to lower def 10% when attacking)

Dragonborn (picking Dex/Wis, Power & Critical Strike increased by 3%)

Stat Roll: Dex&Wis: 18, Str: 12, Con/Int/Cha: 10

All of your points should be put into Dex and Wisdom to increase your damage and critical chance

Stat Focus

As of right now, I’m not maxed out fully on my gear (dang you resonance stones!) but my gear is primarily focused on these 3 stats (Get as much point into these as possible) Power, Critical Strike, and Lifesteal

The secondary Stats are Armor Pen (You want to get around 4k) and Recovery. (You want 2k-3k)

Power: Where all your damage comes from. Big power = Big damage

Critical Strike: Makes your have a chance to hit harder. The higher the percentage, the bigger your numbers (Killing things is fun!)

Lifesteal: We’re squishy and dont like to be hit, like, at all. But on the off chance we are smacked, we gotta get that health back. With the encounters we’ll be using we’ll be doing a lot of Area of Effect (AoE) damge that also is Damage over Time (DoT). Due to the massive amount of numbers we’ll be seeing that just means more chances for that lifesteal percentage to pop. I personally average around 25k-60k damage for each tick. so on the chance that I proc the lifesteal, I will be getting the majority of my Health back.

Armor Pen: This is a PVE build, so we dont want our resistance ignored (see image 3) to go past 60%, because anything past that doesn’t effect our damage output. Mine is at 48% because when my Bonding Runestones on my companion proc, it pushes my resistance just above 60%. I will get in more detail for my companion and Bondings later.

Recovery: This is going to reduce our cooldown time for our encounters. With our Feats we’ll be investing into, this isn’t super significant and its not something I personally focus any stats towards but if an artifact gives me recovery and a primary stat, I’m not going to turn it down.

Gear

Helmet: Dusk Raid Hood

Chest: Elven Assault Coat

Arms: Elemental Alliance Raid Bracer

Legs: Dusk Raid Gaiters

I personally mainly run group related dugneons, I rarely ever solo anything. So the Dusk Set bonus is better for me over the Dragonflight. Dusk set bonus (for having 2 pieces) gives me 1000 Power (While in a group). Dragonflight set for 2 pieces gives +500 power with a slightly increase stat bonus on the gear. So if you Solo a large amount of content, Dragonflight would be your better choice. But Group play you have better power stat with the Dusk set.

If you are rolling in astral diamonds, a good idea is to work on the Leatherworking Mastery Profession. With this, you could craft the Umbral Raid Bracer as an alternative to the Elemental Alliance Raid Bracers, But it is a large investment and not really affordable.

Rings: Ring of rising power & Ring of brutality (Gotta get more power)

Rings do not stack upon each other if they are the same item(two +4 rings wont proc the buff twice on your character), so its a better move to have 2 different rings.

Alternative Rings: Ring of Rising Precision, Ring of Sudden Precision (Bumping up critical strike)

I have yet to be lucky enough to get any +5 rings, but Personally I would run on my character a Ring of Sudden Precision +5 and a Ring of Brutality +5

Belt: Greater Twined Belt of Dexterity

I use the Twined Belt because when refined to orange is gives +4 to the dexterity stat. if a perfectly rolled character that mean you can hit 30 Dex witch overal stat bonus is 20% damage increase. the Lostmauth set is an alternative set but after a recent patch which reduced the effectiveness of this articaft set bonus, the damage output isn’t as good as just pushing the 4% increased overall damage from the Twined belt.

Cape: Lostmauth Necklace

You can pick alternative Capes as well, as long as you push towards the Primary Stats of Power and Critical Strike and Arm. Pen. Since this build doesn’t use an artifact set.

Shirt: Gemmed Exquisite Elemental Tunic

Pants: Gemmed Exquisite Elemental Pants

Weapon Set: Twisted Set

It is still the best weapon set for the Hunter Ranger with its set bonus which gives roughly 4000 power. and with roots procing damage and massive DoT, the 24 stack is maxed out constantly while in combat.

Enchantments

Offence Slot: Brutals (Power and Critical strike)

Offence Alternative: Azures (Critical Strike)

Defence Slot: Darks (Life Steal)

Utility Slot: Dragon Horde Enchantment and Fey Blessing

With the Horde enchantments, the percentage cap is reached at 5% max, as well as there is a cooldown timer on these enchantment to gain refining stones (They start giving less drops the longer you play)

Fey Blessings also cap at 5%, but they do not have a cooldown for drop rates.

