User:RolandOfGilead/R/D Toxic Spammer

Overview
This build uses Poison Arrow, Barbed Arrows, and Toxicity to spam an instant -10 Health regeneration among the enemy team while using Earth Prayers to protect oneself.

Attributes and skills
Unspent points: 2

Equipment

 * Sentry's Armor: +10 Armor while in Stance
 * Poisonous Longbow of Shelter with +5 energy mod: 33% longer poison duration, +7 armor vs. physical

Usage

 * Offense: At the start of match, just before fighting breaks out, use Toxicity, Barbed Arrows, then Poison Arrow on the foe closest to you. Switch through the enemy team with the Tab key and spread the -10 health degen among the enemy team. Recast Toxicity and Barbed Arrows as attention and situation allows, but take care not to let both run out for long. Spreading only Poison is probably not enough pressure on the enemy Monk.


 * Defense:
 * At 13 Expertise and 8 Earth Prayers, Conviction can be kept up indefinitely with only 2 Energy per 20 seconds.
 * Signet of Piety allows you to quickly switch off Armor of Sanctity if the +3 Helth regen is needed quickly instead of the +24 armor.
 * When under direct attack, use Armor of Sanctity and poison your attacker. Once the attacker realizes through experiment that you have 70 + 10 + (7 or 30) + 24 = 111 or 134 armor and 13 damage reduction, he will probably lose interest in you very quickly.
 * Stand your ground for a while instead of immediately starting to kite. This might disencourage the attacker and make him disengage.
 * If your attacker insists, kite him and refresh Poison periodically until he disengages or dies from poison. Watch out for self heals, be ready to use Distracting Shot at any moment.

Counters

 * Restore Condition owns this build. Connecting a Distracting Shot with a Longbow is impractically difficult even if the caster predictably spams it; otherwise, the only practical solution is to have its caster shut down as soon as possible.
 * Killing Toxicity as soon as it was planted, interrupting Barbed Arrows as the skill is casting. To avoid this, have tactical overview and use these skills only when you are in a reasonably "safe" position and not under attack.
 * Heavy health degeneration on you. Enemy Rangers or Necromancer that happen to have a Poison or Disease skill of their own can return the Toxicity favor. This build then has to rely on external healing and condition/Hex removal once you hit -10 health degen of your own. On the flip side, however, this build has no problem whatsoever with regular damage. For possible counters, see Variants

Variants

 * Sentry's Armor is available in Factions only; without Factions, use Druid's Armor instead.
 * The attribute points in Markmanship only serve to provide the minimum requirement for a PvP bow for a little direct damage. For a build focusing more strongly on either degen or defense, re-distribute these points among Earth Prayers or Wilderness Survival/Beast Mastery.
 * Replace Conviction with an evasive skill to protect casting Barbed Arrows and Toxicity, like Throw Dirt or Whirling Defense. Druid's Armor might be a good choice of armor in that case.
 * Replace Signet of Piety with Troll Unguent as the self-heal.
 * Advantage: can be used frequently without an enchantment, 2 energy instead of 5 for Armor of Sanctity recast.
 * Disadvantages: loss of synergy with Armor of Sanctity/Conviction, 3 second casting time, less HPS than SoP.


 * In PvE and non-random PvP, another Ranger could bring both Toxicity and Lacerate. This frees some attribute points for the Toxic Spammer and adds another -2 Health Degen to work against skills like Healing Breeze.


 * If the opponent team is expected to use lots of Hexes and Conditions of their own, use the following build instead:

Unspent points: 1

This variant allows you to get rid of many Hexes in a matter of seconds, while also healing you for lost health. Depending on what your overall situation is and what hexes are cast on you, either keep the Armor or the Boon active while spamming the other for pious Restoration. Note that one enchantment must remain active for Pious Restoration to remove hexes, but if you only need health, you don't have to keep one.