Back to Guild Wars once more, and the familiar unfamiliarity, as I try to work out how the hell yet another dusty abandoned MMO works – the usual sort of deep and philosophical questions: who, where, what, when , why. Time for a little stock-taking!

(Note: Whether or not Guild Wars is technically an MMO at all is a matter for some debate. I’m going to just ignore that debate and call it one, simply because I can’t be bothered to invent a new term for it! It’s close enough for me.)

My main GW Self seems to be a L20 Ranger/Necromancer, and I have no idea why, other than I was going through a bit of a Thief: Deadly Shadows play-through at the time and quite liked the ‘Pagans’ concept. A bit of informal and casual census-taking of the various town, outpost and mission lobby areas seems to show that at least 75% or more of ALL players are Warrior/Monk hybrids, and I begin to suspect I’ve done something terribly, terribly wrong in picking my own particular hybrid combo. Most of the other players have Monk in there somewhere – hell, who wouldn’t want to be their own cleric on top of their ‘real’ class? I’ve been back several days now and have yet to see another R/N.

GW has always been one of the trickier gameplay mechanics to understand, I’ve found, with it’s curious blend of skills and attributes making for some kind of real-time Magic: The Gathering kind of experience, largely based around building up interesting and effective combos of eight specific skills, out of the various hotkey actions you accumulate on your journeys and quests. Coming up with a workable ‘build’ becomes paramount then.

Previously, I’d got where I am now with an almost exclusively Marksmanship/Expertise based set up, designed to simply make my bow shots really hurt, and to hell with anything else, and I largely ended up ignoring my Necromancer half entirely. This rather unsubtle approach, in a game based around buffs, debuffs, counters, interrupts, lockdowns, and all sorts of other intricacies, has started to become less effective in recent lands and missions however, and besides, it does seem a shame to have an entire half of my character I never use, so I’ve recently been looking for proper R/N Builds, and have come up with the following:

Expertise: 16 (12 + 4 from rune/mask)
Blood Magic: 11

  • Vampiric Touch (Blood Magic) – Touch, damages target, heals me
  • Touch of Agony (Blood Magic) – Touch, damages target, damages me
  • Throw Dirt (Expertise) – Touch, blinds target and nearby other enemies
  • Whirling Defense (Expertise) – Stance, increase block chance, partial damage reflect
  • Dodge (Expertise) – Stance, increase run speed, increase evade chance
  • Signet of Agony (Blood Magic) – Signet, damages surrounding enemies, makes me bleed (DOT)
  • Plague Touch (No Attribute) – Touch, transfers a negative condition from me to the target (e.g. bleeding, above)
  • Resurrection Signet (No Attribute) – Signet, raises fallen party member from the dead

Druid Armour, with Vigor, Atunement, Expertise runes, with the Expertise Mask: Extra Energy Blood Magic based Truncheon + Idol: More Extra Energy.

It’s an extreme close combat type build, based mostly getting in the enemy's face, and spamming out the Vampiric Touch and Touch of Agony skills as often as the enrgy pool allows. The Rangers’ Expertise attribute massively reduces the energy (mana) cost of touch-based skills of any profession (which this build has a-plenty), and the self-healing element of the Vampiric Touch allows me to survive fairly well at point blank range. The Rangers’ greater armour, melee survivability and cheap touch skills make this strategy more suited for an R/N than an N/R. (Necromancers instead get an exclusive skill that gives them extra energy any time anything dies near them.)

It’s based extensively on the R/N Touch Ranger build found on the GuildWiki (which seems to seriously need some new hardware, asap!), with some alterations – 'Vampiric Bite' is a Factions only skill, and therefore inaccessible to me at present. I’m using 'Touch of Agony' instead, which kind of negates the healing effect when I bounce between them, but still makes for a pretty high DPS output, equivalent to the DPS I was getting from the Marksmanship bow build, only with needing to muck about with Preparation and Ritual buffs before each pull! I haven’t got to the Boss Mob that drops the 'Offering of Blood' elite skill yet, so I do tend to run out of energy a little too often still. There are no potions in Guild Wars. The rest of the skills increase survivability and offer a few neat tricks; 'Signet of Agony' followed swiftly by 'Plague Touch' being my favourite.

It makes for a more hectic experience than just hanging back with a bow, but quite fun and surprisingly viable, although I really could do with the other life-drain touch – with both my main attacks also healing me, I’d be pretty unstoppable. Need Factions…ahhh….now I see! Very cunning…

Anyway, once I’ve been around the block a few times with this, and got the hang of it, it’s back on with the PvE Story, and the Crystal Desert Missions – Ascension awaits!