With my current gear I have 5 Ultility Slots, so I push 3 rank 9 Fey Blessing and 2 rank 9 Dragon hordes to maximize the percentage and drop rates from both types of enchantment.

Alternative Utility: If you dont feel like getting free stuff for killing things, I suggest adding Darks into the utility slots for a movement speed buff. We will be doing a lot of running back and forth and the faster you can do that, the better.

Weapon Enchantment: Dread Enchantment

The trapper paragon has extreme encounter cooldowns, therefore you’ll be poping encounter more often than at wills, so the Critical severity buff on the Dread enchantment is much more effective than using a vorpal enchantment.

Armor Enchantment: Soulforge Enchantment

Though Negation is also a valid armor enchantment, I find that in big dungeons, I occasionally get 1 shot. It happens. So the soul forge is there to be my saving grace. And since we’ve already stacked into Life Steal, we’ll come back up after getting hit alittle too hard, and steal that remain HP back and keep on pushing out damage!

Artifacts

Main Slot: Wheel of Elements (fire buff gives 30% damage increase, Power, Stamina Gain, HP)

Slot 2: Heart of the Blue Dragon (Critical, Recovery, Combat advantage)

Slot 3: Lanturn of Revelation (Critical, Arm. Pen, Combat advantage)

Slot 4: Lostmauth Horn of Blasting (Power, Arm. Pen, Control bonus)

I based my artifacts to give a balance of 2k (when mythic) of Power, Critical, and Arm. Pen. onto my character, and a little extra recovery from the Blue Dragon. The secondary stats I focus on was combat advantage cause that just mean I do more damage when I’m sandwiching a boss in a dungeon, control bonus helps with rooting enemies, and stamina gain so run away alittle extra.

Other Good artifacts:

Heart of the Black Dragon (Arm Pen, Recovery, AP gain)

Kessels Sphere of Annihilation (Arm Pen, Power, Combat Advantage)

Black Ice Beholder (Arm Pen, Recovery, Combat Advantage)

Thayan Book of the Dead ( Crit, Arm Pen, AP gain)

Sigil of the Controller (Crit, Power, Control Resistance) *

Belial’s Portal Stone (Life steal, Power, Control Bonus)

Rod of Imperial Restraint (Life steal, Recovery, Control Bonus)

Sphere of Black Ice (Life steal, Recovery, Control Bonus)

Symbol of Air (Power, Recovery, Movement)

Shard of Valindras Crown (Power, Life steal, Control Bonus)

Sigil of the Hunter (Power, Recovery, Stamina) *

Sigil of the Great Weapon (Power, Arm Pen, HP) *

Tiamats Orb of Majesty ( +500 Power, Recovery, Crit, Arm pen, AP Gain )

*  I do not advice using the Sigil, I personally do not like the fact they cannot be used as refinement so when you decide you do not want to use that artifact, all the refinement invested into it is no longer relevant. That is a personal preference, therefor I listed sigils on this list as well.

Powers (Role Swapping time!)

I will be listing the powers to invest in for both Paths. Since both are valid choices. Personally, I prefer the Stormwarden because it is more focused on AoE damage for its Personal Skills and At Wills. But for some single target damage (if thats what you’re into) the pathfinder is the better choice.

Non Path related Powers

At Wills: Aimed Strike / Rapid Shot

Aimed strike has received a major buff with Mod 10 which reduced the charge time dramatically. I personally only use it on occasion, but I like to have it skilled up when I fill a more ranged oriented build. Rapid shot is best quick attacking at will, which is what we will be using to help add our stacks of Aspect of the Serpant.

Personal Class Feature: Aspect of the Serpent (This will be the first thing you make 4), Aspect of the Lone Wolf, Aspect of the pact, Seekers Vengeance.

I know a lot of Trapper builds advice Crushing Roots for the daze aspect that it adds, you’re welcome to put points into it, I just personally don’t. Most damage situation the adds that can be hit with the roots die rather quickly, so the daz that if placed on them seems irrelevant.

Aspect of the Serpant will be the first power you bring up to 4. It will be you largest source of damage increase. I will go into further details when I talk about my personal Rotations.

