Feedback : Mod 10 Hunter Ranger using the Combat Skilltree

artifleur

Mod 10 brought a lot of great changes to the HR Combat skilltree and I'm having great fun playing with my HR.

I specially like what you did with Thorn Strike. The way it tracks the target's movement, the area of effect and the damage, considering the very short cooldown, make it a great skill.

That being said, a few things still need to be improved :

1 - Blade Hurricane / Flurry

Flurry doesnt work well with all encounters and, in fact, very poorly with some.

Please see here for more details : arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1221784/hunter-ranger-combat-capstone-blade-hurricane

2 - Mobility

The combat HR needs to stay in melee range of his targets while avoiding control effects and lethal attacks. To do that one would need additional mobility but doesnt get any from any of the available feats.

The trapper gets Fleet Stance, the archer gets Hasty Retreat. We dont get anything even though we obviously need more mobility than an archer.

An answer to this may very well be to improve Marauder's Rush

3- Marauder's Rush

An 83 feet teleport could be an extremely nice skill for a melee HR, to catch up with a target moving away, or after avoiding some red zone attack or after being thrown away. But as it stands it simply a bad choice for several reasons :

- It doesnt work well with flurry
- The animation is unnecessarily long. After teleporting and hitting your target your character is locked in place and cannot do anything for a whole second if not longer
- It deals very little damage and can only hit one target. Making it an aweful encounter when you already are in melee range of your target.
- The cooldown, while not very long, still is too long to make the teleporting part actually useful in the middle of a fight. In most cases, when you would actually need it, it is on cooldown.

So, what I suggest is :
- reduce its base cooldown to 8 seconds, same as Thorn Strike.
- shorten its animation, so that we can start attacking right after teleporting.
- give it an additionnal effect when using it on a target which already is in melee range (such as higher damage or 15' burst instead of single target) so it doesnt feel like a waste to use it in that situation.

iandarksword

I find that taking Fleet Stance and Deft Strikes from the Trapper tree, and then your choice of the rest of the Combat tree provides for some movement bonuses. Also slot Dark enchants, insignias of vigor on your mounts and get a mount that has Gladiator's Guile as an insignia bonus.

artifleur

Using fleet Stance is an option but I would have to constantly spam tab which I otherwise very rarely use. I would be afraid of losing my 5% lifesteal bonus due to this constant change of stance. I would also have to sacrifice something else, probably Fluid Hunter.

I dont see any possible benefit from Deft Strikes since I pretty much never use any ranged encounter.

I do have dark enchants in utility slots and gladiator's guile.

lirithiel

I begged and pleaded with Amenar to give the Combat HR some sort of speed boost, but there just wasn't enough time to look at everything and of course he left soon afterwards. As was suggested in this thread get a mount with Gladiator's Guile. I bought the Wolf of the Wild Hunt and that insignia bonus helps somewhat. I also dipped into Trapper just for Fleet Stance.

I would actually suggest changing Serpent Weave to something that gives Combat extra movement instead of a meaningless 0.5-sec CD on melee encounters when dodging.

artifleur

I wouldn't want to lose the 0.5s cooldown reduction. As small as it may be, it is better than nothing and I usually shift a lot during fights.

Adding a speed effect to Serpent Weave, on top of the small CD reduction, could be a good idea however. Something like 10% movement speed for 5s after shifting.

The main drawback is that, since it is in the first column, it would be in reach of trappers and archers and not something unique to combat.