Character Focus - Taliesan Voell [OGC] Ranger/Ritualist Since my last character focus my whole approach to builds has changed radically,  not to mention shiny new sets of armour, new weapons and a lot of new skills!   Up untill I made these changes, the focus of my ranger was around marksmanship, partly because of the very high requirement of 13 on my old bow, and partly because I believed this was the best way to inflict the most damage on enemies.   So on aquiring a new bow, the somewhat lower (but still not great) requirement of 10 marksmanship allowed many improvements to occur: Firstly and foremost I discovered the full potential of the ranger primary attribute – Expertise. Each point spent on this makes all ranger skills 4% less energy to cast and recharge more quickly.  With this improvement I found myself not running low on energy nearly as much as before, for example with expertise 10, a skill that would normally cost 10 energy would cost 6 energy. I no longer need the superior rune of marksmanship required to effectively weild the bow, so I could finally drop down to a minor rune and free up an extra 75 health. With most attributes now only needing to be around 10, this allowed me to spend more attribute points on my new secondary profession – Ritualist, namely the chanelling attribute. With experience certain skills have made themselves a constant part of any build that I choose: Troll unguent – one of the few ways a ranger has to directly gain health, this gives me between 5-8 health regen depending on the build. Lightning reflexes – gives me 75% chance to block and makes me attack 33% faster, I use it before I cast troll unguent to limit the damage I take while casting, and against single targets that need that little bit extra speed to kill. Distracting shot – in my opinion the best interupt the ranger has available, deals limited damage but disables the enemy skill that is interupted for a further 20 seconds, nothing worse than watching that spell of doom charging up with nothing you can do about it! Flesh of my Flesh – after experimenting with all the monk resurect skills, I found this to suit my style of play better, it resurects with my current health but only 5% energy with no attribute speant on it, and then it halves my health.  I havn’t found the loss of health to be a problem as I generally avoid melee combat.  This skill also recharges pretty quickly so its possible to res a few people during a battle without leaving myself open to attack. So heres the updated and improved version of my old barrage build (B/P). This is a great build for doing massive damage to a tightly packed area of enemies, with barrage hitting up to 7 foes and each one of those shots splintering to every adjacent foe, the amount of damage clocked up can be astonomical!  Below is an example screenshot in which I managed to capture 6 arrows landing at once and causing over 800 damage! Also on a shot like this, a zealous string on my bow gives me +6 energy back, after costing 3, so the attack can be sustained for longer. Heres the armour and weapon setup I use for the barrage build.  Health 595, Energy 30>> For a long time I didn’t have any other elite skills of use available to me, and therefore relied heavily on the barrage build, doing very well against big groups of enemies but coming unstuck slightly on single targets or small groups. After spending some time acquiring some new elite skills and some basic skills from the new Eye of the North expansion, I came up with the following build, which has now taken the place of barrage as my most used build The strength of this build is in quickly despatching a single enemy and moving onto to the next.  First of all I use Expert Focus to lower the energy costs yet further (notice the 14 points in expertise!) then I use Burning Arrow and Screaming Shot to quickly lower the foes hp to 50%.  With expertise 14 and Expert Focus in play, casting skills like Burning Arrow with energy cost 10, becomes much less of an energy drain, costing a mere 2 energy!  Once the foes health is lower than 50% I repeatedly cast Needling Shot, which of course now recharges instantly and costs 1 energy! For an added burst of speed, I can engage Lightning Reflexes, and achieve the machine gun effect! Again for this build I use my main bow which has a Zealous string, so once Needling shot is up and running it doesn’t cost me any energy, as one is regained per it.  I also gear my armour slightly differently for this build, with the focus very much on expertise, and another rune to boost my health regen skill, Troll Unguent.  Details below:  Of course sometimes it can still all go horribly wrong…