Aspect of the Lone Wolf: A good defensive feature to help you when you’re in the thick of it, by increasing deflect it increases your survivability. I personally do not run it unless My group is severely struggling on staying alive.

Aspect of the Pack: Great when you want to play a more supportive role, this power gives everyone on your team a boost to their combat advantage. Combat advantage buffs are great when you want to selfless give your teammates better damage.

Seeker’s Vengeance: Tired of buffing your team with Aspect of the Pack? Try this on for size. Whenever you hit a enemy in the back, your damage goes up an extra 10% at rank one, and increases by 3% for each point. maxing out at a 19% damage increase (as long as you’re hitting them from behind). Excellent feature for those greedy DPS Hunter rangers.

Encounters: Hindering Shot, Constricting Arrow, Binding Arrow, Fox’s Cunning, Longstriders Shot, Cordon of Arrows

With these encounters, you’ll see how this build actually is a Swiss Army Hunter Ranger. Using different encounters you can play the roles of buffing everyone’s damage output with a supportive role, boosting the Def and damage resistance of your heal along side of healing for a Healer role, and eliminating damage as a tank role, but still able to switch a DPS monster. Bye bye Others classes. This is Hunter Ranger Territory now.

Hindering Shot: This is a Damage oriented encounter that I personally keep on at all times. It’s melee stance ability applys Strong Roots that will be dealing damage from Thorned Roots. And it also keeps the enemy in 1 spot so you can just go out and start pushing other encounters. The primary damage output for this is the melee stance, where the range stance is there with 3 charges to quickly fire off and reduce the cooldown of your melee encounters to get back into slaying your fiercest enemies.

Constricting Arrow: Constricting arrow is another encounter I use when I’m maximizing Damage. it’s range stance applies Strong grasping roots (AKA most of your crazy stupid damage, them roots are our damage). and it’s Melee stance gives us our stamina back. so we cant shift (dodge, whatever you want to call it) back out and smack them with more arrows and not worry about running out of stamina.

Binding Arrow: So you want to be a healer. But no way do you want to play a cleric. This is the encounter for you. The range stance is good for rooting single targets with strong roots (or multiple if they’re all bundled together) but the Healing comes in with the melee stance, Oak Skin. What Oak skin does is it buffs the defense of all members of your team (at rank 3) so nobody takes as much damage. And on top of it, it applies a heal over time. Now I’m going to be honest. The heal over time is very minimal. You wont out-heal a cleric with this, but if they’re like me and you like to run all hunter ranger groups, this will help keep everyone alive. The Def increase from oak skin also stacks upon itself so you can pop it as frequently as possible (or get 2 people using the encounter) and bring everyone’s defenses really high. giving your team better survivability and a light kiss of healing on the side. So you put out damage in range stance, and defensive buffs to the team in melee.

Fox’s Cunning: Here’s the tank role encounter. The range stance allows every player on your team (at rank 3) to automatically dodge the next attack directed at them. You get 2 or 3 Hunter Rangers running at the same time with this encounter, people wont die anymore. and everyone continues to push out damage by quickly lunging into the group of enemies with the melee stance. this gives the hunter a quick opening to drop the other melee encounters on top of the enemies and then quick jump back out to push the range encounters. Rinse and Repeat. You need a tank, the HR has you covered.

Longstriders Shot: With into the fray being not as effective (Sorry Guardian Fighters), the Hunter Ranger has the ability to make up for it with this range encounter. When you are 30 ft away (its a pretty big distance that can take a bit to get used to moving back out there) you gain a 60% movement speed for everyone in your group for 4 second as well as a 40% Damage buff to all members of your group. The Melee stance (Gushing wound) causes a bleed that every time it ticks with help of Swiftness of the Fox all of your ranges encounters should instantly be recharged allowing you to pop off another longstrider shot (when you hit the 30 ft distance from the enemy you are hitting). Buffing Support Role? You bet.

Cordon of Arrows: This is the biggest Damage encounter that you have. The range stance also is a super effective control encounter. You will bundle your enemies in to a tiny condensed pile of pure hatred to you. You wont mind, you’ll be smacking them with roots that eats away at their damage soon enough. Similar to hindering shot, this encounter has 3 charges of it while in range stance. The melee stance is going to be your amazing damage. Think of Plant Growth as your 12 gauge shotgun, blasting away your enemies HP in close combat. Plant growth applys entirely different roots than the Strong grasping roots that deal damage. So you can stack both roots on top of each other for maximum damage. I love running this encounter with hindering shot because both roots are applied in the melee stance and they work together to destroy your enemies.

Daily Powers: Seismic Shot, Forest Ghost, Disruptive Shot

Seismic Shot: This is an entirely damage oriented daily. It has a similar ability to Cordon of arrows which will bunch your enemies together. But most times they smaller enemy wont survive the attack anyway. I use this daily most.

Forest Ghost: The hunters version of Stealth. Great for making runs to revive ally. It also received a buff so it no longer just hits a target 1 time, now it will hit targets multiple times at 1 second ticks. So it deal more damage. Though I personally only use it when a teammate need to be revived to help keep me from getting smacked in the face and dying right next to them.

Disruptive Shot: When you’re fighting enemies, and they’re about to drop a red area of unhappy feelings on the ground, use this daily on them. The attack applies daze and on uses 25% of your AP. so you hit one of your encounters and you’ll be back to full in no time. I rarely use this myself, but sometimes it just good for saving ya from a big hit you might not be ready to dodge out of.

These are all of the Encounters and abilities and all that fun stuff I use which are not Path based, below will be the features for each class that I find to be effective.

Stormwarden Powers

At Wills: Electric Shot

This at will is the big brother to rapid shot in my opinion. it works in the same way as a fast hitting attack, but now it does AoE damage. I switch rapid out for electric shot when there are a large groups of enemies.

Daily: Cold Steel Hurricane

This is the Single target/ big boss killing version of Seismic shot. Dealing major amount of damage to larger enemies. It is extremely effective on Dragons and I use it on them over anything else. its not as effective for groups as seismic shot and also lacks any control effects. but if you are fighting dragons, this is the daily to go too.

Class Features: Twin-Blade Storm & Blade Storm

Twin-Blade Storm: Group damage monster feat. at rank 3 whenever you are hitting more than 2 enemies at a time (this means 3+, cause They like to word things strangely) including the damage from roots, you deal and additional 12% damge (rank 3) and 16% damage at rank 4. It is a very effective feature if you’re scared to go back to using blade storm after the bug in it being fixed.

Blade Storm: If you aren’t scared, keep using blade storm. the chance to deal 20% (rank 4) of your attack in the area is super useful. when you are in a group of enemies and you hit something for 40k damage and every enemy around you is going to hit 8k damage to everyone around you.

Pathfinder Powers

At Will: Hunters Teamwork

This at is great for putting damage out as well as Debuffing the enemy. In range stance the at will marks and enemy and cause them to deal less damage. The melee stance tragets and enemy and applies a damage over time. This at will is best used on high HP enemies and Bosses.

Class Feature: Cruel Recovery

This is an interesting feature to add when you are playing a healer or other supportive role. Every time you land a critical strike, you’ll gain temporary HP. This is proc off every critical strike from your roots, at-wills and everything else. so though it only adds 1hp every crit, you’ll be hitting criticals so regularly you’ll be gaining temp HP and great amounts.

Feats

The Feats are what pull all of the encounters together into making whatever power role you feel like playing at the time effective.

Heroic Feats

Predatory Action 5/5: 5% more damage from dailies.

Weapon Mastery 3/3: 3% increased critical Chance

Battlewise 1/3: 2% less threat (I just kinda put it there cause I didn’t know where else to put it, and having the enemies not want to attack you is good)

Agile Combatant 3/3: deal 3% more damage when switching stances. Since we switch stances contantly as a trapper, it only makes sense to get more damage for doing it.

Endless Assault 3/3: Encounter powers deal 6% more damage. We’ll be having our encounters more often than switching stances, so lets make sure they hit as hard as possible.

Scoundrel Training 2/3: Your at-wills deals 6% more damage. I use aimed shot, which is our hardest hitting At Will, so it only made sense to buff At-Will damage.

Disciple of Dexterity 3/3: Increase the amount of damage you get for each point into dexterity. This is why we use the twined belt of dex and we push everything into Dex. So we maximize out damage that way.

Trapper Feats

Readied Stance 5/5: 5% more AP when you switch stances. I like having dailies, and I never really saw a significant difference in the run speed with Fleet Stance, so more AP = More Dailies = More damage

Deft Strike 5/5: Melee encounters make your range encounters deal more damage, and range do the same for melee. 10% more damage to be exact!

Trappers Cunning 5/5: 25% chance when you crit to apply weak roots. They don’t do damage but the help keep your enemies still while you make them regret being on the wrong team.

Forestbond 5/5: When you apply Grasping roots you reduce your cooldowns on your powers. by 5% (Oh! now trappers cunning is more useful! Awesome)

Ancient Roots 5/5: Makes your weak grasping roots last a little longer (whatever) but makes your strong grasping roots last 5 SECONDS LONGERS (More Damage, That’s what I like to see)

Swiftness of the Fox 5/5: You melee attacks in general (Used to just be encounters, they’ve made it so you’re at-wills also work) reduce the cooldown of your Range encounters, and Range reduces melee. (Pathfinders, if you use Hunters Teamwork/Careful attack you’re going to love this)   DISCLAIMER: Encounters that have charged (range stance Cordon of Arrows and hindering shot) will not be effected by swiftness of the fox! as awesome as that would be, it is not a factor.

Thorned Roots 5/5: Big Daddy Damage is coming home. You deal 200% of your weapon damage every second with strong grasping roots. and just 250% if they cant be rooted. This is your damage, this is your friend. Damage only comes from Strong roots, not the weak graspping. Just a reminder.

Serpent’s Bite 5/5: every stack of Aspect of the Serpent that is used in now increased from 12% now to 17% and adds and extra 2.5% critical chance as well to each stack.

Master Trapper 1/1: Whenever you have someone rooted, when you switch stance you will proc Master Trapper. This will give you 20% of your AP back and increase your overall damage by 30%. On top of that, your roots last 60% longer. We just keep stacking more and more overall damage on our characters, I dont even know what were at anymore. This is the big damage boy that’s pulling everything else together. we are a DPS Machine now. But not only that, but were can throw supportive encounters listed previously and still push out a huge amount of damage.

Boons

Sharandar:

• Dark Fey Hunter (400 power)
• Fey Precision (400 Critical Strike)
• Elven Haste (3% Faster AP gain)
• Elven Ferocity (Chance to deal 20k damage when striking a foe)
• Elvish Fury (Gain 135 power for every foe defeated for 45 seconds. can stack 30 times)

Dread Ring

• Conjurer’s Gambit (250 Crit and movement)
• Evoker’s Thirst (400 Life steal)
• Forbidden Piercing (3% resistance ignored)
• Shadowtouch (When Dealing damage, a chance to deal 20k damage, target receives 25% less healing as well)
• Rampaging Madness (When you deal damage, gain madness. After 50 stacks of madness you gain 4k power, lifesteal, and regeneration for 10 seconds)

Icewind Dale

• Encroaching Tactic (400 Combat advantage)
• Refreshing Chill (400 stamina Gain)
• Sleet Skills (2% crit Severity)
• Cool Resolve (Gain power depending on the amount of stamina missing)
• Avalanche (After taking 20 hits, you deal 15k damage to nearby targets)

Underdark

• Primordial Might (400 power and 1600 HP)
• Primordial Focus (400 Critical Strike and 1600 HP)
• Drow Ambush Tactics ( Combat advantage damage bonus increased by 10%)
• Dwarven Footing (Control effects are shortened 5% when applied to you)
• Abyssal Strikes(10% increase damage to demons)

Tyranny of Dragons

• Dragons Claws ( 400 Power)
• Dragons Gaze (400 Crit)
• Draconic Armorbreaker (400 Arm Pen.)
• Dragons Greed ( 400 Life steal)
• Dragons Fury 3/3 (8% increased Crit Severity)

Guild Boons

• Offence: Power or Critical Severity
• Defense: Lifesteal or Defence
• Utility: Revive Sickness. Or whatever you feel like using honestly.

Maze Engine

• Abyssal Siphoning (5% life steal severity)
• Demonic Influence ( 400 Combat Advantage)
• Demonic Swiftness ( 3% increase AP gain)
• Baphomet’s Might (Chance to gain 2000 critical strike when attacking a foe)

Elemental Evil

• Wave of Force (300 power and 2000 HP)
• Heart of Stone (4% life steal severity and 2000 HP)
• Searing Aggression (400 Crit and 2k HP)
• Gale of Retribution (chance to heal 24k hp and Critical is increased 1000 for 10 seconds after being hit)

Storm King’s Thunder

• Cold Hearted (2% life steal Severity and 1k HP)
• Hardy Constitution (400 Stamina Gain and 2% Everfrost Resistance)
• Chill Determination ( up to 2000 recovery based on how much stamina you are missing)
• Vengeful Heat ( deal up to 2000 damage to all nearby enemies when you kill a foe)
• Chill of Winter (The exact Same thing as Avalanche from Icewind dale Campaign)

Rotations (I can’t wait anymore)

So We still need to talk about Stable Buffs and Companions. But I’m going to talk about the Rotations before hand. I’m going to split this into a few different “Roles” that I like to pretend are viable. But definitely are viable when you run full Hunter Ranger groups for dungeons. I will be basing these entirely off the Stormwarden Path. But just for ease of Pathfinders I would always put Hunter teamwork in my LT, and Rapid in my RT. And most times I would run Aspect of the Pack for support roles, and Seekers vengeance for Offensive roles.

The Big DPS

At Wills: Aimed Shot(LT) & Electic shot or rapid (RT)

Encounters: Cordon of Arrows (X), Hindering Shot (Y), Constricting Shot(B)

Personal: Aspect of the Serpent & Blade Storm or Twin Blade storm

Rotation: The start of the fight I open the door with ranged stance I fire off Constricting arrow for strong roots.Then I stance switch 2 times to activate Master Trapper and finish off my range encounters with Hindering shot then Cordon of arrows.

(B -> RB -> RB -> Y -> X -> RB)

After that encounter rotation I switch to Melee, using the ranged encounters I should have 2 stacks of Aspect of The Serpent for my melee encounters. So I’m going to start with my 2 hardest hitting encounters. Hindering Strike (Y) and the Plant Growth (X). Then hit with Steel Breeze (B). The problem a lot of players have is after the encounters they’ll just switch back to range and push their encounters back and forth. But if you check on a dummy, you’ll notice you would only have 1 stack of Ranged Aspect of the Serpent. To ensure you recieve both stacks, use your right trigger to shoot off a Aimed Strike (which might proc Blade storm with each bleed tick the melee encounter does) This way you definitely have 2 stacks of AotS range. So now you switch stances to range. The Bleed ticks with Aimed Strike will also proc your swiftness of the fox so your range encounters will be quickly recharged.

(Y -> X -> B-> LT ->RB)

From here on out you’ll just keep a regular rotation that you’ll keep up with until everything around you is dead and you’re on the top for most Damage Dealt. In range stance you will use Constricting Arrow (B), then Hindering Shot(Y), Cordon of Arrows(X), and finish off with your Rapid shot or Clear the Ground (RT).

(B -> Y -> X -> RT -> RB)

And your melee stance will remain the same with (Y -> X -> B-> LT -> RB) then keep going back and forth as such.

You just stick with this rotation and you’ll see a great amount of damage output.

The Support Roles (This is great for Full Hunter Ranger Team)

At Will: Aimed Shot(LT) & Electic shot or rapid (RT)

Encounters: Cordon of Arrows (X), Fox’s Cunning (Y), Your Support Encounter(B)

Healing and Def Buff (Oak Skin)  – This is really only going to be run for all HR runs. or if you and your HR buddy come across a dungeon without a Tank. Works best with 2 HRs

Damage Buffing (Longstiders Shot) – This will be effective with melt teams that might already be up there on DPS. You could be alittle lower gearscore than your allies, so instead of struggling to halve their DPS, just make them hit even harder. Only need 1 of these per group

Damage Dealing Support (Hindering shot) – If you’re running with enough hunter rangers and no tank. You all can use fox’s Cunning to keep everyone alive as to roots bleed out from everyone destorying everything in your path. Leave no witnesses your warriors of the wilderness.

Rotations: We will start off almost every fight in range stance. My personal preference is the start with Fox’s Cunning (Y), then your support based Encounter (B), and then cordon. Afterwards switch stances.

( Y -> B -> X -> RB)

In melee stance you’re going to go in for DPS. You’ll have 2 stacks of AotS so you’ll want to make em last. I personally use Fox’s Shift (Y) to teleport me into the middle on the hordes of enemies, then use Plant Growth (X).

There is slight modifications depending on what support role you’re playing. if you are using oak skin, dodge out of the fight before using the encounter. Otherwise use your final encounter in the horde, your fast attacking at Will, and then dodge out of the fight.

(Y -> X -> B -> RT -> RB)

Once you’re out of the fight and back in ranged stance,, you’ll start you Rotation that also uses the At Will. Fox’s Cunning, Support Encounter, the Cordon of arrows, and your At Will.

( Y -> B -> X -> RT -> RB)

Rinse and Repeat these rotations. You’re welcome to switch to a rotation that you are more comfortable with as well, this is merely a suggestion.

Companions

The Bigger the Bonding Runestones, The bigger your DPS. You’re going to find that this is the situation with all Classes. The biggest focus outside of your feats and your weapon/Armor enchantments are your companions and your mounts. The bonuses both of these give you are going to be where most of your damage. You can gain almost 300% of you companions stats with a full set of Rank 12 Bondings. For an example, my Base power is 22k, and when my companions bonding proc, my power jumps to roughly 50k power. (with rank 12s)

Your Active Companion you are going to want will either be the Fire Archon or Mercenary Companion.

Both the Fire Archon and Mercenary Hold all offensive slots in their runestone, so that allows you to push as much as possible into the Power stat. from the Bonding stones.

Both also hold 2 ring slots. I personally use a Ring of Brutality +4 and a Ring of Sudden Lifesteal. But this is mainly because I haven’t picked up any precision +4 Ring ever. (I’m not a very lucky person) If I could, I would personally put a Ring of Brutatility, and Ring of Sudden Precision into the slots. The Mercenary has a waist slot, I would add a gemmed belt of recovery), I’m not sure what a good Talisman for the Fire Archon would be. Preferabley one with 1 or 2 enchantment slots to maximize your stats.

Recent Update: I have officially Swapped my primary companion to the Fire Archon. This companion pairs with the Mount bonus Protectors Camaraderie, where the Mercenary companion was unable to. Additionally the Fire archon tends to not jump into the middle of battle so it gets downed less frequently, which keeps my characters stats boosted for longer time periods.

The other 4 Companions I use for the active bonuses are as follows:

Erienes of Belial – +5% Critical Serverity

Bear Cub – 10% chance when taking damaging to increase your life steal Chance by 75% and Life Steal Severity by 25% for 6 Seconds

Air Archon – Increase damage to heros not at full health by 5%

Yeti – 10% chance when taking damage to increase the damage dealt by 7%

I personally dont know of any other effective companions at this time with sufficient Stat bonuses. I apologize for my lack of information upon this topic. if there are companions you like for your hunter ranger please leave a comment!

Mounts

Here are the Mount bonus I personally use. I’m going to keep this topic rather short as well.

Combat Power: Tenser Disk is the Best in slot combat Power. It gives you 10% increase power, movement speed, and +2 dex, Str, Constitution, and Armor Class. Nothing beats it.

I use the Armored Griffon combat power, which reduces the damage nearby enemies deal by 30%. Which seems like a solid debuff in my opinion.

Equip Power: I use +2000 critical strike from the Heavy Howler mount, but +2000 power is also I viable option.

Mounts that give Critical Strike: Heavy Howler (2000) , Rage Drake (2000) , Imperial Rage Drake (4000)

Mounts that Give Power: Apparatus of Gond (2000), Guard Drake (2000) , Heavy Giant Spider (2000) , Heavy Twilight Nightmare(2000) , Purple Owlbear (2000), Black Ice War Horse (4000)

If you do not have a Mount combat power, I would replace Cavalry’s Warning for Protectors Camaraderie. Protectors Camaraderie give your character 3% of your power and defence. And it is able to stack 4 times total. (Glitched on the Mercenary making it unable to be proced with him. That is mainly why I am not using it. until I can make my Fire Archon Legendary.)

The individual insignia bonus from each piece I would focus on are on Critical, Power, Movement, Armor Pen, and Recovery.

Ending Notes

This is my Build. if you have any questions, Feel free to leave any comments and I’ll be happy to answer them as soon as possible. My GamerTag on Xbox is Senpai Andrew if you ever want to run Hunter Ranger End tier Content. I’m always looking for other Hunters to discuss our classes features and learn as much as possible. I’m especially interested to see some of the Combat and ARchery Paragon players might switch to since they’re viable options to play with as well. I just personally cannot see them out DPSing a Trapper Build thanks to our constant and almost instant encounter cooldowns.